Swagg.9236

I'm saying that none of it is good. Rev teleporting, blocking and healing all incoming damage for a protracted 5-7 seconds straight with a random, passive blind thrown in there for good measure isn't fun, skillful or interactive gameplay. Mesmer chaining passive evades off of instant skills and signet casts covered by effective invulnerability isn't anything different. That all said, the answer to gameplay design as annoying and silly as a a guy dealing damage while teleporting and passively evading all incoming effects shouldn't be "lol press this button and instantly stun him when he hits you lmao;" it should probably just be a redesign of rev/mesmer/guard/ele/thief/spellbreaker (bruh, they all do the same thing on some level). Why submit all players to that same flowchart paradigm instead of just making combat more open-ended and creative? That's boring for everybody. What I am also saying is that auras (in all cases, but in this one specifically, the elemental ones) are not only very one-dimensional, but also either negligible or needlessly annoying. Static Aura can be bypassed with stability, but it's super oppressive if an attacker doesn't have consistent access to stacks of it. It's either worthless or way too powerful for no justifiable reason. Direct-target/teleporting damage is so accessible and high at this point that it's very possible to brute-force damage through the entire support ele kit without much trouble, so Frost Aura chill is a questionable counter to anybody (especially if that somebody is already going to be touching your face with 2-4k auto crits or initiative-attacks on a contested point). Magnetic Aura positively GRINDS games to a halt when a single player can give a whole area projectile immunity for 12 seconds straight. Popping Transmute Fire every 10s is just mindless, keyboard-monkey cooldown work, doing so isn't really a substantial gameplay element, and Fire Aura itself CONSISTENTLY DOES NOTHING within the scope of all the mountains of freebies passively generated by any build right now. Considering their weird place within GW2's metagame, it'd be pretty easy to re-work them into a model contributor to a more interactive combat paradigm without disturbing everything else. They could serve as a stepping stone to a better combat system (not that I'm really holding my breath for that to happen, but it's still a vision).

I actually play loads of tempest, and I think it's honestly depressing how cripplingly dependent the spec/whole class is on a passive stun that triggers when somebody hits you.

Changed the title and bumped because of a re-focus onto elemental auras with an expansion on other related effects like traits, utilities and other sources. Auras are still pretty gross in general, and their impact on the field shouldn't be entirely dependent on players reducing themselves to mindless beat-sticks.

I know I'm butting into this conversation thread, but you've kind of already mentioned the main issue with GW2: there is no real hope to cull the bloat and expand the scope of general interactivity among classes. As it stands, GW2 is kind of like a horse hoof that hasn't been cleaned and trimmed in several years: akin more to a misshapen glob of rocky gunk than the end of an articulated joint; it's very difficult to perceive any clear role or identity within it. It's not like one COULDN'T do it, but it's more of an issue of how it seems everyone who plays GW2 somewhat seriously will immediately begin to screech the moment when someone suggests trimming the overgrown horse hoof. No "big voice" within the game's community would ever support it, and the devs don't really seem tuned to any idea beyond letting the hoof grow out forever. It's not that GW2 needs help "mitigating the pull towards homogeneity," but rather that GW2 is already incredibly homogenous. Unfortunately for the game as people have come to know it, the only way out of the rabbit hole is to effectively re-write how it plays for the sake of establishing actual roles and playstyle options. That said, even if this sort of initiative were miraculously given a green-light, it stands to be said whether or not the dev team at anet right now even knows how to work the code well enough to turn the game into something which actually promotes creative movement, timing and coordination with the most interactive elements currently within GW2. There are certainly plenty of specific ways to up-end GW2 for the better, but I'm not even sure that it could technically get done. You're really better off just waiting the extra month for Elden Ring to drop lol.

