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The Problem with PvP


Lost Elegy.9276

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I will be blunt: I played the Classic World of Warcraft stress test and it IS going to be used in this explanation. If comparing two games in the exact same genre or the thought of WoW offends you, move along.

NOW THEN, ON TO THE MAIN POINT. The PvP in Guild Wars 2 is flawed. No sane individual with any understanding of the game will argue that point. The pro scene is dead, win trading is rampant and the Guild Wars 2 dev team is doing everything in their power to pretend that PvP doesn't exist. The point I want to focus on is far more fundamental than these issues, though. I wasn't able to notice it at first, but coming back from the WoW stress test has given me a fresh pair of eyes and now I can't un-see the fundamental issue Guild Wars 2 has: Abilities simply do too many things at once. What do I mean by this? Let me give a few examples from WoW for a moment: Shadow Word: Pain, Frost Bolt, and Garrote. For those of you that don't know what these do, I'll explain:-) Shadow Word: Pain is a targetted Damage over Time effect that has no cooldown, low mana cost and can be cast instantly. It does no initial damage and cannot stack with itself. It's a fairly weak ability that has a VERY simple task: Damage. Over. Time.-) Frost Bolt is a spell that has a roughly 1.5 second cast time for a small amount of damage and slows. The slow is dependent on the rank of the spell, which also increases the damage and mana cost. Damage and a slow, but has a sizable cast time.-) Garrote is an ability that silences the target for 2 seconds (In Guild Wars 2 it would be a Daze) and does damage over time, but can only be used from stealth. Stealth cannot be regained during combat without using another ability with a 3-minute cooldown. Stealth slows you by 50% and taking ANY damage causes you to lose stealth.

Why am I wasting your time with these abilities from another game with a much, much slower combat system? It's rather simple: These abilities don't do much, and that's the entire point. WoW gives you a long list of spells to make your character with, and you won't use all of them. You have to choose what you want your character to be good at, and that specialization comes with a cost and a glaring weakness for that set of skills you chose. Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, can't seem to simplify any buttons on their action bars to save its own life. The most BASIC of abilities in the game have special properties tied to them. Necromancer's Staff 1, the simplest of their abilities, do the following: It can hit up to 5 targets, pierces through all enemies, has a 20% chance to be a physical projectile combo finisher, gives the caster 4% life force and has the ability to be traited to do EVEN MORE THINGS. In WoW, when a rogue hits someone with a dagger, the attack does nothing but cause your weapon's damage to the target. Plain and simple delivery of damage. GW2's Thief's Dagger 1? The first attack is a double strike, followed by an attack that regains endurance, followed by an attack that causes poison. A simple auto-attack applies a debuff, regains energy and hits 4 times with 3 attacks. Starting to see my point? Abilities are overloaded to an absurd degree in GW2, and nowhere is this more so than within the Elite Specializations. Let's pick on Holosmith: Corona Burst, a single button, does ALL of the following: "Strike nearby foes and begin to store up energy, gaining boons and heat each pulse. After charging, the energy explodes, inflicting conditions on nearby foes." In other words, it's an AoE attack that grants two stacks of might, causes 8 out of 25 total possible vulnerability stacks, hits multiple times over 5 pulses, counts as an explosion and is affected by three traits. If these traits are taken, this ability furthermore grants stability, shields, can cause additional vulnerability and has a chance to cripple and bleed the target. All of this on a single push of a button. This bloating is hardly limited to Holosmith. You can argue that all these effects are a "necessary evil" due to the limitations of the 10 button system that Guild Wars 2 has in place. You're entitled to that opinion, but let me explain why this limitation makes no sense:-) While WoW can have the ability to have 40+ button slots onscreen simultaneously, the vast majority of them aren't even used for combat. A plethora of abilities are not used in combat and would be better off considered as novelty item-like effects. On average, the characters in WoW use around 16 buttons.-) Guild Wars 2 has weapon swapping, special stances, kits, stealth-exclusive abilities, etc. While there can only be 10 abilities on screen at once, any good engineer can happily show you the 40+ buttons they can have on-demand with their kits. PvP is a symptom of a deeper problem. These "Meta Builds" that people run are practically the only viable ways to play their classes. When one out of the five players trying to kill you has 7 different ways to stunlock your character across 4 buttons, you need to have immediate access to multiple stun breakers and mass stability. When anyone running a condition build can do your healthbar over time with the press of two buttons, you need to have access to mass condition cleanse. Classes without access to either of these have to abuse long evasion/invulnerability times to avoid being obliterated. PoF has done little more than pour oil onto this fire of a problem by bloating what each elite can do. Deadeye Thief, for example, can mash 4 on their rifle and remove a stack of debuffs in less than a second. They still need to run Precision Signet (Removes 3 stacks of conditions immediately at the press of a button from themselves and allies) to avoid exploding when a condi class so much as looks at them.

