Rotation vs reaction, work vs fun

[Talan.1608]

On 7/6/2023 at 4:39 AM, Yasai.3549 said:

The June update hit 3 builds that prefer reactionary gameplay and these 3 builds are all healers in nature. HealRes Scourge, HealDruid and HealQuickHerald. With your resources now being held hostage by Boon application, it's no wonder people who are fans of these builds are absolutely livid. Imagine being a DPS but you have to burn your DPS skills not doing damage and you can imagine why these Healers are so heartbroken when forced to throw away powerful Heals, Barriers or Energy that can translate into powerful utilities just so that the group can "maintain boon uptime".

To an extent this applies to heal scrapper as well, since function gyro was given a blast finishers, making it a needed tool to apply quuckness

[DeceiverX.8361]

8 hours ago, Lily.1935 said:

I've heard some people talk about the early days like that, but early GW2 was pretty awful and I highly doubt any of them would keep playing that version of the game. I was there, it wasn't just unbalanced, it was broken. People would stack in corners the only viable set of armor was berserkers in pve and only a small handful of classes were even viable. Engineer was under powered, Ranger was under powered and necromancer wasn't just bad, it was the weakest DPS, provided almost no support, had no defenses and and had skills which actively harmed your party's synergy.

It was typically Warrior, Guardian and Elementalist who were the best DPS at the time and it wasn't interesting gameplay. Elementalist would summon a fire sword and run into the wall stacking its trail effect causing massive burst damage. Then that was nerfed, then they'd do the same with staff which also was nerfed. Then you had Warrior which was rush into the corner with greatsword while the enemy stacked up and couldn't do anything. Guardian was pretty solid with its utility and also broke several world bosses with hammer stacking multiple symbols at a time doing absurd amounts of damage. Mesmer and Thief had uses too but the game's meta was centered around "how can we cheese this the best.

There was No Skill in early PvE. There was a good number of players that thought that stacking in a corner and bursting out fire fields  and abusing movement mechanics against a wall to out DPS 5-8 players before the advent of quickness was the intended way to play and a few of the quit  when that horribly abuse of the system was patched out because they had spent 2 years not learning how to dodge or even running dungeons normally.

I'm not saying there wasn't good things that happened during that time. Attack on Lions arch was fun, the new shiny game was cool, old lions arch was great. But Balance was an absolute mess. Guild Wars 2 is a much better game today then it was then.

But its not like there weren't support roles in those days either. Just they were different roles like the Reflect class(mesmer or guardian), the Phalanx strength warrior, Stealther(Mesmer or Thief). And Support did exist in PvP and WvW as well. HoT just codified it a bit more, pushing more into traditional roles.

Arena net has always struggled with transitioning into a new philosophy for their game. This current balance patch is trying to transition into their new philosophy for balance. And its ROUGH right now for sure. But Its not like this is the last build we'll ever see.

Sorry for the long rant.

The big thing is that most players had no clue about what was going on, either due to the lack of DPS meters.  And no offense, but it kind of shows in your post.  Warrior DPS was actually not even that dominant so much as it was consistently around third place (there was this silly thing going on in the community where a lot of dummies thought multi-hit skills were dealing the total summed damage on each strike which made people freak out over big numbers; hundred blades is now better than it used to be and GSAA was painfully low compared to other options), and Necro also did far more damage than people gave it credit for and hovered around Warrior, because its MH dagger AA chain was one of the best in the game and rivaled thief's which *was* the best DPS in the game using the old 5/6/0/0/3 build.  Yet most necromancers camped staff and scepter which were respectively utility and condition damage weapons, prior to condition damage being a viable way to deal solid PvE damage until the inclusion of Viper gear, because all Condi sets had defensive stats.  Which was intentional for a game balance PoV.  This was an era where DPS was maximized by using stuff like Lightning Hammer.  Players were overwhelmingly wrong in their perceptions, which I addressed in my very first post about DPS meters.

Ranger was as you said weak because ANet hadn't given pets PvE durability yet and launched ranger with effectively 30% less DPS to account for the pet attacks, which was mathematically sound in Open World, except the pet was usually dead from dungeon AoE damage/boss aggro with only having a few thousand effective health, such high toughness, no active mitigation, and long pet swap timers.  Plus, almost everyone was playing ranger as longbow because there weren't any archer alternatives, and RF also had such a long cast time that it was a DPS loss to the AA chain, so people were nerfing their own damage output on top of an already-weak class, and GS had a weak amount of sustained damage because it was a massive burst damage weapon with built-in evades on AA's thus being balanced for less DPS, and had otherwise low coefs outside of its PvP burst combos (Remorseless AOO Maul builds regularly hit for 30k+ per hit).  Sword was the best output, and nobody played it lol.