GW2's problems are beyond comparison. It's a matter of intra-game complexity. GW2 FEATURES no complexity. It has the elements present to possibly engineer complex gameplay interactions, but they're all just left to rot and dry out in a code cul-de-sac rather than see any sort of proper universal inclusion and expansion. During the moments of highest action volume during any given PvP encounter, GW2's content relies most heavily on scripted movement, scripted attacks, and protracted effects with no consistent counters or means of interaction. If you want an example, fine: Team Fortress 2 gives a player a whole 3-4 actions to any given class outside of basic movement options, but the universal nature of those movement options combined with nearly every weapon's effectiveness increasing based on the user's proximity to a target create a deceptively massive skill ceiling and, for a beginner, a 90-degree skill curve if you find the right communities to show you how far any player or team can push the game. THREE TO FOUR ACTIONS yet mind-boggling potential and levels of uncertainty that can still manage to startle players with thousands of hours. A "skilled" GW2 player can reliably predict the minutia of any PvP game based on pressing F4 and looking at the classes despite the fact that you're looking at 16-30 buttons per player; and it's mainly because there are no universal, interactable mechanics which allow players to gain and manipulate momentum without overly relying on class-locked mechanics. That's not depth. That's compartmentalization. Putting the best skills into boxes and then only letting a few builds or classes use them isn't the way to make a game with a high skill ceiling. Thanks to that paradigm, GW2 is just... like, 2 rather similar classes copied and pasted across the 9 professions. GW2 lacks expression. There is no agency. There are only the two options and a bunch of "wrong answers" without any justification. That's why GW2 is shallow. It is solved. There is no mystery, and that's probably why it's not popular. Moreover, does stacking up a massive line of dominoes imply a complex task? Even if it's a huge number of dominoes to set up, are you really doing anything complicated throughout the task? A high number of rotation elements doesn't equate to gameplay depth if the elements don't consistently interact in a manner which promotes complexity. The worst part about these discussions is how it's always a lose-lose battle with most people who continue to defend GW2's lackluster merits. I'll make a comparison to another game's systems, but people will cry out about how it's invalid to compare two "seemingly incongruent" designs like an MMO or an FPS or an RTS or a 3rd-person, single-player RPG. Or I'll get a "But that's not how GW2 works!!" sort of response. I'm frankly sick of listening to your posturing and mudslinging. You aren't here to promote discussion and raise GW2's skill ceiling; you're here to justify your subjective position so that you can feel good about yourself.

Whether they were aware of it or not, both the playerbase and development teams collectively identified a few elements which operated outside of GW2's established framework at launch: in PvP, these two main elements were D/D Elementalist and Thief. D/D Ele effectively levied every lucrative action in the game with no real drawback or shortcoming; it had more buttons to press, and therefore had more fuel in the tank than any other class when it came to sustaining combat. Thief could repeatedly activate certain skills (no weapon cooldowns), teleport on demand, had access to perfect invisibility on demand, and often evaded or blinded targets while attacking. For a good year or so, these were the only classes that consistently sat in this "beyond the meta" tier above the rest of the classes. When GW2 launched, the game's PvP damage thresholds were scaled in a way which made some (I stress "some") sense if we excluded D/D Ele and Thief, but because those classes consistently outran the average player's DPS (either via passive healing, outright damage negation, or teleports), a series of decisions ended up buffing the rest of the classes to effectively mimic the "beyond the meta" builds. The mindless powercreep that occured from 2013-2015 worked to mimic D/D Ele and Thief. The advent of elite specializations mostly sealed the way back from this paradigm, and a slew of direct upgrades quickly solidified the final metagame: a patch-note card shuffle of classes which all ran the same 1-2 builds (either a shade of D/D Ele or Thief). For instance, Revenant has always basically just been Thief with Defiant Stance. Druid became the new D/D Ele by virtue of being an offensive attacker who had a free heal stance. Tempest is just a better D/D Ele while Weaver is a straight up clone of 2014 Thief. Chrono was strong explicitly because it had a "cooldown reset" button (which plays to Thief's strength in how it could repeat cycles of attacks or skills), which is why, in PvP, it's often just a "double burst rotation" core mesmer with a CC elite. More comparisons could be made, but the point is that classes never gained any sort of role or individuality over time, but rather saw themselves all compressed into one or two "roles." As it stands, if your build doesn't have teleports or protracted damage-negation, then it levies an OBSCENE amount of damage (ideally while also negating damage just long enough to finish off a target). It's still the D/D Ele and Thief meta. Unfortunately, the GW2 playerbase associates conforming to a super shallow gameplay paradigm as skillful, hence all of the mudslinging equating to "git gud" or "learn2dodge" rather than anything constructive or true.

The problem with campaigning to increase the overall skill ceiling of GW2 is that you have to be honest about how shallow it is; and when you are honest about how shallow GW2 is, you'll only get a massive amount of push-back because the average GW2 PvP'er has THE absolute most fragile ego that exists in video games. The people who take this game seriously are not only few in number, but they are extremely loud and extremely insular. It's tragic, but you're probably not going to break the walls of the echochamber.

