Guild Wars 2

Eponet.4829:

The problem isn’t that it’s impossible to avoid everything significant, it’s that it’s easy to. Make the AI less predictable, and you’ll see more diversity. Berserker wasn’t even the most commonly seen set in the last PVP tournament, people were switching to celestial for the added durability, condition damage, and healing power.

And they love it so much.

edgarallanpwn.8739:

Since when does a tank afk in wow? In WoW tanks are crucial. They hold aggro, and keep the bosses and mobs from wiping the team. they have to learn to rotate cooldowns, rotate aggro, position the bosses in phases and much more.

Surely, but here your typical tanks just afk.

edgarallanpwn.8739:

I played dps and my ques were never more than 20-30m at MOST even in lfr.

HUGE overstatement.

And now you wait a couple of seconds in a game which has much lower population.

Also has nothing to do with holy trinity. And if you think a thief/Mesmer would be going tank.. then i’m not sure you understand the mechanics properly.

Thiefs have tons of dodge mechanics and evasion built in specifically because they’re dps only.

Mesmers have dodge, and clones to dash around and dodge dmg.

Because when you evade you usually can’t be hit?

Cynz.9437:

have you checked pvp lately? it flooded with turret engis….

Em, the analogy is between AI in pve (your enemy) and sort-of-AI in pvp (players). No need to bring kitten to this already fruitless discussion.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

The majority of people in pvp know their classes well enough to not care about taking damage, or have builds oriented around outlasting berserker (which also shows proficiency).

Then there are the condi builds that use rabid and carrion.

Then there are knight/valk amulet warriors/thieves, respectively..

What’s this talk about AI not being strong enough?

I’m talking about spvp, the meta is simple and it’s celestial plus berserker’s. There is only one condie spec that could be considered meta and it’s not used in any tournament anymore (it also uses carrion, not rabid).

I mentioned AI because a lot of people seem to be under an assumption that making AI smarter will completely change meta.

xDudisx.5914:

They also said wvw ranks were going to be character bound, that exotic was going to be the final tier, etc….

Dungeons haven’t seen virtually any change since probably ac rework which was more than 2 years ago. Wishful thinking at best.

Also how is your comment related with the rally mechanic? Skiping or not is not what OP started discussing.

You brought a proposal of change which is related to skipping. I’m not sure why are you even asking this question.

maha.7902:

because this game is balanced around pvp where multiple gear stats are actually used?

“don’t see any use”?

please at least do some research before making bold claims like that.

Not really, pvp uses like 2-3 amulets. Mostly celestial and berserker’s. I’m wondering why…? Maybe AI isn’t strong enough.

xDudisx.5914:

They should make so you can only rally in champs or legendary mobs. Suddenly dungeons are harder and less forgiving. For spvp the downed state is not a big problem because you can’t kill a player as easily as a trash mob.

Mobs are skipped.

Anet said they won’t change dungeons.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

This doesn’t mean that any build with the stat at it’s core is a zerker-build. On the contrary it means that everything has to be zerker to call it so. Not only the stat-combination that bears the same name as the build.

You can very well play full support 00266 ele with full berserker’s gear and your damage will by really low. An ele running 64220 with valyrie’s or knight’s will have more damage potential. So can the former still be called zerker build then? No, because there’s no such thing as a zerker build.

mando.2730:

As an experiment, I would like to suggest this to everyone: Next time you do some dungeon runs in a full zerker party, any time someone goes down, let them die. Or if they rally, have them leave the fight/area completely, and see how that affects your run. Now try it again, but with a more balanced party composition and see how you go. I tried this earlier today with a group (did AC, CoF and HoTW), and the zerker runs were far more painful than the runs with a more balanced group. All of a sudden, we had a real need to run less glassy builds, and we actually had a couple players specced for power/healing, and a couple specced for tank/condi/boons, and one for dps (but slightly less squishy).

Just a nice little experiment, which improved my experience a whole lot. Of course, put the downed state back in there and we can just zerker our way through picking people up as they go down.

I solo/duo dungeons so I’m not sure how that would affect me at all.

BunjiKugashira.9754:

Since a build contains traits, skills, armor & weapon-stats, runes and sigills… Yes I’d call zerker a build. A build that coincidentally bears the same name as the stat-combination it’s built around.

Indeed, there are 9001 zerker builds out there according to this logic.

Tigaseye.2047:

They should just get rid of the stuff that makes stacking and meleeing virtually compulsory (if you want to maximise efficiency).

