Maybe stop adding variety to add new content for player, too much redundancy

[kiroho.4738]

On 7/27/2024 at 2:01 PM, Astralporing.1957 said:

Versatility only works if the options to choose are somewhat equal in worth. Meanhwile, in GW2 90% of all gear/build options you can pick are complete trash. And i am very generous about that 90%.

"Complete trash" for what?

For Fractals, Strikes and Raids? Yes.
For Story, Open World, Metas, World Bosses etc. -> 90% of the game? No, because literally everything is viable there.
And I'm not at all generous about that 90%.

 

On 7/27/2024 at 2:01 PM, Astralporing.1957 said:

It's that versatility that results in the 10x gap in dps between average and top.

Hardly disagree.
I claim that even without all the "trash" stats, runes etc. -> with only meta stuff there won't be a big difference to now.

The thing with GW2's combat is that equipment and even the build only plays a rather small role for the overall dmg.
The personal skill -> what skills you use in what order, what attacks you dodge, which attacks you side step, when to use a block etc. etc. are so much more important.

It's no secret that some people - even when 1:1 copying equip and build from meta sides and copying the rotation - reach only like 10 or 15k while the benchmark for that build is at 44k+.
You can find posts on reddit from people having exactly that problem.
Get rid of the meta rotation, and you rather easily get under 5k

 

PS: The 10x gap you mention refers to open world events btw.
This means the lower end are single players without a squad not knowing much about the game, getting downed regularly - and the top end are organized people with meta builds, 100% boon uptime, good to very good rotations that dodges all or most of the incoming attacks.

 

On 7/27/2024 at 12:25 PM, Parasite.5389 said:

y'know, if you don't like the game, you can play something else

I never liked that argument. It's hella toxic and hurts the game if people follow it.

I mean, people criticize the game, that's good (as long as it's not toxic). And OP is far away from a "this needs to be changed to the game is unplayable" statement.

Just imagine OP would just leave the game instead of making this post. And every player not 100% liking the game would do the same. What would this lead to?
1) Ofcourse it would lead to a very empty game. But more importanly
2) it would lead to a game where the devs receive no negative feedback at all. No suggestions, no critique about anything.

Devs would just do what they feel is the right thing and no player would say anything against it. Those who don't like it, would just leave.
This wouldn't only kill the game very fast, it would also stop any improvements of the game.
In the end it would be very similar to a game, where Devs simply not listening to the players at all. There are/were games where Devs doing exactly this and well, usually such games die relatively fast.

 

In other words: No, don't play something else, just because you don't like a certain Part of the game OP. Share your Critique, even if @Parasite.5389, I myself or anybody else don't agree with you. Feedback is important, as long as it's not toxic/destructive.

 

[Parasite.5389]

24 minutes ago, kiroho.4738 said:

In other words: No, don't play something else, just because you don't like a certain Part of the game OP. Share your Critique, even if @Parasite.5389, I myself or anybody else don't agree with you. Feedback is important, as long as it's not toxic/destructive.

with all due respect, OP isn't offering any constructive critique, they're just bringing up redundant points about things that are already happening in game, with their only points being:

• Reducing the amount of build variety, balancing, and "Bloating" per expansion from new elite specs and trait line - which Anet are doing by not making any new elite specs moving forward and instead giving us a Single new weapon this year
• And Producing more PvX content - Because 4 new maps, 2 strikes and a Fractal with CM, convergences (with CM), and rift events during SotO; and another 3 maps, a new Raid (with a convergence), new Fractal (with CM), new PvP game type, + all the other new features to come in JW clearly isn't new content

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

i think if anything this game isn't versatile enough compared to its predecessor. the gear, classes and builds still feel extremely limiting in scope.

 

in the original guild wars you could have an entire secondary profession before even leaving the tutorial area, and there's thousands of skills to chose from instead of being locked into a few overpowered or underpowered weapons and abilities you're forced to take for every encounter.

 

i feel like it also pales in comparison to every other major mmo that has way more build options! i feel like the developers are extremely conservative with versatility because they don't want it to become a nightmare to balance, but the game is really starting to show its age since its lost all sense of progression beyond getting full legendary gear (which takes only about one year at most), and if you have that then you're basically done with everything.

 

does anyone remember when your traits affected your attributes, or you had to get abilities from monsters? now just insta-80 and buy 250 hero points from wvw or gemshop, throw on some berserker, harrier, or even celestial gear and run the one or two meta builds for you class and you're good to go. it's just so stale. 😞

 

let's not even talk about how flying over everything with mounts has simplified all build options by removing mobility entirely, outside of pvp.

Edited July 29 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[kiroho.4738]

3 hours ago, Parasite.5389 said:

with all due respect, OP isn't offering any constructive critique, they're just bringing up redundant points about things that are already happening in game

I mean, obviously what happens in game is not enough for OP?
That's a valid opinion and as such constructive feedback.

You (or me) not agreeing to their points, doesn't invalidates their point.

 

3 hours ago, Parasite.5389 said:

Reducing the amount of build variety, balancing, and "Bloating" per expansion from new elite specs and trait line - which Anet are doing by not making any new elite specs moving forward and instead giving us a Single new weapon this year

As said, apparently that's not enough for OP.
It's a valid opinion.

You don't have to agree with it (I don't agree either), but you have to tolerate it. And you really shouldn't advice OP to stop playing just because you don't agree with that opinion..

