Swagg.9236

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.

When I say "CC is it's own reward" What I mean is that CC interrupts an enemy's attack, impairs their ability to move, allows the player to get 1 or more free hits in, allows their team to get that many hits in, allows the player or the team to escape if necessary, allows the player or team to heal if necessary. There are more but I think you get it. I'm saying there is no need to have traits which encourage the use of CC. Players will build that into their build ANYWAY because of how useful they are. Edit: Typo The problem with GW2 is that none of that is good enough anymore. Passive and instant abilities generally cushion so much of every PvP encounter, that players have to torrent skills onto a target in order to bring it down (not that facerolling is hard, but it's inherent in GW2's design: spam to win). Combine this with the fact that there are no resources to really lose (aside maybe from health, which can be regained or simulated very easily) whenever a target is interrupted, and you're really only left with the achievement of having, in most circumstances, denied a target of a fat 5% of their basic damage or bunker rotation. So then CC was slapped onto every other skill just to keep people still enough to kill them. However, after the damage nerf, CC chains became even more oppressive and necessary just because it took enough more to bring any given build down. I'm not saying that ANY of these elements are foundations of good game design, but rather than they've all combined together in both continuity and coexistence in order to create basically just 1 or 2 types of builds for the entirety of GW2, regardless of which class you pick. Warrior just ended up as the CC-heavy, rushdown ungabunga guy compared to the other option of off-screen Mesmer/Thief burst. Good point. I imagined that the reason CC became so incredibly prolific after the big nerf is that time-to-kill increased so much that players simply had more time to endure CC. What you said, however is far more accurate of a picture. Players don't get "worn down" like they did in vanilla because if you give them even a second they will heal themselves. CC spam seems to be the only way to kill stuff short of 1-shotting (which is kinda hard these days). So what do you think is a better solution: Reduce healing by a lot or reduce the tools players have access to? Yeah, it's not so much that health itself is "worn down," but rather it's a process of burning through everyone's passive/instant panic buttons along with all of the evasion that every player generally does while attacking. If you want an actual solution: remove all evasion periods from attacks; make sure everybody has at least one non-target-dependent, movement skill on a weapon bar with a semi-low cooldown (6-10s baseline), then basically just cull all skill bars from 16-30 skills per player down to something like 8. When you have 16-30+ skills that aren't balanced by anything but cooldowns, you're going to get a vomit stream of spam no matter how "intelligently" anyone plays the game. People are encouraged to churn out skill activation as often as possible because the reward almost always outweighs the risk by magnitudes; and this dynamic only slants even deeper toward effortless reward as the buildcrafting enters into the metagame territory. You can't have every class to literally everything the game has to offer. You need to break up the "one man army" archetype that just rules every PvP interaction into several actual roles. Unique movement skills can help with this, but ultimately, you need to bring risk back to damage so that victory starts to hinge on coordination and timing rather than repeatedly grinding a muscle-memory, PvE rotation into a target until your cooldowns eventually hit a cycle that benefits you more than an opponent. Now, that's not Guild Wars 2, but then again, Guild Wars 2 doesn't feature a well-grounded game design. So, up to you: get a better game that resembles nothing like GW2 or get more GW2.

When I say "CC is it's own reward" What I mean is that CC interrupts an enemy's attack, impairs their ability to move, allows the player to get 1 or more free hits in, allows their team to get that many hits in, allows the player or the team to escape if necessary, allows the player or team to heal if necessary. There are more but I think you get it. I'm saying there is no need to have traits which encourage the use of CC. Players will build that into their build ANYWAY because of how useful they are. Edit: Typo The problem with GW2 is that none of that is good enough anymore. Passive and instant abilities generally cushion so much of every PvP encounter, that players have to torrent skills onto a target in order to bring it down (not that facerolling is hard, but it's inherent in GW2's design: spam to win). Combine this with the fact that there are no resources to really lose (aside maybe from health, which can be regained or simulated very easily) whenever a target is interrupted, and you're really only left with the achievement of having, in most circumstances, denied a target of a fat 5% of their basic damage or bunker rotation. So then CC was slapped onto every other skill just to keep people still enough to kill them. However, after the damage nerf, CC chains became even more oppressive and necessary just because it took enough more to bring any given build down. I'm not saying that ANY of these elements are foundations of good game design, but rather than they've all combined together in both continuity and coexistence in order to create basically just 1 or 2 types of builds for the entirety of GW2, regardless of which class you pick. Warrior just ended up as the CC-heavy, rushdown ungabunga guy compared to the other option of off-screen Mesmer/Thief burst.

