Guild Wars 2

Yep, that’s also what I have been suggesting. Remove/reduce pure DPS gear and DPS stats, make all class/weapon DPS ‘flat’. Make every build a ‘support’ build, just with a different flavour. Improve team play by buffing combo fields, for example.

Of course, its not that simple… the dungeon encounters should be probably redesigned as well…

Well, this is quite a subjective thing. Different people will tell you different things. I recently tried a Mesmer and I was absolutely thrilled. I find both Necro and Ele quite boring in comparison.

Here is my list, with short explanations/examples:

1) Gameplay design goals and consequentially, class balance choices. Players should have the feeling that class balancing is FAIR and the player is in control of the gameplay (which is not necessarily the case, for example, with pets/turrets)

2) The DPS/support builds in encounters. Current PVE encounters heavily favours pure DPS builds (my suggestion here would be to drastically reduce the importance of Power stat and bring the DPS of very class/build to a more or less flat state, so that ALL builds are support builds in one way or another)

3) Ascended gear and grind – not what I signed for!

Atherakhia.4086:

I probably have a better grasp of computer programming than you do. But this is a server side latency issue, not a client side display issue. It can’t be resolved. They’ve said as much.

Assuming that each client receives updates every second, additional 64 bytes per notification would result in 312KB for 5000 players. Are you seriously telling me that the game server connection is that constrained that it can’t manage additional 300KB upstream per second?

locoman.1974:

That is if the only information the game has to send is how many stacks of a specific condition the mob has. Thing is, if each stack is applied by a different player with different condition damage then you also have to add how much damage each stack is doing, which changes every tick because of conditions finishing and being replaced. Add to that as well if one player had condition duration buffed, the other one doesn’t, the third one has twice as much condition duration and so on.

No, your client does not need to know all that. It is not reflected in the logs and not shown in the UI.

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

Those who try and argue semantics are really not adding anything. I’m well aware that my Quaggan is not real.

You sir, are a true sophist. This thread is a a very skilled provocation, entirely devoid of any meaning or logics. To everyone reading: I suggest just to ignore and move along.

For those who actually take this thread seriously (why??), a very quick explanation: be respectful to your fellow human beings and you will not be banned. It doesn’t get any simpler as that.

Olba.5376:

Because you don’t need to send detailed data from those 100 mobs to every one of those 100 players. Whereas if you’re attacking the same mob, you’re required to send the same data (which updates in real time, btw) to all participants. Which can be any number from 1 to … map cap.

I think you are greatly overestimating the task. Just one byte is enough to encode up to 256 stacks. Two bytes – 65536 stacks. A brute-force (the most stupid and simple way to do it) notification for 12 conditions would thus take 24 bytes per player. For 100 players, its 2.4KB of data required for notifications. This can be reduced greatly by using incremental updates + smarter encoding. Surely the server has enough bandwidth to send a few additional KB of data per second.

Ellisande.5218:

The problem is that the game can’t send back that the mob has a 25 stack of bleed, it sends back all the information on each of the separate 25 bleeds because each bleed does different damage per tick, ticks at different rates, expires at different times and has different times remaining.

I though that the client only reported the damage YOUR conditions are causing to the target? So there is no need for the server to inform the client of EVERY condition, is there? It is more then enough enough to send each client updates about the current number of conditions+estimated number to account for lag. Which can be done quite easily.

If I am allowed to add my 2 cents to the discussion Right now, GW2 is arguably the ‘best’ MMO on the market. The reason why many people complain is that it could have been so much better. Unfortunately, ArenaNet seems to have some sort of management crisis. The history of the game shows clearly that they are suffering from miscommunication, lack of central vision and suboptimal workflows. They have some amazing tech and very talented people – but there is nothing that would focus these talents on the work that has to be done. They started amazingly well. Then, they were kind of outsmarted by the hardcore players (who quickly found the way to ‘break’ the game – I am talking about metaplay) and instead of calmly thinking how to fix the issues, they started applying bandaids. Which broke the game even more. I remember half a year ago, when many people were complaining about patches, I was saying ‘be patient, they are good designers, they have a balance master-plan, it just takes time’. I hate to say it, I am not that sure about that anymore. The whole balancing act eludes me. I feel that much of the balancing the team does is based on impressionistic, subjective opinions of the devs instead of more objective, statistics-based data mining.