In summary: I'm all for fast-paced combat, but the reaction time expected of the average player in PvP is just unreasonable. I've watched players in platinum-ranked games, who by all accounts are far better than me, die to being clipped by some random ability they had no way of reacting to and exploding in less than a second. You can call me bad all you want, but I feel like abilities need to have a large amount of what they do stripped down and slowed down. At least in PvP.

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@mortrialus.3062 said:

@"Lost Elegy.9276" said:

GkBYPb4.png

A9kitCW.png

Ill do you one better.... Not including range or duration.

Earth Overload...:CrippleImmobilizedirect damagebleed stackssummons dust stormapplies magnetic auraapplies stabilityapplies protectionremoves conditionsapplies regenapplies vigorapplies swiftnessapplies furyincreases crit damageIncreases precisionheals the userHeals alliesbreaks stunblast finisher

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@sephiroth.4217 said:

@"Lost Elegy.9276" said:

GkBYPb4.png

A9kitCW.png

Ill do you one better.... Not including range or duration.

Earth Overload...:CrippleImmobilizedirect damagebleed stackssummons dust stormapplies magnetic auraapplies stabilityapplies protectionremoves conditionsapplies regenapplies vigorapplies swiftnessapplies furyincreases crit damageIncreases precisionheals the userHeals alliesbreaks stunblast finisher

You gotta post a screen cap of the tool tip in all it's glory to really show just how wild some of the stuff is in the game.

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So for 7 years skills doing several things were okay but because of anet's neglect of sPvP today.. it ruins the combat system? I don't get it.

Unless your argument is that the core game was less balanced than WoW, because if not your issue is with the elite specs - and furthermore alot of the added effects need to be traited, which in some cases goes at the cost of other equally sound options - allowing you to be great at 1 thing only but have glaring weaknesses.

The only skills in the game that are truly overloaded are profession mechanics when traited , and I don't really see an issue with that as it is your professions main source of utility - and every profession have equal options to do so.

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@Fat Disgrace.4275 said:

@"Lost Elegy.9276" said:

GkBYPb4.png

A9kitCW.png

Ok but doesn't that mark have like 10 traits tied to it? Ofc it's going to be overloaded :-/

In my opinion if you invest entire traitline and several other traits from other lines in to one single skill that to be honest is not even too strong despite all that, then I don't think it deserves to be used as an example of some stuff being "overloaded", especially since the rest of the kit is, for that very reason, pretty plain and definitely not overloaded.

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@XECOR.2814 said:Please dont say staff auto on necro is overloaded ever. You are losing credibility.

You're missing the point of the OP I think. He probably take necromancer's staff's AA because among the auto-attack it's one of the weakest yet compared to WoW things it's already overloaded with effects.

The thing is that GW2 and WoW are 2 vastly different games. One with a gameplay relying on a restricted number of skills, while the other just fill it's skillbar with every skills possible. One with a gameplay heavily dependant on a ressource (mana) while the other is just limited by cool down most of the time.

I'm not saying that he don't have a point by saying that gw2's skills are in general overloaded with to many effects but comparing WoW and GW2 is like comparing apples and potatoes (yeah, not even orange, potatoes).

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@"Lost Elegy.9276" said:-) Garrote is an ability that silences the target for 2 seconds (In Guild Wars 2 it would be a Daze) and does damage over time, but can only be used from stealth. Stealth cannot be regained during combat without using another ability with a 3-minute cooldown. Stealth slows you by 50% and taking ANY damage causes you to lose stealth.

Ive said it many, many times before but you used caps so lets start it over again. You know why stealth is being disrupted when one take damage in WoW and it doesnt when one take damage in gw2? Answer is...bim bam bom...autoattacks! In WoW in order to reveal someone you need to use AoE skill which has channel-time (eg. Blizzard) , AoE skill with one field that has fair cooldown (eg. consecrated ground), or instant re-castable spells that drains your mana like...you know like what (eg. Arcane Explosion). The other option is attacking stealthed person you need to come close to it, target it and use target-locked skill (eg. many, just like Sinister Strike). So basically, in order to reveal someone you must either stay still casting sth, use one of your CD, drain your mana/hp or come closer to enemy and be in danger of random backstab. Pretty fair, isnt it?