Melee has higher dps (with some exceptions) because it has higher risk and it makes buffing other party members easier.

maddoctor.2738:

Actually most RPGs don’t have dedicated tanks and healers, that’s a pure MMORPG thing, used to “force” people to play together. Although in more recent years RPG developers are “trying” to add more trinity systems to RPGs, which is something I hate.

Get your trinity away of my RPGs you lazy devs!

They might not have things like threat management (like in gw1) but the idea of frontline and backline still exists (infinity engine games for instance).

mando.2730:

It seems like bad design that healing power and toughness/vitality are stats, yet there is no place for tanks or healers. What is the point in having these stats (especially healing power), if healing has no place?

It seems to you like that because you still attached to typical rpg system. It’s an rpg with action combat system.

mando.2730:

Yeah the diversity in sPvP and even WvW is far better than in PvE. I love playing a healer, or a tank, or a DPS in PvE, but unfortunately there isn’t any point in playing anything other than DPS in gw2. There are some ‘support’ roles that you can fill of course (boon sharing on a guard etc), but it never feels like a solid role, just a secondary thing to DPS (as a side note it has been mentioned that a good idea would be to have to spec into boons/condis more with gear than you currently can, to achieve better boonscondis – e.g. without spec protection is only -10% inc damage etc, and blind is only effective 20% of the time etc).

It’s quite amusing that you say that because in pvp people constantly whine about celestial meta and in wvw they whine about gwen meta. It’s typical grass greener on the other side situation.

warbignime.4610:

Just because the game mechanic allow this, doesn’t mea n it’s good. Also your statement is straight up false, everyone run zerker because it’s the most efficient build , also running a build that us way less efficient and effective is just foolish.

I’m sure you can back that statement up.

And no, not running glass setup isn’t foolish. Not everyone can do it.

mando.2730:

For example, I have never come across a situation where there is a need for healing, or speccing into healing even making sense at all <— just kill it quicker with zerker = less damage taken anyway. (Note that I still run a cleric ele sometimes as I enjoy healing, even though people rage at me for it).

That’s exactly why I often have to solo bosses, because people wanted to kill them as fast as possible but couldn’t pull it off.

Healing power makes sense in pvp where your objective can be about defending a point. In pve you are an attacker.

lordkrall.7241:

Except for the fact that you could only win gems in tournaments that required gems to join in the first place. So no, it was not just creating loads of gems out of nothing.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Tournament_Ticket

Manuhell.2759:

Obviously they shouldn’t be as efficent as a full glass cannon in the damage department. But they should be comparatively as efficent in the defensive (or healing, or whatever) department, according to the gear used, and assuming their skill level is on par.
As things stand now, they can’t do so – as i explained before, there is a lack of skills using such stats, thus there are no ways to skillfully use them.

But i would also add that as there are ways for players to make up for the lack of defense by using dodges and defensive skills, there should be similar ways for players to make up for some of the lack in offensive stats while using defensive gear, maybe using endurance as well.
For example, they could tie toughness to endurance and/or endurance regeneration, maybe lowering toughness’ passive effects a bit to make up for it, and put good offensive skills on certain weapons with additional endurance costs (vigor may have to be rebalanced as well in such a case). In doing so, people with high toughness may have less passive defense than now, but they would be able to choose to either dodge more or use that endurance for offensive purposes (and likely getting some damage in return, albeit softened by toughness).
Some of those skills could even have particular mechanics involved – good base power and with relatively low endurance cost but unable to crit, for example; such a skill would be tailored for a power/toughness/something that isn’t ferocity gear user, for example. And i can’t see anything wrong with that – right now, most of the offensive skills are tailored over using power/precision/ferocity gear. But that isn’t set in stone either, after all. Or sacrificing a percentage of your current endurance in exchange for an offensive bonus (based on the amount of endurance spent; thus making it more convenient for people with high endurance).

In short: just put skillful, active ways to use other stats as well, and whatever those stats do, make them equally efficent in their respective regards.

Defensive playstyle is already pretty powerful, I believe I linked some videos. If not then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1mxlA13ICk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMx9VJYD78s

Also, reactive healing should never be as good as proactive protection. The required skill level is on a completely different level. You can compare how hard it was to compete in gvgs as a fuse and as a prot in gw1.

Belenwyn.8674:

The gear is part of the build.

It affects the build but it’s not an integral part of it.