What the game needs, quickly:

- More transparent, consistent development and issue resolution
- Clear gameplay design principles, which have to be communicated to the players and balancing must follow those principles. Example: all weapon abilities must do at least two things to promote skilled gameplay (aka. no ‘boring abilities’); weapons should have one bread and butter attack ability, some situational abilities and some high risk/reward abilities; player should be in control of the character (responsiveness!!), there should be no hard counters, misfiring an ability should be punished, HARD. All in all, the gemaplay principles must give the players the feeling that they/their team is responsible for the failure, and not some ‘unfair’ unpredictable game element (e.g. pet killed off by PVE encounters simply because they don’t have enough HP).
- Identify the core gameplay and class problems and devise the ways to fix them. E.g. ranger pet responsiveness; pet uptime. Do this for ALL classes. A-Net’s attachment to warriors seems a bit weird
- Rework encounters and mechanics to promote team play. E.g. make combo fields more important and crucial for team success. Right now, optimal solution for PvE is going all DPS. This should change. I have no idea how this should be changed, but I am sure that this is possible. One idea would be to limit the way how DPS can be increased, e.g. remove pure DPS gear from the game altogether. This way, players will be ‘forced’ to go support in one way or another. Add more options to support based on the DPS (e.g. buff/heal on critical hit, heal on dodge etc. are good mechanics here). Remove the conception of DPS/support weapons – all weapons should do comparable damage, but support different playstyles and ideas.

Right now, they seem to be trying to change their development structure and make it more transparent. Which is a good sign. We’ll see.

P.S. This ended up much longer then expected Hope it makes at least some sense.

HiddenNick.7206:

green plum.7514:

What would be an example of a game which is not pointless?

For example Gw2 to the point when you complete your personal story. As stated in the first post.

I fail to see how a badly written, boring questline makes a MMORPG ‘not pointless’. Actually, the game would be so much better without it. The storytelling in the zones is much more engaging than the cheesy personal story writing.

I’m not sure I’m following. What would be an example of a game which is not pointless? I’m playing games because I think its fun. I have no interest in grinding for legendaries etc. For me, the main problem in this games is that most people I run into are only interested in dungeon speed runs, champion trains and other such nonsense.

Actually, my experience is quite the opposite. I am usually the lowest level character in the group (mind you, I am talking about standard dungeons, not the exp mode ones) and yet most lvl 80 are beyond horrible. I very seldomly run dungeons because of this. Its not ok if my lvl 60 Guardian has to be the one carrying the group of lvl 80s in a lvl 40 dungeon

I have more fun levelling the messmer than I had levelling the warrior. Sure, its not that faceroll, but the gameplay is very satisfying. It’s a shame not every class has this dynamic ‘I-have-to-use-my-skills-appropriately’ feeling. And the ‘pet’ system is really good. It would be nice though if the illusions didn’t disappear until the end of the combat, rather then die together with the target.

It is rather interesting to see how man people who actively play the game totally misjudge it. Myself, I am a casual player and I don’t do much PvE, but I have been closely following the discussions around the game since BWE1. One big problem with the game is that most people just focus on one single class (that they play) and are ignorant of the subtleties of the other classes + blindly repeat the myths they hear elsewhere.

The fact is, colesy and others are absolutely right. Guardian sustain DPS > Warrior sustain DPS (in a bully buffed group). Its also easily to explain why most people find it hard to believe. First of all, Guardian is strongly associated with support roles. Secondly, Warrior perceivably hit higher numbers – what people forget is that 42K 100b has a cast time of 3.5s, which results in effective DPS of 12k for 100b only, but you also have to factor in the cooldown. Thirdly, Warriors clearly have higher DPS when played solo or in not min-maxed groups, because Warriors have easy access to offence buffs.

Colesy is also spot-on when talking about zerker gear. However, you must remember that this is about min-maxing! Glass cannon groups are the most efficient in PvE, but this requires very skilled players. Players of average skill (or noobs like me) are better off running defensive builds, which allow more margin for error. Under these circumstances, Warrior DPS will be higher again – simply because Guardian must sacrifice more DPS to get defence.

Tl;DR: indeed, in a properly min-maxed group, with highly skilled player Guardian DPS > Warrior DPS. Most players won’t get there though. Personally, I never cared about min-maxing. I just want to enjoy the game. I play guardian because of cool blue effects. I also play Warrior, because stuns and mobility is fun

I think you should just change your guild. Not only your guildmates seem to have a severe lack of knowledge about how the hammer works (and btw, Guardian Hammer damage is HIGHER than Warrior Hammer DPS), but they also have that unpleasant mob mentality. There are plenty cool people in this game, roll with those

Do you still believe in objective community feedback after reading these forums? The main reason, I think, is because they don’t want to hinder their ability to make last-time chances. Imagine the QQ if a change is ‘promised’ but does not actually arrive.