It's not AoE spam that's rewarding; it's pressing almost any button that's generally far too rewarding under any circumstance. Balanced only by cooldowns and with most attacks automatically guided by tab-targeting, it's hard to argue how just attacking indiscriminately isn't always the correct answer in every situation, especially considering how it's effectively required because, in order to down any particular player, it's absolutely necessary to force said player to burn through every, instant panic button and passive fail-safe in a build. AoE is just generally more annoying because GW2 PvP is entirely dictated by who controls three, 240-unit-radius circles on a map. AoE or no AoE, every build in GW2 is designed to cater to facerolling across a keyboard.

There are waaaaay better options to reduce the brainless snowball effect in GW2 that wouldn't have to rely on the dynamic of what is effectively just a spontaneous gravity emerging on the field. Considering how shallow and straightforward combat becomes in the presence of downed allies, downed state (and by extension rallying) is more like a cycling dungeon trap rather than a unique string of dynamic player interactions.

Condition burst is just power burst except with a shorter, overall cooldown and more passive elements.

Your entire post is simply wrong and impossible. First, most mmorpgs with few exceptions were designed from the ground up as pve games with pvp as an after thought - this game included. Next in an mmorpg unlike fps’s there are too many classes, skills and variables to ever achieve true balance. Also, let’s be frank from a company standpoint pvp modes or games speaking about mmorpgs ( FPS or mobas excluded) are not as profitable nor ever have been as pve based games. All we have now is the perpetual carrot on a stick chasing imaginary balance which can never be achieved in the current direction we are going. We would be better served by realizing certain classes and specs are simply dominant in this mode and only working with those. Diversity will always lead further away from balance. Balance is something I wish games would just give up on, a good player can make anything shine. As long as its fun and enjoyable SOMEONE out there will make it good and showcase its strengths; Stripping the fun from other classes is a fast track to death.While I agree that buffs are generally always better than nerfs, GW2 is not a game in which individual player skill can truly shine. You try to hit platinum with a core staff elementalist build. It's certainly possible, and I (among a few others) can serve as anecdotal proof, but it's infuriatingly difficult to maintain that rank because there are so many builds which will simply not die to your damage output and walk through your ward walls no matter how perfect you are in execution (and if "staff is a support weapon," then I guess we should just blindly agree that it's better to just play "Cooldown Solitaire" with yourself on a node than actively influence a game's flow). Point is that GW2 quickly becomes a game about "picking the good fight" rather than "I'm better than this dude, so I'm just going to lay into him," and after a point, certain builds just become a burden to a team no matter how skillful that build's player may be. Builds often have the final say on a player's skill level, not an individual's creativity or execution. That guy to whom you were replying had a good appeal in the idea of how It's just the "too little too late" version of my stance regarding how GW2 should have never launched with more than four classes in the first place. This game is just not deep enough to feature enough roles for everyone to be happy.

GW2's specs outshine all core elements exactly because no original class (or even Revenant for that matter) was ever given a unique role to help define the flow of combat in any context (PvE or PvP). This is why PvE was exclusively ruled by 3 classes; and PvP has always been dominated by patch notes (along with Thief Shortbow 5 and pre-nerf Portal) rather than uniquely innovative players or game-defining engine gimmicks that only precise inputs could exploit. Despite having enjoyed so much about Guild Wars 1's profession roster, I can easily make the argument that GW2 deserved to have absolutely no more than 3-4 classes at most. This game simply does not feature enough depth of combat to provide space for more than that. If you aren't willing to entirely up-end how GW2 "plays," you'll never have any "core" set-up that looks or performs any better (or differently) than the current core PvP Guardian (which, by the way, is almost EXACTLY just how it played in 2012 PvE; a straight-up "Stack might on Alpha" level of basic gameplay). So, unless you just want a bunch of PvE builds from the Launch+1year era to start killing/tanking things in PvP without any effort, you really need to re-think how GW2 is supposed to even work as a game. If you don't (and nobody will by the way), you'll just receive arbitrary damage buffs and cooldown reductions like always.

