Guild Wars 2

These defenses are a little absurd. More nerfs to mob loot? Why, exactly? As if it’s not already irritating enough to try and gather the resources you need to level up a crafting profession?

Look at it this way: I originally, for several seconds, thought crafting was actually enjoyable because it used up materials I gained while actually out having fun fighting enemies. Then I ran out of the stocks I’d built up while not doing any crafting, and my opinion changed.

I really could not care less about the market for crafting materials; something tells me that if players have complaints about pricing, they know exactly who to blame: themselves, for establishing absurd prices in the first place and remaining willing to tolerate them. Consumers have control if they’re willing to exercise it, and I’ve seen more stupidity in the GW2 economy than in the real-world one so far

But I guess we could just make crafting drops even rarer. Why not, it’s already getting tedious to play the game; why not pile it on heavier

You’re completely right about skills; there need to be more of them and certain ones need to be balanced to be more effective. Additional weapon types with different bars or, better yet, customizable bars from weapon-specific pools would be great.

There’s really no ill effects to balance here if the devs test it even half-competently. Balance isn’t that great to begin with, it’s not as if they’ve hit some ideal that they’re afraid to shy away from. As it is, builds are too restrictive and at this point anything to increase viability of certain existing skills and variety of skills in general would be more than welcome.

I agree totally about the Orr enemy placement, but it goes for practically all of Tyria. Enemy locations and placement are totally arbitrary, for the most part; I mean, are there grawl in a cave? Makes sense I guess, but why is the cave where it is? Why is it right next to a dozen different conflicting pointless geographical features that defy a nice, cohesive design? Why are the spawns like there was an explosion at the Acme Mob Co. Factory, and mobs were just strewn about the countryside like sparse debris?

As far as I can tell they didn’t organize this for gameplay OR realism in most places; I was actually satisfied that in Orr, the land and enemies were all perfectly thematic and related. So I guess the jury is permanently out

I’ll try to lay out some areas I think need improvement:

First of all, gameplay:

Skills and the skill system desperately need a second look in two major ways:
Skill diversity:
-Weapons
-Utilities and Elites
Skill effectiveness:
-Absurd cooldowns
-Overly situational or underpowered abilities

It’s VERY IMPORTANT to note that not every skill suffers from being underwhelming; a handful in every class are quite good, a shining few are even overpowered at times. But with the skill selection already so limited, a prevalance of underwhelming utilities, and on top of that, only three to choose from, creates a very restricted and unfun experience.

In lieu of adding an additional utility slot/s, a nice fix could be to increase utility effects and effectiveness. Most classes need this across the board, and the players of most classes draw from the same pool of commonly-known good utilities, futher decreasing any semblance of build variety.

Additionally, utilities and elites often have ridiculous and completely unwarranted cooldowns which does not seem to synergize very well with a game that often prolongs conflicts, requiring you to employ all assets generally when they come off cooldown to stay alive and inflict DPS/control. And why so few elites? Look to GW1, which had numerous diverse and usually fun and intersting elites that entire builds could be formed around. In GW2, some classes are forced to pick the one of several elites that is “not the worst”.

I didn’t mind the weapon-skills system in the betas, but after playing longer, it’s really worn on me and I find myself very tired of being restrained by the same 5 first skills. A couple classes have synergy in switching weapons/attunements/kits, but for the majority, you have a weapon that’s good and a weapon that rounds out ranged options or tight situations. So, effectively, a single weapon the vast majority of the time.

Customization of the weapon bar by having pools of weapon-specific skills would add an entirely new level of depth and customization to the game that, frankly, does not seem to have many drawbacks. There are any number of ways this can be done, and (a group of people and I who play GW2 regularly talked this out for quite some time) there are several different systems where any drawbacks or balance questions this could introduce would be negligible. All that additional variety and gameplay, and at practically no cost except some work and testing by ArenaNet.