About OpenGL – the main reason why it is not used for games is because high-performance OpenGL applications used to be a PITA to debug. There is still no SDK, limited developer tools (on Windows at least). In contrast, DirectX is fast, reliable, simple and very well documented.

And as far as features go… OpenGL has supported that multithreading you people are talking about for over 20 years now

What? Guardian is one of the most played classes in this game and certainly among the most balanced ones.

maddoctor.2738:

green plum.7514:

Nerf the loot in A, buff the loot in B. Recalculate every n hours. You can even have a basic UI to show which encounters are most rewarding. Basically, diminishing returns on global scale. Doesn’t need much work to implement also.

It’s funny how you say it doesn’t need much work…

Because it doesn’t. They already should have statistics gathering mechanics in place (if they don’t then I will be very disappointed). Every day you can collect the data and compute the how many player received rewards from this in the encounter. Then rank the encounters based on this score and use the rank to modify the loot table. The particular way on how the loot table should be modified can require some brainstorming but its not rocket science. And depending on who good their UI layer API is, implementing a basic UI should be trivial.

P.S. Yes, I am a programmer.

An easy ‘fix’ would be to adjust rewards based on the popularity of the content. Everyone runs the dungeon A but almost nobody runs dungeon B? Nerf the loot in A, buff the loot in B. Recalculate every n hours. You can even have a basic UI to show which encounters are most rewarding. Basically, diminishing returns on global scale. Doesn’t need much work to implement also.

Do you even have an idea how OP these suggestions would make the class? Your suggestion for Binding Jeopardy is particularly a joke. Kindled Zeal is another one.

Dear all, it might interest some of you here that the last developer preview build of 10.9 Mavericks in combination with 17.09 GW2 patch has improved the performance to the levels that I completely abandoned the Windows client because frankly, there is no noticeable difference between the two. I can now run 1680×1050 with high settings on OS X my 15" base retina and get 40-50 fps on average. Which is basically the same as on Windows. The image quality is rather good.In really high populates zones this drops significantly (to around 15-20 fps in LA during primetime) and big WWW battles can still get laggy, but again – the Windows client has the same problems for me. All in all, I am extremely impressed with Apple’s/Nvidia progress on the GPU drivers. The Unigine benchmarks also show less then 15% performance difference between OS X and Windows, which is a new high in my experience.

Happy Mac gaming for you all!

A quick disclaimer: I do not play a thief.

@OP: this is by far the most well formulated, sound and reasonable suggestion coming from a player that I have ever read on these forums. Hat off to you. I wish people like you were designing this game.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

^— It’s sort of ONLY tiny studios that release both OSX and Windows clients – the reason for which being that if they don’t they have an even smaller market than their already small market.
Very few major studios produce games for release on both windows and OSX. Notable exceptions being racing games and recently SimCity (which was a disaster on both clients and EA is just not a good company so yeah…)

Well, its a bit more tricky actually. Games made by tiny studios do not have the same performance constraints, so they can get away with a simpler engine. Plus, if you develop a game from the scratch, its fairly easy to build it in a way that is more cross-platform. The issue with GW2 is that (as many have pointed out), its using a patched archaic DirectX engine. This would be quite non-trivial to port to OpenGL – and then you have to maintain the two versions of the engine at the same time. The biggest issue with OpenGL (and the main reason why it has declined in popularity over the last few years) is lack of development tools and clear standards. Its a bit messy, unpredictable, there was no debugging capability, no clear documentation, no SDK – and the ARB (who is the organisation responsible for the API) missed a lot of opportunities in the past. OS X offers some pretty decent OpenGL debugging tools for developers, but its still far from what Microsoft has. And anyway, even if they do a native port, there is no guaranty that it will be actually faster then the Cider version. The main problem are the sucky OS X graphics drivers… the situation has improved somehow with Mavericks (my rMBP runs GW2 at 40+ FPS at medium settings and 1680×1050, which is ok for me – although there is some occasional stutter), but the Windows version still has 20%+ higher performance.

Now, Blizzard can do a native port because a) they have MUCH more resources, and b) their engine is less sophisticated. To do a good Mac port A-net would probably have to redevelop their engine in a cross-platform friendly way, which they can’t really afford right now.

There is no ‘nerf’ here, its a bug fix. DS was never supposed to soak up all the damage, it is an additional buffer, not a block. Its a shame of course, because many players relied on this bugged mechanics in the first place. I don’t have enough Necro experience to discuss the consequences of this fix.

