It it me or is guild wars losing it's diversity and direction?

I have really enjoyed some of this game and at times loathed much of it. For me Halloween aka Mad King was fun. And that's where I had an opportunity to look back at the old vs the new.

Mobs are losing their identity. What I mean by this, is every mob has some form of a ranged attack and can be tough in close or far range. I really don't like this particular change to NPC's in general. There should be a diversity of close combat mobs and ranged mobs that don't intermix. This allows player to utilize their weapons/ skills to the fight, if all of the mobs hit hard no matter how you fight them then it becomes a race to do the most damage.

Too much projectile hate. This just goes for mobs and many special abilities that are outright broken. For instance smokescale/ smogscale/ dust lions all have some for of an AOE projectile field that no projectiles can hit them in it (even when your outside the field and not affected by the blind). A veteran Smokescale can one shot a full health character with it's opening attack. The abilities have long durations and little downtime. Dust lions added long duration knock downs to this annoyance. Though to be fair their field isn't as long lasting as the smokescale.

Every awakened undead applies slow/ cripple combo for super long durations. Not to mention the one that bursts out of the ground and can down you in one attack since knock down takes way too long to recover from.

Look at two condi's they buffed torment and confusion, and how many of the new mobs use those particular condi's.

I'm concerned with the constant escalation of damage and health of mobs. And this leads to a massive balance problem with the entire gameplay, Veterans that are worse than champions is now a here to stay problem (you can thank HoT being about group play for that one), but it's not just there you can find basic mobs that put vets to shame, then there's champions that are worse than world bosses. It's really starting to feel like there is no balance or more accurately keeping the mobs in check when it comes to gameplay. I would like to see a return to some semblance of balance and mob type, though at this point we already have had an entire expansion where this was ignored.

I enjoy the game for much of the time I play and this is where I'm torn. If I quit, that's it. I won't come back as nostalgia for the old isn't what I like spending time on.

I do hope this game does get back to basics with less muddying of the water, only time will tell. Better gameplay should be more important than a new shiny.

That 2nd line I'm soooo annoyed with.One you forgot mentioned also was the Chak and the Branded earth elementals in PoF

Now I want to know what champion is worse than a world boss.

nah just pay 60$$ and become a god.

I don't agree with any of the assessment.

I think part of a growing / changing game is getting players to learn and adapt. No one should take range only options nor melee only. You should learn to carry a stunbreak/condi cleanse or transfer.

Unfortunately people don't for some reason realize this and would rather complain about "hard Open World content" when its equally as challenging as GW1 only back there you actually adapted and changed your builds/comp accordingly.

I hate the duration of the current debuffs. I can end a fight in 5-7 seconds but am kept in combat for 10+ seconds because the slow and poison/vulnerability durations are so long....and then some pat has come by or the mob packs have respawned by the time the debuffs wear off and I'm in combat again.

@TexZero.7910 said:I don't agree with any of the assessment.

I think part of a growing / changing game is getting players to learn and adapt. No one should take range only options nor melee only. You should learn to carry a stunbreak/condi cleanse or transfer.

Unfortunately people don't for some reason realize this and would rather complain about "hard Open World content" when its equally as challenging as GW1 only back there you actually adapted and changed your builds/comp accordingly.

First off Guild Wars 2's hardest PvE content is baby tier easy compared to HM areas in Gw1 or Raids in WoW. This isn't about diversity in having 3 or more builds being viable, its rather certain skills/weps out shine the hell out of most weps or skills available. Power creep is the cause of this, and anet struggling financially.

@TexZero.7910 said:I don't agree with any of the assessment.

I think part of a growing / changing game is getting players to learn and adapt. No one should take range only options nor melee only. You should learn to carry a stunbreak/condi cleanse or transfer.

Unfortunately people don't for some reason realize this and would rather complain about "hard Open World content" when its equally as challenging as GW1 only back there you actually adapted and changed your builds/comp accordingly.

"Growing/changing". That makes it sound like some deep personal growth. They opened a new wing to the themepark and the new ride is called 'aoe/condi'. Yeh it grew bigger but c'mon man....it's still shallow af.

@Zenith.7301 said:I hate the duration of the current debuffs. I can end a fight in 5-7 seconds but am kept in combat for 10+ seconds because the slow and poison/vulnerability durations are so long....and then some pat has come by or the mob packs have respawned by the time the debuffs wear off and I'm in combat again.

The thing i'm most annoyed with is so much looooong cripple and slow effects in this game. You fight a mob that does cripple, and after you're done with it, you still limp around fro a good minute before you can continue on your way. Like, seriously? I don't even care about vulnerability, i can walk that off until it wears off, but cripple makes you limp, and chilled is even worse. Both last for what seems like forever.