Mesmer being a burst class with fragile AI it depended on for its damage output also was hit by the same issues ranger had and was subsequently pretty bottom-of-the-barrel,, and engineer had so much utility and solid burst combos in PvP while having no good DPS weapon (although bomb kit WAS overloaded for a time in this regard with BOB builds).

And despite all of this, I literally never got kicked for build or class choice on any character I made, which was probably a good dozen or more.  When I made my necromancer, I hit level 30 and spammed dungeons in story/exploration to 80 rather than doing hearts/OW.  I remember being in CoF with green level 50 gear for a while.  Most groups were "all welcome" and frankly, one of the CoF groups I did when finishing gearing/grinding tokens at 80 was within a minute or so of one of the recorded speed run times, hovering around 6 minutes for the run.  When people had no measure of what was going on behind the scenes, so long as the content was done at a reasonable pace, they frankly never cared unless they were preparing to do speedruns in an organized group or something.

The rest of the "stack up and cleave as DPS in a corner" meta in dungeons and old content (which in reality isn't much different than what it is today) is also a vestige of most of the content having AI bugs and exploits wherein you could more or less safespot a lot of the aggro/AoE/projectiles, and because a lot of the content was designed as a stepping stone into gear where things had to be designed not for endgame players but for players who were still joining the relatively new game and were probably doing this stuff in low-grade or under-leveled gear pieces.  You couldn't balance dungeons around players having ascended gear loadouts because dungeons weren't designed to challenge full parties of organized and kitted-out players; but rather still be doable by people in white gear.  People have fond memories because the content was objectively harder when not exploited and designed for weaker groups while having weaker gear and builds relative to today.  And that's ignoring all the elite spec powercreep, and boon uptime/availability, too, which has since more or less tripled damage output on DPS builds on average.

Which goes back to what I said; issues are some facets of being able to stat-check anything with boons, but overwhelmingly it's all still encounter design when it comes to making people not just stack up and rotate.

Edited July 7, 2023 by DeceiverX.8361

[DeceiverX.8361]

Double post.

Edited July 7, 2023 by DeceiverX.8361

[Lily.1935]

On 7/7/2023 at 3:45 PM, DeceiverX.8361 said:

The big thing is that most players had no clue about what was going on, either due to the lack of DPS meters.  And no offense, but it kind of shows in your post.  Warrior DPS was actually not even that dominant so much as it was consistently around third place (there was this silly thing going on in the community where a lot of dummies thought multi-hit skills were dealing the total summed damage on each strike which made people freak out over big numbers; hundred blades is now better than it used to be and GSAA was painfully low compared to other options), and Necro also did far more damage than people gave it credit for and hovered around Warrior, because its MH dagger AA chain was one of the best in the game and rivaled thief's which *was* the best DPS in the game using the old 5/6/0/0/3 build.  Yet most necromancers camped staff and scepter which were respectively utility and condition damage weapons, prior to condition damage being a viable way to deal solid PvE damage until the inclusion of Viper gear, because all Condi sets had defensive stats.  Which was intentional for a game balance PoV.  This was an era where DPS was maximized by using stuff like Lightning Hammer.  Players were overwhelmingly wrong in their perceptions, which I addressed in my very first post about DPS meters.

So, you're just incorrect about this. The power of auto attacks didn't match that of dedicated skills which rooted you in place or had some persistent damage. This has never been the case, the burst of 100b was much stronger than dagger which could only strike 1 target at the time as well. Most necromancer didn't camp scepter, dagger and axe were extremely common. Necromancer's strongest burst at the time didn't out damage 100b, which was focus skill 4 which had a bounce in combination with Axe skill 2. But axe's damage had been buffed so many times and still wasn't good, and it with focus had necromancer's strongest burst. So, the fact you believe that an auto attack was stronger than a dedicated skill which rooted you is baffling to me. And its not like 100b was the only skill which out damaged a rather lousy auto attack. Whirling attack did too which they'd rush into the corner of. Warrior wasn't the strongest, but I also mentioned Elementalist which dealt even more absurd damage with burning retreat. Not to mention Fiery greatsword. I was there, I was playing the meta, I was using the most effective build necromancer could muster. It was laughably bad.