If this change indeed makes Necro unviable (whatever that means), then this shows that there are some gaping issues with Necro design in the first place, and I believe it is a good idea to discuss them. But please do not call fixing a broken feature a nerf.

Zealot’s defence needs either a damage boost or a change. Right now, it does not do any more damage (depends on your crit rate of course) than the #1 chain, it roots you, the activation is unreliable and the block hardly works as it is. A nice change would be if it applied a cripple or something like that.

Ghotistyx.6942:

So again, check this out. It takes time for these things to get from known issue (or new content) to on our dinner table.

You are confusing new features and bug fixes. What Colin writes makes perfect sense for new content and big changes (like ability changes). But increasing projectile speed is (or better – should be) a trivial change which does not have to go though all these instances. As far as testing goes – I have a strong suspicion that ANet simply lacks a proper testing framework. The bulk of testing should be done with statistical simulations and unit tests based on the game engine. From what I have seen so far (slow and often broken patches) they don’t have anything like this. I mean, there are still areas in the game where mobs respawn with absurd speed, and they can’t fix it. If they had proper testing facilities, such issues should not exist at all, because they are easily detectible without any human interaction.

Sandra Martino.3870:

Scepter is the only viable ranged weapon we have (staff is but support/tag only) and yet it cannot hit moving targets. Result: ranged guardian do not exist. Wait what? Yes!

This is true for most ranged attacks in the game. I fail to see what the big problem is. If the opponent is side-strafing like that, he is most likely not doing anything useful.

Guardian can quickly stack vulnerability on large packs of big weak mobs with Justice is Blind, Blind Exposure and Renewed Justice. Just jump in, activate Justice and use it on cooldown. Together with Inspired Virtue, it also allows you to stack Might as crazy.

However, in the dungeons or high level content there is not much opportunity to use this, the mobs simply don’t go down fast enough. Its also less useful agains bosses. Its fun for leveling though.

Obtena.7952:

It’s not at all. The dev stated they had no idea when that would be fixed. They only acknowledged it wasn’t correctly implemented. The only truly mindblowing thing is that people equate ‘no idea when it will be fixed’ to ‘next patch’.

No, the truly mind-blowing thing is that it takes so long to change a single number

Tarsius.3170:

green plum.7514:

Hm, Jon actually promised us a scepter fix :/ It it really that difficult just to increase projectile speed?

He didn’t give us a time-frame though. I suspect it was “discovered” too late to make it into this month’s release cycle

They have a release cycle of over 1 month for changing a single number? No wonder they can’t get around to fix bugs ^^

Hm, Jon actually promised us a scepter fix :/ It it really that difficult just to increase projectile speed?

You are right of course. I mean, it makes sense that turrets have a cool down – after all, they are meant to be area ‘control’ items and it would be a bit unfair if you could just move them around at will. However, as so many other minions, turrets just die too quickly. They need a significant health boost, along with some of the Necromancer’s Minions, Guardian’s Spirit Weapons and Ranger Spirits.

The Guardian is designed around close combat, sustained damage and control. The Burning condition which comes pretty much for free with the Guardian is a particular example of sustained damage. I don’t know any other class that can apply Blinds (which are a great damage mitigation tool) on a regular basis. And Scepter is actually very good for ranged PvE, and it will also be better in PvP once dev’s will buff the projectile speed as already promised by John few days ago. And I am not even starting about the Staff, which is simply an amazing weapon.

Yes, Guardian has its limitations. But so does every other class (save for Ele ^^).

I think that recent turret buffs actually put them in a fairly good place as far as damage and utility goes. Of course, I am not even close to be a high-tier player (and my Engi is not max level yet), so I don’t have much credibility ^^ However, turrets just need better defences. In WvW they are absolutely useless because they go down from all the AOE the same moment they are placed. Again, its the same problematic as with pets. I think the best solution is really a passive AOE damage reduction for all minions.

Most people here should work on their language comprehension skills. What the devs in the video are saying is that they want to LOWER the base thief damage and give them a trait to increase their damage agains characters with lots of boons. As well as nerfing the mug trait. . The overall thief burst is decreased but burst agains characters with boons either stays the same or is slightly increased. Well within the assassin theme and makes the gameplay deeper. I have no problem with any of that

Esplen.3940:

Perma (or semi-perma) switfness on mesmer is easily obtainable with a centaur runes and a heal skill or a boon duration runeset in conjunction with sigil of speed or focus (and yes, this is without any utilities).

