Guild Wars 2

swordsman and duelist are pretty close

warden kinda blows

As for Necro’s lack of “team buffs”. I think that’s not really true. Necro, as a class, is not a Guardian. They are supposed to be the debuffers, and that means weakening the enemy as opposed to strengthening the ally. Weakness on a group of enemies is similar to Protection boon on a group of allies. Cripple on a group of enemies is similar to Swiftness to a group of allies.

The problem is, their debuffer role is like almost exclusively PvP-centric. You can apply weakness with other classes in PvE, chill is irrelevant, vulnerability can done by literally every other class too – and poison is a non-issue. Their support utilities need to have a pvp/pve split in order to make necros worth taking.

I hope this isn’t a srsly try to show an implementation of crowdcontrol

Why not? You lock down bosses from doing major mechanics with either immobilise or shaving off defiant and then interrupting a key skill.

i’m speaking in wider “game as a whole” terms, not in organized teams/guild dungeon runs terms.

Well there’s no point balancing it open world because people are just smashing CC everywhere, but in instances, defiant functions just fine – it prevents CC spam but rewards you for timing it right.

Support = helping your party. this is extremely vague and can fall to Boons as much as it can Pressing F to Rez a downed player. Support typically means damage mitigation or healing and Healing Power Scales terribly for all classes. It is also not carried by a boon (boons applied to others absorb relevant #’s from who they sit on rather than whomever applied them). This leads to a very self serving type of support rather than fostering the want/need to have a Support oriented Player in your group.

“self serving” like might stacking, fury stacking, stability, aegis, reflection …? If you want to clear a dungeon efficiently you need players maximising their team support at as small a tradeoff to their damage as possible – this means dropping one or two DPS traits in return for more support, dropping DPS utilities for more support utilities. Your idea of “support oriented” is probably healing power or boon duration stacking, but GW2 neither has that nor needs that.

CC – Control also casts a wide net and can fall to Stuns/conditions/Damage etc.. Mirky waters. a large percent of CC is easily negated either (pvp (including wvw)) or entirely negated (PvE, boss buffs, invulnerable, shortened durations etc..) Playing CC is extremely unrewarding overall at this time.

I didn’t know “enables the party to maintain full DPS uptime and rotations” = extremely unrewarding.

This is not how things tend to work and from my experiances in gaming and in GW2, is not how they should ever work.

There is virtually little to no trade offs. no punishments or “lacking” costs to Define any Roles in Gw2 beyond – Does more damage than X in Y situation because of Z.

In ArcheAge you can take different skill trees to complement your playstyle as best as possible – and there’s no drawbacks no matter which ones you take – it’s purely dependent on how well you feel they synergise. IIRC, in Aion you were able to choose skill trees at no drawback as well.

I know Support/Control/Damage is how the skills and ultimately the classes differentiate themselves from eachother. But, for the most part, these three categories aren’t the Roles themselves. They seem more like tools selected in varying portions to fulfill roles.

(Like how in league of legends roles are a description of territory you’re responsible for, and champs with different abilities like tanking or ranged damage can fulfill the same role in different ways).

And there is nothing wrong with that – if you force certain roles you end up having unpopular ones which nobody wants to do – it’ll be lf 1 healer all over again. For example take cof p2 – nobody wants to run magg over to the magmacyte, you get groups where all 5 people port.

In PvE there seems to be very little in the way of spatial or resource things going on to create differing responsibilities among party members. The ones I’ve noticed so far are things like Ooze Bait in the TAether path puzzle, that exist only on an encounter basis. Standard combat against challenging foes in and of itself doesn’t seem to have these kinds of noticeably different roles between party members.

You have certain classes brought for passive buffs, you have offensive buff-stacking pre and during fight and you’ll normally have a “defensive” buff class like guardian or mesmer for aegis, projectile reflection, stability and condition cleansing. Then you have engi and thief that can stealth which is unique to them and is a whole separate role entirely from the usual combat ones.