If you're thinking it got better against bosses you're sorely mistaken. Ice bow, Fiery greatsword and meteor swarm could melt bosses in seconds even before power creep set into the game. Prebuffing was also a major thing too and if you think necromancer's vulnerability stacking might have helped it they really didn't have a lot of it. Mesmer, engineer, warrior and elementalist were all much better at it and there was a time were they were the best but with the combination of professions which could actually dish out damage which each could apply somewhere around 7 to 10 stacks and do it quicker.

Necromancer gets even worse than that because the party wanted to abuse fire fields which not only did not bring any, they brought dark fields which were worthless to the group, didn't provide stealth and would override the fire fields. Worse still wells have been buffed significantly since then, at the time they did very low damage. I know, I was using them. Even then they were better than minions before HoT but that doesn't mean they were good. Core necromancer almost does double the damage it did at launch which in full berserker puts necromancer below 10k.

ALSO we have confirmation that necromancer's damage was low from the devs at the time. They had responded multiple times to the community that necromancer's low damage was intentional. They weren't meant to hit hard. They were meant to be tanky and selfish which the community HATED.

Also, you're wrong about Condi gear. Rampagers existed since launch and was the go to condi gear, it wasn't Rabid. And before HoT released Sinister gear was released during Silverwastes. Most gear was somewhat defensive. And condis were just not good. Arena net didn't expect much overlap with condi builds it seemed but it proved not to be the case and when they changed the condition cap from 25 to in the thousands, we saw a few condi builds pop up. You know which ones were effective? Because it wasn't necromancer, they struggled to hit 25 stacks of bleed while Engineer could hit that with 20 stacks of burning which was a lot at the time.

On 7/7/2023 at 3:45 PM, DeceiverX.8361 said:

Ranger was as you said weak because ANet hadn't given pets PvE durability yet and launched ranger with effectively 30% less DPS to account for the pet attacks, which was mathematically sound in Open World, except the pet was usually dead from dungeon AoE damage/boss aggro with only having a few thousand effective health, such high toughness, no active mitigation, and long pet swap timers.  Plus, almost everyone was playing ranger as longbow because there weren't any archer alternatives, and RF also had such a long cast time that it was a DPS loss to the AA chain, so people were nerfing their own damage output on top of an already-weak class, and GS had a weak amount of sustained damage because it was a massive burst damage weapon with built-in evades on AA's thus being balanced for less DPS, and had otherwise low coefs outside of its PvP burst combos (Remorseless AOO Maul builds regularly hit for 30k+ per hit).  Sword was the best output, and nobody played it lol.

Rangers had a lot of problems, but not as much as necromancer did. Even without their pet they weren't horrible. They had fire fields, the ability to give fury and their spirits gave passive buffs to allies. They had uses but everyone wanted to use a longbow which was an abysmally bad weapon at the time. Greatsword, Sword+Axe were both pretty decent weapons but people didn't really use them. Ranger had been in a few speed run records at the time for dungeons because of the utility.

On 7/7/2023 at 3:45 PM, DeceiverX.8361 said:

Mesmer being a burst class with fragile AI it depended on for its damage output also was hit by the same issues ranger had and was subsequently pretty bottom-of-the-barrel,, and engineer had so much utility and solid burst combos in PvP while having no good DPS weapon (although bomb kit WAS overloaded for a time in this regard with BOB builds).

Mesmer was premium in Fractals. With its group stealth, time warp, portal and feedback its lower damage didn't matter. If you think Mesmer was bad early on I have to assume we weren't playing the same game because Mesmer was premium. Often you didn't want more than one, because yes warrior, elementalist or guardian had better damage but you can't ignore their utility. I ran a LOT of fractals, I was the fractal officer of my guild at the time.

On 7/7/2023 at 3:45 PM, DeceiverX.8361 said:

And despite all of this, I literally never got kicked for build or class choice on any character I made, which was probably a good dozen or more.  When I made my necromancer, I hit level 30 and spammed dungeons in story/exploration to 80 rather than doing hearts/OW.  I remember being in CoF with green level 50 gear for a while.  Most groups were "all welcome" and frankly, one of the CoF groups I did when finishing gearing/grinding tokens at 80 was within a minute or so of one of the recorded speed run times, hovering around 6 minutes for the run.  When people had no measure of what was going on behind the scenes, so long as the content was done at a reasonable pace, they frankly never cared unless they were preparing to do speedruns in an organized group or something.

