Guild Wars 2

I have already explained, in detail, why instances matter, and why we need them here . I concluded that instances are essentially the only decent way to properly showcase content, and a lack of them leaves potential players with the impression that ANet do not have confidence in their own content..

It’s absolutely true that blindly copying superficial aspects of WoW in the hopes that its success will magically transfer over is an absolutely terrible idea. But instanced raids can be justified on their own merits without appealing to that sort of magical thinking.

DSRilk.2978:

I’m confused by your second point. Usually “dealing with other players” means having to actually deal with them. Like trying to get them not to do things that kill everyone else in the group. Is your issue literally just having other players nearby or am I misunderstanding you?

In an open-world zerg, not only do players not have to perform as well individually as they would in a smaller group, they also have a harder time doing so due to things like culling and other client-side performance issues; things being obscured by a mass of players, numbers, and particle effects; the implications of having a hundred people all share the same VOIP channel; and far more.

Because the designers quite reasonably felt that introducing things like friendly fire mechanics and competition for limited resources — essentially incentives not to work together with other players — went against the spirit of an MMO, this sort of zerg is the optimal way to do any kind of open world content.

From this, it follows by the “water finds a crack” principle that players will always approach content as a critical mass zerg wherever it’s possible to do that. And what this means is that most kinds of content are much harder to engage with properly when they aren’t instanced. If ANet took the Silverwastes and turned it into a 20-man instance, it would instantly become far more enjoyable — even if they changed literally nothing about the actual content found there.

This means that instances are needed as a way to showcase content — non-instanced content will not be engaged with properly, so no matter how good it might be, it will not be appreciated. Not a single piece of group content has been showcased in this way in the last 18 months.

I can’t blame any potential player for seeing that fact and inferring from it that ANet have no confidence in the quality of their content. And given how incredibly bad some of the instances the game does have look to the uninformed, I can’t blame them for looking at the content that ANet does have confidence in and coming to the conclusion that this game really, really, really isn’t for them.

None of the things people fear happening as a consequence of raids being introduced to the game could ever kill the game as effectively or as decisively as driving off potential players will. Not by a long shot.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

IT DRAINS RESOURCES NEEDED ELSEWHERE AND ALREADY DEVOTED ELSEWHERE. It is extremely labor intensive to implement such a game mode on to a team that is already overwhelmed.

Already refuted, but again:

Arenanet’s release date is flexible (and we’re talking about things that might be seen in a follow-up patch rather than in the expansion itself), and a lot of MMO studios have seen layoffs and shutdowns. This means that Arenanet have the option are able to add capacity if they need it. So by ‘resources’, you mean ‘money’.

Money might be finite, but it comes from and goes to a lot of places, and the places that will ever have anything to do with you, me, ANet, or GW2 aren’t even a drop in the ocean.

DSRilk.2978:

I’m not saying “do only what I want,” I’m saying there’s no way you can do end game guild-based raiding and still do anything else.

That is patently absurd.

Carbine Studios was practically razed to the ground after the Wildstar launch. Despite that, they’ve been adding both raids and open-world content, and more dungeons, solo instances, QoL improvements, and all sorts of other things.

Final Fantasy XIV has no trouble whatsoever releasing a hardcore raid every six months, while still releasing plenty of small dungeons, story quests, feature improvements, three PvP modes, single-fight group trials, and world bosses.

Is even World of Warcraft an example of this? I suspect that you’ve overlooked a lot if you think it is.

DSRilk.2978:

This is flat out incorrect. Raids require artists and designers – the same people used to create new dungeons and new world-based activities. There’s a massive overlap.

The second and third sentences are correct, but your conclusion does not follow. The Heart of Thorns release date is Soon™, and thanks to semi-recent events, there are a lot of designers and artists with all of the relevant experience who are currently looking for work. That means that this is ultimately a money problem, and money problems are a lot more complicated than you seem prepared to acccept.

Ultimately, you will never see the ‘cost’ of raiding reflected anywhere outside of quarterly reports and dividends.

timmyf.1490:

I can’t believe people are literally suggesting they’ll quit if ArenaNet builds content they aren’t personally interested in playing. This blows my mind.

I’m inclined to agree, simply because any amount of time and effort going into a new raid is actually pretty unlikely to be time and effort that would have otherwise have gone into something else that you might like more.

The more likely scenario? They’ll just decide to save a bit of money and report a minor surplus back to NCSoft, who will pay slightly higher dividends, and if any MMO content comes about as a result at all, it’ll be something pointless like some cash shop lingerie in Vindictus or something.