@troops.8276 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I don't agree with any of the assessment.

I think part of a growing / changing game is getting players to learn and adapt. No one should take range only options nor melee only. You should learn to carry a stunbreak/condi cleanse or transfer.

Unfortunately people don't for some reason realize this and would rather complain about "hard Open World content" when its equally as challenging as GW1 only back there you actually adapted and changed your builds/comp accordingly.

I mean you say this but how big was that Eater of Souls thread again ?

@TexZero.7910 said:

@troops.8276 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I don't agree with any of the assessment.

I think part of a growing / changing game is getting players to learn and adapt. No one should take range only options nor melee only. You should learn to carry a stunbreak/condi cleanse or transfer.

Unfortunately people don't for some reason realize this and would rather complain about "hard Open World content" when its equally as challenging as GW1 only back there you actually adapted and changed your builds/comp accordingly.

Is this misdirection?

@troops.8276 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:

@troops.8276 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I don't agree with any of the assessment.

I think part of a growing / changing game is getting players to learn and adapt. No one should take range only options nor melee only. You should learn to carry a stunbreak/condi cleanse or transfer.

Unfortunately people don't for some reason realize this and would rather complain about "hard Open World content" when its equally as challenging as GW1 only back there you actually adapted and changed your builds/comp accordingly.

Nope, just showcasing that this community of players found a very trivial fight with minimal "mechanical difficulty" so hard that it had to be nerfed. Given that information you can see why condi cleanse and get out of the red circle is considered growth.

@TexZero.7910 said:

@troops.8276 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:

@troops.8276 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:I don't agree with any of the assessment.

I think part of a growing / changing game is getting players to learn and adapt. No one should take range only options nor melee only. You should learn to carry a stunbreak/condi cleanse or transfer.

Unfortunately people don't for some reason realize this and would rather complain about "hard Open World content" when its equally as challenging as GW1 only back there you actually adapted and changed your builds/comp accordingly.

Ok, that makes sense then. I got the wrong end of the stick somehow. I'm a 'casual' player and resent that 'casual' somehow means so bad that I would call for a nerf if I didn't know 'not to stand in the fire'. Not directing that at you at all in anyway though, its just the whole Anet caters for casuals excuse has left me a bit....touchy. lol. I've met 'hardcore no-lifers' who still keyboard turn and mouse click skills.

And now the penny drops as to why you responded to the thread. Sorry.

Every expansion is getting easier.The world is no longer alive.Race is no longer relevant.....I fear you may be right

@"Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921" said:I have really enjoyed some of this game and at times loathed much of it. For me Halloween aka Mad King was fun. And that's where I had an opportunity to look back at the old vs the new.

Mobs are losing their identity. What I mean by this, is every mob has some form of a ranged attack and can be tough in close or far range. I really don't like this particular change to NPC's in general. There should be a diversity of close combat mobs and ranged mobs that don't intermix. This allows player to utilize their weapons/ skills to the fight, if all of the mobs hit hard no matter how you fight them then it becomes a race to do the most damage.

Too much projectile hate. This just goes for mobs and many special abilities that are outright broken. For instance smokescale/ smogscale/ dust lions all have some for of an AOE projectile field that no projectiles can hit them in it (even when your outside the field and not affected by the blind). A veteran Smokescale can one shot a full health character with it's opening attack. The abilities have long durations and little downtime. Dust lions added long duration knock downs to this annoyance. Though to be fair their field isn't as long lasting as the smokescale.

Every awakened undead applies slow/ cripple combo for super long durations. Not to mention the one that bursts out of the ground and can down you in one attack since knock down takes way too long to recover from.

Look at two condi's they buffed torment and confusion, and how many of the new mobs use those particular condi's.

I'm concerned with the constant escalation of damage and health of mobs. And this leads to a massive balance problem with the entire gameplay, Veterans that are worse than champions is now a here to stay problem (you can thank HoT being about group play for that one), but it's not just there you can find basic mobs that put vets to shame, then there's champions that are worse than world bosses. It's really starting to feel like there is no balance or more accurately keeping the mobs in check when it comes to gameplay. I would like to see a return to some semblance of balance and mob type, though at this point we already have had an entire expansion where this was ignored.

I enjoy the game for much of the time I play and this is where I'm torn. If I quit, that's it. I won't come back as nostalgia for the old isn't what I like spending time on.

I do hope this game does get back to basics with less muddying of the water, only time will tell. Better gameplay should be more important than a new shiny.

I get the sense that 90% of the complaints people make about mob difficulty are based on the yardstick of standing in a fairly stationary way and only using damage-skills and heals. But the mobs should be thought of as puzzles that each have unique solutions. Mess with your build. Study for tells. Catalogue all the attacks and their timing. Load up stuns, and cleanses, and invulerabilities. Watch for break-bars and bust them down, etc etc etc. There's almost nothing in this game that can withstand an analytical, experimental, persistent attitude.