The whole “we need one guy doing this, another guy doing this, another dude doing this” already exists in the game, it’s just multiple classes can do each thing, and each class can normally do a slight part of it but either just to themselves or for shorter duration (or RNG) – your problem is that you don’t have the game outright spelling it out for you: YOU NEED A HEALER, YOU NEED A TANK AND YOU NEED DPS. The intricacies of the combat system in this game were so subtle we once thought warriors and guardians were #1 – but once we actually did research we began to realise that literally every class in the game was solid for instanced content besides necromancer which has decent DPS (exceeds warriors by like a whole thousand if in lich form) but lacks team utility.

Make anything look like a bobblehead and I won’t even bother with this tournament, the bobbleheads are monumentally stupid.

highest damage is

pick up fiery greatsword

4

collect loot

Vox Hollow.2736:

As a note, I want to be very clear that we’re looking for comments from all game modes, PvE, PvP, and WvW included.

Hopefully I’m not going to come off as passive aggressively snarky when I say this, but;

I’m kind of at a loss to describe how classes can fill differing roles in PvE, because I don’t really feel like there are any?

There are damage, control and support roles – it’s just you’re expected to do all three – not just specialise in one.

And if ANet don’t stay true to this, we’re just going to end up with buffbots, tanks, healers and GW2 will be generic MMO #239612752362

HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLY

OH

MY

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tychondus.4821:

maha.7902:

because not all classes bring something unique to instances and so there’s a lot of discrimination. ANet need to give engineers and necros something unique to make them worth taking.

Oh i see the issue. Its a fair call as well. The overall scale of this balance issue, is massive. It pretty much impacts every part of the game and the gamers experience. Lets see how anet weasels its way out of this one…..I hear Season 2 is about to start…..

It impacts people who want to do instances with those classes but either realise they aren’t as good and feel bad taking them, or still want to take them but get kicked from groups.

PvE balance is honestly mostly in a good place, but there’s outliers like this, ice bow and fiery greatsword which need to be remedied.

PvP, I honestly feel like most of the “imbalanced” things are just overly prideful people crying because they got trash canned by someone better than them and just want things nerfed – but overall, the balance is in a pretty decent place. Also, asura need to be removed or some way to make them show a human model.

AsmallChicken.9634:

maha.7902:

i like how literally this entire thread is a bunch of pvp heroes and theres like zero pve balance discussion

All classes can spam 1 equally as effective in the zerg clusterkitten of their living world releases. So no problems there.

i’m on about dungeons.

we currently have six solid classes out of eight – engineers need some sort of passive buff equivalent to something like empower allies, and necromancers just need team utility full stop. ranger sword auto needs to be fixed to not lock you in place for pve – and if anet sort this out then it’ll cut down a lot on class discrimination.

it would also be nice to get their opinion on the state of skills with large AOE like meteor shower, ice bow 4 – these two skills, especially the bow have massively scaled up damage against large bosses – and then there’s fiery greatsword which desperately needs to be forced to have a target for the fiery rush.

Why do you need balance in PvE? Really who cares if someone made a build that could take down lupicus is 2 hits. its PvE. You are not fighting monster that WANT to kill you. Unlike other gameplays such as WvW and PvP.

because not all classes bring something unique to instances and so there’s a lot of discrimination. ANet need to give engineers and necros something unique to make them worth taking.

i like how literally this entire thread is a bunch of pvp heroes and theres like zero pve balance discussion

Literally the last four times I have taken mesmer in to low-man Arah p2’s (some on stream as well ….) wardens have bugged out. I love playing mesmer but I’m absolutely sick of the class being so screwy and causing wipes.

Well the thing is – if we did a tournament where people have to go through a full tour of certain dungeons, sure you can have a hella glassy composition of say, triple ele, warrior, guard but the risk of failure becomes that much higher because of how squishy the classes are – whereas if you pull it off you’ll get pretty kitten quick dungeon clears. So you’d actually see some diversity in composition between guilds who feel they can go balls to the wall DPS and others who would rather say, not have two people die then have to three-man the rest of an instance.

You can also try soloing with condition damage gear – the damage is pretty on par with direct damage and you don’t need to buy expensive runes, just expensive sigils (lol).

Without first having that discussion, professions where the strength is “direct” or “burst” damage will have a HUGE advantage over those who’s strength is healing or ccs (or even condition damage).

