Summons(Counterplay and interaction)

[Lily.1935]

Summons or "pets" as they're called in other games is something that has never translated well into Guild wars 2. And not for lack of effort on arena net's part. As far as I'm aware, there are issues involving conjured creatures and objects such as turrets, spirits and minions that strip engagement away from the players summoning them and make them a frustrating slog for those trying to fight against them.

Personally, I'm a fan of having the ability to summon a hoard of little monstrosities to do my bidding while I sit back and laugh like a super villain as my opponents crumble at the feet of an overwhelming zerg listening to their screams(or imagining them) like "There's too many of them!" right before they get muffled out and squashed on the weight of my forces. But I do understand why this might not be fun for my opponent and why just having a zerg isn't necessarily going to be fun for myself either.

The Primary point of this post is to discuss how we could make these "pets" more engaging for the player using them and not such a slog for foes fighting them. Another layer of depth to these fights that could help to aid in future design. Some of these issues that I'll discuss are problems that arena net are currently working on fixing in the game engine, with some success that we'll be seeing in the future expansion, Path of fire.

Issues:

• The first problem we run into is the issue of interaction. Summons(and I am including turrets here) are mostly just bringing them into the world and mostly forgetting about them. Its not a very meaningful interaction with them. Minions on necromancers have a bit more iteration with them, but nothing on the scale that you would have had in GW1 with Minions. Spirits I feel can get away with this since their passivity is a part of their flavor, at least for rangers. While Turrets and minions the lack of meaningful interaction from the player leaves them feeling a bit lacking and wanting. There isn't a clear solution to this as I've been debating about minions for years and there has yet to be a consensus.
• AI Bloat is another problem we see as Arena net has been cautious about having too many summons on screen at once. In World events this can be especially problematic as it can put unnecessary straight on the user's PC as well as the servers. Most MMOs solve this by limiting the number of summons to a very small handful of creatures, usually 1-3 from what I've seen and builds them almost in ways that they are a physical part of the class. GW2 doesn't do it this way and I wouldn't want them to either.
• 5 target cap is probably one of the largest issues plaguing this style of game play. If your opponent floods the field with a dozen minions and you're a warrior trying to fight that necromancer, you're not going to have an easy time pushing to that necromancer and hitting the correct target. This gets even more frustrating for you when they start redirecting conditions and damage to their summoned minions.
• How do you fight them? The last issue I see is that the means to fighting the Summon style of gameplay is to hit them or the summoner really really hard. But the summoner knows this and they counter play you and build themselves like a wall and doing that can be nearly impossible for some players as the summoned creatures overwhelm the player. There really isn't enough ways to fight against this style of game play built into the system.

The Game play around summoning is unfortunately not very meaningful. And because of this playing with or against them doesn't offer much of an experience for the players. It can be a fantastic spectacle for Spectators to watch how this type of game play can roll out and interact as one of the most popular games in the world is a real time strategy game. So its not like this style of play can't be engaging to the players or an audience. It seems that in GW2's case it boils down to the flaws of an MMO's design.

Going back to Guild wars 1, it was a game that made the summoner feel extremely engaging and was a marvel to watch in large scale Guild v Guild matches for GW1 which i'd occasionally just sit back when I was board and watch. I loved watching those matches as a swarm of minions would move onto a point in Jade Quarry as a counter group would also move in and decimate the swarm of minions with a well placed meteor shower, or a ray of judgement would rip through them, dying at the feet of the mesmer who cast it right before they could land an attack. Or when they miss cast their abilities or the necromancer in a desperate ploy to keep those minions alive, sacrificed him/herself letting those minions become masterless and rampage on the point, overwhelming the opponent. Both possibilities were riveting to watch.

But the problem with GW2 in this regard, is its not GW1. GW1's scope was much smaller than GW2, and at any given time the number of people you'd expect to see on screen was something like 16-24 at most. No where near the numbers that GW2 has. At in PvE this number was even smaller than that most the time with the common cap being 8 in the exploration maps. This was different in town hubs, but you couldn't use skills in town hubs, most the time.

