Swagg.9236

A perfect example of what I was talking about in how a player is forced to curve their build's purpose toward mitigating the assumption that someone else on the field is using certain abilities.

Don't drag staff elementalist down to the level of the average GW2 PvPer. The fact that a player can miss an attack on ele staff is evidence that it has a skill ceiling at all. It's quite rare in this game.

Warrior main mechanic should have been a combination of adrenaline and banners. At least with the latter, its presence could have consistently carry a unique field impact with maybe some unique movement abilities. Instead, you just spam smoothbrain barrier while block stalling and dodging around off cooldown.

Basically, a universal action that all classes have which could also remove X (3-5?) conditions. It could also consume endurance if you wanted. Point is, if every class had access to what would effectively be limited, on-demand condition removal, PvP encounters wouldn't automatically force players to sink opportunity cost on active condition cleanses (which almost always are EXTREMELY boring skills to use) or focus 33-66% of their passives on counteracting other people's passive actions that litter the field with things like immobilize or burning. If you're fighting a condition build (a scenario that sort of lands in the hands of RNG), that means that you are going to need condition removal, as avoiding hits in a point-centric team-fight is effectively impossible beyond a certain point of protracted time. However, pigeonholing players into taking a whole bunch of instant or passive effects just to survive such an encounter is not a way to elevate the skill ceiling. You're forcing players to lose opportunity cost advantage for their own ideas or creativity just because someone on the field decided to play a certain way. There's no way to efficiently punish a condition build for just churning through its rotation because, if you're able to counter one, then you've already sacrificed something (damage, more HP, more boons) in your build just to have that arbitrary and asymmetrical counterweight. At the end of the day, condition builds effectively play the same way as power builds: both either post up at range or go charging in while negating the outgoing effects of opponents and simultaneously attacking. Therefore, if players didn't always have to consistently cripple their own builds in a way just to take into account the assumed presence of a condition builds, then condition builds would be on a more even field with direct damage. After all, pressing a keyboard button to instantly paper someone else's rock isn't a hallmark of finesse or intelligence; so there is no reason that the opportunity to press such a button should be locked behind arbitrary time-gates and opportunity costs because it is distributed to players on a completely random, entirely flavor-based, class-by-class basis. If you give players the power of universal counterplay, the only thing that it would mean would be that people might actually have to consider the consequences of a particular instead of, at worst, breaking even every time. Who's going to argue against a wider distribution of condition cleanses? People who think that that one single ranged attack deserves to tick that one, random peeling guy for 25% HP? Burn guardians? Trap rangers? Pistol thieves? Invuln-chain mesmers? Weavers that basically just do a PvE rotation on a point while a passively pulsing PBAoE does the work of a tempest overload except without the channeled cast? Does a game really lose anything by giving players a universal means of mitigating conditions when said game is saturated with random condition application (even in the case of power builds)? tl;dr: Asymmetrical condition removal was an utterly asinine design choice. Everyone should have a condition removal ability just as everyone has a dodge (they could even both consume endurance if you want). Obviously, a tourniquet fix like this would have to come with adjustments and culling to the way that condition removal is arbitrarily scattered across all classes with no real holistic thought process behind it, but ideally, anyone reading this could just use their imagination to assume the necessary adjustments needed (it's basically just a simple numbers game anyway). Thought exercises are fun, I guess.

Movement control isn't fun in any game. It wasn't fun in GW1 either, but at least there, taking something like movement control generally implied a huge opportunity cost due to the way that builds were constricted in their skill choices. In GW2, you get oppressive amounts of movement control FOR FREE either by having it just randomly baked into your weapons because "lolflavor" or even passively because you took a trait which is entirely independent from weapon or skill choice. It's pretty disgusting.

