The beginning of the end

[JTGuevara.9018]

On 6/27/2023 at 3:53 PM, Grand Marshal.4098 said:

Good job on almost fully homogenizing the game's combat.

You have, at long last, introduced the KEY boons to all specs. 

You are either Quickness or Alacrity. That's it, no other utility, no unique skills, no real incentive to play a class over the other. Does Quicknesss Zerker work better than Quickness Chrono? If so, you should play the Chrono for it's unique skills right? Too bad there ain't NONE.

You stripped the last unique thing from especs and added it into core specs and elites. 

What's next? 

As a warrior I'd like to see you add Full COunter, Berserk Mode and Dragon Trigger all in 1 bar. 

It is about time we remove the traitlines and make every class an amalgamation of its parts.

No need for unique skills, no need for interesting counterplay like boon removal. 

I am a doomer I suppose. Enjoy this terrible game you have created. I know I haven't been for months and I am sad that I still feel a connection to it that makes me write such a paragraph. Agree or disagree, it's ok, what matters is not the enjoyment of combat, but the pleasure of total victory. 

In other words, gw2 is not an rpg. It is an action game. Where every class does the same things aka dodge, move around, hit things and pop AoEs and boons. (Some better than others...) Should they even be called 'classes' then? Each 'class' is visually different(warrior, mesmer, etc) but functionally they are all the same.

This is the culmination of gw2's design: a hack-and-slash action game with rpg aesthetics. The 'new trinity' that gw2 has pushed has come full circle and has been shown to be as bogus as Trump's 'businesses'. Actually, now that I think of it, which one is it! Is it DPS/support/boons or DPS/support/control? I forget!

I've seen enough action-RPG hybrids in my lifetime to know that the 'rpg' falls off eventually.There is a reason why Baldur's Gate, gw1, turn-based rpgs are still played.

[Batalix.2873]

1 hour ago, JTGuevara.9018 said:

In other words, gw2 is not an rpg. It is an action game. Where every class does the same things aka dodge, move around, hit things and pop AoEs and boons. (Some better than others...) Should they even be called 'classes' then? Each 'class' is visually different(warrior, mesmer, etc) but functionally they are all the same.

This is the culmination of gw2's design: a hack-and-slash action game with rpg aesthetics. The 'new trinity' that gw2 has pushed has come full circle and has been shown to be as bogus as Trump's 'businesses'. Actually, now that I think of it, which one is it! Is it DPS/support/boons or DPS/support/control? I forget!

I've seen enough action-RPG hybrids in my lifetime to know that the 'rpg' falls off eventually.There is a reason why Baldur's Gate, gw1, turn-based rpgs are still played.

I think the answer is a bit more multifaceted than this but you're not wrong.

I think the more fundamental underlying issue is that "strategy" really isn't a popular feature to have in a game, because it implies a lot of thought, time investment, learning, and skill-development that most consumers do not have the patience/interest to engage with.

Games inevitably sell better when they remove challenge and strategy in favor of something approaching auto-attack/single-click spectacle. We have already seen this happen with other aspects of GW2: the more "work" that can be skipped with leveling to 80, waypoint, gliding, mounts, the more accessible the game gets, the more popular it gets, the more sales and larger playerbase it maintains.

Because for most people games are not really an activity but simply "entertainment" or alternatively a "community", of course the class/combat system gets simplified over time because it's ultimately at best third on the priority list.

Put simply: no game (and arguably other forms of media) can be both "challenging/engaging" and "successful". The market, the consumers that comprise it, and the things they prioritize in their consumption, are not compatible with expertise/technicality. 

(And this makes sense, after all games are a fairly non-essential feature of human culture. They are a leisure past time that, like many other luxury/consumptive industries, mostly capitalize on the working class being immobile, bored, and looking for easy distraction/validation from that reality. Like much of American "culture", the industry has mostly evolved not really to facilitate particular needs, but to convince Americans that this has always been something fulfilling/necessary, when really it's just yet another "welp I made this or have this asset, how do I get money out of people with it" advertising scam. Games, like all media, are constantly fighting their own irrelevancy and fairly exploitative inherency, trying to maintain this bubble that insists they and their followers have some sort of worth/value. While downplaying the reality that people are forking up money mostly for the license to waste their time on thoroughly counterproductive past times with minimal translation to real-world benefits. At the end of the day, the media industry is mired in several layers of apologism for passive non-engagement, so of course popular games are going to cater to LCD low effort engagement. And of course the majority of consumers won't really care to dissect the truth from all that, because beneath all the facades and justifications that is all they really wanted.)

Edited July 10, 2023 by Batalix.2873

[Matoro.9708]

Delete quickness and alacrity.

Many traits gave uniquely named boons specific to the class - GW1 did this almost exclusively, and while often it becomes a tricky business of meta, it does provide custom buffs that avoid homogeny and the feeling of utter uselessness. As time went on GW2 removed these in favor of boons, particularly the two. I would reintroduce these in cool ways, like the soulbeast utility effects. 

