Swagg.9236

Lmao. This game was dead in 2015. The one caveat on the news is that the guy was more or less forced to say that GW3 was in development because of how pressured he was over NCSoft's constant financial failings. GW2 was never going to last forever, and regardless of what anyone thinks, the player base is anemic but super dense at the top end with all of the people who actually bought into the "Masteries collections, time-gated grinds, and buying expacs to win in PvP is totally real gameplay, guys" farce. People could have an impression that GW2 is alive mainly because it has a lot of overly-invested mouth-pieces. The way that the game is designed now is almost entirely in a way that chases out new players trying out the totally old and busted junk while the people who paid for the powercteep continue to think that nothing is wrong. It's a sun burning iron. Maybe GW3 will actually have GvG lmao.

This is the price you pay for fun, and honestly, the toll is pennies on the dollar when the game isn't outright bad. Basically, nobody cares, and the few opinions against custom map editing don't really matter in the face of the potential.

GW2 had no real roles in any mode. PvE had "roles" but it was more like "25 might stack guy" (happened to be ele) + "guy with buffs that could stack with 25 might" (banner slave warrior who then literally autoattacked with axes all fight) + DPS (all guardians). Every other class was worthless because they not only didn't provide any of these, but they also didn't deal enough DPS. For the most part, all of these "roles" were just DPS at the end of the day. Banners weren't something you juggled, and stacking might generally happened right before an encounter started and then was sustained during DPS rotations. Everyone was just a DPS in PvE. In PvP, GW2 had only two real classes that served the same role: old-school WoW Rogue. Old-school WoW Rogues are defined by a bunch of cooldowns that don't allow a lot of interaction with the user in the midst of PvP. These include invisibility, instantaneous movement, stuns, and other defensive gimmicks that don't really have proper counters and often chain directly into the user's offensive suite. During post-lauch GW2 PvP and extending well into 2014, Thief and Elementalist were always the Rogues by virtue of how they always have defensive options to off-set the risks involved with attacking anything: Elementalist by sheer volume of buttons to press (lmao 25 buttons vs your 15-20); and Thief by sheer volume of buttons to press (initiative). The big issue was that, instead of trying to course correct by establishing actual role options for the game, anet just made everyone else into Rogues. The real question is what is the honest-to-goodness difference between Thief, Revenant, Holo/Scrapper, Willbender, Reaper/Harb, Soulbeast, Spellbreaker, Mesmer, and Elementalist? How do the best builds across all classes engage opponents in PvP? How long do those fights last? Why do those fights last at all? How many hits actually go through or matter in any significant way when two enemies have full cooldowns up? GW2 has no real roles; only long-range Rogues and melee Rogues. Anet made GW2 PvP intentionally frustrating in order that every player could press all of their buttons at least once so that they could feel like they did something. Then, after PvP was revealed for the clown show that it was, they laughed at anyone who took it somewhat seriously, or wanted to see improvements.

I still think that conquest could work if you just had a map editor. It's not like conquest is amazing (especially with how shallow GW2's gameplay can be at a baseline), but there are so many variables and design ideas that people could incorporate into custom maps in order to bring out the best of the game's movement gimmicks. More jump and positioning options build into transitions between points? Putting points closer together but the transitions have way more movement options, no-teleport zones, and line of sight interruptions? All three points are the size of Foefire mid? Make the map more vertical than horizontal? Remove a game-specific gimmick set to spawn on timers and outright replace it with a fourth point? Build out a map with angled and sloping height variance in order to keep a bunch of leaps in mind (lets people with free-aim leaps cross gaps and make transitions that teleports can't)? To stay on the thread topic, though, you probably could make a Jade Quarry mode. As it stands, the game is likely built best to facilitated a payload mode. GW2 is extremely blob-centric. I'm not saying that it would be the most fun thing ever (to play or watch), but I'm just saying that the game is built to run it.