i didn't say that but i agree with it. I also agree, but I still think that there's a lot more to the hypothetical situation of "GW2 PvP is really good now!" than just the addition of a bunch of different game modes. It's just hard to make anything that demands people to play in unique or different manners when most classes can just face-tank all PvP effects while also negating positioning and timing by teleporting up through suspended bridges, through walls or across varied terrain heights. Players NEED vulnerabilities or they NEED to just be able to outrun everything manually. At least in the latter case, it can be possible to see who used their movement "properly" or "more efficiently" in the midst of everyone just doing PvE rotations. It's still not a great scenario, but it at least has a skill ceiling that would exist in the third dimension. I mean, for instance, how do you make Jade Quarry fun if everyone has ground-targeted teleports or tab-target teleports that can go through surfaces? Why would you need hexes like Seeping Wound or ranged attacks? Couldn't anyone just appear on the carriers and kill them? Why wouldn't anyone just run that single build (shrinebombers not withstanding)? Why run Melandru's Shot when you could just teleport? That's kind of the situation with GW2: movement and positioning don't really have the value that they used to, and I don't think that more game modes could fix that.

You not only made sense, but you're probably the only person in this thread who honed in on what was supposed to be the most important part of that stupid wall of OP text. The problem generated by the lack of established roles and unique playstyles in GW2 is, in fact, SO BAD, that people have looped all the way back in on themselves by creating terms like "bruiser," "duelist," and "side-noder" in order to desperately delude themselves into thinking that a class or a build isn't basically the exact same playstyle and set-up as every other "metagame level" option in GW2. Players who hold ANY investment in GW2 will fight this point to the death because without it, they lose all credibility regarding things like skill level or "competitive history." If people really do face the reality of how GW2's metagame is so cripplingly dependent on patch notes more than player innovation, development and creative expression, it becomes very hard to justify or place value in anyone's accomplishments in PvP. And, it's not like a game needs to hold itself to a super-strict holy trinity in order to implement class roles or unique playstyles, but GW2 has nothing at all when it just tries to blend everything into a single playstyle mush of identical mechanics that are just arbitrarily tossed to random classes based entirely on flavor.

Truth.

It's actually kind of hilarious how this game's outset was defending by a massive hugbox corps that demonized anybody who tried to tell anybody that there was a "metagame" (or just a "correct/best" way to play) in any part of the game, when there clearly was; yet, as feature bloat swelled over time, the metagame's overbearing presence became so flagrant that now you can't go a step in a place like the PvP lobby without hearing somebody tying "player skill" to "knowing what build to play in PvP." From "Necromancer is viable anywhere! Stop bullying!" to "Player skill is heavily and directly tied to interfacing with a pop-up menu before a match even starts." At its core, GW2 is just a loud hypocrite factory.

WvW deserves nothing because it's a confused aberration which rejects any elements of team composition balance or stat restrictions. Rejects elements of team composition? What are you talking about? Zergs have specific things they want, much to the whining of rangers and thieves that want to zerg while offering nothing or next to nothing to justify their spot. Shoutbreaker is very strong in WvW and started there much earlier than it even thought of coming to sPvP. Zergs have their own, perferred, on-the-fly compositions, sure, but the point is that there is no team number limit on any side. Player stats are so oppressively strong in WvW that anybody not running the best 4-stat armor is probably going to either get completely bodied or fail to deal any significant damage in any encounter. Either way, in an even-player encounter or when it comes to zerg v zerg combat, there are always so many discrepancies between parties that it's difficult to take any part of WvW seriously on any sort of competitive level. This isn't saying that GW2 PvP isn't also a titanic joke, but WvW is just GW2 PvP with even more problems with regards to "level competition."

Use your judgement to tell when they're done/used most CC, akind to how you think about when it's time to clear the peak of conditions. Those who only rely on so much of it are bound to be countered by Stability users like Conditions gets countered by Resistance. This is why GW2 will never be a skill-based game: everything comes down to just playing extremely passively while whittling away a target until they can't defend themselves. It's just a numbers game of cooldowns. Skillful aggression has no place in GW2. Waiting for an opponent to make a move should not be the consistent key to victory. It just turns everything into frustrating, autopilot stalemates; and that dynamic is extremely suppressive for player creativity.I can simplify any game out there the same way you do to discredit their existence. 90% of the time taking initiative and I win my fights so I could careless.You'll never be able to flick kill a guy botting at you in GW2. The success of aggression in GW2 is almost entirely predicated on build comp and cooldowns. Movement, aim, or some other general skill that any player can master and manipulate will not save you.