GW2 PvP never had a true foundation upon which to build any sort of team-based gameplay. It was always survival of the generic, one-man-army. Specializations just exacerbated the issue.

That's an advantage. It doesn't make condi "inherently" better. Both of them have positives and negatives. And also, what do you mean with "selfish" cleanses? Group cleanse is much more readily available than other Group defense mechanics like protection. It's one of the reasons condi generally isn't meta, is that one player can cleanse an entire team. Condi is, in fact, inherently better solely by virtue of the fact that dodge is the universally, baked-in damage mitigation mechanic for all classes, but it doesn't cleanse or counteract active condition damage. Condition cleanses have never been universally distributed in an even manner; you're forcing players to preemptively allot skill bar slots or trait choices just to safeguard against the chance that somebody dumps a 20k DoT via skills that aren't intrinsically linked in a legible combo or bound to a committed action. At least dodge has the courtesy to not consume any parts of a skill bar or weapon slot. Dodge a big burst from a Mesmer or Revenant, and you're negating thousands of damage, but you will NEVER use dodge to mitigate the entirety of Ranger shortbow autoattack spam or Thief venom stacking; it's just going to casually clip you for at least half of your health from a few hits if you aren't constantly playing peek-a-boo with cover (and not all builds can do that). So explain why condi builds are always in the minority in high tier play? It's extremely rare to see more than 1 condi build per team in P2+ games or in MAT. I'll save you the bother and give the answer: because a team that leans too heavily into condi can be completely countered by 1 support spamming group cleanses, in a way that power can't be countered.So I guess it's gone beyond just the skill bar and trait menu, has it? You're forced to dedicate an entire player slot on a team just to suppress some random guy's autoattacks and 3 spam? That's pretty horrible, Guild Wars 2 player. The point is that you're talking about hard counters, and regardless of how hard condi is countered, it's still, baseline, more effective than non-DoT, direct damage in a controlled vacuum. That's why it's so frustrating to fight them: if your team isn't geared up with "press button to heal" boy on the point (which is also effective against direct damage), you're often at an utter loss if your own build can't poke for thousands of damage while playing footsies with the line of sight. It's not fun, it's not intuitive, and it doesn't promote player agency or expression. Condition builds, far more than power builds, often boil every encounter down to pre-fight deck-building rather than direct engagements based on player confidence: if your opponent is running a condi build, whether or not you engage them at all at any point during the game is almost entirely by what you or your teammates brought to play. That's not fun; that's just being in prison for 10-12 minutes. Why should pre-game decisions impact the actual gameplay (or force a lack of it) so drastically?

That's an advantage. It doesn't make condi "inherently" better. Both of them have positives and negatives. And also, what do you mean with "selfish" cleanses? Group cleanse is much more readily available than other Group defense mechanics like protection. It's one of the reasons condi generally isn't meta, is that one player can cleanse an entire team. Condi is, in fact, inherently better solely by virtue of the fact that dodge is the universally, baked-in damage mitigation mechanic for all classes, but it doesn't cleanse or counteract active condition damage. Condition cleanses have never been universally distributed in an even manner; you're forcing players to preemptively allot skill bar slots or trait choices just to safeguard against the chance that somebody dumps a 20k DoT via skills that aren't intrinsically linked in a legible combo or bound to a committed action. At least dodge has the courtesy to not consume any parts of a skill bar or weapon slot. Dodge a big burst from a Mesmer or Revenant, and you're negating thousands of damage, but you will NEVER use dodge to mitigate the entirety of Ranger shortbow autoattack spam or Thief venom stacking; it's just going to casually clip you for at least half of your health from a few hits if you aren't constantly playing peek-a-boo with cover (and not all builds can do that).