The only work-around I could think of would be something more like: "Stacks are lost whenever attacks hit or miss. You cannot lose more than once stack per ¼s interval." That way, you would get an AoE-like effect tied to each stack considering that it would all update based on the time interval, and people would just have to live that MAYBE, on SOME OCCASIONS, a dude might get an extra unblockable attack or two from a single stack depending on how much passive/layered stuff was blowing up at a location. I suppose the same effect could be applied to any sort of skill which employs a "gain X charges/stacks of [effect]" mechanic in order to buff the user.

I'll admit that removing passive protection from earth might hurt ele on the whole, but I argue it's better in the long run to force people to either build teams around making up for lost passive effects or make people take certain active skills in order for certain bonuses in order to increase global opportunity cost. Reading over this big laundry list again, I think I see what you say could cause elite powercreep, and I did a few touch-ups. Probably not really enough, but it at least limits a few things.

I'm also not saying that Elementalist shouldn't be the only one considered for "core-only" buffs to traits, but it's important to consider how core ele actually operates within GW2 right now--which is to say, more accruately, that it doesn't. Core ele is basically barred from playing the video game. It doesn't have the extra, freebie buttons to crank out the numbers you get with weaver or tempest in PvE, and it is entirely walled in PvP by classes that walk over the core ele weapon options and trait set-ups with boon spam and protracted damage/effect negation. Core ele has ZERO AGENCY. However, core set-ups for warrior, ranger, guardian and necro (in particular) would be ENTIRELY OVERTUNED if they suddenly got "core-only" buffs because they already have niches right now. Moreover, giving a bunch of random core-only buffs to classes like engi, mesmer, rev and thief would probably just start causing the core set-ups to mimic or arbitrarily outperform the especs. That's not to say that such a thing would be particularly bad per se, but more that you're just going to create more random bloat and artificial contention among class options. I'm all for people suggesting core buffs for the other classes, but I feel like you'd end up very quickly seeing people either run out of ideas or people starting to realize that all of their buffs just make the core set-up into something that an espec already does. GW2 has never handled side-grades well after all. Core ele might very well be the only class that might see something remotely unique out of a series of core-only buffs without it ultimately just becoming a copy of one of its especs.

Tempest is good mainly because of a combination of aura passives and a really overtuned water overload. It wouldn't be bad to nerf the overload and trait bonuses in exchange for having autoattacks that aren't completely trash and might actually promote/reward some protracted, single-element time investment.

I understand, but considering the AoE impact that it has, buffing it even with something as seemingly innocuous as an activation reduction is liable to render it as easy-mode as any other skill shoved in an overtuned weapon kit or build. There's nothing wrong with relying on a team to hold an area, or chaining CC and positioning together in order to set-up for a high-risk finisher attack. Moreover, getting 2 hits on a target with Meteor Shower is often enough to send somebody to the shadow realm if it's in the middle of a team fight (and if it goes off in a 1v1, it buys so much time by denying space or threatens to rapidly tilt the HP/cooldown advantage in the ele's favor). I could maybe agree with a 0.5s activation reduction at the most, but I also still think that the strongest buff that it could get would be to shrink its overall target radius from 360 to 300 without reducing the actual meteor impact radius (currently 180). You would get a whole lot more hit confirms within the target area with this set up, making the skill a much bigger threat to play around.