It's been very clear that they gave up on roles early on. Anet was on a knife-edge when they talked about how GW2 would be a game without any established roles along with things about the closest thing to a "healer" in GW2 would be an elementalist camping in water attunement for passive regeneration (which equated to a non-healer because everyone just ran DPS ele in everything). When they went to go balance on that knife-edge, they basically just stepped up and fell over it instead of giving any effort to their marketed design. Everything quickly orbited around elementalists (by virtue of how many buttons they could press due to sheer button volume) and thieves (by virtue of how many buttons they could press due to initiative and zero cooldowns). Now everything is just an E/A except that shadowsteps don't have aftercasts for whatever reason. It's pretty wild. What's the most unique build in GW2? What are the unique roles? Healers heal themselves and can deal pretty consistent damage instead of remaining a vulnerable team element within the context of a skirmish; so there goes the delineation between tanks and healers. I remember when everyone was trying to pretend that "side-noder," "brawler" and "duelist" weren't just the exact same build with slightly less or more respective teleports. I'm not saying that we need the BLESSED HOLY TRINITY ALL HAIL without any change or further imagination, but GW2 doesn't have any roles that anyone can make which won't just die to what is effectively just a knock-off Rogue.

GW2's pvp isn't built on interactions; the goal is to make combat as one-sided as possible. This generally drains victory of satisfaction and losses lose any potential meaning. On top of this, the PvP zone is riddled with weird dev-written nudges at how they also think that PvP is toxic as heck but refuse to do anything but acknowledge it in a joking, condescending manner (i.e. the Vials and Salt and things like the chat dialogue with the Mini Llama Tender/Raiser whatever that NPC is). Anet made a toxic game, and then they laughed at the people who took it seriously.

Lmaoooo, I saw that guy yesterday. Truly a magical individual.

One gem has been deposited into your Black Lion Trading Post account.

The undead wizard, rogue, and the hunter/beastmaster are healers? And the paladin is a healer twice over? I could go for the other ones two, but do you see the point? GW2 is a muddled mess and makes zero sense to anyone at first glance without going through a bunch of patch notes, wiki pages or videos unless somebody just gives them a full lecture on it (which is an awful way to experience it). Sure, anyone can also play the game to find out at that pace, but there is no initial sense to it at all, and the lines blur over every class. How is every profession DPS but only a few are "support" or "tank" without any real holistic concept behind the reasoning? Why is the thing marketed as a blue mage the tank?? That's not creative or surprising. That's confusing for anyone (particularly because the marketed definition of so many of these classes completely clash with what they generally do in the game).

If only GW2 had actual roles--professions that served actual, tangible purposes--so that anyone who played the game could understand at a glance the intent of other players and how roles could blend in a given situation. How can anyone be justifiably upset at someone for playing a "role-playing game" as if it has any roles outside of a single, generic rogue derivative that's hidden across all the classes arbitrarily (and only if you bought into the expacs)?

The "simple topics" likely allude to the things that ultimately generated the game state that nobody seems to really enjoy right now. Sure, people play GW2, but it never seems like anyone is truly enjoying it. Winning doesn't always feel fulfilling, and losing never feels like it offers anything on the back-end. Why else would that be the case except if combat itself has such a cluttered and esoteric design that all of the most important interacts are generally hidden from players on first impression for no explicable reason at all? Legitimately, if attacks just didn't evade, block, immobilize or blind while leveraging massive damage (or if teleporting players didn't simultaneously inflict CC), you could solve maybe 50% of this issue off the cuff without any further investment. Recycled post? What if GW2 were a game intentionally marketed as a "drop it whenever and pick it up again whenever you feel like it" kind of experience? Holy smokes, that would be craaaaaazyyyy.

The worst part is that I could've said this, but then you'd just get a bunch of people dogpiling their echochamber confirmation bias opinions onto that post because it'd just be me telling them to look into a mirror with nobody else on the line to support. It's actually tragic how that's how it is: GW2 will never change because it's kept the way it is due to confirmation bias. Anytime that anyone wants to legitimately critique something, it's often the "git gud" or "go play another game" or "you didn't design it, though lmao" response. There isn't any real engagement; there never has been any engagement. I wouldn't even call this game great when it launched (and that's often the timeframe that so many people like to refer as the golden age). I tried pretty hard to believe that this game had a PvP future up through 2014, but it never happened, and it only went completely down into the abyss the second that direct upgrades launched with the first expansion. I do at least appreciate that you can pump the breaks and take a step back to have a more holistic perspective on this topic, though.