Use your judgement to tell when they're done/used most CC, akind to how you think about when it's time to clear the peak of conditions. Those who only rely on so much of it are bound to be countered by Stability users like Conditions gets countered by Resistance. This is why GW2 will never be a skill-based game: everything comes down to just playing extremely passively while whittling away a target until they can't defend themselves. It's just a numbers game of cooldowns. Skillful aggression has no place in GW2. Waiting for an opponent to make a move should not be the consistent key to victory. It just turns everything into frustrating, autopilot stalemates; and that dynamic is extremely suppressive for player creativity.

WvW deserves nothing because it's a confused aberration which rejects any elements of team composition balance or stat restrictions.

This would absolutely destroy warrior even more. A thief tapping someone with Headshot before a warrior uses Bulls Charge would be handing them free stab. Either this concept is useless and does nothing because the effect is too short, or it's too strong and CCing someone is as wasted as if they had stab. It's already too easy to ruin CC chains by overriding longer CC with shorter or weaker after it lands, this would make it useless before it even lands. Shame that warrior was designed as "the easiest class to play" in a game without cross-classing. Half of this game was built in a way that doomed it to forever being outright overpowered or woefully ineffective with no middle ground. you can say it about any class tbh, thief by design has no counterplay, so by default it will either win when its too strong or do nothing when its too weak.necro class mechanic is RAW hp, so it either can facetank with the HP when its too much or it gets gibbed when its not, and so on and so fourth.Every class was never very deep, but Warrior's lack of depth was gratuitously evident from launch. It was never good in PvP because it effectively amounted to a Thief who couldn't teleport back out of anything: it was almost always a one-way street into a 100b burst; get a free kill or suffer a pathetic death. The only times when it started to become "better" was when a bunch of patches started passively baking damage and effect negation into all of its traits and weapons. And when Warrior would drop below the level of "general effectiveness," it was because patches took those little baby toys away. While, yes, it's true with every class, Warrior is the most salient gauge for the effectiveness of tool tips over player skill: it is never good when its patches are bad, but it's far too powerful for its effort whenever the patches favor it.

This would absolutely destroy warrior even more. A thief tapping someone with Headshot before a warrior uses Bulls Charge would be handing them free stab. Either this concept is useless and does nothing because the effect is too short, or it's too strong and CCing someone is as wasted as if they had stab. It's already too easy to ruin CC chains by overriding longer CC with shorter or weaker after it lands, this would make it useless before it even lands. Shame that warrior was designed as "the easiest class to play" in a game without cross-classing. Half of this game was built in a way that doomed it to forever being outright overpowered or woefully ineffective with no middle ground.

Taking a bath in stability or running through a PvE rotation littered with blocks and evades are not at all complex.

The only reasons Rev was ever relevant were: PvE Herald originally granted a passive 50% bonus to boon duration for any party (when this was nerfed, the class was basically replaced by a rune set).PvP Herald is literally just Thief with a better Defiant Stance.It's such a fragile and shallow class, and it doesn't really contribute anything to GW2 on the whole. It's not that it isn't "good" in PvP, or that players can't be "better" than others while using it, but randomly deleting Rev from the game one day probably wouldn't really impact GW2 in a way which couldn't be made up with just another Mesmer, Thief or Engineer. It doesn't carry any weight, and its mechanics probably would have been better utilized if they were sprinkled onto the other classes rather than forcibly shambled together into what amounts to a lazy, nostalgia-bait advertisement for a half-baked video game expansion.