@Haishao.6851 said:Now I want to know what champion is worse than a world boss.

There's a few, offhand I couldn't name them as it's been a while since I've had to fight them. I think what many forget it's usually the adds that make them worse and in the case of the bounties it's that everything is elite around them. There's a few Mordrem champs that can put Teq to shame.

Not so worried about the mechanics in this post, I'm ok with mechanics provided they don't undermine balance. This has to do with the mobs feeling like the same fight over and over. If planning your attack has no benefit above just burning them down quickly is that a game you'll play for long?

I would argue that diversity of mobs is massively increased over the core game which really showed very little due to the ease of kill. I think what you are seeing is that mobs are using more clear skills and showing what profession they relate to in the same way they used to in GW1. That is good thing for better gameplay. For example, we are seeing Harpies use Spellbreaker skills and Candids being quite unique in their fighting style, with other mobs showing the ability to block, snipe, melee, swarm and other such tactics. I think this is something that they really started with HoT and even earlier perhaps with LS2, but have fleshed out further in PoF.

Are they more annoying/challenging? I think there is an argument that some of the wildlife could be more faceroll or less dense in numbers, with all mobs being less reliant on so much spamming of cc. I've seen drakes decimate other mobs and players from confusion stacks for example and harpies swarm in destructive numbers. Sure it adds a sense of danger, but really most of the danger should be coming from the 3 main factions of Branded, Awakened and Forged. With the exception of Djinn and Hydra, other mobs could relax things a little whilst exploring.

It is a minor point though since there is no major imbalance, there is just potential for some tweaking, especially in the overuse of crowd control.

Evolving doesn't mean losing your identity. Because I never ever thought of this games identity is that the open world was easy. The difference between this and most other mmos (where the open world remains easy) is that those games focus on dungeons and raids and this game focuses on open world. That IS it's identity. Anet decided to give the open world some harder areas so people who think core Tyria is too easy have something to do to. This decision was made because of the game's identify.

If you think this games identity is just ease, you're probably wrong, or at least it's evolved past that, and players should to.

And no, the mobs aren't becoming the same. There's great differences between what mobs do and how to handle them, in addition to the stuff you've listed. All this has done is made Guild Wars 2 the open world game it was meant to be at launch.

Evidence....Orr at launch was much harder when it came out and there were complaints and Anet nerfed Orr. The original game had harder open world end game zones. Anet even spoke about these zones before launch. They were always intended.

No, the game still has an identity, which is a game that focuses and puts a tremendous amount of effort into the open world.

I'm not asking for easy content, more of a balance in mob levels. Since gear doesn't improve 80 is all there is, it really doesn't make sense that every expansion is higher health and more add spam. If the mob fights like a champ don't tag it as elite. Their type should be a clue of which one is the most dangerous aka takes priority. They can keep the difficulty the same and yet mark the mobs more based upon how challenging they are by type and it would improve gameplay. Second having mobs that all fight the same packs of branded, forged, and awaken doesn't make them feel unique, more of just the same with a different skin.

Not quite sure what you mean but I'm loving the game and type of content we're getting. I just want it to be faster! I guess I want more so fast because its so fun

@Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921 said:I'm not asking for easy content, more of a balance in mob levels. Since gear doesn't improve 80 is all there is, it really doesn't make sense that every expansion is higher health and more add spam. If the mob fights like a champ don't tag it as elite. Their type should be a clue of which one is the most dangerous aka takes priority. They can keep the difficulty the same and yet mark the mobs more based upon how challenging they are by type and it would improve gameplay. Second having mobs that all fight the same packs of branded, forged, and awaken doesn't make them feel unique, more of just the same with a different skin.

Mobs were always like this, it just is more noticeable due them being tougher to fight. And it is the same with most mmos too.

Part of the reason is because mobs are built on set frames, which makes it easier and cheaper to overlay new skins and tweak skills to either look different or do only slightly different things. That is just how game design for mobs work in mmos. You get very few genuinely new open world mobs appear due to time and costs involved in making them.

Also you have to remember, Anet has stated that the skill level overall of the community has gone up greatly since HoT. This means damage and hp of mobs is increasing to match player skill and power creep from elites.

I can understand your complaint. However I'm the opposite. I honestly think hot maps and hp bosses and mordremoth were far more harder then POF. You might disagree however the reason I say this is I got all my hps in POF by myself. Thief. Ranger. However I had a lil hard part with one, with my engi. Other than that mobs, and Veterans are nothing close to hot maps. However I understand why since many people in forums do say that want hot maps to be easier. And people complain hot maps and bosses were too hard. So POF is nerfed down.