DSRilk.2978:

Honestly, the day they add raids is the day I give serious consideration to dropping the game. I have ZERO interest in raiding the way WoW does it. I vastly prefer GW2’s current approach. The reality is those types of raids take a lot of time and effort to create – time and effort they’d have to pull from parts of the game that I personally really prefer in no small way.

Nobody is proposing anything with more than a superficial resemblance to the way WoW does raids. That said, please could you elaborate on what your problems with WoW raids are so that we can talk about how to address them?

MattyP.6954:

I’m unconvinced that ArenaNet can make fun, rewarding, and challenging instanced group content. Dungeons, as they stand now, consist of stacking in a corner while wearing zerker gear, dps racing the mobs, and running to the next corner. It’s not fun, it’s just another braindead farm.

It takes significant time and effort both to learn to play a class to the level required to farm dungeons and to learn the dungeons themselves to the level required to farm them. From this, it follows that dungeon farming isn’t even remotely braindead. It also follows that it’s not a pure DPS race — if it was, then merely being good at your class would allow you to farm dungeons.

You’re basing your opinions on how dungeon runs look when the people doing the runs have done the same dungeons dozens of times before. The use of corners is a vestigial remnant from a patched exploit, and the use of zerker gear is neither here nor there.

Farming isn’t a good thing, but ultimately, all the fact that people farm dungeons in GW2 means is that there are people who are pretty happy with the gold per hour and other rewards that they get from GW2 dungeons.

green plum.7514:

But this is exactly the point I was trying to make earlier. Raids, per definition, are only interesting to large, organised guilds that are interested in PvE and have dedicated players that are ready to organise their life around playing that content.

That’s been brought up already in this thread. It’s not really true, and hasn’t been for years. Easy-ish puggable raids are a thing, and have been for a while. You can also go with shorter instances and smaller groups.

FFXIV has a raid consisting of six fights, each of which takes place within the same arena and lasts less than a minute (if you take longer, the next wave of enemies spawns — after about seven minutes, the entire raid is electrocuted).

Gustavef.6730:

It is not being afraid. It is business. Why make content that only 10 to 25% of the user base can play if it does not generate any new revenue? With out having a monthly fee, the whole “I will leave this game” is a hollow threat to ANet.

As there are full-fledged MMOs that could have been pitched successfully on the basis of a potential audience 10 to 25% of the size of this game’s, I’ll assume you’re missing some decimal points.

Aside from that, there are three problems with your claim:

1. Those 2% of players are also going to be doing things like creating guides, streaming their work, maintaining community resources like wikis and guides, and so on. These are beneficial to the game as a whole and also help to attract new players, which means the business case for raids is better than you think.
2. Raids don’t have to be a “no casuals” club of elitism that excludes virtually the whole player base.
3. IIRC, statistics like 2% refer to the proportion of the player base that clears the top raid available before it ceases to be current (this is roughly the correct figure for FFXIV, at least). The proportion of the player base that will attempt the raids and thus benefit from their inclusion is far higher.

As far as the cost of implementing instanced raids is concerned, what WoW does is pretty expensive, but raids don’t have to be like that to be good. FFXIV managed a raid every three months (plus some raid-quality single boss fights) despite making an order of magnitude less money than WoW, and even Wildstar has been adding more raid content.

Raids — even high-end raids — aren’t inherently hardcore content either. FFXIV’s high-end raids only require eight players, and are broken up into separate instances that are individually short enough that you could only have one hour of playtime a night and still clear them every week. 24-man raids are entirely puggable.

And frankly, people need to stop spreading the stupid berserker stack and spank myth.

For further notes to inform comparisons:

• ARR launched with very little content – 20 small dungeons; one raid; some trials (single boss instances). Since then, 15 small dungeons, about the same number of trials, and five raids have been added, as well as a small PvP arena and lobby, and two 24v24v24 ‘Frontline’ maps.
• ARR’s open world has 17 explorable zones, 6 city maps (2 per city), and 3 housing districts (each of which has 6 identical ‘wards’). Explorable zones average somewhere around the size of the Silverwastes, possibly a bit larger. Cities are far smaller than GW2 cities despite being spread over two maps each.
• Patches only added instances, although some zones have had updates to their appearances.

Heavensward will roughly double FFXIV’s explorable landmass IIRC, but new zones will be individually larger.

ANet asked for community input on the subject of raids — and specifically clarified that to mean instanced raids — about six months ago.

From what we’ve heard about guild halls — that they’ll be established in specific locations connected to the open world, and have their own associated stories — I got the impression that they will have something to do with raids.