People ITT think that making stuff like faster autoattacks will make their tanking gear more efficient. They couldn’t be further from the truth, so called zerkers will simply adopt via trait system, utility skills and weapon choices. The gear will remain the same.

Manuhell.2759:

If anything, it is quite the opposite. As it stands now, gear already matters…but only as long as it is zerker gear (condition damage has its own, other issues; no use discussing about them here).
Cause the large majority of the skills, being offensive, use all of those stats. But there are just few to no ways to use the other stats. Defensive stats just aren’t coupled to defensive skills, healing power is used by few skills and usually one must have dedicated builds just to use said stat, let alone raising it (and as we want to avoid having healers, it can’t even have really sensible effects, even when focusing on it; imho, they should just couple it with boon effects as well and rename it support power, enlarging its scope and thus the possible applications).
Boon duration surely has more applications…but the amount given on armors and trinkets is laughable – 11% at most, and there is a single gear giving those – giver’s/snowflake, with a “toughness/boon duration/healing power” stat distribution that won’t ever be used by anyone. Could as well just use platinum doubloon on any other gear, at least you can get to reasonable amounts with those.
Basically, either they lack uses, scale badly or are given in laughable amounts. Or a combination of the three.

As now, people already have skillful ways to use offensive stats. They just have to give skillful ways to use the other stats as well. Else there won’t ever be any point for good players to use any gear other than zerker.

Once the condition cap is fixed, you can bet sinister’s gear will be just as good as berserker’s. What people ITT want is something different. They want their sentinel’s or even nomad’s gear to have the same efficiency as a full glass cannon gear without all the disadvantages of having much less passive defense. That’s why their suggestions are like that.

Hopefully, anet designers aren’t that myopic.

Test.8734:

Are you that concerned about a game in which berserker isn’t king? Don’t worry, you would still have your existing playground. Everything else would require more and better, but if you don’t want to adapt, you can stay at what’s already there.

I’m not really concerned about wishes of the vocal minority, I just like to read your proposals.

But I have to ask you, what exactly would change the first of your “new dungeon idea”? Instead of berserker’s I would equip soldier’s gear and then what? Gameplay is different? Did you really think that through or you’re just throwing random ideas around?

Test.8734:

Indeed.

Add a new dungeon where all enemies have an energy shield and are thus unable to receive critical hits: boom, two thirds of berzerker become useless. Add a positive spin on in (near the beginning, a friendly NPC gives the players a gizmo that refills endurance when they kill someone with the energy shield) and you have a different dungeon, requiring players to adapt (and not only gear, but traits and etc).

Add a new dungeon where all enemies either do fast attacks or come in huge waves of small enemies, so dodging each big attack is impossible – and then other kinds of defense become important, and berserker is not enough.

Add a new dungeon where most enemies have very high armor, very low health and are extra vulnerable to conditions. You change the focus away from berserker by rewarding a playstyle that is usually punished in PvE.

“But Test, what if someone complains saying, ‘I love berserker and I don’t have money to buy other gear?’”

I would say, “See, that’s what players who don’t use berserker have to deal with today, and stop complaining – you still have all the dungeons in vanilla GW2, in which your playstyle is the most effective”.

I see you like passive gameplay where your stats instead of your actions influence the end results. That’s okay, everyone should have an opinion but you should maybe try a different game where it is already happening instead of constantly complaining here without any result.

Artemis Thuras.8795:

I’m also seeing people talking about the meta without realising that I as a guardian am constantly: condi clearing; providing stability; providing aegis; providing reflects; grouping mobs; providing swiftness in several ways using several skills, all depending upon the encounter. Always as a priority over the dps. These things are part of the current meta. It is not dps and nothing else. Which it seems some people still naively believe.

It’s like flogging a dead horse. The OP and people like him want their gear to matter, not how they play.

Chobiko.9182:

Actually, no, it’s not skill at dodging that has made it so. It is the lack of added value of other stats/builds to a fight. The reason the zerker meta persists is because “why sustain when you can kill”? If you take a cue from pvp you can see that zerker is not meta there and there’s a reason to it. It’s because you cannot reliably kill with zerker (partly because enemy expects that burst, partly because the enemy can counter/sustain that burst).

How can you emulate that in pve? Well, first off you need to make fights slightly more unpredictable (faster attacks, random patterns, less exploitation possibility, shorter leashes, etc.)