So, the discussion really needs to be – What can be done to bring the roles of control and support back into the game in a meaningful – and fun – way? In terms of balance, I think that is the single most important question we need to see answered.

Condition damage:

(have a faster time I haven’t uploaded, 2:48, pushing harder for quicker)

Control:

Support:

(aegis, stability, projectile reflection, might, fury, swiftness)

Lingie.6417:

Chessrook.8643:

I really have to ask here, am I the only one who HATES this? Frack am I the only one who is actually trying to have a good time?

..And the rest of the OP content.

Tried running Sorrow’s Embrace earlier. Couldn’t go with any party because I wasn’t stacking or skipping everything but the bosses. When I went to make my own party, people were joining it to kick me out of it, because I didn’t want to skip or stack.

The community has become really toxic about “stacking” and I wish ANet would put an end to it. The skill requirement for the majority of the game is out the window from it, and it doesn’t allow for a good experience for players who have no idea what’s going on. (i.e. getting kicked out without warning.)

Toxic maneuver, filled with toxic players. That’s about all I can say about it.

Sigh.

You would literally have to redesign every single encounter in every single instance to remove stacking, not even kidding you.

if you cut all of coe you could run arah 1/2/3 and make like double the gold in the same amount of time

I don’t see how not skipping mobs and not using consumables is meant to make it any more interesting, that literally just adds tedium.

hendo.1940:

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Well I have to say his point are pretty underpinned. Atleast…

If you understood the game even remotely as much as the “elitists” around here(and weren’t a complete dracula drone which your tone makes me think you are), you’d haven’t said this, even under crystal meth.

If you’re a BHB and report this/get me infracted, it’ll just confirm it.

Stop trying to farm infractions.

He made a video of himself cleaving three mobs and then used that as his DPS (74,126 damage – 13,236DPS over 5.6s) versus videos of people hitting a single mob.

Cue Nike linking Magecrusher 77,955 damage hundred blades (22,272DPS over 3.5s) – obviously against a single boss GG, nemesis loses.

One of the rules we were given is:

2. My basic stance is that mobs should try to move out of ground-based AoEs and skills like 100b, and enemies with ranged attacks should always try to keep distance from players.

So ice bows, fgs, lava fonts, smites are all forbidden. Either way we’re not going to be using fgs/ice bow, but if we were allowed to immobilise we could use lava font and/or smite so as to represent stopping mobs from trying to walk out/keep their distance. t would allow us to achieve a smoother run.

We’re not using fiery greatswords or whirlwinds, we just want to use lava fonts on staff eles or maybe smite on scepter guards.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Carighan, you touch upon a very good subject. And that’s the problem that Anet has added a lot of mechanics to the game, but left a lot of them unused in combat. Boon control is but one of those mechanics, conditions is another. And then there’s control, which is rendered useless in boss battles. This is indeed why we see this massive divide between the usefulness of one class or the next. Some classes focus a lot on a mechanic that has yet to play a roll in combat. Meanwhile we have some other classes that have mechanics that are all covered in combat, such stability, reflects and direct damage.

Conditions:

Control:

Boon control is more relevant to PvP.

We may try another run today.

Regarding the no ground-targeted aoe/high damage channeled skills rule – is it allowed for us to immobilise mobs in order to “lock them down” in the aoe fields? Would that be fair? Because the argument is that it’s stupid that they don’t run out, but if we hold them inside it seems fine to me – otherwise it’s honestly starting to get quite hard to try and improve our tactics.

Well here’s the SE p2 some of us in DnT did:

Nobody has a better recording anyway so it’s THE RECORD

TKiller.6829:

Belka opened on me with pulsing orb and point blank shot effectively pushing me in the orb. Six times in a row. I can’t tell if I’m unlucky or just not learning.

she pretty much always opens up with orb > point blank so you just anticipate it and dodge

also, shameless plug

Dual.8953:

DigitalKirin.9714:

Dual, would you be willing to record a run with zero stacking (no hit box overlapping)?