This might mean that one of the guild hall facilities could be a scrying pool or similar that lets you relive past events that happened there (in the form of hardcore raids).

Or it could mean that nearly every guild hall is gated behind a raid, some small, some big, some easy, some hard, and the most prestigious guild halls would also be the hardest to acquire.

Or a mix of both.

Since non-puggable raids are traditionally regarded as more hardcore content while housing is usually regarded as closer to the casual end of the spectrum, if guild halls are gated behind raids, there will be at least a few very easy options.

FFXIV is doing well and I have to admit that I’m more hyped for Heavensward right now than I am for Heart of Thorns. And for the avoidance of doubt, FFXIV:ARR had sold four million copies as of March 2015, it doesn’t have four million subscribers.

That said, a comparison like this is misleading. For a start, an FFXIV dungeon is a slice of content about the same size as a single GW2 fractal, not a full-size GW2 dungeon path. GW2 boss fractals are roughly the size of FFXIV turns (8-man hardcore raid instances).

lordkrall.7241:

And yet a FF sized expansion every five years is totally okay? We should use the original FF-release after all.

A Realm Reborn was a massive content drop in a new box. By any reasonable definition of the word, that qualifies as an expansion even if it was branded as a relaunch.

tobascodagama.2961:

Vague Memory.2817:

The greatsword skill reductions at 2% on spatial surge hit means you have to hit 10 times to get to the present value of 20%, this seems quite low considering we don’t know how this will stack, for how long, and if a ICD is involved.

You or your clones need to hit 10 times, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.

2% is also either a placeholder or a text error, the same number came up several times during the necromancer/mesmer segment when it seemed clear that the actual numbers being planned were different. Not sure I like a trait that basically tells me to camp greatsword to benefit, though.

Sweeps.3059:

Ok I may be wrong but if we do get passive swiftness won’t that makes us faster than everyone else?
every other class (except guardian) gets 25% but swiftness is 33%
am I missing something here?

Mesmers could already do that via Runes of the Centaur. Permanent swiftness has also always been available to Engineers using Speedy Kits.

In groups, constant swiftness is very easy to get already.

Michal.4513:

shiii mesmers didnt get love for soo many years (in gw it was like 4 or 5y) now in GW2 its the same story…. let the things happen _ …. and then ppl QQ about how broken it is, and its req a nerf…

I think you have the wrong thread.

I said “signet of double annoyance” because the “gained a boon” voice lines are extremely annoying, especially when played every ten seconds. It’s not a new problem.

Specifically swiftness as well… that’s actually better than most of the signets and traits it’s competing with from other professions.

It will still be the Signet of Double Annoyance, however, so I guess it does need to be better than what the other professions get to compensate for that.

The phantasm recharge on shatter trait is something like -5 or -10 seconds, not -2%. Throughout that part of the livestream, it’s pretty clear that ‘2%’ is either some sort of text error or placeholder text.

The accompanying explanation for it was that they don’t want you to be locked out of your whole profession mechanic when you use phantasms, which is perfectly reasonable. It follows that that trait should at least be milkable for a substantial phantasm uptime buff in situations where you’re having trouble keeping phantasms alive, and in theory they could even tune it so that summoning a phantasm only to shatter it after 1-2 attacks is actually the best way to use them.

That said, your suggestions do seem quite cool. Except for “illusions do more damage while mind wrack is not on cooldown”. That’s specifically the sort of thing they’re trying to avoid, and I agree with their reasoning on that.

Kaleban.9834:

If ANet can’t balance/fix the base game after two and a half years, how much confidence do you honestly have that they’ll be able to introduce a new system, revamp the old one, and fix/balance it all upon HoT release?

1. Bug fixing is not the same thing as skill design and balancing, so you’re already inflating the scale of the problems you describe.
2. They launched the game in the first place, which is itself a pretty massive undertaking and far bigger than most of the subsequent work they’ve done.
3. Again, this is a system that’s specifically designed to make the balancing work easier.

sirsquishy.8531:

who wants to click the UI, everything should be hotkeyed. so that invalidates the ground targeting change, as the target goes to your cursor on hotkeys.

Clicking on the UI should be about as fast as — or faster than — putting the cursor on your feet and pressing the hotkey. Obviously, it’s slower than the skill not being ground-targeted at all.

There shouldn’t be anything wrong with a hotkey to cast a ground-targeted spell at your feet, however. Just make sure someone brings that up at the AMA and I’m sure they’ll take note.

Last time I checked, clicking a ground-targeted skill on your skill bar spawned the targeting ring at your feet — so on fast-cast or instant mode, that’s where you’d cast. Not sure how helpful that actually is to you, however.