However I don't think they are losing direction. Even though POF got nerfed down for new people to play, the maps are still fun. Hps are still fun. And soon I'm going to do the POF story again. As for will it be detrimental to rating and people? No. I think it gives another opportunity for new people or old players to just play the game without stressing to get through the map. Hot first time playing was annoying. But going through it again knowing routes it's fun. POF first time is a breeze. Think that's the difference. I think you probably have a wrong build? I'm just running exotics so it's not like I'm running ascended through the map. I'm running average armor and doing great in POF maps. I think the direction was a great different approach.

@"Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921" said:I'm not asking for easy content, more of a balance in mob levels. Since gear doesn't improve 80 is all there is, it really doesn't make sense that every expansion is higher health and more add spam. If the mob fights like a champ don't tag it as elite. Their type should be a clue of which one is the most dangerous aka takes priority. They can keep the difficulty the same and yet mark the mobs more based upon how challenging they are by type and it would improve gameplay. Second having mobs that all fight the same packs of branded, forged, and awaken doesn't make them feel unique, more of just the same with a different skin.

I can't agree with any of that, except that ANet should be careful about tagging foes as Champs, Elites, and Vets (which, for the most part, they are). "Most dangerous" isn't always the Champ; that's never been the case for any game that I've played, including this one. Groups of mobs having the same 5 foes also seems fine to me (although I haven't seen them always exactly the same five); each mob has its specialty and which one needs to go down first often depends on which prof I'm on.

It absolutely makes sense to me that each expansion brings some new level of difficulty to simply wandering about. That's more a matter of preference than of "improved gameplay." I like having to learn to adapt, rather than being able to rely on what worked in the previous areas. If ANet could afford it, I'd love to see an expansion that extended Vanilla Tyria (with similar difficulty of mobs) as well as introduce new zones. And while I'm dreaming, also have content that changed parts of some zones (like we saw in LS1), new races, new profs, and so.

But since ANet is limited in being able to offer a limited amount of new stuff, I prefer them to keep on doing what they have done: mobs in new zones take on new skills/traits/powers, that things get progressively more challenging even just walking around, and that the expansions are generally not just extensions of the old zones.

@"Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921" said:I'm not asking for easy content, more of a balance in mob levels. Since gear doesn't improve 80 is all there is, it really doesn't make sense that every expansion is higher health and more add spam. If the mob fights like a champ don't tag it as elite. Their type should be a clue of which one is the most dangerous aka takes priority. They can keep the difficulty the same and yet mark the mobs more based upon how challenging they are by type and it would improve gameplay. Second having mobs that all fight the same packs of branded, forged, and awaken doesn't make them feel unique, more of just the same with a different skin.

The problem is right here. You think that level and stats are what makes you good at this game, and that's not true. This game has always been about skill progression. A guy in greens with good technique can do things that a guy who can't play well can't do in exotics. Your stats don't have to go up for you to get better. And we are more powerful in some ways due to elite specs anyway. If you have doubt of that, run dungeons again. Dungeons are much faster and easier to beat now than they've ever been.

Yes, the difficulty needs to increase, because we get betters (well some of us do) by fighting harder foes.

Edit: This was true even in Guild Wars 1. Max level cap was 20, but when Eye of the North came out, we were fighting things that were 24 level minimum and even 28 level and 30th level in the "open world". Our levels and stats didn't go up, but what we were fighting got more powerful. Even the weakest eye of the north enemies had more health and armor than enemies prior to that, with no gain in player stats or level.

I am speaking from the perspective of a soldier equipped guardian right now.I like the smokescale mob. It is a good idea in general, but you have to know how it works not to go down when it is a veteran or elite mob. It´s the mob I fear the most in HoT after the Bristleback veteran and the Hylek dagger fighter. i can imagine that it gleefully dances on the corpses of berserk players who relly on spike damage only.The Awakened are soso mobs. I like their resistance to this or that and how they try to escape close combat if they are using projectiles too, but tarred is utterly boring.Sandlions and sandwhirls, just no. Spamming blinding is not a good design.Hyena are the usual pushovers, and Eels are just the snake version of them.Harpys got some new skills and more damage, but nothing to write home about. Still pretty easy.The forged are ok. I did not quite understand what´s the point of the wall mages though. Officers force you to dodge often or suffer.

I diagree with the idea that you have to get better in a game though. It´s neither a competetive sport or a real job. And even if it were true, the largest majority of players who call themself casual will not have an interest to better themselves in a game meant for enjoyment and relaxing. I am pretty sure that the largest majority of men or women who play this after work or when their kids are finally sleeping after a gruelling 2 hour battle full of tears and temper tantrums have no interest in hard fought battles with a mob they picked up around the next corner, they want to relax and cool down from a stressfull day.