Stacking itself ain’t my battle. I’m more a neutral party now, so I mainly poke holes in percieved flaws in arguements I see on either side. With this one, I don’t see it helping the pro-stacking side argue their point. You won’t how impractical the non-stackers are being by being even more impractical.
(That and I’m running low on room for Fraps)

How are we being more impractical by simply following their rules?

Going to try for another attempt tomorrow, now that I feel I’ve identified some of the problems we had we may be able to get a smoother run (it’s not really representative of no-stacking if we just use footage of a run where you’d see what went wrong and change your tactic immediately afterwards but using the practice rune as evidence … meh) with some more practice.

If I can get a group tomorrow, I’d like to get a cleaner run – hopefully one which can be used as legitimate proof of "this is what a no-stacking run would be like done ‘properly’.

I was thinking if we use two ranged players that might be able to overcome the problem of running out of space to melee, but ground-based AOEs aren’t allowed so … no staff eles. What’s the second best ranged dps weapon/class?

The point is – we were playing five melee characters, and if stacking was removed, you get situations where people are basically unable to to even use their weapons and attack (abomination when we accidentally got him in to a wall). You get situations where positioning is crucial versus a boss (Belka so you don’t get shot in to barrels) and we couldn’t even take advantage of that because we were forced to stand around her just so we could melee. You get situations where you can’t take down mobs efficiently (abominations at the gate to Lupicus) and you end up pulling more elites because you end up in their line of sight since you’re trying to melee the abominations. You have alphard where you either have to kill it in one burst in the middle, or you’re just annihilated (four wardens not spinning in a row ftw, anet fix mesmers please). Brie where the AOE circles literally made it so not only was it annoying positioning ourselves away from our party but doing that along with area denial AOEs meant that you would have like one or two guys capable of meleeing.

I’d hardly call it a satire when after all of that it was still faster than most pug runs, but the point is – dungeons are extremely pro-stacking, and removing that aspect of them honestly just makes gameplay awkward and stilted, and paths become in the case of speed clearers slightly longer (our average arah p2 would be like 16-18 min … while experimenting with these guidelines we had that bad ~45 min first attempt and then the second attempt was ~30 min) and in the case of most – either unplayable or a lot longer.

portal consumable

everyone had to go after two runs, but we got two arah p2 clears done, and not stacking (as outlined in this thread) is … well, it makes melee extremely frustrating. Mind you we were attempting self imposed collision detection, but if players can’t group together a little tighter (like, not even on top of each other, but the rules were strict for these attempts, we basically had to stand in a star) it literally kills all positioning against bosses. Not being allowed to group mobs was also annoying as it basically made cleaving weapons completely pointless.

Bosses being close to walls also shut off two players from meleeing.

It made helping the party more difficult (we couldn’t group mobs, and then say, drop reflect on them to reflect projectile damage we were receiving from outside the group of mobs) and bosses were needlessly chaotic.

Now personally, I want to do more of it (the two runs weren’t even clean) but my initial impression is that removing stacking makes cooperating with your party difficult, it makes melee frustrating and the game honestly just wouldn’t gain anything from doing so – and it wouldn’t “fix” anything. If we were allowed to group up closer together (just not stuck in one pixel) and actually allowed to position mobs it would have been a lot less frustrating.

wish we could have practiced some more and refined it a bit

we’re streaming our attempts at this right now, the best one will go on youtube:

http://www.twitch.tv/sylarscreed

stream is up, we’ll upload the best video though:

http://www.twitch.tv/sylarscreed

We are currently working on the video for this.

You asked “Can people here offer definitions of what they feel stacking is?”
Some people actually think standing still is stacking. I’m not going to defend it because I don’t believe it – but you asked, and there’s your answer.

Well I’m filtering out the ideas completely devoid of logic like that – because that
means people standing 900 range apart of each other with bows are stacking. They’re not, so I’m not taking that suggestion seriously.

So far I have:

LOSing bosses through stacking ontop each other in a corner. Stacking often occurs in conjunction with “cheesy” skills [whirlwind attack, fiery greatsword].

Being in melee/bomb(engi) range of party member and lower.

Also stacking mobs. Mobs must be fought with some separation between them else you stacked them. Mobs that are stacked should be separated via stomp or skills of the same ilk.