OK, that's a fair point. Leaps are trash, and Guardian GS 3 will often literally turn you 180 on a target and fling you off in the exact intended direction. If GW2 wasn't a mega spaghetti mess, then maybe leaps wouldn't have such a problem. I'd imagine it's likely due to how player movement is so erratic nowadays between superspeed, swiftness, knock-backs, teleports. Then again, my favorite instance of leap inconsistency is when using Sanctuary's bump (which has to be, like, 100 units at most) to snare a target into a window where a leap SHOULD land, and then the GS 3 leap will simply kickflip 360 me like I'm some kind of cross between a boomerang and a ping-pong ball. If leaps weren't trash, then ask the question: How bad would it be for us to lose a bunch of teleports in exchange for leaps? You can at least weapon-swap cancel leaps for some extra distance or trick jumps. Teleports are so boring. That's a fair question. I mean to say any teleport that has an attack tied to it, or one which generally lends itself to chaining an attack. JI is a great example of a cheesy one because it's basically just Guardian Steal except without 14 different passive trait bonuses loaded into it. It's still terribly gross to fight for the sake of legibility, and nobody who gets caught by it will ever feel like they were within some kind of engaging PvP exchange. Sure, can you pop a few buttons to negate that user's JI pop? Sure, but then who's having fun? The point is that, by design at this point, GW2 is anti-engagement. There is generally only going to be one person having fun in a PvP engagement, and nobody who loses is going to feel like they have something to learn or change in most cases. Often, the best solution to losing any given match-up is to just be more passive in the next engagement (which isn't fun to play, and it isn't fun to watch). This passivity eventually grows so stifling that sometimes the best way to play PvP is to avoid a lot of PvP entirely by just walking around fights and going to points or getting some random map objective first.

Most people do looking at the game's condition lol, although, to be perfectly honest about it, the things discussed above aren't that far off from what everybody else does with their nitpicky, onesie-twosie number cuts and increases now. Only real difference is whether or not there's anyone left at anet who could actually deliver on an increase in ammo skills or changing something from a laser beam to a ground-targeted AoE. Defaulting to "theme" as the justification for your class is that same core problem. It's not just the devs at this point; it's the players who also think that flavor should define the function of a class and not the other way around. Whatever you're playing, it's just a knock-off rogue.

Less teleports in general, offensive teleports replaced by leaps, a possible GCD on teleport usage, more ground-targeted AoEs or linear cascade attacks (i.e. rev hammer 2), smaller AoEs, shorter duration AoEs, WAY MORE ammo system attacks to counteract AoE reductions, less weapon bar blocks/evades, no more blocks/evades on attacks, everybody now gets more dodges (endurance totals possibly tied to profession/armor weight). Honestly, you could probably delete an entire weapon bar skill slot, and end up with a better canvas to establish this kind of design by function and opportunity cost than trying to fill five slots per weapon combination. You'd probably have to do something drastic to the state of auto-attacks, though, since they're mostly just over-tuned filler/fodder right now rather than something that really compliments the holistic flow of any given weapon set to which they're attached. Blind and aegis are also dumb. I'm not saying that GW2 is going to change, and I'm not saying that I am going to fight for GW2's PvP (because it's a lost cause). I'm just putting out an observation based on how people play GW2's PvP, eternally complain about it, yet continuously lobby for the exact same """design"""" decisions which sunk them into the hole that the game is in right now. You'll never have a thriving population because GW2's PvP has a deceptively low skill ceiling which suppresses creativity and denies any emergent gameplay; it is impossible to shoutcast PvP from more than a wavetop viewpoint; PvP is entirely antithetical to the average or new, curious spectator (because none of it will make any real sense); and, despite its stunted skill curve, the gameplay is esoteric enough (due to all of its glut of passive, risk-mitigating gimmicks), that a new player's first experience on it is almost certainly skewed toward a bad impression. If you think that adjusting numbers will save a class or "balance" a build, you're so far off the target that you're basically shooting the other people next to you at the range (which is probably what it feels like for anyone who just wants to have fun but keeps seeing all of these people crying about how GW2 PvP is fine but just needs X nerfed or Y buffed). You're all trapped in your own ivory wizard's tower. Edit: Oh yeah, this game should've had a map editor, like, 8 years ago lmao. It doesn't seem difficult to use, and anyone can tell that even the anet devs abuse it regularly in awful ways (just go to the Silverwastes and check out the stretch scaling on any of the bigger rocks in the area). Adjusting stuff on old Skyhammer looks like something that anyone with a little bit of free time could do. If players could just make their own maps, then even this game's current combat could maybe improve a tiny bit by virtue of more jump tricks and no-teleport spots present all over the place.