Unfortunately, I don't see Glyph of Elemental Power ever working on AoE because of how the GW2 engine works, and how I don't think that anybody at anet is willing to make a simple workaround for it. If you really wanted it to work that way, you'd probably just end up turning the glyph into its own AoE attack with a bunch of charges (which may or may not just be a better idea, but glyphs absolutely suck aside from the degenerate rez one, so it might be better to just "improve" its current iteration). Auras in generally need a massive re-work if you ask me. I had a big thread on it in the PvP section at one point, but basically, they're WAYYY TOO PASSIVE right now, but even if we added some bonus effects to auras, it would probably just make them even more oppressive and passive than they are now. I'm all for adding different and unique transmute/application effects to auras, but if they get that, then auras need to become something that actually involves input from the user aside from just bathing themselves in them via instant skills or passive traits. The problem is that I wanted some unique and player-controlled elements to break-up and manipulate the flow of how elementalist plays, but in the end it would just further powercreep the e-specs. The other weird issue is (because of how GW2 sort of lacks any real holistic design philosophy), letting this genie out of the bottle might actually be terrible because a number of classes kind of don't deserve it lol. Like, core necro/warrior/guardian/ranger would probably be entirely too oppressive if they got a bunch of extra random bonuses to what they can already do, and even a few other core classes like thief/engineer/rev are probably only a hair's breadth away from being entirely too overtuned if they get a handful of passive, core-only bonuses. It'd just be another patch note shuffle that would invalidate other elements of the class without any real effect on the global game skill ceiling. More direct upgrades rather than side-grades. If you ask me, it'd be way too easy to just fold all the good parts of every specialization into the core elements of every class and just expand the baseline options that every class has. Anet would never do that because the e-spec "distinctions" are how they drum up hype for an expansion, and they're also kind of the main driving force behind what people consider "skill" in PvP (i.e. you're bad if you play core ele vs just giving in and playing weaver or support tempest). But to give you an example, it'd be like how, in order to mimic tempest without a traitline, you could straight up just make a new glyph skill that gives the user access to all the overloads (give it the stunbreak and MAYBE a stack of stab), and then add more aura synergy and generation options to existing, standalone utility skills that are already terrible. And then ele just gets baseline access to warhorn. tl;dr: Ele deserves core-only buffs. Most other classes don't. If I had my way, we wouldn't have e-specs at all; just more utility skills, better weapon kits, and profession mechanic (F1-F4) options.

Why keep arguing about how unique classes in mmos have to be when GW2's PvP revolves around a super shallow pool of universal mechanics which everybody tries to cram into their build? I'll admit to shouting at the wind here (because it's clear the average investee in GW2 PvP doesn't truly comprehend the attributes and differences between simple and complex systems), but the main issue with this gamemode is the very fact that no class is truly unique. Moreover, even attempting to be unique is just going to get you put into a wall by some dude using the same build(s) as everybody else. You've got support (which is basically just cooldown solitaire), and you've got attack-while-negating-effects man. The rotations might not necessarily be identical, but the overall feeling is very similar. There is very little interaction; it's more like a combination of rock-paper-scissors and whack-a-mole. Matchups can resolve one way or another merely by the way two people loaded up a build prior to a match rather than in how they expressed themselves during an actual fight. GW2 lacks spontaneity. That's why the metagame is so homogenous. It's also why, if you're going to have everybody use nothing but the same 3-4 mechanics anyway, you might as well continue the homogeneity in a way which actually allows players to use their tools well or poorly. At least that way, you'd have an actual skill ceiling compared to what you feature now.

Meteor Shower can hit beyond 5k with the initial few strikes depending on circumstances, but the key thing is that it's an extremely powerful skill that, graciously, is one of the few (if possibly the only real) skill in the game that has an appropriate cast-time investment for the impact it can levy. I'd rather keep that, because this game is pretty emptyheaded enough.

Main goals: Core is bad for no reason (outside of it being a marketing scheme), but naturally, buffing stuff like crazy is just going to make Tempest and Weaver easier and easier. There are, however, also a lot of flatly bad traits and traitlines which don't necessarily have any sort of continuity within them. There are also a number of bad utility skills within this category. This is an attempt to give them a little more room to have an impact without consistently forcing the user to either be very hands-off or throw themselves against a wall just to get a single hit in. ARCANE (specialization) FIRE AIR WATER EARTH GLYPHS ARCANE (utility skills) CANTRIPS

The people who take GW2 remotely seriously have no idea what they actually want. The other side to this is that CmC (or any of the devs who were given a modicum of free reign with PvP design) clearly never had the imagination or the gumption to actually do anything remotely interesting or innovative with GW2--regardless of what the PvP playerbase thought that it wanted.