Secondly, you can make other stats/builds more viable through increasing the added value they provide in fights. The warrior meta sacrifices some personal dps for partywide dps with phalanx strength and empower allies. <- Still, they are running a zerker meta.

I suggest changing the way gear affects your stats as the best way to make viable other stats than the zerker meta. The way healing power, boons, and condition damage affects encounters also needs to be carefully tweaked to make them more viable.

In pvp you have celestial meta (so no diversity as well) and people complain on pvp forums as much as you do here. So, please don’t bring pvp into this.

Nike.2631:

Blind and Aegis not scaling with any attributes has at least as much to do with the success of ’Zerker as the mini-godmode of dodging.

If the Aegis only absorbed a portion of a hit based off your Toughness, you’d see people gearing differently… instantly.

The high base efficiency of un-geared self-heals and kitten poor scaling of healing power is another way in which “Zerker isn’t especially right, just all other stat combos are wrong.”

Then you’d see people wearing Knight’s gear and you’d whine about that in the future. There will never be a diversity in stats because there will always be this one stat combination that is optimal in the eyes of the players. How hard is it too understand?

Ankushp.7245:

So then i guess you agree that due to skill in gameplay which most people have sufficiently for the current difficulty level of gw2, gear builds are rendered ineffective.

I wouldn’t say people have enough skill in this game. That’s absurd. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have to solo bosses like lupi all the time while pugging, now would I?

Ankushp.7245:

But then from what we see here Skill in playing is overpowering the effect of gears (which is something people want i guess) BUT the skill needed isnt much. Hence any player with limited skill in dodging and using his other skills well is currently able to nullify effects of wearing pure zerker gear.

Please don’t use hyperboles in a discussion, they don’t lead to anything constructive.

maddoctor.2738:

I’d say remove troll stats like Sentinel first

How is it troll stat set? I mean, tanking takes an enormous skill.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

- Remove Zerker and maby Assassin stats.

Don’t forget about sinister gear.

DarkWasp.7291:

I like what you’re saying, but the OP is actually asking for enemies to have faster attacks. Sure they’d be smaller hits to balance it out.

So the idea isn’t to invalidate the dodge mechanic. It’s to make it so not every encounter is easily dodgeable.

For example, that annoying boss at the end of HotW P1 actually makes condition and ranged builds seem more viable in pugs because he’s a bit more dangerous to melee than most enemies.

And no I’m not an anti-zerker advocate either. All of my characters are zerker and I love that playstyle.

That’s what we’ll most likely get in HoT – challenging group content. Let’s also not forget that anet said multiple times that they won’t touch old dungeon and instead will focus on the maguuma jungle content.

I think it’s a great design that your success doesn’t depend on your gear but rather on your skills. This isn’t WoW or any other generic MMO where this happens.

Yes, make passive defensive gameplay even stronger.

Kronos.2560:

-If that was in fact the case you must have played in the wrong guild and I hope that’s a joke, I had loads of fun coming up with all kinds of crazy varieties of different builds in gw1 (not to mention varieties of group combinations with heros). There was never a time i felt i was seriously lacking in dps because I was messing around with a new build combination.
-Where as in gw2 I have felt that many times running non-zerker gear. (I have yet to try nomads, but I’m scared to see how little damage i would do)

The OP is clearly talking about speedruns, not your usual gameplay. I’m pretty sure he would never compare gw2 dungeon with let’s say gw1 mission which was nothing more than a personal story done in a group.

What’s more, no one forces anyone to join those elitist groups, it’s people like OP who click “join” or “merge” buttons. If you want to play however you want, just make your own group (like those zerkers), play with friends or participate in any other content in this game where you cannot be punished for going with whatever build you want (even naked).

You never lacked dps in gw1 because each casual group had almost always 2 healers, that left 6 spots for dps characters and you were not able to increase or decrease your health/armour with just a gear. And please don’t bring gw1 heroes to a discussion about pugging.

Anet made a serious mistake by introducing stats to gw2. This game would have been much better without them.

Algreg.3629:

You keep insisting that zerker gear has no “downs”. It has, you die more easily. People running it succesfully just know to avoid this. Don´t get me wrong, I really dislike GW2 combat with the dungeon stacking and all. But if you change the game there will be a new best gear people will flock to, nothing changed. I wonder what that whole zerker complaining is really about. I suspect it is 10% trinity fans finally wanting to get their beloved, dusty system in here and 90% bad players who cannot manage damage mitigation in zerker, feel left out and demand better players having their toys removed.