Revert the ranger sword change, and others like it, such as the engi rifle nonsense. Lots of these pointless changes quickly kill the soul of the game and the original vision.

Fix turrets when?

Some days I think we should just go back to the 2014 trait system. 

The game could be saved, but chances are the devs won't, which is the best doomer fuel.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

13 hours ago, Matoro.9708 said:

Delete quickness and alacrity.

Many traits gave uniquely named boons specific to the class - GW1 did this almost exclusively, and while often it becomes a tricky business of meta, it does provide custom buffs that avoid homogeny and the feeling of utter uselessness. As time went on GW2 removed these in favor of boons, particularly the two. I would reintroduce these in cool ways, like the soulbeast utility effects. 

Revert the ranger sword change, and others like it, such as the engi rifle nonsense. Lots of these pointless changes quickly kill the soul of the game and the original vision.

Fix turrets when?

Some days I think we should just go back to the 2014 trait system. 

The game could be saved, but chances are the devs won't, which is the best doomer fuel.

Ya, GW1 had what were called enchantments, they didn't operate like gw2's buffs, they were just types of skills that all classes had. In some sense they are like unique buffs that had counter-play in being removable. 

If I were to make an analogy...if you were to bring back unique effects, then made them all strippable, that would be similiar to guild wars 1.

Enemies in PVE were also capable of stripping enchantments (PVE Monsters often just had player builds of their own) and this is one reason for the difficulty of their PVE mode. Note that most if not all bosses in GW2 PVE...don't strip boons. 

Edited July 17, 2023 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[Juan.6124]

On 6/27/2023 at 9:53 PM, Grand Marshal.4098 said:

Good job on almost fully homogenizing the game's combat.

You have, at long last, introduced the KEY boons to all specs. 

You are either Quickness or Alacrity. That's it, no other utility, no unique skills, no real incentive to play a class over the other. Does Quicknesss Zerker work better than Quickness Chrono? If so, you should play the Chrono for it's unique skills right? Too bad there ain't NONE.

You stripped the last unique thing from especs and added it into core specs and elites. 

What's next? 

As a warrior I'd like to see you add Full COunter, Berserk Mode and Dragon Trigger all in 1 bar. 

It is about time we remove the traitlines and make every class an amalgamation of its parts.

No need for unique skills, no need for interesting counterplay like boon removal. 

I am a doomer I suppose. Enjoy this terrible game you have created. I know I haven't been for months and I am sad that I still feel a connection to it that makes me write such a paragraph. Agree or disagree, it's ok, what matters is not the enjoyment of combat, but the pleasure of total victory. 

Show us where quickness zerker can provide portals, reflects or an ability similar to focus pull temporal curtain.

Edited July 17, 2023 by DirtyDan.4759

[Sober Oni.8290]

There are four things that originally got me into playing GW2... those being the exploration, PvP, GW1 lore, and the all around satisfying feel of the game's combat. They gave up on adding fun things to discover in maps years ago, PvP has been an abandoned game mode for God only knows how long, GW1 lore being destroyed aside the "story" is just painful at this point, and the last and strongest pillar of combat is down now too. This legitimately is one of the worst states combat has ever been in this game, to the point where I can't believe I'm actually missing chronojail, and it's such a depressing shame.

Combat feels horrendously clunky and counterintuitive on every class now, with most classes having their identities ripped away from them (poor necros, and I say that as an ele main), but hey at least every class can give your precious alacrity and quickness so woo I guess. I've seen "The game is dying" pop up many time in many games over the years but yeah... beginning of the end indeed.

[Batalix.2873]

22 hours ago, Sober Oni.8290 said:

There are four things that originally got me into playing GW2... those being the exploration, PvP, GW1 lore, and the all around satisfying feel of the game's combat. They gave up on adding fun things to discover in maps years ago, PvP has been an abandoned game mode for God only knows how long, GW1 lore being destroyed aside the "story" is just painful at this point, and the last and strongest pillar of combat is down now too. This legitimately is one of the worst states combat has ever been in this game, to the point where I can't believe I'm actually missing chronojail, and it's such a depressing shame.

Combat feels horrendously clunky and counterintuitive on every class now, with most classes having their identities ripped away from them (poor necros, and I say that as an ele main), but hey at least every class can give your precious alacrity and quickness so woo I guess. I've seen "The game is dying" pop up many time in many games over the years but yeah... beginning of the end indeed.

I would rather have a game where every class has distinct strengths and weaknesses, roles and niches, but you can easily swap between them. Rather than this where every class is pushed into the same "DPS-boon" role because of the artificial cost of rerolling.