Now lets look at gw2, here you can just simply, SIMPLY spam aa and randomly hit sth with it. No mana, no cd, no hp, nothing, n o t h i n g is being spend. Not even talking about small/long range AoEs or stupid pewpew laser-tracking ranger Rapid Fire. Also pretty fair, isnt it? This game wont ever be like WoW because its basics are so different, you would either need to change whole mechanic (here eg. stealth) or whole combat system.

Combat system in gw2 is more dynamic than in WoW, especially classic one. And its good, gw2 was supposted to be new MMO, not another WoW copy. What we lack is proper balancing system. In my opinion up to HoT things were more or less balanced. Even bunker meta was more fun than what we have now. PoF gave this game so much unbalanced things that I cannot even think how long would be the list If one wanted to create it. But thats okay, ppl do mistakes, but also try to fix them. So, we noticed that Mirage is overperforming, community noticed, "pros noticed", developers noticed. We shall make the game playable again, right? Month should be fine amount of time. Have we done it? Nope, year must pass to see any good changes for one overperforming class (meanwhile 2 or so raid wings, wohoo).I dont even mention "balancing" technique which is disabling certain traits in certain game-mode instead of fixing it, because its far more than hillarious.

If developers changed their mind-set from "If everything is OP then nothing is OP" to actually playing the game and trying to pretend they know what theyre doing, Id appreciate it. Or at least playing forgotten part of the game.

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Imagine a 4 sec stun in gw2 rofl...Just wondering why you compare a game that gives you like 40+ skills at hand, all available at same time with a game gives you 10 (weaponskills, only 5 available at same time)+5 (utilities)+1-4 (classspecific f skills). Can't you image, that the game with that way less skills available at same time gives the skills more impact/ effects and lower cd? I think that makes sense that gw2 skills offer more, not to mention the faster combat with dodge mechanic needs to be balanced differently to wow in this regard.

@Widmo.3186 said:

@Lost Elegy.9276 said:-) Garrote is an ability that silences the target for 2 seconds (In Guild Wars 2 it would be a Daze) and does damage over time, but can only be used from stealth. Stealth cannot be regained during combat without using another ability with a 3-minute cooldown. Stealth slows you by 50% and taking ANY damage causes you to lose stealth.

Ive said it many, many times before but you used caps so lets start it over again. You know why stealth is being disrupted when one take damage in WoW and it doesnt when one take damage in gw2? Answer is...bim bam bom...autoattacks! In WoW in order to reveal someone you need to use AoE skill which has channel-time (eg. Blizzard) , AoE skill with one field that has fair cooldown (eg. consecrated ground), or instant re-castable spells that drains your mana like...you know like what (eg. Arcane Explosion). The other option is attacking stealthed person you need to come close to it, target it and use
targer-locked
skill (eg. many, just like Sinister Strike). So basically, in order to reveal someone you must either stay still casting sth, use one of your CD, drain your mana/hp or come closer to enemy and be in danger of random backstab. Pretty fair, isnt it?

The only thing i would change to stealth in gw2 is that players who miss a skill (for example hit a block or trying to attack with blind etc) don't get revealed. It is not logical, that the stealthed player gets rewarded with staying in stealth when failing an attack out of stealth. That also would have been a less clunky way to balance thief stealth attacks instead giving Backstab an ICD.

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I'm sorry but I dont really see your point here.

Are you saying pvp is bad because the skills are hard to understand?Are you saying pvp is bad because it's too fast?

Because skills doing several different things isnt the core issue there. That's just the way the game was designed to begin with, it was always like this, albeit to a lesser extent for sure.There was always 12 different things you needed to watch out, you always needed to be able to deal with alot of different things lest die to a bad match up.

And if your saying you want gw2 pvp to be more like wow pvp then... I just don't know what to tell you I dont think that's possible.

WoW pvp is extremely stressful and small mistakes can be punished hard. It's slow paced and I feel like I don't have alot of tools at my disposal, admittedly I did play priest.GW2 PvP in comparison is a breeze. You can make mistakes and dont have be constantly out thinking your opponent to not get tornadoes.

I just dont really get what you want here, sorry.

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@White Kitsunee.4620 said:WoW pvp is extremely stressful and small mistakes can be punished hard. It's slow paced and I feel like I don't have alot of tools at my disposal, admittedly I did play priest.GW2 PvP in comparison is a breeze. You can make mistakes and dont have be constantly out thinking your opponent to not get tornadoes.

I just dont really get what you want here, sorry.