Those are just some ideas that come to mind, and really, even an amateur game dev should be able to see glaring parts of GW2 that beg to be enhanced and retooled. Can Anet not see these things? Are they unwilling to? I feel like personally I will never know because of a fundamental lack of communication aside from trite offerings now and then, so I’m not confident that they are considering or have the ability to turn this into a better game.

Current skill system is not fine, actually, it’s highly restrictive. Essentially your skillbar, in terms of customization, is between 1-2 weapons (since these skills are set by weapon and not individually chosen), 3 utilities (many of which are either vital or bizarrely situational) and 1 elite (chosen from a tiny pool).

To the OP, you’re not the only one who’s had the idea of being able to either choose individual weapon skills (for instance from a pool of “sword skills” or “pistol skills” for each class) or choose entirely different skillbars for existing weapons. It’s a fairly good idea; a good way to keep the current system would be to indroduce a high volume of new weapons, each with a unique skill bar. More varied types of bladed weapons, ranged weapons, whatever. It’s no secret that skill variety currently suffers.

The real issue here is that the “trinity” of DPS, Tank, and Heal actually works. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to get away from it, but for the games that use it, it’s a very useful tool that helps keep a sense of balance and function.

So if you’re going to escape from it, as GW2 wished to do, you have to ensure that more evenly distributed abilities on a class actually are effective. So if I want to heal as well as do damage, then I had better be able to design my class to be at least fairly good at both. And why not; isn’t that how we get away from the idea of being locked into a “trinity” or other similar system? Unfortunately the tradeoff between support and DPS is usually extremely high; generally a class will need to sacrifice all traces of decent damage to even slightly effectively support allies, and some classes have poor damage output even when building for it, sacrificing vital support skills altogether.

Honestly I wouldn’t mind if they don’t add “tanking” as a feature; I think the game is fine without it.

However, Healing is something that needs to be improved. More classes need more options for it and its general effectiveness needs to be increased across the board regardless of Healing Power investment. Certain healing skills are fine; the Warrior and Guardian both have an excellent self-heal. However, many healing properties attached to skills, traits, and boons are utterly worthless and there is no excuse for it.

Let me begin by saying that I mean this as a polite but serious message to ArenaNet. Guild Wars 2 is in many ways a fun game, but is riddled with problems that impede and negatively impact the game to its very core. While many of these should have been addressed in earlier stages of development, many issues could also be attended to now or could have been over the many months of release GW2 has now weathered.

These range from basic issues, gameplay flaws and mechanics/balance issues, to the lack of interesting additional content. While I partially enjoy the game as a whole, it’s very clear it needs a lot of improvement that goes beyond simple fine-tuning. But quite honestly, I’m not even seeing fine-tuning.

The question is, where on earth are your priorities? New cash shop items, a single underwhelming event that was mostly broken? And now with the Wintersday stuff coming up, I find myself honestly preferring that you’d just forget about the holiday flavor entirely and work exclusively on gameplay. No Wintersday in exchange for real, necessary changes? I know it won’t happen, but that’s a purely fair trade.

People who think the game is fine in its current incarnation are quite simply wrong. There are too many inconsistencies and imbalances in core class design and gameplay mechanics; the only way not to notice them is not to play the game or to play it through a thick cloud of denial. A very long article could be written detailing exactly what sorts of changes need to be looked at and what currently isn’t working very well in the game, but this isn’t the point of this article. If one should be written, that can be arranged; that may be beneficial, since by all outward appearances, key people working on the game are either clueless or being barred from making appropriate changes.

I know I don’t speak for only myself when I say that the lack of progress in continuing to expand on GW2’s gameplay and iron out issues has been very disappointing and discouraging. And again, I’m really not trying to stir up any conflict or arguments; I and others just feel very strongly that ArenaNet is currently exhibiting a very misguided and unproductive set of priorities which do not appear to be on the brink of changing, as they very much need to do. Thanks for reading.