Most people have been playing so long in zerker gear and builds that don’t know there are other posibilities, some setups allow to stack several regen-like effects in a team that when powered by healing power can add together well over 1K heal/second party wide. Add to that the healing skill, personal regen-like effects (healing signet…) and the inmunes, reflects that non zerkers can use too… and you don’t need to use a dodge in most bosses; of course that is if you drop your DPS in exchange of healing power, not so smart actually, but imposible NOPE.
HS is not a good example, as that thing is fundamentally broken. It has more HPS in passive than most of the healing skills you have to actively use.
And you got a link to this supposed heal build?
Haven’t seen any evidence of face tanking beyond some glitched bosses, and the whole team spamming as much healing as they can while stacked.
Meaning that your individual heals, no matter how your build is set up, will not allow you to face tank anything beyond maybe a veteran in the starter zones.
I think one source of issues is not the numbers, but the lack of any kind of taunt or other reliable aggro manipulation.
A whole lot of the skills are built around SPVP capture points, to the point that they are sized specifically to cover such a point if they are AOE skills.
This because said points makes for a fixed location. And both attackers and defenders have to choose between staying and take damage, or abandoning the point and survive to fight another day.
But with bosses, and other mobs, unless we all stack in a single location the boss will ping pong around as aggro values shift. This in combo with the movement inherent in the dodge mechanic makes back row support virtually impossible, as the fight is constantly moving around the room.
Thus stacking is a way to take control over the fight that would normally be done by a tank or a controller. And the latter is made more difficult (or virtually impossible) in GW2 thanks to the ever present defiant mechanic.
Since I didn’t see a mode in there, I’m going to assume sPvP, so…
Attainable critical damage currently in PvP will remain relatively untouched, as we feel that it is currently in a good place.
This change will have no effect on sPvP.
Sorry, I’ll edit the post now. I was referring to WvW/EoTM PvP.
wait wut
i came here expecting ferocity qq and all i get is condi qq ?
so disappoint
I’m not QQing about condi, I’m QQing about the fact they think a crit damage nerf should have priority over almost everything else that’s broken.
Different things are broken in different game modes. If ANet could find a different way than the telegraphed spike damage and AOE spam to get people to use their beloved dodge mechanic in PVE, maybe we would see more similar builds between game modes. But until then zerker is the way to fly in PVE, and the way to faceplant in PVP…
Myopic focus on SPVP when making balance decisions.
The issue may be found in the loot mechanics.
Direct mob loot drops have a chance at being at character level, but mostly is not. But champ containers always drop character level loot.
Another thing is that Queensdale is right next to a major city, and so have bank, TP and crafting stations readily available (and the MF a gate away).
No such thing down in Orr. Just masses and masses of risen.
I sometimes wonder if GW2 was intended as a MOBA, until NCSoft told them to make a MMORPG or can the project completely.
Most games are moving away from a 3 class system in favor for a soft 3 class system much like you seen in GW2. You can still play a tankly hero a all in glass dps hero and a more support hero in GW2. In some format you about have a 3 class system spvp and the player made gvg / wvw over all.
Maybe true in PVP, but anything but true in PVE because of mob design…
Don't feed the trolls, Anet *minor spoilers*
in Battle for Lion’s Arch - Aftermath
Posted by: digiowl.9620
The basic issue here is that the updates pace do not allow them to really think about how someone can troll during the events. They had years to study and restudy the open world and dungeons by comparison, and so there are a vastly reduced opportunity to troll there (most have been introduced during post-launch updates).
Those bomb plants may well be ANet’s most troll-ish creation yet…
“Used a shooter reticle rather than tab targeting”
they considered it, and the code is still in the dev client, but it was apparently left out because it made the game too action focused for their liking (straight from Jon Peters after people found the option in the EOTM test client and posted screenshots).
I miss the point in healing. Heal just doesn’t matter in GW2, in pve anyway. I don’t want to take a step back in gamedesign and have them reimplement this trinity but GW2’s design isn’t exactly better in my opinion:
-discourages teamplay
-discourages build diversity
-makes balance harder to achieve for anet (a lot more redudance in skill purpose)
-has no effect on community elitism
-has no effect on negative PUG experienceIn short: They didn’t replace trinity, they just removed it. Well, anet has a history of promoting the lack of gamemechanics to features in GW2. It’s amazing, people actually buy this.