2. My basic stance is that mobs should try to move out of ground-based AoEs and skills like 100b, and enemies with ranged attacks should always try to keep distance from players.

… Though some mobs just stack relentlessly so there is most likely not much you can do to prevent them from stacking after initiating aggro.

Break physics having more than one body occupy the same space (?) [operate as if collision detection exists]

Crash all characters together, make a pile, don’t dodge, don’t move, smash 1, 2 ,3 ,4, 5 when appropriate things will be over before you blink.

I think all of these are reasonable.

Was thinking arah path 2 or 3 – I’m gathering rules in this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Stacking

for what we aren’t allowed to do, but would anyone on NA be interested? Proficiency in arah required, and berserker gear and meta builds are fair game, it’s literally just player and mob positioning which will be different.

will need to find a time everyone is available.

Mesket.5728:

maha.7902:

Why should we not be allowed to stand still?

If you have no incentive to actually move, why should we have to move?

Thanks, I do stack because I agree with the currently lame AI we have its the most effective. I wish for a game where standing still means dead and mobs have more AI than a potato.

What I mean is this:

Say a boss attacks every three seconds with a cleaving attack. Why should the two players behind it have to be moving around for absolutely no reason, and why should the three players in front have to move around in between these attacks when they would just need to move when they actually swing?

I’m taking on reasonable suggestions here, and most of them are reasonable, but things like “you should always be moving” just smells of tacking on extra challenge for no reason, because if you remember, the party for this dungeon will need to be out of close melee radius so if everyone is moving that basically means unless doing in sync we would all literally have to range bosses.

Why should we not be allowed to stand still?

If you have no incentive to actually move, why should we have to move?

Also:

Fastforward to 3:50 – is this kind of positioning allowed?

What I’m trying to do is for people to explain the “problems” they have with stacking. I don’t think anyone has ever said they have a problem with the fact that you can stack boons.

This also isn’t a “make the run as challenging as possible” thing, the whole point of this is people explaining their actual problems and me planning to do a run which omits every single one of them out, not “well I guess this is stacking so add this to the list because lolwhynot”.

This isn’t a thread to complain, I’m trying to get feedback on what stacking is so that I can form a dungeon party and perform an instance without doing what the community consensus is on stacking – so if you want to complain please open a new thread or reply in one of the countless other threads on the topic.

Being in melee/bomb(engi) range of party member and lower.

Does this mean having a party around a boss in a sort of heptagonal shape would be forbidden if we were all meleeing? We wouldn’t be directly on each other but we would be in cleave radius. Or is melee fair game, just not standing on top of each other on one pixel?

Also stacking mobs. Mobs must be fought with some separation between them else you stacked them.

So temporal curtain and binding blade are forbidden? There are many mobs in dungeons which will aggro and then willfully stack on top of each other trying to attack the party, so I’m not sure how we’re meant to get around this.

2. My basic stance is that mobs should try to move out of ground-based AoEs and skills like 100b, and enemies with ranged attacks should always try to keep distance from players.

So channeled skills that deal high damage and high damage AOE skills are no bueno?

1. What would constitute cheesy skills?

2. What is your stance on pulling mobs? Not LoSing, just pulling.

Ring. I need an ouroboros loop.

So there’s been a not-so-unusual amount of threads complaining about stacking lately.

Can people here offer definitions of what they feel stacking is?

What I want to do is come to some sort of consensus on what “stacking” is and then get a few friends and do a dungeon run without doing it.

It trivialize the game, it makes dual and triple boxing possible since you don’t even need to move in the whole fight.

Stacking doesn’t trivialise the game at all, there’s been countless times where I’ve stacked in groups and they’ve all hit the floor because, well, stacking itself doesn’t actually do anything. Take for example the first group of four elites in Arah p3, I’ve seen quite a few groups stack there, do nothing to mitigate the pain from the mobs and just hit the floor. Stacking itself does nothing.

It just let bad players think they are good.

Something should be removed because it … makes people feel good? Sorry, I forgot we played video games for self gratification.