Finding a solution to some of these problems might not be easy, but if we want the gameplay of a Minion master or turret engineer to feel both engaging for the one using them and the one fighting them, there needs to be a way to combat these strategies effectively.

Solutions

• Increasing target cap from 5 to 10-15: Of all the issues with this style of game play, its the target cap that harms it the most. Summons can quickly hit the cap which makes dealing with them a chore. Now I know that increasing the target cap could be quite powerful and make things like WvW even more chaotic, so this solution should be used sparingly.
• Anti-Summon skills: Going along with the target cap, having skills that have a triggered effect clause that only occurs when striking a summoned creature is a pretty good way to help counter them. I'll link to the GW1 page to give you an idea of what some of them did in the first game, but it wasn't the only means that it would counter them. https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Anti-summon_skill
• Hard CC: This isn't an issue with Minions and elementals specifically as they can be hard CCed, but this is a problem for Turrets and potentially future Spirits that might be stationary that are immune to this sort of interaction. Making it so you can interact with These, turrets especially, in this way gives a means to move otherwise immobile objects that would otherwise create a problem. Turrets have been nerfed pretty hard, but I feel that if there were proper ways to counter them, much of this could be undone, such as a means to knock them back.
• Movement: Some summons are immobile. And this creates a problem for players who are constantly on the move. This is especially apparent for turrets that once again they get to be the focus of this suggestion. The Ritualist of GW1 has some similarities to the engineer and their spirits are more like turrets of GW2 than of Spirits of GW2. GW1 also had the issue of moving spirits around since they were stationary. However they got around this by having a skill that could move them. For Turrets it would be nice if the player could pick up a turret like a bundle without actually despawning the turret. A fairly major change, but it would be a quality of life improvement that could aid them, and offer unique means of fighting against a guardian who just used their shield to knock all of the engineer's turrets off the point.
• Anti-fields: WvW could have the largest issue when it comes to summons and I feel its important that we have some form of Anti-field. Something that stuns summons on entering it or destroys them in mass. WvW needs ways to break up zergs and summons can be the zergiest of the zerg strategies. ANd having a very potent and clear counter to them can prevent them from completely running away with the meta.
• Proper distribution of abilities: It goes without saying that all these ways to fight against summons and using them are nice and all, but without the correct number of skills and classes that can fight them we would still have a problem. For Core professions The Guardian, Necromancer, Engineer, Revenant, Mesmer should all have means to deal with summons on mass while Elite specs like Spellbreaker should also be able to fight them with great success. Where else it could be, I'm just thinking on theme for this particular example but arguments for other professions I could get behind. Druid might make sense for example as summons might be "Unnatural".
• NPCs should also have counterplay: Its one thing to talk about how a player should be able to fight summons, but NPCs such as keep lords or even a PvE boss in a fractal or raid shouldn't just get steamrolled either. The point of this post is engagement.

Overall, This style of game play has quite a few complications to it and I feel that it requires a very deep look into it and a close eye on it. As my solutions might not be the best, or perhaps they're good but lack a larger perspective. More over, the discussion shouldn't be a shut and closed case. I feel that some summons just under preform and it would be nice to see them get some love. Minions, Turrets and Gyros especially.

Edit: I'm not including Clones and Phantasms in this balance as their flavor is that they don't actually exist, or they're not supposed to.

But please, as always, lend me your thoughts. This discussion is about how to improve the play with summons. Do you agree or disagree? let me know and lets get a discussion going.

[BunjiKugashira.9754]

In my opinion minions currently lack a skill curve. In PvE minions are way too easy. They're easy to maintain and even easier to fight along with as they take all the aggro from you. In PvP on the other hand minions are too squishy and no matter how skilled you are, the cooldown will prevent maintaining a standing army. Even if you retreat to restock on minions, the next aoe will just wipe them all out again.

I believe the only way to make minions viable is to introduce a minion-focused elite spec. Deathshroud would be replaced by a set of skills that spawn temporary minions, heal minions, or buff minions at the cost of some necromantic energy.