Pretty much.
The problem is not so much the lack of trinity, but that they ham fisted the implementation of “active combat” on the PVE side. Rather than make dodge one way to survive, they have made it THE way to survive. End result is that all defensive stats are made worthless.
While i agree that eles autoattacks are most of the time are weak, there a weapons of other professions that have even worse autoattacks. Those also would need to be buffed then.
And the problem was?
ANet could do this, if they made the dailies pr account.
Meaning that said daily would be different for each account, picked from the range of zones that their highest (or lowest?) level character could handle.
1. Agree, but its a trial and error issue. You dodge, you fail, you realize that it pulls after the circle appears on the ground and it fly into the air. You are able to do it second time. The boss is big enough to see this animation even when there are a lots of effects. And Aurora Glade isn’t that populated anyway.
More than enough to send people to overflow, meaning that is not a issue limited to a single server.
The more i think about it the more i want to see ANet change mob scaling from health to toughness. This would decrease the effectiveness of individual contributions to a fight equally between direct damage and conditions as long as the hard cap on condition stacks remain.
The problem with Liadri was the overly cramped cage the fight was happening in.
Had the same fight been happening in a open air arena, i think there would be much fewer complaints.
GW1 was a all instance game. Meaning that ANet had a much wider CPU budget to work with. They knew exactly how much computing time characters could generate with their abilities, and so could cram the AI on top by tweaking the mob count. End result, fewer but smarter mobs.
Reddit’s GW2 section is practically moderated by ANet. So it seems to be your beacon of positive energy.
I have seen quite a few idolatry fans in there, but nothing that suggests ANet moderation. Mind you, there seems as of late to be a spillover from the dungeons subforum…
Regarding the rally system. When I started playing, I had a GREAT problem figuring out what my downed skills were doing for a simple reason: when downed, I had no time to read the tooltips. For me, it is only natural to search for information in other sources (so eventually I googled it), but for many people it’s not.
There is a similar, tho lesser, issue with transform skills.
Then again, the game has had a problem with “discoverability” from day one…
I suspect the game was designed with a myopic focus on the post EOTN GW1 crowd, thus blinding the devs to the influx of new players (both from other games, and to the genera as a whole).
Meaning that they designed the game for lore hounds, explorers, and experimenters that will poke and prod everything just to see what happens while they keep extensive notes.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
If ANet made mobs more “difficult” by upping toughness rather than vitality we would not have this discussion. But as long as it is vitality that gets upped, the hard limit on condition damage ends up favoring direct damage spam.
Honestly, I don’t want more revealing. I want more shapely. I don’t need to flash any skin, so much as present a nice silhouette – something the game’s trench-coat fetish pretty much destroys. In fact my favorite Photoshop tinkering with armor appearance shows far less skin than the base it was built from~
this! Also for men: what is it with the trench coats and pirate hats? I’d love to see a fighter-pilot look for an Engineer or something like a Frontier Trapper, with lush fur trimmings for a Ranger
Didn’t one of the gem store armors have a steampunk pilots cap? Or was that the light armor?
So, my question is: what can ANet do to naturally teach players to dodge, to eat appropriate food, to set traits to their characters and so on?
For one thing, Anet needs to change the default keybinds.
The default keybind is not usable. It doesn’t say fluid gameplay but scream clunky gameplay all over. To not change the keybind is a huge handicap.
I seen players using the default keybinds, their enemies kill them so easily.
Pretty much. The UI is straight up MMORPG (Seriously, most MMORPG interfaces default to a single visible skillbar with a “spinner”. Not that different from the GW2 weapon swap), but you can’t really go out onto 6-0 without letting go of wasd or mousing the skills…
The more i poke it the more it feels over-designed.
The bottom bar eats up half the screen space here. And the “looking glass” seems to do crap all.
Most action games are like this. Dark Souls feature tankier gear and stat selections, but you can finish the game at lvl 1 (zero levelling) with an upgraded club if you know what you’re doing. Ultimately points in vitality and endurance are only there to make the game easier for you. But people coming to gw2 act like they expected a game like WoW. This isn’t WoW, and if you want WoW you should know where to look at.