Good for you. I was auto kicked for running necromancer. I was kicked a lot. And a lot of people experienced this, the Reaper song on youtube before HoT release actually references being kicked. It was such a common problem at the time to claim it wasn't is just a lie. I had such a bad experience with pugs I don't like doing anything with pugs to this day. They were awful. And most the welcoming groups you'd run into were started by necromancer or rangers or engineers so by necessity they had to be, but those groups were a minority.

 

On 7/7/2023 at 3:45 PM, DeceiverX.8361 said:

The rest of the "stack up and cleave as DPS in a corner" meta in dungeons and old content (which in reality isn't much different than what it is today) is also a vestige of most of the content having AI bugs and exploits wherein you could more or less safespot a lot of the aggro/AoE/projectiles, and because a lot of the content was designed as a stepping stone into gear where things had to be designed not for endgame players but for players who were still joining the relatively new game and were probably doing this stuff in low-grade or under-leveled gear pieces.  You couldn't balance dungeons around players having ascended gear loadouts because dungeons weren't designed to challenge full parties of organized and kitted-out players; but rather still be doable by people in white gear.  People have fond memories because the content was objectively harder when not exploited and designed for weaker groups while having weaker gear and builds relative to today.  And that's ignoring all the elite spec powercreep, and boon uptime/availability, too, which has since more or less tripled damage output on DPS builds on average.

People refused to run content without stacking in a corner. I managed to convince my guild to do it once and they complained for the next week about how awful it was to do. Now, that doesn't mean everyone would react like that but not a single group while doing dungeons I could find would run it like that. Stacking in a corner was considered mandatory, if you wanted to go off on your own you'd get kicked.

But even during that time people demanded you have Exotic gear at level 80 in full berserkers. A lot of people didn't believe you could do it in white gear. And running dungeons without stacking, I can see why they think that and even doing dungeons today I can see why it wouldn't be possible. Dungeons have a lot of just unfair mechanics that will down you even with your fancy legendary gear today. Cheap mechanics like a troll with an auto attack that dazes for a second that also does 5k damage. There's a reason a lot of dungeons aren't run any more. (BTW I used to solo HotW on my necromancer and that Troll wasn't a problem at the time because of how Stability worked and Death shroud had 50% damage reduction, which is funny because necromancer now has lower raw defense then it used to, one of the few fights that has actually gotten harder due to balance changes rather than easier. Although that's not 2014 since necro didn't get foot in the grave until a bit later.).

 

But my point stands. 2014 Guild Wars 2 was a mess. Its not a better game, its a far far worse game. And the nostalgia goggles you have are very rose tinted in this case...

[Matoro.9708]

There has been a lot of remarkably valuable, pertinent feedback lately from the community that I really think could save the soul of the game. Posts from people like OP that just seem to 'get' what makes games fun and immersive. I could even add to their argument: one of the greatest roleplaying games of all time, D&D, is largely reactive. After you make your character, you roll the dice and your only responsibility is to respond. No judgement, no time pressure, no 'wrong' choices. You just get to be 'you' and it's enough.

I have somewhat renewed faith that there is at least some sort of consensus among a portion of the playerbase about what makes Guild Wars special, and that even if this project fails, maybe somewhere down the line a different studio can make something better. As a pessimist though, I think it's human nature to ruin things. Still, I admire the salient arguments coming up. It's on the devs to listen.

[Gaeb.2837]

On 7/6/2023 at 2:05 PM, Echostorm.9143 said:

I don't agree about DPS loving rotational gameplay.  Many games provide for DPS to use reactive skills.  In DAoC you had attacks that would only succeed after you block or parry for example.  I like to be able to save my CC and boonstrips for when they are needed, not because they're step 12.  I like having a blink to save me from dying when something goes wrong, not dying because my build demands all skills do damage.  I want to feel enaged in the fight, not mindlessly spamming things in a certain order, that isn't fun, it's macroing.

Even the not too distant past there was some of this 'engagement' for DPS: When defiance bar break used to make players do more damage than it does now, you did have to be thoughtful about saving your big burst damage for that window (back when I was learning T4 fractals I always had to be thoughtful about when my Reaper Shroud 4 was up vs defiance bar) rather than just mindlessly following a rotation .... but that got nerfed HARD.