Your stats have very little to do with your build. This is not going to change when the expansion lands.

Kaleban.9834:

Instead of everyone hammering on Gale, look at what it means for builds.

It will decrease the raw number of possible builds. This does not mean less build diversity, because build diversity is a lot more complicated than that. It does, however, mean an easier time balancing things in the long run, because having fewer combinations means that it’s harder to overlook things that might be problematic.

Now what this means at launch and in the long run is that ANet is going to have to re-work and re-balance EVERY single selectable trait in every single traitline for every single profession to make selecting 1 out of 3 traits a meaningful choice. If one has to choose between a 20% damage/<33% health trait like Bolt to the Heart and a Precision converted to Healing Power: 7% trait like Soothing Winds, its not much of a choice.

This is, however, work that only has to be done once. It’s short-term stuff, not long-term.

may make balancing professions even more of a nightmare, AND take longer between iterative patches.

It won’t. See above.

Balance is basically the whole point of this change, aside from the elite specialisations, which are there to expand the individual professions without creating too many new combinations to worry about.

MiniEquine.6014:

You misread the article, just accept it and adjust your views accordingly. Everyone will pick 3 trait lines and those 3 trait lines WILL get maxed out. You get 2 of each adept, master, and grand master traits in EACH line.

Exactly. The reason the pictures in the blog post look show a line stopping at the fourth or fifth trait of a specialisation rather than extending all the way to the sixth is that that player doesn’t have all of the traits for that specialisation unlocked via hero points yet.

Galeskyring.9617:

What anet is doing is confining us to 3 lines, and those lines automatically are maxed or near maxed depending on whether you want 5/6/5 or 6/6/4 and options in each line is extremely limited, there won’t be any originality in builds nor diversity.

For reference, each baseline profession will have 196,830 trait builds available to it, and each elite specialisation will add another 196,830 trait builds. Just the 393,660 trait builds this will give us for each profession at the launch of the expansion is enough that the game could grow its playerbase fivefold without there ever needing to be two people online with the same build.

The raw numbers say that build diversity and originality will be just fine, thanks.

And build diversity and originality aren’t even about the raw number of possible builds anyway. They’re about the number of builds that aren’t utterly worthless crap. That number is more likely to grow than not with the expansion, because a smaller raw number of choices means more attention given to each build, and thus a much smaller proportion of worthless crap.

EDIT: fixed a very incorrect statistic about the game’s playerbase.

Leo G.4501:

I don’t see a problem with such. It’s not like the boss randomly dodging affects much. Honestly, it’s inconsequential to discuss. Every boss should have their ‘thing’. Unless it’s some sort of unfair mechanic like “everytime the boss dodges, someone goes down”, it’s not disruptive just unique. Trying to pin a specific formula to provide to every boss’ ‘thing’ isn’t going to happen though. Also, who suggested replicating PvP in PvE is the epitome of game design?

Specifically what is being said there is that if a boss just goes invulnerable or dodges attacks for no reason at all, that’s really nothing more than a “ha ha screw you” to players.

In PvP, enemy dodges, blocks, etc., contribute to your fun because all of them are limited resources and you’re dealing with a human being — you have counterplay because you can bait enemies into wasting their defences on less important attacks.

In PvE, you need to provide some sort of mechanic for players to engage with before evades and invulns are fun on mobs and bosses, because barring some pretty major AI advancements, you simply don’t have the same sorts counterplay available to you that you would when you’re up against another human.

If the boss turns invulnerable at fixed time intervals, that’s fine. It’s also OK if there’s a tell that shows the boss is about to go invulnerable. In these cases, there’s actually a mechanic for the players to engage with — you need to figure out the tells and the patterns in order to avoid wasting too much damage.

Invulnerability can also be used to provide feedback to players — a boss might turn invulnerable to signal to players that there’s something else on the field that requires their attention, for example.

ODB.6891:

I almost agree with you on the question of why some of these gear sets even exist. I asked that question a long time ago on these forums. The only justifications I could think of were that some of them were meant for pvp venues only and that some were meant as training gear for players to learn to pve. They should have restricted some of these gear sets to only be usable in the proper venue upon game launch. Nomad should never have been allowed in pve. The same with clerics.

At game launch, it wasn’t immediately obvious that some of the stats available weren’t any good.

1. Healing power is more effective than vitality if you have to go more than about three minutes between resets.
2. “Toughness has diminishing returns” is a myth, and not the real problem with the stat anyway.
3. The sort of things you can pull off when you go all-out with direct damage weren’t anticipated, and so conditions weren’t tuned to be even remotely competitive in PvE.