In other words, GW2 is a action game in MMORPG drag. The interface is classic MMORPG with a few “tweaks” but the underlying mechanics are more in line with a third person shooter.
Seriously, just give me permanent mouse look and a proper crosshair already and stop trying to pretend that GW2 can straddle the gap by overloading the UI…
It would help if ANet didn’t make counterintuitive mechanics.
For instance with the knights — and its not the first, you find the same with the blocking trainer in Queensdale — you have to dodge when the circle vanishes, not when it appears. But that is the same as holding your hand above the fire after your instincts are screaming that it is too hot.
And we find something similar with the “dodge” daily. In truth it should have been called the “evade” daily, as to get things to count you have to get the evade popup. And to do that with the dodge mechanic you have to wait until the very second an attack about to hit the character.
Zerker needs more effort to survive because it’s glassy and usually fights in melee while condies spammer stay back with all of his soft cc and additional tankiness. Go play pvp with zerker and then condies build and tell me again how condies are “significantly harder to play”.
That’s the problem. Too much balance discussion focuses around PvP tactics, which are completely irrelevant to PvE. You can have build that devastate in PvP and are completely useless in PvE, or that are worthless in PvP but dominate in PvE.
PvP is proof that this game can be balanced if they worked really hard to restructure PvE. A lot of content just needs to be instanced and enemies need to be reworked in those instances to provide adequate balancing.
sPvP is far from being balanced… look into the pvp and profession subforums
But the SPVP balance issues and the PVE balance issues are polar opposites. Where as in SPVP high bunker and conditions are the way to play, it will get you a very different experience in PVE. And not because the player side numbers change, but because the enemy side numbers change (often massively so).
Getting hit is unexpected. So they will hurt a lot. The game is pretty much Devil May Cry in “Dante Must Die” mode.
Heh i recall seeing early video of a thief 1v1-ing a dungeon boss, and quipping how much it made me think GW2 was multiplayer Devil May Cry thanks to all the acrobatics and evades.
i’m running full earth/water traits on my elementalist, with full berserker gear. it’s definitely better than the various iterations of full fire i used to do. high damage becomes less appealing when you’re often just a oneshot/instagib waiting to happen, requiring your team to spend a lot of time reviving you, or fighting on without you… mind you, the damage is still noticeable – especially by the AI! or like, i don’t know what it is, but the enemies seem to focus me a little too much still… it’s kinda annoying.
Likely because those 300 from the earth line makes you just a but more rugged than a balls to the wall zerker warrior. And in their almighty wisdom, ANet made (relative to the group) high toughness a red flag for mobs…
I don’t want to say I’m 100% confident with correctness here, but when I play my Elementalist… She feels weak.
Like squishy /and/ dies a lot. Her damage output feels lacking, even with full ‘Zerker gear and traits. I’m wondering if this is just me or if Ele’s in general are just that squishy and pathetic. It feels like throwing sticks at a boulder.
My Elementalist was my first 80, but now I feel so pathetic on her when I use her. Clothies should be high damage, but I feel like Ele’s have almost the lowest damage in the game.
I feel the same way about ele. It’s supposed to be best ranged caster with high damage, but I have a feeling that only zerker thief is squishier than zerker ele. I think it’s because of water attunement. You’re supposed to heal yourself much better than other professions, so your damage and survi is lower. But the truth is that heals are really really weak unless you’re cleric, but then your damage is close to 0. I can’t figure out how to make ele better or at least enjoyable. It’s good for nothing, even in soldiers gear I can’t even gather materials in Orr, when my zerker warrior barely notice mobs damage.
Heals are weak even in cleric, outside of PVP, period.
This because the PVE side numbers are wildly out of whacks thanks to the ham fisted way “active combat” is implemented. You can’t choose to dodge or not depending on build, you are forced to dodge no matter the build.
The problem is that each bleed in a 25 stack counts the same as 25 separate conditions in terms of pr second calculations.
And no other game do their DOT calculations as GW2 does, iirc. Most simply use stack size as a multiplier on the on application damage calc, and then apply said calculated damage each second no matter what changes on the part of the target or the attacker.