Well, the problem here is that you have to use centaur runes (thus sacrificing other potentially more beneficial runes) and you waste your heal skill. With the Mesmer you’d have to cripple your build to achieve this.

Now, Guardian is a different thing. Using +boon duration runes for a Guardian makes lots of sense, because boon’s are Guardian’s main theme. You not only get perma-switfness but also protection, regeneration and retaliation (also might), not to mention trait lines that increase your damage output if you have active boons etc. AFAIK, Mesmer does not benefit from +boon duration to the same extent.

P.S. I don’t play Mesmer, I play Guardian. And I do agree that it seems unfair that Mesmers are let out of the ‘we can run quickly’ party.

TheGuy.3568:

Perma swiftness on guardian is nigh impossible without using a staff so forget boons galore there slow as molasses.

Perma (or semi-perma) switfness on guardian is easily obtainable with a shout/boon duration build (and yes, this is without staff).

Unfortunately, torch #4 does not trigger fury.

P.S. Why are you prefixing your sentences with a LOL? I’m confused

Well, as it stands the GS is the most flexible damage-oriented weapon in our arsenal. It is high damage, it is reliable, it has utility, it has a leap, it has a high condition damage move (#5) with an optional pull component. It has the ‘flow’, and its fun to play – and it also gives you more then one option to do things. Hammer is nice, but it does not have this dynamic feel to it and abilities #3,4,5 are very situational (at least when talking from the single/small group open world PvE perspective). The 1H sword is neat, but is basically only has the auto-attack and the teleport. Basically, the GS has just too many goodies and any alternative feels like you are sacrificing something (unless you run a very specialised build of course, I am talking about a generic merry run around DPS role). Compare it to Warrior where you can switch to Axe if you feel like chopping or to Hammer if you feel like smashing.

P.S. I would really like to see some 1H weapon updates for the Guardian, right now they seem a bit underwhelming compared to the 2H options…

HannaDeFreitas.4236:

Even on the glassest build you’re dealing half the DPS of a Warrior and probably less than other classes as well; if we had a DPS meter you would realize that your DPS doesn’t really matter compared to what others deal.

Huch? Guardian is among the highest-DPS professions in the whole game. It certainly does not have the burst of the warrior, but the sustained damage can be higher.

All I can say that I am happy that people like the OP are not designing this game – or any game (for reasons outlined by multiple posters in this thread).

P.S. Is there such a thing as Mary Sue of game design?

Hicci.8761:

-“Retreat” now includes 50% chance of tripping

This one is great

Hicci.8761:

I did not say guardian was a sniper… I merely corrected you. 1200 range is vital against some dungeon bosses like the nightmare tree or Lupus. In PVE scepter is an fantastic weapon but in WvW or PvP the player is forced to approach enemies and not support your allies with ranged pressure.

I fully agree. I also never said that the scepter range should be reduced! My ‘three orbs, three different speeds’ idea simply says that orb speed should be adjusted in such a way that they meet approximately 900 units from the launching point. Then they should continue to 1200, of course. I think such idea would be interesting in PvP as it could allow for fun burst options when setup correctly.

Hicci.8761:

Scepters range is 1200. I would prefer homing projectiles.

So? Its auto-attack is still mid-range oriented by design, and I see no problem with that. Guardian is not a sniper.

Brutal Arts.6307:

So why is everything so bugged/poorly thought out on release? There must be a disconnect in this process.

Because thousands of players (=dozen thousands of runs) are much more likely to find a problem than a few dozen runs with devs. To truly test something the system must be automated; e.g. use bots to run dungeons.

I love your sword, focus and torch (except Zealot’s Fire) suggestions.

I am unsure about making #2 a symbol. A targeted symbol on such a short CD would be ridiculously OP – so they will have to increase the CD to accommodate.

About #1 – I think it would be interesting if the orb would slowly accelerate – slow when launched but increasingly gaining speed. Or, one could make it a chain skill, where each skill in the chain launches the same orb but at a different speed. First one would be the slowest, second one faster and the third one fastest. The idea here is that all orbs reach the enemy (at say, 900 range) at approximately the same time.

ZoroDaOtter.3859:

Blind Exposure -> Halting Darkness: Applying blind also applies one second of immobilize.

Problem solved?

This would be broken as hell.

Guardians have access to many teleports and leaps on short cooldown. Add a cripple to it and it would be difficult to kite them at all. And btw, with a shout build it is not that difficult to get perma-swiftness (or close to it).