Play a charr then
I wonder now if something as simple as a second access route would help. I see people trying to jump along the side wall from time to time, but that is a dead end. Having a second path in would avoid the clumping of lava fonts and such on the bridge where most of the trouble occurs. Usually because someone pulls a Leeroy and come back trailing a bunch of embers. Never mind that the ground flare reaches half way across the thing, and is hard to spot with the elemental in the background, the embers flapping about, and the lava fonts.
Is it just me, or do I see a lot of problems here? Now I’ve been playing for only a couple of days, but I must say that I’m extremely disappointed. I won’t go into all the details, because this is not the place. I bought this game because of all the reviews and discussions I’ve read stating how easy it is to solo in this game. And that to me is a major selling point. Now I’ve tried out all of the classes, and I was hoping that all of them could solo in their own way, which I have not seen. It seems that the content is only solo-able with a higher level. I have had several incidents already that have been needlessly frustrating. I’ve also been playing MMOs now for over ten years, and I’ve played all kinds of classes and games, so I’m not new at this. It just seems that this game still has major balancing issues that need to be resolved.
Yup. It’s only been out for a few months, and the devs are still working on balance.
Also, I think part of the problem may be that they’re balancing for downscaled lvl 80s? I leveled in basically 3 areas, and only started exploring after turning 80. I noticed that a few things I’d tried to do before that were very hard / so difficult they got boring were much easier and more fun when I was 80. Since the whole game is supposed to be endgame, I wonder if balancing for 80s may play a part in the current wacky game balance.
The PVE “balancing” is in essence weird. 1 level below and you can be steamrolled by anything short of a single trash mob. 1 above and suddenly even veterans are more an annoyance than a threat, simply because their extra health makes them take so long to die. Champions however are all over the map, independent of your level.
Yes for SPVP, maybe for WvW and dungeons, no for open world PVE.
Tho the main issue with PVE is not so much the mechanics, but that the mobs and such often behave as if the game is still a non-action MMO. By this i mean presenting a solo player with waves of multiple mobs, yet our CCs are more fighting game combo breakers than proper CC.
End result is that PVE favors professions that can drop PBAOE hurt instantly, as trying to target that ground circle, never mind if it is channeled, is a waste of time and virtually force you to stand still because the interface just isn’t there for doing it on the move smoothly.
I avoid it because unless i am playing a profession with mostly single target weapon skills, the ground targeting mechanic gets in the way of what is likely to be a very “mobile” (read several minute long circle kite) fight.
People would think that the game is built around PvP. I would say theres way more PVE content than PVP.
Sure, content favors PVE. But the balance and game mechanics focus is on SPVP.
Ah yes, self-sufficiency. Then why the revive mechanic? Let those that are so fool that they get downed fend for themselves. Never mind that if you actually try to be a good samaritan you end up a aggro magnet.
IMO the game is not fluid and reactive, it is dogpiled chaos. All these interrupts and dodges are fine and dandy when the fight is 1 on 1. But once it becomes group on group, never mind group on boss, it just devolves into a process of hitting hard, hitting fast, rinse and repeat.
The game takes on the appearance of the barbarian hordes rushing the roman formation again and again, never learning, never studying, if they get beaten they just retreat for a bit and rush on again.
Yeah there are no taunts or any other form of aggro management. There are just certain things (like equipping a Shield) that you can do in order to try an manipulate the aggro system, but in the end you still have rely on hope that you will hold the aggro.
Yea, i think a big part is the opaqueness of it all. We have this vague list of things that is supposed to affect aggro. But we do not know the initial conditions of various mobs, nor do we know if any of them have special conditions or exactly how much various actions and gear impact the whole thing.
The only real way to get any sanity into this would be if a group of people were willing to face down the same big mob repeatedly using a controlled range of setups of professions and gear to try and establish a baseline. Then approach a different mob with the same exact process and record any differences in behavior.
So if you want to complain about something, your target should actually be melee combat and the tools they have to both get in range and keep people in range versus the tools available to ranged classes to keep targets at range.
Indeed. One part i notice is that while the game have all these effects that seems like classic mmorpg CC, they are all so short in effect that the only time they really matter are in SPVP where the fights are usually short and brutal.
But CC in a traditional sense was there to allow a squishy class to take control of a encounter with multiple mobs by putting one or more of them out of the fight for multiple 10s of seconds. This then allowed said class, via different means, to face down a group of mobs similar in size to what a hardier class would just wade into and start pounding on. Brains vs brawn basically.