It actually took quite a while for people to figure the game out. Even now, if you visit the mesmer subforum, you might see hints that theorycrafters once regarded them as literal healers, for example.

Tigaseye.2047:

…and as a Ranger, who wants to range, it does not make me a happy bunny.

The word ‘ranger’ is older than anyone ever using the word ‘range’ to mean “fight from range”. That simply isn’t what it means.

Bows cannot be tactically appropriate everywhere, because if they were, you wouldn’t need any of the other weapons you’re allowed to use. Like nearly any other MMO, this is meant to be one of those games where you’re expected to use the most appropriate tools for the job out of those you have available, not one where you can just do whatever you think would be coolest at any given moment of time.

Tigaseye.2047:

Even in my current guild, I have to listen to certain members constantly laughing about bearangers (or whatever they call them) and going on about them not stacking and using longbows, like that is some kind of crime.

Players who use bears and wield longbows are called ‘bearbows’. The problem is that they camp longbow and use bears even when they have far better options, not that those are what they use.

You’re also missing what I said about stacking. You have to stay close enough to the rest of the group to get buffs (and to provide some buffs). However, the groups that stand in tight stacks up against walls or in corners? For the most part, they’ve been doing it wrong for months now.

The knockback thing I can somewhat understand and I have tried not to use it in groups (or only when absolutely necessary), but isn’t it funny that it’s apparently fine for other players to pull mobs towards them (even if that reduces our potential to do as much damage, with longbow), but it is not considered OK for Rangers to do the equivalent, by knocking back?

Why would it be OK when there are usually four other players all using attacks that rely on mobs staying where they are?

As I say, the whole thing needs a total rework, as currently melee is considered by most to be absolute king (and given buffs are gained from stacking and that melee has been made to do more damage than ranged, who can even argue with that?) and anyone who tries to do anything else is just considered a noobish annoyance.

Currently, content design massively favours melee and attacks that rely on enemies staying where they are. Yes, that’s lame. But there are situations where ranged is better, and there’s a good chance we’ll start to see more of them in the expansion.

And again, all of the tools you have at your disposal are meant to be used. If bows were good everywhere, you’d be breaking that rule and we’d be complaining about swords being lame.

How’s this?

“Partially recharge a skill or replenish a resource of each nearby ally whenever you attempt to bestow a condition, strip a boon, or bestow a control effect. 1 second recharge. No skill may be affected more than five times per use.”

• Chance: 50%
• Radius: 600
• Number of Targets: 5
• Cooldown reduced: 5%
• Endurance replenished: 10
• Initiative replenished: 1
• Adrenaline replenished: 1
• Life force replenished: 5%
• Energy replenished: 5%

ANet have been using a rusty butter knife to surgically remove most of the unique benefits we offer in dungeons, so I think they do owe us something back.

And literally any control effect and many conditions could be regarded as ‘disrupting’ an enemy, not just nailing an interrupt — and our on-interrupt traits are almost always named in the pattern “… Interruption”, so it’s a little weird for this not to apply here.

Tigaseye.2047:

While I find this game beautiful and imaginative, from a levelling/exploration POV, I find the group gameplay and class design an almost primative snorefest, which is only made difficult by the fact that I haven’t done the paths enough to know all the places to skip and stack, yet, have few defences in a stacking melee situation and suffer from poor fps.

Last I checked, stacking tightly in a corner was considered extremely distasteful and totally pointless.

It used to be a good idea, but nearly all of the skills that benefited from fighting enemies in a corner or up against a wall were nerfed months ago.

Rangers also have some traits (+10% power damage vs. flanked enemies, for example) that specifically require them not to stack.

As for bears, plonking a 54k hp sack of meat down in front of your group is far from the worst way to deal with certain threats (unblockable projectile spam, for example).

tfcgeneralkmk.9508:

i disagree with that last statement

only one of those three options can offer a valid PvE experience to players

all three options are valid what is fun to you may or may not be fun to others

to me personally all three aspects of pve right now are enjoyable

“valid” was the wrong word. “Sustainable” would probably be better.

Windsagio.1340:

It is, but there’s a pretty consistent feel that as it stands dungeon-running is reward-motivated out of scale, and it’s warping the whole experience.

Have a quick look at this.

Basically, fun, along with most of the other worthwhile elements of gameplay, often acts as an impediment to “winning” or “getting shinies”. But even though fun is the entire point and it seems completely absurd that a player would want to get rid of it in the name of shinies, that’s exactly what many players can’t help but do.