If people are afforded the same opportunities to interact in a certain way with a mechanic that saturates the game, then there is inherently the ability to use that opportunity well or poorly. If everybody can cleanse conditions and heal, then they can also waste them, use them poorly or use them well. Just like knowing when to estus in Dark Souls or when to bee-line for a health pack in a quake-like game, it adds another dimension to player interactivity and therefore raises the skill ceiling. Frankly, the problem I'm seeing here in this thread is the immediate conclusions that people make about what this sort of healing skill paradigm would look like: harping about how 3 Shelters in a row would be terrible, or how Withdraw isn't """supposed to work that way.""" Healing shouldn't be some freebee. The worst thing that anybody could do for GW2 at this point is remove EVEN MORE risk from combat. The established metagame holds the player's hand so fiercely right now as it is. As was mentioned before (as a joke, but the irony is that he's more on track than he would want to admit), the goal is more like giving everybody a set of Mendings so that people could heal based on their own decision-making processes and not force the game to rely so heavily on passive elements to insulate players from risk while they do anything involving attacking.

How is the PvP metagame defined by "different" classes and e-specs? Everyone effectively uses the same mechanics across every class. Things have gotten so bad that you don't even see legitimately class-restricted, unique mechanics like Portal anymore. Moreover, generic self-healing sources doesn't necessarily mean that everybody is automatically pigeonholed into the same playstyles. The entire Dark Souls franchise works to defy that idea, particularly the third installment. Why not normalize everything? It's not like every class already doesn't trend toward the same, homogenous mechanic stacking of invuln/evade/block/blind/teleport/passive healing. Tell me the actual problem of giving everybody Estus (or Mending) outside of it just boiling down to a flavor argument. I'll concede that this game is hysterically saturated with passive and instant stun mechanics, but does that mean that a normalized, consistent and fair healing system HAS to be oppressed by poorly implemented and arbitrary distribution of control mechanics? It's not like you couldn't cull the insane amount of control this game throws around (by the way, all that control is what pigeonholes so many classes into taking that homogenized blend of reactive and passive defense mechanics).

That's generally the result when you make a skill capable of doing what it has always done before yet also adding an extra dimension to it.

All healing skills get ammo counts of 3 with skill recharges somewhere around 5-10s and count recharges set around 45-60s (healing totals get readjusted). All healing skills cure 3-5 conditions (maybe get bonus healing when user is unaffected by conditions or lower recharge if used above certain HP thresholds). No traits or gear items (like runes or sigils) are allowed to passively cleanse conditions. No skills that directly deal damage (or are tied to something that deals damage) are allowed to cleanse conditions. Certain "support-style" weapon kits and utility skills receive more condition cleansing properties or current ones are buffed. So why isn't this the way things work? Why is most of the condition removal not only passive but also so incongruently distributed amongst every class? It wouldn't be hard to redistribute and concentrate condition removal into healing skills and certain "support" weapons. Then at least it would not only be clear when people are attempting to clear conditions, but also the people who want to clear conditions know exactly which skills to make available if somebody gets condition bombed (as opposed to relying on hidden cooldowns on a bunch of random gear items and passives). I'm not saying that your system doesn't """work""" now as it is, but it's not only incredibly esoteric and obfuscated when viewing from an outside perspective, but it's also incredibly clunky to use if players aren't willing to shoehorn themselves into a select few builds (metagame) which just so happen to mostly run themselves or coincidentally synergize with the best passives.

Just aim directly beneath your feet if you want the old effect out of the current, more versatile version.

Looked at all the feedback and made a bunch of changes. It's still a PBAoE kit, and now every skill in the suggestion box functions identically to how they work now (aside from Updraft which still is described as an 800-range targeted leap--which could still be used on top of the user's location if the user didn't really want to move too far from the launch AoE). Everything just has targeted buffs here and there. I did throw in a different rework for Transmute Frost again because, as it stands, it's still super low-energy and pigeonholed into certain (generally passive) specialization choices if it's going to have any sort of decent combat impact. This one isn't too outlandish, though: very in-line with the PBAoE nature of most other skills in the kit, so it should flow pretty logically with everything else while providing strong combat disruption and decent support.

Those sorts of shortcomings is why I suggested the changes to the water and earth autoattacks respectively. Water wouldn't so much be for consistently striking enemies, but rather support, while earth would have a melee component (which always has a super generous hit registry; and combined with the fact that it also sends out a projectile, it can help counter blind spam that would otherwise heavily negate its slower attack speed). I still like Fireball the way that it is, though, because it has always been a really good minesweeping attack for stealth spam, rez pressure, and people skittering behind terrain and blind corners.

Actually, turning staff's air auto into a stick-target attack kind of seems somewhat appealing. The way it works now is pretty low-energy. Gives a little bit of something to do if someone just sits inside of projectile counter too.