Shows how much you know about Gw2 & WoW pvp. I'm a seasoned veteran on both games. Especially in pvp.& i can 100% assure you, you got both games reversed. WoW pvp is anything but stressful. It's mounted so you can survive anykind of stupid mistakes & still not get 1 shoted. Unless something is broken & not patched. But all classes will survive an unslaught from multiple players & give you that chance to run or regroup. Even attacks from power creeps. Down side is it's still an old tab targeting old school game. Still draws a big crowd tho.

As for Gw2, LOL, it's really a joke. ... 1 mistake & your dead. 1 mistake & you high probability you lose the match for the team. You get lock out, 1 shoted, power creep fiasco. Or you tank & do no damage . & all that with in the same old tired run around conquest game mod & redundant maps. I can't understand how you can say it's a breeze? It's only upside is that it use's in a good way a combination of tab targeting with action play. That's the only PLUS it got over WoW. But even as that, Gw2 pvp is boring as kitten compare to the old school WoW pvp. It should not be but in reality it is. Only reason that explains why WoW pvp is still way more popualr then Gw2 pvp.

You got it wrong & need to wake up & smell whats really cooking.

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Unranked is the problem. Its offseason. Make a random build (not some meta thing) on a class you dont play much (to simulate being newish to pvp) and after a few matches you will see!New players get obliterated in seconds (kinda what your talking about OP) in unranked, by full groups of vets going for their dailies(?), or maybe just being the trolls many of them are.I literally had a match today where 1 guy on my team said "sorry if I suck, new to pvp", versus a full team with 1guy I noticed with best of the best title. Needless to say it was a landslide.This doesn't teach players to get better, it teaches them to not play pvp and stick to pve, which leads to less player populations and less caring by Anet to balance things for the few hundred players always threatening to quit; when they are largely at fault for creating such a toxic environment.

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Well I agree and I've been saying this for the last 2 years.

GW2's skills do too much Staff at the same time. This is just nonesense. The powercreep is real people, stop defending it.But the discussion here won't do much.

People don't want changes. When na OP thing or Build gets nerfed, people cry, when the UP thing gets buffed, people cry.

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@Vieux P.1238 said:

@White Kitsunee.4620 said:It's mounted so you can survive anykind of stupid mistakes & still not get 1 shoted. Unless something is broken & not patched. But all classes will survive an unslaught from multiple players & give you that chance to run or regroup. Even attacks from power creeps. Down side is it's still an old tab targeting old school game. Still draws a big crowd tho.

As for Gw2, LOL, it's really a joke. ... 1 mistake & your dead. 1 mistake & you high probability you lose the match for the team.

I'm gonna have to hard disagree with you man. Three things:

  1. Mounted? What the heck are you talking about, as far as I know there isnt any mounted combat in wow.
  2. I played disc priest only so that may contribute to my opinion of it.
  3. I was talking about bfa pvp, I haven't tried classic wow pvp yet. Waiting for release

Even still I dont know what your are talking about man, WoW has so much less survivability baked into its classes, when a paladin or dk got on me there was literally nothing I could do to escape. I just had to take it for the rest of the game.

And sure damage is alot lower in WoW but CC is sooo much higher, without significantly less stun breaks and ways to deal with it. You get caught out and you have to take the full punish for it.

To me it sounds like your describing the opposite games, gw2 it's easy to 2v1 and survive because mobility and disengages are so high, you often arnt punish for your mistakes of bad positioning or getting caught out because your stunkbreaks don't have 3 minute cooldowns.Yea sure I haven't played WoW PvP for very long, I'd hardly call myself a veteran of it, but I'm certainly a veteran of gw2 pvp,And I'd like to think my opinions on it are at least mostly informed.

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@White Kitsunee.4620 said:

@White Kitsunee.4620 said:It's mounted so you can survive anykind of stupid mistakes & still not get 1 shoted. Unless something is broken & not patched. But all classes will survive an unslaught from multiple players & give you that chance to run or regroup. Even attacks from power creeps. Down side is it's still an old tab targeting old school game. Still draws a big crowd tho.

As for Gw2, LOL, it's really a joke. ... 1 mistake & your dead. 1 mistake & you high probability you lose the match for the team.

  1. I was talking about bfa pvp, I haven't tried classic wow pvp yet. Waiting for release

You can't have an opinion & talk about comparison between these 2 games when you haven't even played fully on both pvp's.
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@White Kitsunee.4620 said:

@White Kitsunee.4620 said:It's mounted so you can survive anykind of stupid mistakes & still not get 1 shoted. Unless something is broken & not patched. But all classes will survive an unslaught from multiple players & give you that chance to run or regroup. Even attacks from power creeps. Down side is it's still an old tab targeting old school game. Still draws a big crowd tho.