That means that, in order to entertain players, you need to find ways to keep getting shinies from coming into opposition with fun. It’s why balance matters in a single-player game. It’s the reason “pay-to-win” attracts such revulsion.

This is actually why the game does things like have enemies magically be carrying more stuff when more players fight them — this keeps the desire for rewards from conflicting with the social play and teamwork that MMOs are supposed to be all about.

But, it also gives players the means to optimise fun out of the game by forming into zergs. The end result is that there are only three kinds of PvE content possible in GW2:

1. Open-world content with rewards, which becomes zerg bait and, as such, is usually not fun.
2. Open-world content without rewards, which most players ignore.
3. Content which limits how many players can participate at once.

Given that neither crowds nor ghost towns are social and that blobs aren’t teams, only one of those three options can offer a valid PvE experience to players.

lordkrall.7241:

And why do you think they pulled resources from it in the first place?
There must be a reason for it after all. You can’t really claim that the reason loads of people didn’t play dungeons six months after release was due to them being “neglected”.

I just posted an argument to the effect that open world content cannot fulfil the PvE needs of any GW2 player as well as instanced content can. It follows from this that the reasons behind instances being neglected cannot have been good.

Brother Grimm.5176:

This is the part of this argument Dungeon runners do not want to admit. I’m not saying a mode of the game you love should be ignored, but resources should be put where a majority of players are playing.

That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guild Wars 2’s dungeons are currently dying specifically because of developer neglect. You can’t use the fact that they’re dying to justify continued neglect.

Or in other words, the question isn’t where dungeons are now, the question is where dungeons could be if they were getting proper attention.

It’s already been proven over and over again that dungeons and raids do still work for casual players.

In fact, they can serve the needs of casual players better than open world content would. Players will always optimise the fun out of any game, if it’s possible to do and it lets them ‘win’ more — or, in context, if it gets them more shinies. And this means that in an open loot game, it is literally impossible to make non-instanced PvE content that actually entertains anyone in the long run. If the content lacks rewards, nobody will ever do it, and if it has decent rewards, it will be done in zergs — and nothing worthwhile about a piece of PvE content can survive contact with a zerg, save for its rewards.

spoj.9672:

The beauty of instances is you dont have to do the content a certain way. You can do it however you like. That same choice isnt possible in open world. You either zerg it or zerg it.

Absolutely.

I honestly think that open loot systems do the exact opposite of what the manifesto says they do.

Because the goal is supposed to be that your fun level goes up when other people do content with you — which is the exact opposite of what happens when gameplay incentives encourage whole zergs to show up for events.

spoj.9672:

Except dungeons are more difficult than open world. In encounter design and the fact that you can only have 5 players and not a zerg.

To a point, yes, but the arguments I’m responding to here go a lot further than “dungeons are harder than open world”.

It’s also worth noting that instancing doesn’t always help, at least, not if FFXIV is any indication (although to be fair, these are people getting paired up at random by the LFG tool, and FFXIV has some draconian restrictions on kicking players and abandoning dungeon runs).

rotten.9753:

With the small exception that you won’t be kicked from the open world zone for leeching like that.

True, but if one player is carrying four others in a dungeon, they’re not kicking anyone either. The worst they could do is abandon their group, but you can do that in open world too.

The fact that you have some control over who you get in a dungeon is a point in their favour and a good reason to like them, but it doesn’t follow that open world content is inherently faceroll easymode as a result.

rotten.9753:

He’s correct. Open world content doesn’t require anything more than using just your autoattacks from a safe distance and dodging occasionally.

The unspoken caveat to what you’re saying there is exactly the same as the unspoken caveat to “there is no dungeon in Guild Wars 2 that is not faceroll easymode”.

This is what someone saw when they tried to measure DPS in a Silverwastes boss fight. (note old thread, please don’t necro).

That looks like the 80-20 rule at work to me. Or, essentially, what’s going on when you use that sort of “easy” tactic for many open world fights is no different to having one good player carry four bads through a dungeon.

Obviously, some open world content is meant to be easy, but that doesn’t apply to all of it. And one of the few places where 80/20 didn’t work, of course, was the Twisted Marionette — exactly the sort of open world LS content that the OP deems a waste of time and resources.

I think I’m going to wildly speculate on how this is being accomplished:

Before:

• Each unit (PC, NPC, mob, etc.) has a certain number of slots to receive boons and conditions with.
• Each slot can only accept a specific effect — e.g., you have 25 slots for bleeds, nine slots for burns, etc.