Engineer turrets imo are just too weak. In PvP again they are cleared by throwing 1 or 2 aoes at them. In PvE their damage and utility just can't compete with the toolkits. My suggestion would be to make carrying them around possible. Like warrior banners. Any ally can pick them up (and use some skills while carrying them) and place them somewhere else by dropping them.

The biggest issue for all summons though is, that they don't scale with player stats. I believe this is a problem both in PvP, where a player can go full tank and still have his summons deal damage, and in PvE where summons are just too weak without the added stats from equipment. This is especially a problem for the scrapper's gyros. When scrapper was first released I immediately tried to build a condi-scrapper by placing the whirlwind gyro in a fire field. But with the fiery bolts scaling with the stats of whoever does the finisher instead of whoever placed the field, they were scaling with the gyro's stats. Which were 0. After getting a huge amount of burning stacks with a pityful amount of damage, I had to scrap this build (no pun intended).

[Lily.1935]

@BunjiKugashira.9754 said:In my opinion minions currently lack a skill curve. In PvE minions are way too easy. They're easy to maintain and even easier to fight along with as they take all the aggro from you. In PvP on the other hand minions are too squishy and no matter how skilled you are, the cooldown will prevent maintaining a standing army. Even if you retreat to restock on minions, the next aoe will just wipe them all out again.

I believe the only way to make minions viable is to introduce a minion-focused elite spec. Deathshroud would be replaced by a set of skills that spawn temporary minions, heal minions, or buff minions at the cost of some necromantic energy.

Engineer turrets imo are just too weak. In PvP again they are cleared by throwing 1 or 2 aoes at them. In PvE their damage and utility just can't compete with the toolkits. My suggestion would be to make carrying them around possible. Like warrior banners. Any ally can pick them up (and use some skills while carrying them) and place them somewhere else by dropping them.

The biggest issue for all summons though is, that they don't scale with player stats. I believe this is a problem both in PvP, where a player can go full tank and still have his summons deal damage, and in PvE where summons are just too weak without the added stats from equipment. This is especially a problem for the scrapper's gyros. When scrapper was first released I immediately tried to build a condi-scrapper by placing the whirlwind gyro in a fire field. But with the fiery bolts scaling with the stats of whoever does the finisher instead of whoever placed the field, they were scaling with the gyro's stats. Which were 0. After getting a huge amount of burning stacks with a pityful amount of damage, I had to scrap this build (no pun intended).

I think you make some good points. As I mentioned above, one of the issues is that we don't see this level of control over the summons due to them not having the correct counter play. If we contrast this with something like, say, Boons. Boons have afforded a luxury in their application and use and the players using them and fighting against them get meaningful play with and against them. Summons don't have that play, so the balancing act isn't there.

There was a time that Turrets were pretty dominant in PvP. They used to be immune to conditions and critical hits and made fighting them a slog. They were changed to be impacted by conditions and critical making them far easier to deal with, in fact, for what they did for you they become not worth taking. As you said, they're now weak but there was a time when they were dominant.

Your last point isn't entirely true. Minions for example, when they apply conditions it is scaled on the necromancer's condition damage. Why Gyros don't scale like that is a bit confusing. But your suggestion has been suggested quite a few times before. And I guess I forgot to mention it, though its not a half bad idea.

[Carighan.6758]

Hrm, personally I feel that before pets as a combat type (effectively an attackable DoT with a model) can be fixed, there needs to be more underlying fixes to the combat as a whole:

• Most skill-effects are individually really weak.
• In return, they are quite spammable, either via low CD or ready availability, or...
• ... because each skill seems to do 3-4 things nowadays. There is little if any purity of purpose.

This feeds into a host of issues. Pet-specific, AEs counter most pets and summonables so hard due to how many AEs are flying out and how many skills cause incidental cleave-damage on low CDs, the pets need to be overbearing in quiet situations just to stand a chance at all.