1. 'Exposed' Today (wiki) : +10% strike / +20% condi damage (10s duration)
2. 'Exposed' Better (wiki of May'21) : +30% strike / +100% condi damage (I believe the duration was 5s or variable)
3. 'Exposed' Older (wiki of Sep'20) : +50% damage (I believe the duration was 5s or variable)

I would argue that by moving from 2 to 1 they made the game LESS engaging for DPS (reaction -> rotation) as now its just "play these piano keys in this order". It also results in homogenizing the DPS design because "burst" DPS builds lose their identity in boss fights. Moving back in the direction of 2 would buff builds like Soulbeast and Firebrand (burning is practically power dps and FB can dump a lot of it in a short window) and make for more interesting gameplay in my opinion. 

Rotation vs. Reaction - I would rather gameplay focus more on 'reaction'. Alacrigade, Quick Brand, and old Quick Scrapper both felt like they gave you plenty of options in terms of how to build and focus, and play the game rather than following a strict buff rotation (they need 1-3 skills every 20s or so for their key buffs, which is about the right level of investment imo) or being forced into using non-sensical skills, eg: new scrapper a- Hammer 3 on scrapper locking you into a long animation to give quickness and b- function gyro being a top-tier finisher option that then takes away its rez utility (why they didn't give WHIRL finishers, which would be MUCH more synergistic than Leap given hammer's Electro-whirl and Shredder Gyro both of which are native to scrapper, is beyond me), or new scourge shade a- being really strict on 8s timer or you lose concentration and b- requiring manual aiming if you want to make sure you hit your group, which compound each other in terms of painfulness (desperately needs a duration buff, 12s at least, and ideally give Sandstorm Shroud another pulse or two so we're not reliant on perfectly placing shades for alac - have a writeup of suggestions in the Necro forums/feedback threads). Just ... argh. 

Edited July 10, 2023 by Gaeb.2837

[Ghertu.7096]

On 7/7/2023 at 1:54 PM, Lily.1935 said:

I've heard some people talk about the early days like that, but early GW2 was pretty awful and I highly doubt any of them would keep playing that version of the game. I was there, it wasn't just unbalanced, it was broken. People would stack in corners the only viable set of armor was berserkers in pve and only a small handful of classes were even viable. Engineer was under powered, Ranger was under powered and necromancer wasn't just bad, it was the weakest DPS, provided almost no support, had no defenses and and had skills which actively harmed your party's synergy.

It was typically Warrior, Guardian and Elementalist who were the best DPS at the time and it wasn't interesting gameplay. Elementalist would summon a fire sword and run into the wall stacking its trail effect causing massive burst damage. Then that was nerfed, then they'd do the same with staff which also was nerfed. Then you had Warrior which was rush into the corner with greatsword while the enemy stacked up and couldn't do anything. Guardian was pretty solid with its utility and also broke several world bosses with hammer stacking multiple symbols at a time doing absurd amounts of damage. Mesmer and Thief had uses too but the game's meta was centered around "how can we cheese this the best.

There was No Skill in early PvE. There was a good number of players that thought that stacking in a corner and bursting out fire fields  and abusing movement mechanics against a wall to out DPS 5-8 players before the advent of quickness was the intended way to play and a few of the quit  when that horribly abuse of the system was patched out because they had spent 2 years not learning how to dodge or even running dungeons normally.

I'm not saying there wasn't good things that happened during that time. Attack on Lions arch was fun, the new shiny game was cool, old lions arch was great. But Balance was an absolute mess. Guild Wars 2 is a much better game today then it was then.

But its not like there weren't support roles in those days either. Just they were different roles like the Reflect class(mesmer or guardian), the Phalanx strength warrior, Stealther(Mesmer or Thief). And Support did exist in PvP and WvW as well. HoT just codified it a bit more, pushing more into traditional roles.

Arena net has always struggled with transitioning into a new philosophy for their game. This current balance patch is trying to transition into their new philosophy for balance. And its ROUGH right now for sure. But Its not like this is the last build we'll ever see.

Sorry for the long rant.

Things you're talking about are results of either bugs or oversights, not intended design. You could glitch the AI so a boss would stop moving and attacking, turning the encounter into a sort of an idle game, but it was not planned by the developers to be like that. People here, as I understand it, complain that today ANet designs PvE encounters to play like a sort of an idle game conciously and intentionally.