After:

• Each unit (PC, NPC, mob, etc.) has a certain number of slots to apply or inflict boons and conditions with.
• Individual slots might be able to accept several different types of effect — e.g., you might just have 64 slots with which to apply boons or conditions of any type.
• Boons and conditions will still have caps of some sort to prevent craziness like dungeon groups running around with +9600 power and condition damage from might stacks.

If I’m right, this would actually be something of a nerf in PvP, since applying lots of conditions might restrict your ability to cover them or to apply boons.

Note that while strictly speaking, this makes conditions into a per-player deal, it’s not the same thing that people normally talk about when they suggest that method.

It might make sense to put the floor on the downed penalty at silver or gold for fights that are intended to be particularly hard, just to make absolutely certain that groups can’t rely on it as a crutch.

Going so far as to remove the downed state for hard content seems a little excessive to me.

Given how mesmers usually get treated? Polymorph Moa will become self-target, thus granting us the equivalent of five ‘extra’ weapon skills. Problem solved.

Or maybe they’ll give us something like a tome or something.

runeblade.7514:

No, I’m asking how GW2 can be challenging.

I think the same general techniques used to make content challenging in any MMO would work in Guild Wars 2.

The main headache I can foresee isn’t making things difficult without a holy trinity, it’s more to do with providing the right sort of feedback to players so that fights feel fair and so that when things do go wrong, players have a decent chance of figuring out what’s up.

If people’s collective knowledge of the new fights gets polluted in the same way it did in the Silverwastes, then this expansion is going to be a disaster.

To a point, this seems to me to be one of the main things that the trinity actually helped with, and this is probably the real underlying problem that leads certain kinds of players to complain about the lack of a trinity.

I honestly think you could probably transplant Twintania (link goes to a guide and spoils much of the fight, although some things are glossed over) from FFXIV into GW2, tweak all of the numbers a bit, and there’d only really be one or two mechanics — Fireballs in the second phase, and Death Sentence throughout — that you’d have to change in order for the end result to work, despite the lack of a holy trinity in GW2.

And there are probably quite a few other raid bosses that could be transplanted in a similar fashion.

I’m still thinking on an example of what I might find cool as a more original boss fight for GW2.

Killface.1896:

main reason why dungeons are fail in GW2 is they are that easy you can run them with 5dps(Bezerkers) and easy mindless dungeons get boring fast….

Well, that’s pretty much stock drivel, so here are some stock responses:

1. People putting content on farm doesn’t make that content mindless. Groups will put even the hardest of hardcore raids on farm eventually, if the rewards are worthwhile.
2. Those “5 DPS” groups you’re talking about are anything but — they include multiple players brought along specifically to provide offensive support, defensive support, and utility — at the expense of individually stronger damage dealers.

kuben.9826:

I don’t know how people can get bored with a healer role which was the most demanded probably in every “trinity” MMO.

At its simplest, healing is boring. It’s only when you get to fairly advanced content that actually healing/shielding other players is fun.

And when you are in content like that, the sort of things you do as a healer aren’t really different to Guild Wars 2 staples like plonking down a Feedback or Wall of Reflection to defend against projectiles, laying down a black powder field to make enemies incapable of hitting you in melee, or firing off Virtue of Courage to negate a big hit without losing DPS.

In fact, more examples of strong healing skills that target allies would probably be a pretty safe addition to the game and may even see use — there are already strategies for some fights that rely on the Tome of Courage spells, for example.

Swagger.1459:

What do you mean gw2 is “second to wow only in the genre”?

I’d presume it means that that poster hasn’t seen the kind of figures that the original Lineage routinely posts.

tigirius.9014:

If non-trinity was so awesomesauce why did all those people leave?

As always, that’s very unlikely to be anything to do with Arenanet not caring enough about your personal pet issue. There was something of a content drought then, and at the same time, there were probably plenty of people being tempted by ArcheAge and Warlords of Draenor, both of which had the advantage of being fresh and shiny at a time when Guild Wars 2 was anything but.

KngGilgamesh.3481:

Why must Trinity be brought up again and again with no sound standing? Why are people so infatuated with gear stats in a combat system based on active defense and mobility? Why is stat diversity more important than build diversity?

Options shouldn’t be traps. Imagine how lame it would be if someone dressed themselves up in full berserker gear and then got toasted by raid damage every single time they encountered a dungeon boss.

Now, obviously, it’s not the same thing for somebody to just find that their dungeon runs are taking far too long and getting boring, but it still feels like you’ve just been trapped.

In theory, the only true ‘zerker problem’ for the most part is a presentation issue — there’s no real in-game communication on what individual prefixes are even meant to be used for — and it doesn’t help that, as far as I’m aware, at least some of the prefixes really are only supposed to be used in experimental builds.