Or simply role players who can’t find the use for their tanky characters.

Gw1 had no downed state, no zerkers and you still had a meta where diversity was non-existant. Either you brought the build with proper skills, attribute spread, consumables and split how were told or you were kicked on spot.

Muffin Nook.5923:

That all being said, If anet were to add a “hardmode” where there wasn’t a downed state in dungeons, gave an endurance debuff for less dodging, and bumped up the rewards I would be all for it. Something like that would make us all have to rethink group composition, gear choices, and would probably make skipping extremely difficult in certain dungeons. It would certainly add something to the dungeons after 3 years of the same thing day after day.

So in which dungeons skipping is hard when you have a thief?

All skills using this animation (throwing something) are bugged currently.

Not only thief

rotten.9753:

The following skills have similar animation and their cast time is artificially increased:

- vapor blade
- all ranger traps with the trapper’s expertise trait enabled
- certain stolen skills like blinding tuft
- harpy feathers and both spy kits (consumables)

Vapour blade rate of attack is about one attack per 3 seconds. Totally viable.

The following skills have similar animation and their cast time is artificially increased:

- vapor blade
- all ranger traps with the trapper’s expertise trait enabled
- certain stolen skills like blinding tuft
- harpy feathers and both spy kits (consumables)

hybrid.5027:

What else is there to do?

Whatever they do normally? Logically, if they are a guild that doesn’t do cooperative activities like dungeon tours and they don’t practise enough before the tournament, then the result can be quite obvious.

spoj.9672:

Yeah i dunno. I guess because we like soloing we dont like having friends or talking to people. And we also never play with anyone else ever.

Then what’s the point of competing with guilds that are like that? :>

spoj.9672:

This is so no secret and has been stated many times in the past. We are a guild of solo’ers. We dont do dungeon tours. We rarely do dungeons together outside of pugging or joke runs. The only times you see groups advertised in guild chat is to leech dungeons or to join a semi pug. Theres really no inter guild common tactics or major familiarity because of this. Which means we dont expect to do well in tournaments where we get paths we dont play much. However records are different. The only time you see full guild groups playing together regularly is when attempting records. But we are kind of still inactive so thats not happening at the moment.

Maybe things will change after HoT has released.

I don’t compute, what’s a guild of solo’ers? It’s quite oxymoronic for me.

I’m more surprised by DnT’s performance than a guild that never shown anything spectacular at these tournaments.

ronpierce.2760:

But in case you weren’t worried enough, they’re removing the cap on confusion.

25 was the number he picked probably due to energy cost (20/100).

Scoobaniec.9561:

Source please.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Banish_Enchantment

Supreme.3164:

The health of the game is already jeopardized when premades reach the top by farming pugs, in a perfect system a premade would only face other premades with the top positions as a prize.

Right now a premade made up of top 100 players ( I’m simply considering the leaderboard position) will face pugs coming from the 80-90% percentile instead than facing other “top” premades.

This is why you always see the same 8-10 teams during the ESL cup with the same 20 players who switch team.

If they don’t want to separate solo and teams, then they should make so that teams always face teams and stay in the top position

Let’s say all premades occupy the top 500 positions, then the remaining 500 would be occupied by soloers and those who want to reach higher would have to create another premade.

Out of all premades in the top 100, you are bound to find 2-3 teams able to compete in ES, meanwhile the soloers ,those who don’t reach the top 500 positions, are happy because they can have decent matches with players of their same MMR

Maybe it’s because there are not enough premades because forming teams is just not worth it (too much organisation issues)?

Laraley.7695:

How can a solo player reach the same winrate as someone who only queues with premades? It’s very difficult to do so when you can’t influence what people you get on your team, your team composition and you have no voice communication. And such solo players face premades that just farm them. Obviously not all but not separating solo and team queue will always have to be reflected somewhere.

But you need other people to be online as well (organisation) and the system still prefers pairing up premades so your queue times are much higher. Playing as a team in a team game should have some incentive.

SobeSoul.6910:

Not really.

If you run full premades you shouldn’t be rewarded the same as someone who solo queues point wise.

What is the argumentation behind that?

Solori.6025:

^This.

If you’re complaining about buying the expansion. Remember
You could have been spending 15$ monthly.

Be grateful we are even getting new content to play.

It’s funny what you say because when someone brings the fact that other games have tons of content in their expansions, you people say gw2 is not like other games. But then you compare it to sub games. Mind blown.