But the CC in GW2 is not CC in the traditional sense, they are more like fighting game combo breakers. You slam them to break the warriors 100B or elementalists meteor shower, not to put either out of the fight for 10+ seconds.
And yet they can’t be spammed. most of them have cooldowns of 30+ seconds. Meaning you have to have a very good timing or you waste them.
…people presuming it’s broken in favour of certain things or just randomised to a degree.
I’ll be honest – I came into this game hearing about the lack of a proper “trinity”, and thought that meant that threat had some sort of random or static nature depending on the boss/monster. I had no idea a system to manage it actually exists.
Except it doesn’t. At least not beyond yelling at someone to stop attacking and backing off. Not that doing so is a perfect fix, and i keep seeing claims that a mob will turn around and attack them the moment they walk into LOS no matter the distance or they having done any attacks at all.
I was playing necro at a DE once, where a champ spawned in a relatively open field. I tried to stay out as far as i could on my range but even so the champ would basically turn away from a group of melees and come stomping across the field to get me.
Then again, the most common yardstick is WVW…
I would not mind if the current necro staff attack was replaced with the grasping dead line attack from the promos. Not sure why they removed the line attack from that while the warrior apparently retained his.
Then again i find the whole ground targeting thing to be a mess in a game that is basically a third person shooter at times…
Best i can tell, ANet do not want healing to be able to produce immortal bunkers that can sit on a capture point in SPVP and survive the opposing team in full pounding on them. Necromancers could in some way do this in the betas via the Death Shroud mechanics, and it was severely nerfed right before launch.
Also, some of the stronger “heals” are actually grandmaster traits that attach heals to non-heal skills or similar. Examples being heal on shout for warriors and heal on boon for guardians.
Never mind that very few skills, a couple of water elementalist skills (healing triden on scepter and healing wave on OH dagger. The latter also available on dodge via trait) being the exception, do not get a 1:1 benefit out of healing power (compassion) trait points.
As for why support skills feel limited, it is because outside of might the boons are all or nothing. They stack only in duration, if that.
I wonder if stability could be turned into a defiant like boon, stacking in intensity so that each CC applied would be resisted and a stack of it removed. Tho i guess it would need to be a small stack to avoid someone running around immune for long periods (tho it could be counteracted more readily as people would do the same as with defiant on champs, pile on CC to reduce the stack).
Protection, being percentage based, could act the same way as might.
Fury as well, with higher stack giving a higher crit chance benefit.
Retaliation could really benefit from this in that it is in essence the boon version of confusion, or perhaps mirror a percentage of the incoming damage back based on stack size (right now it does damage based on defenders power).
The rest (swiftness, aegis, regeneration and vigor) would be more difficult to make intensity stacking. Aegis in that it hard blocks all incoming attacks, and so would make someone effectively immune with a high stack.
This would make the benefit of someone being able to pile on support more apparent, as there would be numbers on the yellow icons. And people would know it when those numbers are higher than they themselves can produce.
Except that we see again and again mobs that will stick like glue to a single toon for the duration of the fight, barely switching while said toon is running back from the waypoint. Never mind that Aragorn pretty much pulls a aggro grabbing taunt around the 40 seconds mark, something that is unavailable in GW2.
^yeah, scepter/dagger seems like a good combo for necro. My friend suggested focus, but it feels different, they both are condition weapons though
Imo dagger OH for solo and focus for group.
dagger 4 provides bouncing blind and condition transfer from you to mob . dagger 5 provides extra bleed and weakness(!).
focus 4 on the other hand is vulnerability and regeneration. Focus 5 is chill and boon removal.
All in all i am of two minds about the while chill thing. Sure, comboed with cripple it provides a massive movement reduction. But the skill cooldown is hard to judge as we do not know what skills the mobs use and their cooldowns (in GW1 they used the same skills as the toons).
Well they just ended a month long event and there was a world wide holiday. Give them a couple of weeks to pick up steam again. I suspect that they will be doing more general work now that the next likely reason for a event will be Easter, giving them some breathing space after Halloween and Wintersday/Christmas.
Only to have the mob completely ignore the clone and come after you. Sure you can shatter it at that point, but what is then the point of the clone looking so much like you?
I’m waiting for the day when the word filter changes from kitten to skritt now.
Oh so much this!
Part of the issue with the caster classes is that they converted the classic defense, CC, from long duration mob holds (so you could turn a 2+ group into something you could take one at a time with proper skill management) into short duration interrupts.
This may work for sPVP, but it makes a mess out of PVE. Especially as personal story instances, and more, loves to drop us into cramped quarters with waves upon waves of mobs.
