Apocrisy.9514

No, like almost any other MMO, bosses should have mechanics both melee and range have to deal with. With no holy trinity, and no predictable aggro system, this is kind of different in GW2, it feels like Raids are not part of the same ecosystem for which the game was created, if the bosses aggroed only on toughness, it would make entry much easaier, and difficulty could be set from motes, for example 3 or 4 dificulties, each increasing the rewards and challange. I mean.. if most buffs werent popcorn small AOE the playstyle might drastically change to allow for more freedom in the game modes, the game would feel more fluent and at the same time easier to learn I watched a vid by MightyTeaPot titled difficulty in games and Guild Wars 2's biggest flaw It puts the words to what I've been experiencing, hours upon hours of wiki and youtube surfing to understand some basics, one million currency systems and the like 😄

LMAO. I merely guess that popcorn 300aoe auras and boons were in general implemented to make the game feel more action based, so you pick up things as you roll through them, instead of targeting team mates to buff (like classic WoW had blessing of whatever in paladins) But seriously, to balance the raids for ranged alike maybe i t wouldn't even take much effort, I suppose the following would do: 1. Make aggro toughtness based all the time, as that attribute makes sense for this. 2. Make aoe boons in raid have 2000+ range, but only for that game mode. The balance in other gamemodes seems to be more in check, so there seems to be no need to overhaul the entire combat system, just the combat system in the area in which it doesn't work like designed (as an example, in FFXIV you have different skills in PVP, that games combat system still feels.. slow and laggy, but they addressed imbalance by changing skillsets only in one game mode) 3. Make being in melee in general more dangerous. There need to be un-dodgable attacks that force an occasional move out of melee circle, that would promote the "switching of melee and ranged spec" fluency that I think the game was aiming at, or at least largely advertising such a gameplay in general. Or: Remove sharing boons in Raids, as every class has high self sufficiency in general.. though this one maybe seems more extreme. But on the topic of just in general class balance. I would rather have only 1 or 2 playstyles per class and have that be balanced, than 5 options of playstyle and sometimes even not having the class viable for endgame because all 5 are sub par. I don't think adding specs creates balance, it just changes current meta, and the idea of being able to play any playstyle as any class is appealing but it's really hard to pull off balance wise. All that said, not being in general an active player in the past, I am not sure how often things get balanced, are the balance patches fairly regular? like every 3-4 months? How long has scourge been imbalanced?

I get your point but no, the originally designed classes of Elementalist and Ranger were meant to employ range, the thing is that boss design was made in such a way, that it's pretty much mandatory to stack up for buffs, and there's too many bosses that allow you to just stay melee all the time. I think according to what gameplay I've had so far, this is why there's more variety in PVP and WvW compared to Raiding. I can only raid in different flavours of "warrior", when in contrast I want to raid in the flavor of ranged. I hope that at least in EoD they introduce more bosses that work with ranged. I'm at fractal 18 and so far I have a feeling these can be done with almost any build, but I am a generally hardcore focused player, investing a lot of my free time into games, so I want to do endgame hardcore things, it's just a shame that for Raids its all melee, so I might end up in general not doing them, or just doing them once a week for some gold, but I'll definitely not enjoy it very much, as the game was meant to have hybrid systems, viability of both ranged and melee, but it ended up just being stack in melee range at boss. So until Raiding can accomodate more than just one playstyle, I'll stick to WvW and PvP, maybe an occasional fractal.

I see, so raids were added ad-hoc and it seems like they did not keep in mind the ranged much. Well, it must be hard balancing skills to fit both PVE and PVP and not be too strong in one or the other (scourge) cough cough... The two weeks grind is since I returned back to GW2, I purchased the game on april 2020, got it to 80 and stopped playing til now, so I'm not exactly really new, did unlock my masteries and got gliding, mounts etc.. but never did endgame content, so it came as a bit of a surprise to me, that it's all just melee-centric. Still I must say that I do enjoy the PVP and WvW aspects, as they do seem to allow for a little bit of more freedom in builds and range and whatnot, but I wanted to get into raids and this is a bit of a bummer. I mean, it's still fun to a certain degree, but it's not what I like playing in my games.. might try a shortbow ranger as gw2metabattle says its "viable", though if I'd have to stack up with the rest of melee, i'm not sure if it'll feel any more satisfying other than maybe for the last boss of w4, which until now was the only raid I ever tried. It would be great fun if raids could accomodate ranged classes is all.

Well no, the casters already do wear cloth (or light armor), so it's totally counterintuitive to force the only viable builds, outside of open world pve, (which in most cases is just zerged through content), to be melee. So where my contribution matters, I am to be right next to my target having weak armor? I mean why have a "warrior" skillset class in light and medium armor be their only way to bring about sufficient DPS for endgame content, these armor types in general are designed to crumble if just looked at funny, and as such the priority of such armor wearers should be to avoid being looked funny, otherwise you're creating an illusion of choice. I can choose warrior in different flavours, not a mage, a hunter, a gunner -> these in their originally designed way to play do not get to experience high tier content.

I mean, I had an 80 character from before.. but ascended "grind" and legendary aside, as they are rather small boosts I suppose, only a couple of ranged specs are viable in PVP, but none are viable in raiding. I believe the proper way to balance ranged calsses is have them wear weaker armor and be more prone to damaging abilities by adds or aoe puddles or whatever, not just nerf their weapons into oblivion, forcing cloth wearers to melee. I think tempest overloads should be ground targetable and not stick to a player, staff should be buffed, I don't understand how a mesmer, the cloth armor class is the best tank in the game, this all feels somewhat backwards, and I was hoping this dragons expansion would sovle the issue but instead we're getting only melee specializations

As the title implies, I'm a newbie player haven't even got one piece of ascended on me, and did my first raid a couple of days ago, as a weaver... I made an elementalist because I enjoy the mage gameplay in normal MMOs but from what I can tell so far of the game, there is a serious balance issue between melee and ranged. Basically any class that has a melee weapon is viable only in melee. Is this because of boon range being a small circle? are boons too strong then in this case? should they in raids be raid-wide to fix this imbalance at least there? Normally in MMOs I play Mages, Healers and Rangers... I was hyped for the chance of swapping weapons and thought it brings a hybrid combination only to later learn it's just all melee with different coloured animations.. I really want to get into this game, I found the idea of dodge rolls interesting as an MMO player, but more than half of the time I find myself on youtube watching vids on different class specs and how to get ascended/legendary and after a two week grind so far I am not even close to any ascended piece - I get a "you can get gear from any activity" but then you need some materials that you can only obtain doing X, and another material that you can only craft for which you need to do Y and Z, and for the third piece you gotta do A, B and have an achievement of C, where for that achievement of C you need 4 different masteries unlocked, and it all just feels like so much grind for such a little reward, 10% stat increase or what have you. Why can I not get almost any gold from WvW and sPvP, why is my inventory constantly flooded with some useless 3copper thropies and 1 silver auction house materials, am I playing this game wrong?