. It kills the immersion, it makes the game aesthetically horrible,

Airships, pistols, rifles, tanks and lasers in a universe with swords, shields, heavy plated armour, characters fully encased in steel having less survivability than a scantily dressed light armour class with “soldier” gear on “kill immersion” – but I’m not asking for them to be removed. There are also things like legendaries shooting ponies, footfalls, basically anything steampunk, swamps full of generic undead, players wearing stupid looking outfits which are aesthetically horrible. I’m not asking them to be removed.

it doesn’t push team play

Except it does because boon sharing through utilities and combo finishers is limited mostly to 600 range. “I’m in range of my team so I can give them all of these boons”.

nobody can actually see their team mate

Sure you can, you just choose not to pay attention.

It makes the game cheaper and dumber, worst in design quality

Countering stacking makes the game dumber because it just promotes everyone for themselves range-kiting bosses.

LOS and Stacking are the oldest most dumb strategies used in MMOs to counter very bad AI.

Personally, I don’t care if they remove LoSing – ArcheAge mobs don’t LoS as perfectly as GW2 mobs but I just got over it. Stacking, however – there’s pretty much no way not to stack on bosses if the party is in melee. It’s not even stacking that counters bad AI anyway.

Am I a minority? I really doubt it. Who honestly doesn’t agree that the encounter design should simulate a fantasy combat? Who honestly doesn’t agree that encouraging stacking gets away from this ideal?

If you were the majority, either your average pug group wouldn’t stack or there would be lots of no stacking LFGs. There are neither.

Asking for encounter design to simulate fantasy combat is such an unbelievably broad and vague thing to say that there’s literally no point discussing it since it’s just one person’s interpretation over another’s.

only 2 kind of players supports stacking:

a) bad players who can’t dodge
b) players who played so much they don’t want to play anymore and just get rid of content as fast as they can

Both should not be casting their biased opinion unless they have a solid argument on how stacking makes this game better.

I can dodge, and I’m not just interested in clearing content as fast as possible, in fact it’s certain hyperefficient weapons which have put me off doing dungeons – yet I support stacking.

It pushes team play, enables sharing of boons, allows the party to cleave and it’s designed to encourage good play.

can’t really comment on that. Personally, I have no problem at all forming groups to my liking. Recently, I type “not a speed clear” as part of the LFG comments. I’m generally satisfied with the like-minded people I find this way.

My point was not that it’s hard to find groups. My point was that it is less rewarding to intentionally handicap oneself. The game itself should always strive toward encouraging the most entertaining experience. In my opinion, the most entertaining experience would more closely simulate an actual combat, i.e. not stacking.

Or were you being sarcastic?

And that, good sir, is your opinion.

I personally despise facerolling dungeons so I pug them, solo or low-man them. Therefore, my most entertaining experience would be for encounters designed around solo play – but you see, I know that I’m an extreme minority and I don’t demand ANet to cater the game around me. Anti-stackers repeatedly demand ANet cater the game around them, despite being a minority.

Stephen McBeaven.5640:

maxinion.8396:

Stephen McBeaven.5640:

To me, both sides of the stacking debate seem to be saying the same thing two different ways.

Anti-stacking people: “Stacking is no fun and needs to be fixed. Here are some ideas about how to change the mechanics to fix it.”

Anti-anti-stacking people: “NO! Stacking is the natural result of the game’s mechanics!”

Am I missing something?

You’re missing this part:

Anti-stacking: “We do not enjoy stacking. Please change the game for everyone.”

Pro-stacking: “Make your own groups— you don’t have to stack. You can play how you want, and we can play how we want.”

Well I guess my answer to that is that willfully handicapping oneself doesn’t create the same feeling of challenge and reward. Solving something the hard way isn’t a great achievement if there also exists a trivial solution. Therefore, anti-stackers can’t really “play how they want” if what they want is for there to be an actual in-game (not self-imposed) motive to play in a way that looks appealing on-screen and simulates an actual fantasy encounter.

Of course anti-stackers can play how they want, they just don’t stack, ez pz.

But funnily enough, while berserker players don’t mind making their own groups, anti-stackers will endlessly drone on about how they can’t get in to groups rather than just making their own ones because it’s just too hard for them to type a description in the LFG and wait.