When people talk about GW3, this is actually one of the main draws I think a fresh start on a third game would have. Eliminating the artificial barriers for grinding rerolls and letting a character multi-class like FFXIV. It would preserve class identity much longer, assuming the devs went into the game with the deliberate plan to avoid homogenizing skills like FFXIV did.

[Dorsai.1458]

The only way you get power-fantasy vibes from this game is if you play solo.  

The minute you're in any type of end-game pve group setting, you're reduced to a spreadsheet formula with no class identity. ...just your dps number and boon uptime.  Does not matter one lick what class you are.

[Batalix.2873]

1 hour ago, Dorsai.1458 said:

The only way you get power-fantasy vibes from this game is if you play solo.  

The minute you're in any type of end-game pve group setting, you're reduced to a spreadsheet formula with no class identity. ...just your dps number and boon uptime.  Does not matter one lick what class you are.

Absolutely agree with this, unfortunately. For a time you could get away with running a healer/support in metas and feeling like a boss as you pumped up and rezzed the noobs.

But now every class can do that so kitten Druid/Tempest/Herald drag.

I don't mind that more classes got alac/quickness and in some cases like FB/Scourge/Mech pushed heavily (albeit not heavily enough) into healer/support roles. But a good number of the new implementations just don't feel like a distinct support fantasy anymore.

* Ranger should have kept alac on Spirits and just made Spirits more Spirity instead of glorified wells like so many skills are being retooled into. Made alac pulse enough from a single spirit that you had to keep alive. And also bring back spirit dawdles so you would have to bring an additional spirit or two depending on how mobile a fight is. But imo generally healing a single mobile spirit should have been enough of a cost/benefit to providing full alac uptime for most golem encounters. Then have a corresponding trait in survival that bumps quickness to party members on Quickening Zephyr.

* Warrior makes the least sense of all the remakes, tying boons to burst damage. Quickness should be traitable back on banners. Bring back banner design space and kits (soft spear addition?) so support warriors can actually feel like commanders instead of just passively smashing boons onto allies. And then slap alacrity on Banner of Defense so Warrior can fill out some alacrity but wouldn't be a primary source of it, kind of an inverse to the above proposed Ranger QZ fill.

* Chrono wells and shatters are actually fine as Mesmer's only source of quick/alac. Cut alac mirage, it was always a dumb kneejerk addition and a Solar "I'm lazy" idea at that. Chrono clones are inconsistent. The only thing I would probably have recommended for quick/alac Chrono is increasing boon duration so they could overcap extremely easily. Maybe also put both quick/alac on Well of Mobility and Distortion so it has some additional flexibility. There is definitely design space now for the time mage to so easily overcap on one boon or another that it can make decisions to bring fewer wells/shatters into its core rotation for other tradeoffs.

* Thief is just a confusing mess. Flavorfully thief has never wanted anything to do with group support and alac Specter has never sat well with me. Quickness Deadeye is equally perplexing as the "single target murder machine" spec. I'm not sure how to fix thief but this system definitely feels extremely wrong for the profession. Daredevil feels if anything to be more of the quickness spec and would want to generate it on dodging. And then maybe move Specter's alac to steal instead of barrier, since siphon feels much more flavorfully like it would "steal a boon" versus Deadeye? Iunno, but that overall just feels much closer to something more naturally thief than what we got which is just dartboard design.

* Guardian is just screwed up and has been since FB. On the one hand an argument could be made that FB should be able to trait to either alac or quickness, given that is the the book nerd undoubtedly familiar with all the boons. But FB already does too much. I definitely think putting alac on the dragon magic class might have made more sense, but really that's just a reflection of what a non-fantasy WB is (Shiro burninating assassin on the defense/heal tank, really?). Guardian is just beyond saving to have any class cohesion, but if I had my way: (1) remove quickness from FB and give it literally every other boon besides alac; (2) put alacrity on Dragonhunter somehow, as part of a trait that gives you extra F2 charges for some much needed identity; (3) remove flames from WB F2/F3, make F2 leave behind healing water pools and F3 impassible light walls, add a trait that gives extra F3 charges and quickness.

* Engi is closer to the mark than not. Scrapper should move projectile finisher off rifle/pistol AA, and just make all combo finishers apply quickness, remove the blast from F5. Mech should just remove weapons altogether and replace them with Mech commands, which would solve so many things about the spec including support.

* Necro, Ele, and Rev are by and large flavorfully okay now. Small tweaks needed to reinforce the job fantasy, but it all feels about in line with their job identities.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Batalix.2873

[Mic.1897]

On 6/27/2023 at 4:09 PM, Grand Marshal.4098 said:

Hmmmm idk, maybe the fact that the game at it's conception was meant to be played in such a way where each class had enough tools at it's disposal to perform a certain number of tasks (which were shared globally) and now we have reached a point where Yellow class does the same thing as Red and Blue and Green and it feels stale?

 

You literally said the same thing twice lol