Swagg.9236

The issue is that an enormous number of things CC, and nobody takes significant risks as attackers during burst windows. If someone is attacking with impunity, he might as well stagger or chain his CC skills to optimize zero-interaction from an opponent. The only real interactive factor here is how many stunbreaks or instant movement skills that the opponent has. This isn't something necessarily determined by player/operator skill because there are obviously much better skills and traits to take in lieu of extra stability or stunbreaks. Therefore, regardless of which player feels bad in the exchange, someone is going to feel cheated: whether it's one player who feels like he's being CC'ed to death, or another attacking player who feels as if someone can never be CC'ed enough. It's not about player skill; it's just the build vs build interaction. Some builds are far more resilient or susceptible to CC than others, and due to GW2 PvP's very narrow and shallow metagame paradigms, experimentation is typically, very strongly discouraged. People just learn which classes are the easy kill rather than try to pretend that player/operator skill will triumph a dude facerolling the keyboard (because it won't).

It's kind of wild how this thread exists and yet people still freak out when someone calls GW2 PvP "p2w" lol The real issue is that nobody thinks that GW2's collective catalog of content is worth ANYWHERE near its marketed price except for the people who already got stuck paying it. What about GW2 is worth $100 USD? The story??? PvP doesn't receive nearly the support or customization features deserving of a $100 price-tag. The little platinum tag next to a player's name isn't worth $100--especially if we're going to establish a worry of "new players ladder climbing" by virtue of them just having access to all possible (and therefore the "best") builds. Doesn't look very good for this game's optics if you can just win PvP more consistently by making sure you paid for the right expansion-dependent sub-classes.

Thief and mid-range Elementalist were the only two real classes in GW2 PvP. Eventually, you were going to get a class that basically blended the two due to lack of development in gameplay loop complexity and roles.

Muscle memory isn't a high skill threshold on its own, and that was ultimately all Elementalist was given that the user is forced into 8-10 second cooldowns between stances in most cases. Originally, the fact that Elementalist had so many buttons meant that it dominated without trying because it never ran out of gas for self-healing and outgoing damage options. The reason you feel slighted by the current situation is because you're personally invested in the class' success without realizing that it was only one of two primordial gameplay loops which have never stopped dominating this game's PvP interaction dynamic. Instead of anet working on broadening the gameplay loop issue and the fundamental lack of unique class roles, they basically just made every other class into 2013-era Elementalists and/or Thieves (raw damage powercreep notwithstanding). GW2 isn't hard. Every class is an ele now because the game never got any more complex after launch.

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Those aren't elements of the conquest game mode; those are elements of GW2 PvP which tend to make any PvP encounter a confusing eyesore for any newcomer. Moreover, GW2's lack of combat legibility isn't a layer of complexity but rather a layer of frustrating obfuscation (frustrating because it serves zero functional purpose since so many player animations are recycled and so many particle effects cloud models anyway). In fact, conquest is actually SO simple that it likely only hampers player expression further than it already is by a lack of any real design philosophy for class roles. The most recent maps are extremely flat and open with tons of dead space. Footsies and neutral space don't really exist because people just instant-transmission into each other from 1500 range or dogpile onto a pre-selected, most vulnerable target matchup. Most maps in general focus on exploiting teleport pathing or geometry gimmicks which explicitly counter teleports. Raw movement isn't a skill in GW2, and the skill curve behind timing is about as steep as a wheelchair ramp because the best abilities are instant, near-instant, or get passively supported by instant, layerable effect mitigation. Like I said, you'd be better off designing a mode or maps that actually try to lean into raw movement as a skill that affects gameplay rather than making a "simpler" game mode. The real strat still remains player-created maps, but they've had their chance for years there. The tool they use to generate maps isn't even that complicated. It's kind of nuts that it just rots on an anet server somewhere.

Engineer was always a flavor over function mess.

Conquest isn't complicated lmao. The game just lacks any holistic design philosophy which provides real roles for player expression. New players don't leave PvP because it's complicated or intimidating; they leave because the content is obtuse, esoteric, and visually offensive: tons of teleports, loads of particle effects, no significant cues for most significant attacks or traits, tons of protracted and passive defense, and an extremely bottlenecked metagame which really hasn't changed since launch outside of the fact that every class is just a roided-up copy of the two primordial builds which ran the PvP scene in 2013. Could have tried to make a new game mode to push the limits on the way players move outside of spamming attacks on a selected target, but that's probably too difficult for them. The only real solution would have been to let people use the map editor asset tool and just make their own maps.

I cracked up when I read this. Alright, seriously, I know that this sort of change cannot be something that truly affects this game in a meaningful way because everything else is already so homogenized and sauced up with a decade's worth of asinine, powercreep gone off the rails due to a lack of any fundamental, holistic design philosophy. However, this is the quintessential example of ArenaNettery when it comes to "game design" lmao. Zero mental foresight or basic regard for what this actually might LOOK LIKE when it occurs in the game. I haven't played the game in a hot minute because I can't really access it with current connectivity, but has anyone already been crit for 4-6k from out of nowhere because an enemy guard bonked your ally on the head from 5m directly behind you (now that Leap of Faith hits with an AoE that's basically the size of a standard capture node)? That's gotta be infuriating lmao. I have no idea if people even still run guardian GS or not anymore. Every class is probably coked up on all sorts of nonsense based on some of these commercials and recent additions. I'd imagine that's there a chance that people leveling up in PvE (if that still occurs) are now randomly aggroing distant critters by accident too lol. Truth be told, though, it's the little, goofy and thoughtless decisions like this which have ultimately led to this game's PvP current state. Read the front page of this sub forum, and it sounds like it's entirely on fire because every class is just "other, better thief" or some kind of 2012 cele ele lmao.

GW2 PvP is a game of shallow, esoteric, binary actions which more or less work toward the monopolization of fun. If someone is winning in PVP, then based on GW2's baseline design, that generally means that the other team isn't doing anything engaging. Losing never feels good because the game makes you feel like you were cheated out of a win. Winning doesn't feel good because, due to how much builds decide matchups over player "skill," if a team wins, it's more like a case of the machine engine didn't malfunction rather than a natural sense of victory. If you don't win, you're mad. If you win, then that should've happened anyway so there's no good feeling in it. This is the design of GW2 PvP, and it only continued trending toward this state since launch. The game just doesn't have enough depth for role identity and player expression.

You can't buff or nerf GW2 PvP out of the trash bin anymore--neither incrementally nor with sweeping changes. GW2 at large won't ever attract or maintain new players because to get invested into GW2 is to pay to play the "high-sustain glass-cannon" (as this thread puts it) which every profession has hidden in one of the expansions. There isn't really that much of a skill curve to climb; if you buy the right expac and choose the current build that wins within it, you're going to hit plat with a little bit of effort. But that dynamic isn't really all that fun. If every class basically wants to do the same thing at the end of the day, how is anyone supposed to push any creative limits or truly define one's self as an X or Y? How wide really is that window between "viable" and "wasting your time" when it comes to experimenting with an off-meta strat or--heaven forbid--a generally novel concept? If every class has a real role, then this game could've had a chance. None of them really ever did, though, even in the beginning. PvE was three classes tops; PvP was two. It's the same way now, except that every class gets to be one of those two things now. No new roles ever emerged.

You don't need buffs to anything. You need to cull every class down to where each profession has a consistent role (with actual downsides and unique, party-defining elements) rather than pretending that 9 classes all doing functionally the same thing is any way to design an interactive experience. People are addicted to patch notes and arguments over numbers because GW2 doesn't have real roles.

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.