On GW2 however, every change in might on the attacker and so on is taken into account each second. When they say bandwidth they are likely not talking client to server as much as memory to CPU.
Honestly, the more i look at it the more GW2 feels like it was crafted by artists while GW1 was crafted by engineers. Meaning that GW2 looks and acts esthetically pleasing, but never seems to have taken computing constraints into account when designing core mechanics.
The auto-attack (more like auto-skill, as you can technically slap it on any non-GT skill on your bar) is a late addition, and pretty much a admission that they overloaded the UI by actioning up a traditional MMORPG.
GW2 should have gone the route of Tera or Neverwinter. permanent mouselook, one skill on left mouse button, one skill on right, a few more clustered around wasd for easy reach during a hectic fight.
Instead they did one “better” than SWTOR, where even the basic attack is a pr press skill to be dropped onto a bar. Note however that SWTOR do not have a dodge mechanic. Instead they focus on interrupting the opponent and maybe moving out of AOEs by way of normal movement.
Sorry but no. If I dodge something I should not get any damage at all. If I get any damage, then it’s not dodging.
Then actually dodge away rather than sploiting evade frames.
Elementalists, because of their large weapon skill pool via attunements, are given individually weak skills. With the expectation that players will constantly be jumping between attunements to fire off as many skills as possible on their target.
The problem of the engineer, that they share with elementalists, is that ANet is paranoid about some high APM player finding “the” rotation and rampaging all over SPVP. End result is that thanks to all the potential skill combinations, each one skill has to be that much weaker than anything most other professions bring to the field.
Thanks ANet, for moving this thread to the last place were it will get a sane, considered response…
Depends on game mode. PVE mobs have a attack pattern that makes passive defenses pretty much pointless. small group PVP in WVW or SPVP on the other hand…
Yes, but not for the reason OP is thinking. I just find the whole transmutation system a clunky money grab. In particular that they shower us with stones from level 1 to level 79, but then come level 80 and all of a sudden we need crystals.
It causes all kinds of issues, like how a transmuted back piece will revert to the skin of its stat source if run through the mystic forge for infusion.
It would be much better for everyone if Arenanet offered us one cosmetic outfit tab, and allowed us to purchase more pr character, were we could drop armor pieces to overlay the look of the worn for stats armor.
Right now, if we want to maintain the same look across say a PVE build and a WVW build, we may have to maintain two full sets of transmuted armor. And some pieces are pretty much impossible to get multiples off.
One thing came to mind. I seem to recall that back when the game launched, overflows were described as a temporary measure to deal with the mass influx of players.
Because A.Net seems to have problems with the class balance and since those balance patches take ~4 months each I don’t see that problem to be solved any time soon.
More like the balance team is myopically preoccupied with SPVP corner cases, and in SPVP bunkers do just fine.
ANet has been hung up on “active combat” with the design of GW2. And this has taken on a very hamfisted form in the PVE design.
There mobs are designed so that most of their damage is in a periodic spike attack that everyone, bunker or zerker alike, are expected to dodge/block/interrupt rather than take to the face and heal out of.
End result is that it is safer to go full on offensive, as a dead enemy do not spike. And the faster you kill it the less number of times you have to evade that spike. And with less spikes, there is less of a chance of someone messing up and the fighting going pear shaped.
More like it is useless because mobs will spike through any and all attempts at healing unless you dodge, so you dodge and don’t bother with healing unless you down and out panic.
I think you didn’t understand what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about the heals but about the affect on boons and if it would be OP or not.
But the idea is to make healing power into something that is more worthwhile to take in PVE than it is at present. But the reason for it not being worthwhile in PVE, but much more so in PVP, is that in PVE the mobs are specifically designed to break any possibility of a tank and spank scenario. In essence, the problem is not the stat, it is the PVE mob design.
More like it is useless because mobs will spike through any and all attempts at healing unless you dodge, so you dodge and don’t bother with healing unless you down and out panic.
A-net wanted a game where people didn’t need certain builds/classes to get PvE-content done, it’s the communities ‘fault’ we decide we want to get content done as quickly as we can.
Not by a long shot. It was ANet that deliberately made the effectiveness of boons virtually disconnected from stats (except for regeneration you can only make them last longer), and thanks to the shared skills with SPVP made healing power return on investment downright stink.