Tell me the two builds I run and my rank then.

Does it have to be anyone's issue when any class you play in GW2 lets you walk to whatever target you want and press whichever buttons you want for a fixed number of seconds? Makes everything pretty easy. Only real variable at that point is AoE size and spammability lol. Thankfully, engineer has two classes that do the exact same thing, so you can just pick between them both depending on patch note drops.

Short Answer: It's an MMORPG. Less Short Answer: GW2 is an MMORPG that didn't have any actual roles in it when it launched, and anet never attempted to rectify this. They "solution" was basically to crank numbers and bake in more and more passive mitigations so that people could actually use all of their skills in PvP without dying to an Elementalist or a Thief (which are still the baseline archetypes for god-tier easy mode builds in GW2). This first lead to "Rule by the One With the Most Buttons" (which is why Elementalist and Thief were kings at the start), and in order to drag the other classes up to match that, the other classes eventually just became derivative copies of Elementalist and Thief. By the way, it's insanely un-fun to fight an Elementalist or Thief if you aren't also playing one; however, if you make everyone into the same class, then there is no room for skill expression and emergent gameplay. The game is now defined by patch notes rather than player skill. The only reason this is such a hang-up is that people from 2014 still want to keep holding on to the CRUSTIEST of glories and convince everyone that they're "good" at a video game that doesn't really require that much effort. Esoteric Knowledge Answer: You can't give a player 20-30 skills, and then only "balance" their effects and usage by cooldowns. Moreover, trade-offs create playstyles, and GW2 only buffs things without establishing any baseline capability limits for new gimmicks. Considering how spammy GW2 can be, it would have made way more sense to balance its asinine volume of skills per class with longer cast-times, builder/tear-down resources, baseline energy/stamina resources, and/or charge-up tiers in order to promote risky time investment into effects rather than just front-loading all of the power onto the back of throwaway cast times that are either instant or never last longer than 0.75s. You'll Never Have a Role Answer: The most interesting mechanics and gimmicks in this game are generally locked as utilities or passive traitlines that have been nerfed out of usage because the opportunity cost to take them will never outweigh the capability to be another Elementalist or Thief. This game should have only had 4 professions at the most, and none of those 4 professions really ought to have had more than 10-15 skills a piece. Guild Wars 1 Answer: Anet almost certainly built PvE before PvP, and the professions themselves were almost certainly designed in respective vacuums rather than collectively with a holistic sense of small-scale skirmish roles in mind. Every class in GW2 is a one-man army with no real obligation to anyone else because every class more or less does the same thing without any effort. Every class in GW1 is part of a whole because every class has a number of deficiencies and outright weaknesses; any one class in that game can't necessarily function effectively within any given situation without some level of teamwork.

Super easy to lead a target in a game where your AoEs are 5x the size of a target, have short (or no) cooldowns (in the case of the autoattack), movement speed outside of teleports is atrociously slow, and players often have to sit on objectives that are equal to your AoE spam and maybe only twice the size of your AoEs in the best scenarios (only exception: Foefire mid). There is also no leading involved when you get to walk up to a target with blocks and throw nades at your own feet lol

That's a good point about how everything is "charge in and spam front-loaded skills ala Willbender," and I would agree; however, the engagement almost always opens up on the back of multiple teleports that don't require any real timing and often overlay damage with incoming effect mitigation. Yes, the best builds will generally move about as much as a Runescape duel ONCE COMBAT STARTS, but the initial engagement (and often a break-away movement) will be something that negates timing and positioning (generally through teleports or some kind of scripted movement/superspeed with baked-in blocks/evades/invuln). Warrior, Guard, and Necro are certainly face-tank stars, but are you also really going to deny that every time a ranger, revenant, mesmer or elementalist initiates a burst rotation, they aren't going to do so during a simultaneous window of passive/instant CD pops that are going to mitigate most incoming effect while they spam attacks? Every class is basically doing the same thing, and it's just that Reaper kind of does it... the worst? Hence, reaper is the gatekeeper between the braindead meta and anyone else who is just trying to figure out the game or trying to experiment with something that isn't necessarily "facetank with front-loaded attacks and a bunch of panic buttons in reserve."