I'd fix the underlying issues first. I am fine with only having 10 skills equipped at once, but the skills I do have should never give me a "complete skill bar" feeling. I should always long for the skills I haven't equipped so that there are constant tradeoffs as each thing I use only does one thing, but does it really well. Once that is done and effects are "meaty" but less spammable, pets can be easily balanced, being "just another DoT", which cannot be cleansed but instead can be killed by damage. Give them a medium AE damage reduction (but remember AEs wouldn't be a common thing at all under that rebalance), and then they are fine. Classes bringing lots of pets would in turn have them be rather fragile.

[Brujeria.7536]

I think minions simply wont work because of the overall gameplay here. In GW1 the gameplay was built around the existence of minions, corpses, corpse management and a big number of skills consuming corpses for various purposes and an additional counterplay by stealing minions or killing them quickly. In GW1 you really only had skills you could swap around freely, this was your build. The overall amount of customization in GW1 was much higher because of the simple to adapt, yet very diverse pool of abilities.

In GW2 on the other side you have a lot of predefined skills and minions are not heavy included into all the gameplay mechanics. Minions for all of these classes, are just one pair of utility skills. 6 skills at most, with usually one trait attached to it. Minions are a relaxed and braindead way to play PVE, and not really strong in PvP.

So i think there should be 2 distinctions here: PVE where minions are just there for some damage and for the defensive aspect. And competetive modes where anything like minions is just wrong due to no skillfull play envolved.

In PvE simply add a buffing effect that increases the minions damage per hit, similar to the mesmer phantasm trait.In WvW and PvP minions should be 90% around their active skill. You should be able to pick a certain minion - just like any other utility skill - to benefit your playstyle and to fine tune it. If you pick all minion skills these should build a small niche of gameplay on their own, not related to "there are minions" but to what these minions individually can do.

Minions as an army wont work in GW2 like it did in GW1, that is sadly a fact. Any changes to make minnions an overall thing would require heavy work on almost all areas of the game. And they managed to compress all the beauty and diversity of GW1s enchantmens and curses into mostly boons and conditions in an attempt to not be so complicated and knowledge heavy. So, you see, chances that minions will ever get its own piece of gameplay and mechanics in GW2 is very very unlikely. Maybe to some extend with an dedicated Espec. And even then it most likely wont be in form of an army.

[Acheron.4576]

I really hope the next Necro elite spec will allow us to place emphasis into minions and minion management. It could be extremely fun if properly utilized. I always like the idea of building up undead forces and using them to create even stronger undead. I made a rough idea (while drunk) and posted it on the forums before the forums changed.

[Lily.1935]

@Acheron.4576 said:I really hope the next Necro elite spec will allow us to place emphasis into minions and minion management. It could be extremely fun if properly utilized. I always like the idea of building up undead forces and using them to create even stronger undead. I made a rough idea (while drunk) and posted it on the forums before the forums changed.

I'd enjoy that. But I'd also like to see minions on other professions. Primarily Engineer. And Turrets could be cool on other professions too. Like Elementalist, Necromancer, Ranger. I feel these skill types are not as mono profession as they first appear. Especially considering that Sylvari technically has turret skills, even though they're not called Turrets. Or Spirits on Necromancer.

[Acheron.4576]

I always thought Elementalist could be given an interesting puppeteer type of elite spec. (not to get confused with pet types)Have a familiar and you attack through your familiar instead of with a weapon. (mainly because having an attack skill for every weapon type would be a crazy amount of work) Basically your weapon skills would be replaced with familiar skills and when you use them it causes your familiar to attack and be able to control where it moves with a ground target "F" skill. I've even thought of having them each be something similar to the four sacred beast in East Asian Mythos.

the white tiger - melee attacker with fast hitting attacks and movements - lightning elementOnyxian Tortoise - the tanky one made of black stone and focused on earth element attacks.The Azure dragon/serpent - the water elemental that has focus on healing and attacking from mid range.The vermilion phoenix - a fire element that attacks from afar with flames.

puppeteer type classes are rare in MMOs and I would like to see something like that in GW2. It would make an epic Canthan elite spec for sure.