Never mind that the whole interrupt thing has to be discovered during play, as there is nothing to indicate that a 1-2 second long stun will do anything more than that. And unless you have no background from MMOs at all, seeing those kinds of numbers attached to a 30+ second cooldown will make you instantly dismiss it as pointless. And forget about them unless you run into some very special circumstances…
No, please, no more destroyers. Destroyers are the second worst thing after Risen. Branded or Icebrood I can stand.
Trolls and harpies are ok, the crabs however…
This especially in the tunnels north of Skrittburg, as the crampedness makes it difficult to dodge their lava fonts (a issue i also have with the embers in the reactor core).
Deeper skritt may well come once they open up Tyria underground for exploration (never mind that the place will be crawling with destroyer mobs).
I think they have done a great job at making pvp optional
WvW is still part of the monthly, no?
Why do i get the impression that warriors have a low workload?
By this i mean that it seems few of their skills are ground targeted or in other ways require the player to shift his focus away from the ongoing fight.
Indeed, tho elementalist water skills seems to be the only skills outside of the healing slot that gain 1:1 from healing power. Or at least that is the case on scepter and staff, dagger seems to have a lower ratio for some odd reason.
Some may find that fun, others will likely find it infuriating.
The closest you get is a self healing “tank”. By this i mean that around level 60 certain professions gets access to traits that heals them when they do other actions.
The more i ponder it the more it seems that things are balanced towards action play. Grab a melee or ranged weapon with a pierce or cleave, put the primary attack on left mouse button, turn off auto target and promote target, play the game like a third person action game by performing the attacks directly.
The RPG like controls of mob targeting and auto-attack are a distraction, unless you happen to be on the back row of a massive group encounter.
@OP : Everything except dungeons scales to the number of people. Personal stories, events, meta event … But dungeons are a team work, designed for 5 people. It will probably not change.
While true, some of the personal story stuff can be annoying as even playing them solo results in being zerged by mobs as a squishy caster in cramped quarters.
Of course it had to be a thief
Even odds between that and warrior…
Go into your options, go to your key bindings, find the blank key bind that says “target nearest enemy” bind it, use key to target nearest enemy.
May work in PVP, where most targets are what you want to harm. But in PVE, that may well find you targeting some yellow you do not want to tangle with what so ever (why i try to avoid using bounce attacks because they had a habit of pulling in yellows).
Yea, i have no idea why they decided to make the gate the starting point for the dungeon. Much better if you could step inside on your own, form a group inside (in a permanent overflow kind of way) and then enter the fractals proper.
Video game difficulty should not be something that goes beyond “reason”.
Guild Wars 2 difficulty is not measured by reaction, timing, position, and team work… it’s based on player base finding ways to exploit or find short cuts around bad design for some “cheese”.
GW2 battle design is BAD in general especially in dungeons. I’m willing to bet nobody at Anet has tested fractals at these levels or there would be “guides”. They just used some loopy algorithm to scale w/ the level and sit back and watch in amazement.
“Holy kitten, somebody got to Lvl 50, these guys are nuts!”
ever played really old games? Ping pong, pac man, tetris? The difficulty tends to be infinite. This is an infinite dungeon.
The original pac-man would actually break beyond a certain level.
Thing is that outside of dungeons, a glass cannon warrior swinging anything with cleave is a wrecking machine.
Had one guy that showed up at a DE with mob waves. He would whirlwind into the wave, and if anything was left standing he would have them killed within the second.
It was like watching the ball at a bowling alley hitting strike after strike.
PVE = -30%
PVP = -15% + -15% for a earlier patch.
While your at it, have a look at making the bone minions run towards the target before popping, like the mesmer illusions do on shatter. Then we at least can use them as 30 second ranged (poison) bombs if nothing else.
But put too much emphasis on the “synergy between classes” and you end up with “lf class A, B, C and D for dungeon run, other classes do not bother to apply”
Already happening, as it seems healing shout warriors and altruistic guardians are virtually self sufficient. Stack 5 of either so that they are within PBAOE range of each other and the greens start flying.
Best i can tell, the major issue with thief stealth is culling. Why oh why they can’t have the server specifically include a note to pre-buffer the thief graphics so that is ready to draw when the thief drops stealth to attack, i don’t know.
What is hilarious is that even with a pile of traits the necromancer can’t get close to these numbers.
I sometimes see claims of effective vampire necro builds, but usually they include the runes, the pie, or both, meaning that the effects of the 30 points of traits are dwarfed by a rune set and a consumable.