Here is the thing: Healing power starts at zero. It is a secondary stat. Power, the basis for damage output, is on the other hand a primary stat. And at L80 that means it starts at 916. Precision is also a primary stat. And crit damage starts at 50%.
So from the get go fights are stacked in the offense’s favor.
And then you look at the co-efficiencies, and see offense skill after offense skill at 1.0 or above. But if you look at healing you find maybe 2 skills, and a couple of traits (elementalist and guardian) that come even close to 1.0. most of them are down below 0.25.
The return on investment basically stink.
Then you have mob designs that are deliberately forcing us to dodge. And are so health fat that anything short of full on offense will increase your risk of a failure, because longer fights equal a higher chance of a missed dodge, leading to a lost fight.
The irony is that defensive builds are clearing the field in SPVP, and so we are likely to see defensive skills and stats get even further nerfed in the future.
The only time defensive builds work in PVE is when you manage to glitch mobs into not using all their attacks.
BTW, Escape from LA shows how crazy it can get. There you have mobs dropping AOE attacks that score hits into the 30k range on people in as defensive a build as they can get. With that kind of damage flying around, defense is a wasted effort.
I think GW2’s problem in all this is that just about anything can be traded on the TP.
As such anything that is not behind a straight up RNG, will inevitably be farmed to the ground by someone that learns how to run the challenge in their sleep.
Supposedly the TP is to be the great equalizer, where if you can’t run the challenge directly you can run for gold and buy the item you want instead. Except that there is no end point for how much gold a “farmer” can generate, and so we are looking at what can best be described as hyperinflation. Too much gold fighting for too little produce.
And that is before we consider what effect TP flippers have in concentrating gold in a few hands. Yes, the TP have taxes built in. But flippers account for that in their trading, and so still run a profit. End result is that the rest of the community is covering their taxes…
I think RNG is great, it’s a random system, so all the rare things like precursors are RARE and surprising. For all those who hate RNG what system do you think would be better?
Tokens?
I did the Tequatl fight till I got all the achievements, I would like some of those weapon skins but thanks to RNG I can do it for a year and get nothing.
If you said: look, you get 1 token if it fails, 10 if it succeeds, with ~100 tokens you can get a weapon from a vendor.
That would be a whole different story, I’d actually do it if there was something to look at.Relying on a system that has plenty of evidence that’s broken is not a good thing.
And I don’t even have one of those “cursed” accounts, I got a precursor from Jormag once, Abyss dye, etc.I like the idea! But think about it… Is this tokens you speak of not the equivalent of gold? For nearly everything you do in the game you get money, that money builds up, when it does you can buy one from the trading post.
Or karma, depending on ones ability to trade between players rather than just with NPCs.
Yet people continue to be surprised (or just unhappy) that Zerker remains as meta.
And it will continue, since all defensive stats were intentionally made to scale pitifully.
More like they were balanced for SPVP, where they can at times be overpowered and ANet is on a constant hunt for ways to break the bunker meta.
Thing is that mobs do not follow the character progression. They are instead built to force players to use active defenses. As such they have a attack pattern of 2-3 one second attacks that barely hurt, followed by a spike attack that will take a good chunk of health if not dodged, blocked, or otherwise avoided.
Sure, this works when soloed or in small groups (Tho you don’t need many mobs before it becomes a annoyance more than a challenge, especially when said mobs also spam control effects. In part because the camera make proper situational awareness a pain unless you pretend to be in a tornado). But in zergs the tells that are supposed to warn the player that something big is coming is simply swamped by all the ongoing FX and animations.
They can’t, they made such a big deal about their “active combat” during their pre-launch marketing…
The funny thing is, you would never hear me complain about Demons Souls or Dark Souls: Two games that are said to be impossibly hard, and have plenty one-hit kills (but well telegraphed). But it is GW2 of all things, whose one-hit kills are just unfair, and come out of nowhere every single time. That is a bad sign Anet, when you out-one-hit-kill Demons Souls.
IIRC, those games are primarily designed to be offline/single player games.
That allows for quite different pacing and player approach.
One-hit kills are bad Anet, stop it! >_<
They can’t, they made such a big deal about their “active combat” during their pre-launch marketing…