Movement in GW2 is more "free-flowing" because nearly every action can be used while moving. However, movement in GW2 isn't "good" because it doesn't generally carry a lot of value (especially in PvP). Nobody gains anything for hitting a target in motion, and using WASD will never get you where you want to be in a manner fast or efficiently enough compared to using a skill that moves your avatar for you. If you can't teleport or chain some scripted movement skills (or cover your WASD approach with a bunch of damage/effect negation), you will never melee-engage a target quickly enough or escape any bad situation. Nobody in GW2 considers manually running a good form of in-combat movement. It is absolutely not a good thing. Even in a game as clunky as GW1, movement had huge value particularly BECAUSE it was so limited by skill actions. How much exploring is there to be done within the scope of something as well-mapped as GW2's metagame? Compared to patch note drops, how much do "off-meta" or "counter-builds" truly emerge and rise to a point at which they are relevant? Most importantly of all, how many of these "off-meta" or "counter-builds" are things that have any significant depth or variance to their playstyles? For instance, how about the emergence of things like the old "De-cap Engineer?" What depth is there to that build's usage? What of "Healbreaker:" the build which amounts to pressing warhorn barrier generation on cooldown while doing the equivalent of GW1's "Infuse Health" with no downsides, no cast-time and more or less on command since the recharges are collectively low and cost no resources? How do anti-meta builds display any sort of true creativity or innovation when they are only made in order to counter a meta which, in and of itself, is already frustrating and one-dimensional? The act of finding a counter hidden within a motley selection of odd skills and traits may, in itself, display some level of creativity, but ultimately that thought process is driven by an incredibly narrow-minded environment which is enabled by a singular, one-dimensional, metagame: "never intentionally risk anything while engaging." No matter how cool or creative someone's build appears, if it finds consistent success in the GW2 metagame, it is actively contributing to the domination of the generic, one-man-army playstyle that everyone already has to use.

what exactly makes it bad? If I personally had to say it in a single word: Movement (or rather, the lack of it). GW1's movement restricting mechanics like Crippled and percentile-based movement speed reduction had a purpose because people in all PvP modes generally had numerous, various, and specific places to go for victory conditions, and striking targets in motion often came with bonuses considering how (very nearly) every skillbar action locked players into a stationary animation. In fact, these victory condition locations were often so specific and intertwined with map mechanics (such as in the case with GvG or AB), that entire builds were designed and consistently used just to control movement and support one's team. However, Crippled in GW2 is more like a random, impotent nuisance or unjustified, anti-fun mechanic because nobody has any place to go but the 3 points in Conquest; and most people who go from point to point regularly either do so with scripted movement abilities, targeted teleports, or often just cleanse movement-restricting conditions. Chilled mostly falls into the same line; while the speed reduction on skill recharge does occasionally come into play, it's mostly just a movement snare and, more often than not, arbitrarily comes baked into skills that are almost always guaranteed to be used for purposes other than strictly applying Chilled. Most importantly, there's no reason for Chilled or Crippled if everyone is just going to dance around a 240 radius point while 240+ radius damage ticks are constantly pulsing, flickering and exploding all over it while anyone from either side are simultaneously present. And on top of all this, it's almost asinine to consider rewarding anyone for "striking a moving target" in GW2 because there is no real reason for anyone NOT to be constantly moving and simultaneously committing actions. At the very least, Immobilized prevents a target from dodging (a tangible effect that can have an impact on combat regardless of location), but as a standalone debuff, it's again something that is more often baked into rotations rather than it being the core focus of any given skill or build. Moreover, by making the points of contention so small in the Conquest mode, GW2 is doomed to a crippling dependence on homogeneous damage-mitigation effects that more or less compress the entire game and all of its classes into a single type of offensive build: the block/evade attacker. Revenant, Weaver, Thief, Guardian, Engineer are the most similar; they generally rely the most on attacking while simultaneously evading or pulsing passive damage. They are mostly just doing PvE rotations in PvP because it is so effective. Necromancer more or less plays exactly the same except it doesn't evade, rather relying on having double the health of every other class to last just long enough to participate in a fight. The only other builds which seem to vary from this formula are the "support" types (i.e. Healbreaker, support Ele, Firebrand if people still use it), however, these builds are truly the most solitaire-like of all in GW2: doing little more than watching the minimap, support is mostly just a game of cooldown whack-a-mole with little to do about positioning or timing. Since the offensive builds are always going to be grinding out rotation damage so long as they have access to their evade/block chains or point-wide damage applications, Conquest quickly becomes a mosh pit; and the only survivors are the players who are using the exact same, rotation-based playstyle (with maybe one other guy serving as a battery to keep the PvE chains churning). There is no creativity or expression. There is no player development; just a bunch of patch-note addicts waiting for the next number shuffle. What this collectively means is that raw movement (WASD keys) really doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Players run side-node decaps not because they have "really good movement," but because they have teleport skills, stability, and/or knock-back attacks (or, at least, that mild amount of sub-division was the case at one point, but now it works if even they're just running the generic, one-man-army build and decide to waddle toward a side-node point during a lull in a match). Movement on capture points doesn't matter whatsoever because all players on a contested point are guaranteed to get hit if they aren't passively mitigating the firestorm of damage with their builds' built-in evades, blocks and "invulnerability" periods. So now comes the question: In a game in which damage can't really miss (it's either aimed for you or its area of effect is so wide that it covers the entirety of the average capture node), and movement doesn't really matter since it's all pre-determined by build rather than raw, player input, how is anyone supposed to be able to tell who is really good at the game? If we take away the classes, and the particle effects, and the builds, who is doing anything truly unique, and if we find something different, how wide of a gap really is that difference between the "super top big boi metaking" and the average person who just boots up GW2?