As for Gw2, LOL, it's really a joke. ... 1 mistake & your dead. 1 mistake & you high probability you lose the match for the team.

I'm gonna have to hard disagree with you man. Three things:
  1. Mounted? What the heck are you talking about, as far as I know there isnt any mounted combat in wow.
  2. I played disc priest only so that may contribute to my opinion of it.
  3. I was talking about bfa pvp, I haven't tried classic wow pvp yet. Waiting for release

Even still I dont know what your are talking about man, WoW has so much less survivability baked into its classes, when a paladin or dk got on me there was literally nothing I could do to escape. I just had to take it for the rest of the game.

And sure damage is alot lower in WoW but CC is sooo much higher, without significantly less stun breaks and ways to deal with it. You get caught out and you have to take the full punish for it.

To me it sounds like your describing the opposite games, gw2 it's easy to 2v1 and survive because mobility and disengages are so high, you often arnt punish for your mistakes of bad positioning or getting caught out because your stunkbreaks don't have 3 minute cooldowns.Yea sure I haven't played WoW PvP for very long, I'd hardly call myself a veteran of it, but I'm certainly a veteran of gw2 pvp,And I'd like to think my opinions on it are at least mostly informed.

Looks like troll, but gonna explain sth as ex-WoW player

  1. Google meaning of word "mounted"
  2. Nice, so you touched 1 BfA class and more precisely speaking one of its builds, good knowledge spectrum.
  3. Why talk about sth that doesnt exist? And if you dont believe me, go and see all oldschool PvP streamers/youtubers and what they think about that expansion. You dont even need 2 hands to play on high level in nowadays WoW.

Lack of survivability? Boi, Cloak of Shadows, Vanish, see you on the next episode. Bubble, full heal, lets go once again. Frost Nova, Ice Block, Cold Snap, Ice Barrier, Ice Block, tired yet with my slow or shall I start using blinks? And it goes on and goes on with every class.

WoW might have longer CCs but also stun breakers like Blink or Medalion (nowadays even accessable as "talent") and no one-shot potential if theres no 20 levels difference or you arent naked. In GW2 you dont need long CCs as you can get your hands off keyboard while playing lets say teef, meet rev or FA and get stomped in 3 seconds because you didnt dodge. You can have teleports but guess what, your enemies also have them, and sometimes are on advantage because of gapclosers and youre the one running.

Now, lets show a video from one of the Classic WoW servers when PvP actually meant something compared to nowadays WoW. Stressful af, isnt it?

What do I see when I write "one-shot BfA"? This, look what happens there and tell me which situation was stressful or when one-shot happend.
And random "one-shot" video from gw2.

If youre not a troll, I hope you now see the difference between those 2 games, especially BfA.

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@Widmo.3186 said:

@White Kitsunee.4620 said:Lack of survivability? Boi, Cloak of Shadows, Vanish, see you on the next episode. Bubble, full heal, lets go once again. Frost Nova, Ice Block, Cold Snap, Ice Barrier, Ice Block, tired yet with my slow or shall I start using blinks? And it goes on and goes on with every class.

WoW might have longer CCs but also stun breakers like Blink or Medalion (nowadays even accessable as "talent") and no one-shot potential if theres no 20 levels difference or you arent naked. In GW2 you dont need long CCs as you can get your hands off keyboard while playing lets say teef, meet rev or FA and get stomped in 3 seconds because you didnt dodge. You can have teleports but guess what, your enemies also have them, and sometimes are on advantage because of gapclosers and youre the one running.

Fair enough, If your talking about WoW classic WPvP then I really have no experience on the matter, but then you are really comparing apples to oranges here.GW2 1v1s does have an escape issue if you don't have stealth access, or are playing theif, or engi with rocket boots, whatever.

But, Gw2 1v1s don't really exist atm? Aside from in WvW, and even then it's rarely a 1v1.

Now, lets show a video from one of the Classic WoW servers when PvP actually meant something compared to nowadays WoW. Stressful af, isnt it?

yea it does lol, reminds me of all those stupid Druid + mage comps I played against all the time, a single mistake in positioning meant I wasn't allowed to play the game for like a solid 20 to 30 seconds.

What do I see when I write "one-shot BfA"? This, look what happens there and tell me which situation was stressful or when one-shot happend.Greater Pyroblast + Sin rogues.

I'll admit I probably have much less experience compared to you. The games are different, I enjoyed both for different reasons. But Personally, I fell like GW2 PvP is so much more relaxing and simple.Maybe thats because I've played so much more of it. /Shrug.~~~~

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