But this is really a separate issue to the trinity question.

Knighthonor.4061:

But i have shown that the Trinity Mob AI is more advanced than we see in Non-Trinity mmos.

You’ve provided nothing to that effect. You referring to this?

Knighthonor.4061:

The Bosses are very predictable, and the Mob AI is easy to exploit, which is the reason the glass cannon Zerker has been the PvE meta all along. GW2 Pretty much proves my point. ???

Nope. You seem to have forgotten, but people put content on farm in trinity MMOs as well. Including content aimed at a far more hardcore audience than any of GW2’s content.

Just as in GW2, the vast majority of content in a trinity MMO is predictable enough to be memorised, and so that players can easily anticipate anything that the boss might do. In fact, this is one of the major things that allows tanks and healers to be effective — it shows when a tank or a healer doesn’t really know the content they’re doing and is just improvising.

Also somebody argued that trinity mmos are easier, but this is disproven by the fact that Trinity PvE in mmos like WoW and Rift, is far more challenging than anything we have in Non-Trinity mmos like GW2. No argument there.

MMOs like WoW and Rift have more challenging PvE because they have examples of PvE content that’s specifically targeted at far more hardcore audiences than anything in GW2 is presently aimed at. That has nothing to do with them being trinity MMOs.

Neox.3497:

I played a bit support in WoW:WoD and it was really fresh. Really sad that GW2 doesn’t even allow you to play as a healer…

That’s not true, actually.

For the most part, filling bars — especially when it’s just to cover someone else’s mistake — is just a chore.

But in reality, the real meat of the healer’s gameplay isn’t about filling bars, it’s about anticipating and responding to danger — and when there’s no need to heal in a trinity MMO, you DPS.

Feedback? Wall of Reflection? Virtue of Courage? Power Break? Power Cleanse? Every single one of those is a healer skill, even though they have nothing to do with filling bars.

The situation in GW2 as far as healers are concerned isn’t too far removed from e.g., FFXIV handing every scholar an AI pet fairy who takes care of most of the basic filling of bars that might be needed. Or what Rift does with its Chloromancers.

Aidenwolf.5964:

Not true at all. The trinity means dedicated healers tanks and DPS gear grinding for top level stats is raiding which I think you’re referring to inadvertently. Btw we already have that it’s called ascended.

That should be “designated healers, tanks, and DPS”. Very very few games expect players to be dedicated to their assigned party roles — lots of ‘DPS’ classes are support, and most games require and expect healers to do DPS as well — sometimes, your healer can even be the best DPS you have — e.g., there is only one class in FFXIV with better AoE DPS than the white mage.

Knighthonor.4061:

well going off the statements some of you all made in this thread, some of you have said that GW2 Dungeon mob AI gets exploited all the time. But i have never seen that degree of AI explotation in a Trinity game like WoW or Rift… so it would seem that the Trinity AI although not Terminator smart, is still superior to the the Non-Trinity Mob AI found in GW2.

Are you familiar with the concept of a sacrifice pull?

If you aren’t, it’s a strategy sometimes seen in Trinity games where a tank goes in, aggroes everything in the path of wherever the group wants to go, then kites those mobs away while the rest of the group slips past and reaches the next safe area, thereby skipping a whole bunch of trash.

In the case of Rift specifically, one of the most basic tactics taught to players running Riftstalker tank builds involves getting groups of mobs to stack up by luring them around corners.

Yeah… AI exploitation is far from being uncommon in Trinity MMOs. It’s even easier when you can directly manipulate the numbers it uses.

In fact, you know that the term ‘kite’ is older than GW2, right? And you know how it acquired that meaning in MMO jargon? Yeah, think about that for a minute.

rapthorne.7345:

…but the new generation are lazy and entitled, everyone wants to see big numbers fly so that’s what’s happening

You just set up a giant strawman in here and fought that instead of addressing anything anyone’s actually said on the subject, yet it’s the “new generation” who are “lazy and entitled”.

Seriously?

OP, my personal suggestion would be to play whatever game you think does things better than GW2 rather than trying to turn GW2 into that game, but that’s just me.

You’re being so nonspecific that even if there was something that the GW2 devs could learn from NWO, you’re never going to convince anyone of it.

lighter.2708:

ill see how many content it actually has on release, if it is only as many content as a major patch that other games get every three month for free but for 60 dollars then i’ll rethink the purchase.

It has been very strongly implied that we’re supposed to be expecting a quality over quantity deal here. If that doesn’t work for you then so be it.