GW2 patches are basically just that back-alley hit for a cheap high that will fade eventually. You'll never get anything satisfying since the core issues with the game are never addressed by the surface-level changes that comprise the bulk of every patch.

People's attitudes toward GW2 are pretty poor mainly because there is so little skill required to "compete" in it.

Could just give them all a 0.5-0.75s delay on the AoE attack. Omit the delay for the flashbang perhaps.

If they were both "necessary," then you wouldn't have entire weapon sets or classes more or less pigeonholed into one or the other. You could easily balance the game around either (although one could imagine how silly it would look if the only way to deal damage in the game was through DoTs). Better yet, you could return Guild Wars conditions to what they originally were: conditional triggers with low, fixed damage rates and a high opportunity cost; used primarily to enhance certain skills in order to provide greater depth in build variety and effectiveness. Guess we can't have that, though.

Imagine if this game actually employed real movement and small targeted AoE attacks instead of always falling back into crippling dependency on tab-targeting. Honestly, what's really the problem with doing something like giving a player an attack similar to the sequence a player has to use in order to leap with the raptor mount and then go into the raptor's tail swipe attack? What's really the problem with giving that to a whole bunch of classes?

Funny enough, but this is exactly the reason I feel like Snowball Mayhem is the most balanced, most fun PvP experience in the game. You have 3 classes with 5 skills each plus a sixth based on profession. The roles are clearly defined, integral to the game, adaptable, and play off each other well in an RPS kind of way. The skills can't be spammed and there is strategy and counterplay to almost every move you choose to make. Disclosure: I love SM, and only grudgingly tolerate spvp which has always been too spammy and had too much going on at once for me to enjoy. I imagine that your opinion isn't rare. I remember knowing a lot of people who all more or less agreed with that, myself included. Snowball Mayhem is exactly as you put it: a slugfest between two teams of role-based builds with unique abilities. The reason why roles are so integral to a cooperative gameplay experience is because they put limits on classes. As opposed to the misguided attempt to make everyone able to do everything ala GW2, the restrictions imposed by true roles do two things: they provide focus to combat (roles generally encourage players to do certain things by validating specific actions based on class choice) but due to the very limits that are placed upon certain classes, it allows players to shine the brightest when they somehow manage to overcome certain situations in spite of them. Whether it be a Battlefield infantry unit sniping the head of a helicopter pilot, a TF2 Medic killing a Scout for the last capture node in a round, or a Wildstar healer staying alive as the lone team survivor just long enough to tick down the last few percent on a boss, the limits of roles not only provide guidance for general gameplay, but they make moments like those all the more remarkable and memorable. GW2 has no real roles, therefore, it's very difficult to get many people interested with a highlight reel of "big plays" when everyone else's "big plays" more or less all look the same.