In this game the tank and healer is rolled up in one. This in that towards the end you gain access to traits that heal or place regens on your professions defining actions. Problem is that you need to get to level 60 or there about to actually see them, so until then the only really viable build is DPS. This makes some of the squishier professions, mesmer and elementalist in particular, a grind to play for some 40 levels.
Also, the game do not have any sense of classic crowd control. The closest it has is a system of interrupts that behave more like fighting games combo breaker. But most of those are aimed at single opponents, not groups of mobs.
Meaning that as a squishy profession you can’t simply put a swirl over the mobs heads to keep them out of the fight for 10+ seconds. They will at best be that way for a second or two and then come right back swinging.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
The summoned tropical bird from my Pirate runes on the other hand attacks just fine. He goes out of his way to attack things in fact.
So the flesh golem is a bird brain?
and the character not turning with the camera while not moving a bug? I have searched the web with no luck, I have even seen this question asked before but not reply.
I would really like an official reply on this.
You think it`s a bug because your brain is used to console garbage games.
Normal games work like GW 2 and it`s how it should work.
Dunno. The most common behavior i have seen is that holding down left mouse button move the camera only, right moves both camera and character.
The large majority of updates so far were PvE-oriented (to the face of those who say GW2 is a “pvp game”).
More that the balance focus out of the gate was SPVP, but ANet found themselves with a player base with more love for PVE and WVW (likely because WVW allow players to show off their PVE bling, while SPVP is in that regard a whole different game).
WVW is btw a odd bird, it is PVP but share balance changes with PVE.
Ok, now i need to go hunt some posts.
Not really surprised tho, as the two big events of the winter season (never mind dumping Lost Shores on us in the middle of it) are over, and there are some months until the major spring event, they have time to hunker down and work on other stuff.
Yep, yep. But remember that in sPVP you start with all trait tiers open from the word go. On PVE however you are half way into the game before you even have a chance at using grandmaster traits. And the grandmaster tier is where you find most of the “heal on X” type traits.
This means that PVE players do not get the same sense of freedom in build as sPVPers, as they are almost forced to build DPS characters to be survivable for the opening part of the game. This because most of the DPS comes from weapon skills they can open up fairly quickly, but the support side stuff come from utility skills and traits.
Quite the unusual norn, that.
I play (and have played) a lot of solo PvE, and my Golem’s saved my tiny Asura butt more times than I can count. It’s a big old meat shield that can act as a distraction, weaken things for rallies and such and its damage isn’t negligible.
I use the sylvari mastiff for the same reason. It allows me to focus on piling on the hurt or distract some of the mobs whenever attacking one attracts their fellows attention as well (no long duration control effects?! Honestly ANet…).
I am starting to think that tank in this game is as much about ones ability to heal as ones passive defensive stats.
It absolutely is, which just goes further to illustrate why the terms “tank” and “healer” have little relevance in this game.
A lot of people claim say you should go with Soldier’s gear for top defense, but in reality, most builds should really be using some pieces of Apothecary, Giver or Cleric sets.
There’s surely a break point where investing in healing overtakes investment in vitality and vice-versa but being that healing in this game is very self reliant, a solid healing stat is critical to being really durable.
Yea. The source of my thinking are that almost universally the people that claim they can “facetank” a situation are the ones that have reached level 60 and unlocked some profession trait that allows them to heal while doing other things (damage, applying boons, that sort of thing).
I wonder how much ANet late beta decision to split the traits into tiers affected PVE gameplay experience vis a vis sPVP.
It would be interesting if shield wielding professions could opt to maintain a basic block rather than roll away. A block that rooted you in place, stop you from attacking, and drained endurance while maintained and when taking hits. Maybe something similar for the focus users, but where the effect would be a protective aura of relevant magical energy.
Then again, ANet clearly has a fobia regarding bunker builds.
I am starting to think that tank in this game is as much about ones ability to heal as ones passive defensive stats.
What is funny is that both the heavy classes basically drip healing and boons under certain builds. A shout healing warrior or a altruistic healing guardian both end up as tank-ish healers. Have 2+ warrior stand close enough that they can affect each other and things get “interesting”…
Went back and looked at the elementalist btw, and i the more i look into things the more i feel that the balance focus of the game has been l80 and l80 only. I wonder if ANet broke something when they locked certain traits to certain tiers in terms of PVE experience.
Consider that up around grandmaster a elementalist can trait to heal on dodge with a 10 second cooldown. But the very same weapon skill is on a 40 second cooldown. That is some serious HPS difference. But to get it you have to stomp thru 60 levels of PVE with the lower HPS.
But if you pop into sPVP you can dump 30 points into the trait line from the word go and not notice the squishiness that is a low level elementalist.