Why reinstate the boon which punishes people for successfully hitting a target when you could instead just... make hitting a target somewhat more interactive and involved than "slap tab; headbang onto keyboard" or "hold W; headbang onto keyboard"?

Ok, yeah, but we're talking about reaper as the gatekeeper between people who don't actually have to use their brain and people who want to try to do something different (or new players who have to deal with GW2 being a trash fire), bro I don't even play necro lmao. Why would you be so committed to preserving a status quo if it didn't benefit your easy mode minigame?

I have no idea what you're really getting at here. Bottom line up front: Thief is the core sin of GW2's low skill ceiling due to how it broke the limitations of other classes with unbridled saturation of teleports and freebie risk mitigation enabled by a flavor-over-function "design" concept and the initiative system. Instead of addressing this, a shortsighted anet just made more thieves: Rev is a better/easier thief. Soulbeast is the ranger's thief. WB is the guardian's thief. Mesmer eventually became pink thief after their cooldowns shrunk and they got more options to layer incoming effect mitigation over outing burst windows. Engineer doesn't necessarily spam teleporting damage, but the excessive superspeed and long block windows layered over damage serves the same purpose; both holo and scrapper are thief. Warrior also has two thieves with SB and, to a lesser degree, BS (but the latter also just recovers health quickly without any risky inputs or interactive game elements more than it outright negates incoming damage). These classes often eat reaper (or never die to it) because reaper has to SOMEWHAT commit to ranged or melee damage within 10s cooldown windows (form or weapons), and it can't teleport freely to catch up if people blink out of range. This means that all of the thief derivatives have huge opportunity windows during which they can attack mostly with impunity while the reaper cannot interact. Does this mean that reaper's damage ISN'T overtuned? Those two elements aren't mutually inclusive: reaper damage is stupid high and busted; classes that eat reaper's lunch just invalidate risk, effort, timing and positioning altogether without trying because they're all mostly just copies of each other. GW2 is jacked up because, yes, those builds exist because every class has one; they aren't interesting to interact with; the player base doesn't want risk; and now the vestiges of the original "attrition class" is the gatekeeper between "new, generic, bland trash with zero effort" and "weird attempts at experimentation and iteration in an extremely shallow and solved PvP mini game."

Here's the issue: once again GW2's gameplay breaks down into a shallow flow-chart devoid of emergent gameplay and skill expression. So, what do you do when facing a reaper? The correct answer is to never directly engage the reaper. Blow it up with protracted pressure from maximum range where only marks can really reach (likely with at least one easy teleport in the tank to respace), or you can negate timing/positioning with teleports and then literally evade for 5 seconds straight while attacking (a significant amount of classes do this now). The thing is, YES, fighting a reaper """correctly""" is TECHNICALLY a learning curve, but it's about as steep as a wheelchair ramp, and the ability to walk up it downright negates an entire class. Nobody wins here. Is reaper overtuned? Yes, because anyone who actually goes to blows with it where blows are expected to occur will simply die like a dog to a bunch of nonsense that has no real animation tells, no sensible flow of effects (it's just a cluttered damage cloud that repeatedly blinds and stuns you), and no real way to interact with it or re-position UNLESS you play certain builds/classes. OK, so the correct answer is "play the better classes;" but does that really elevate any sort of skill ceiling? No. It's a binary interaction. Roll a rev, practice for a few hours, and you'll smoke every reaper you see unless you're maybe playing while sloshed or high out of your mind. Did you git gud? Heck no, you're using a class that cheats more than reaper lmao. The skill ceiling to this game is so low that everyone is bent over at the hips. Build Wars™, babyyy. Reaper is a gatekeeper class. People--regardless of skill level--who play lesser builds die to it (or at the very least, will not kill the reaper in any sort of expedient fashion) because they can't interact with it, however, anyone who plays builds that just teleport and/or evade for 10 seconds straight while bursting (they're everywhere) will just generally kill the reaper by dancing in and out of the reaper's effective range during their locked-in, ten-second weapon and form cooldowns. Does reaper need to lose damage? Yes it does. The rest of the game also should've stopped adding passive evades and blocks to literally every burst window.

Everything about GW2 is too easy.