 

3 hours ago, Parasite.5389 said:

And Producing more PvX content - Because 4 new maps, 2 strikes and a Fractal with CM, convergences (with CM), and rift events during SotO; and another 3 maps, a new Raid (with a convergence), new Fractal (with CM), new PvP game type, + all the other new features to come in JW clearly isn't new content

That's actually not much for two years compared to previous releases.

When you look at LS4, we got in less than 2 years:
6 Maps
3 Raid wings including challenge modes
3 Fractals + Instability overhauls
2 Mounts
6 Legendary weapons
A Legendary ring
A Legendary accessoire
New Bounty Hunts on 4 maps
2 Stat combinations
And more

In other words: No, with the mini expansions Anet does not produce more pvx content. The release less content.
I mean, that's the whole idea behind the mini expansions and Anet communicated it openly, so you shouldn't pretend it's not like that.

 

 

[kiroho.4738]

1 hour ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

in the original guild wars you could have an entire secondary profession before even leaving the tutorial area, and there's thousands of skills to chose from instead of being locked into a few overpowered or underpowered weapons and abilities you're forced to take for every encounter.

When you actually play GW1, you see that the problem there is even worse than in GW2.

Yes you had thousands of skills to choose from on the first glimpse, but as soon as you play around with skills and builds, you will see that 95% of them are useless or simply worse versions of other skills.

As soon as you want a somehow viable build (that gets you through the story), you will see that you are limited to only a small amount of skills.
The large majority of skills is too bad or - as said - there are simply better version of them.

Example: There is one skill that revives your pet ony absurdly short range. And there is one skill that revives your pet on very large range and heals it when alive. Also with much less cast time and cooldown. Plus latter skill qualifies you to take your pet. Former one needs a second skill to actually have your pet with you.
And since you get the latter skill during any tutorial and the former one only at the mid of one campaign, there is no way anybody actually uses the former skill.

 

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

29 minutes ago, kiroho.4738 said:

When you actually play GW1, you see that the problem there is even worse than in GW2.

Yes you had thousands of skills to choose from on the first glimpse, but as soon as you play around with skills and builds, you will see that 95% of them are useless or simply worse versions of other skills.

As soon as you want a somehow viable build (that gets you through the story), you will see that you are limited to only a small amount of skills.
The large majority of skills is too bad or - as said - there are simply better version of them.

Example: There is one skill that revives your pet ony absurdly short range. And there is one skill that revives your pet on very large range and heals it when alive. Also with much less cast time and cooldown. Plus latter skill qualifies you to take your pet. Former one needs a second skill to actually have your pet with you.
And since you get the latter skill during any tutorial and the former one only at the mid of one campaign, there is no way anybody actually uses the former skill.

 

my point is that you at least had options, here if your weapons and abilities are bad then you're just out of luck. a big, well-known example by the community is the elementalist, who has had to work hard to achieve the same level of performance as nearly every other class since the start of the game, and most of this can be attributed to the poor design of their kits, especially their bland and outdated utility skills which basically don't exist outside of pvp.

 

i think another well-known example is the warrior, who is loaded down with endless possibilities for weapons and utilities and most of them are bad, so they just end up taking the best options out of what they have available just to fill a skill slot!

 

i feel like there's a reason the guardian has been the most-played class since the game's launch, and especially since path of fire.

Edited July 29 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Astralporing.1957]

34 minutes ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

my point is that you at least had options

There's no point offering options, if they are bad options. ll this leads to is more noob traps and game unbalance. A smaller, but more meaningful number of choices would be vastly preferable to that.

Edited July 29 by Astralporing.1957

[kiroho.4738]

1 hour ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

my point is that you at least had options

So you say having a hand full of good and thousands of useless options is better than having a hand full of good and a hand full of bad options?

Yeah, no, it's not. That's nonesense...

 

[Sobx.1758]

15 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

There's no point offering options, if they are bad options. ll this leads to is more noob traps and game unbalance. A smaller, but more meaningful number of choices would be vastly preferable to that.

The thing is that a lot of options considered to be "bad" are mostly "bad for that one job" ("maximizing dps"). Those options aren't necessarily bad for other things, especially when talking about open world.

 

18 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

let's not even talk about how flying over everything with mounts has simplified all build options by removing mobility entirely, outside of pvp.

I think you kind of have a point with this one, most mobility options lost their value in ow because everyone can do it with mounts, so why not slot something else instead. They didn't lose their value everywhere in the game though, so in the end... they're still not overally bad options to have.

[kiroho.4738]

48 minutes ago, Sobx.1758 said:

The thing is that a lot of options considered to be "bad" are mostly "bad for that one job" ("maximizing dps"). Those options aren't necessarily bad for other things, especially when talking about open world.

That's not the case for @SoftFootpaws.9134's argument about GW1.

Just one example: There is one skill in GW1 - Comfort Animal - that:
- Revives your pet when it's dead
- Heals the pet when it's not dead
- Qualifies you to have your pet (in GW1 you need to take certain skills in order to have your pet with you)
- Can be obtained very easily at the very begining at all campaigns
- Has a huge range
- Has a short cooldown (1s)
- Has a short cast time (1s)
- Has low energy costs (5)

And there is a second skill - Revive Animal - that:
- Revives your pet when it's dead
- Does not qualify you to have your pet (so you need a second skill)
- Can only be obtained in one campaign somewhere in mid game
- Has a extremely short range (you need to stand on your pet)
- Has a much longer cooldown (20s)
- Has a much longer cast time (6s)
- Has the same energy costs (5)

In short, Revive Animal is simply a bad skill. Comfort Animal does the same and much more with less costs, less cast time etc.
When taking Revive Animal, you still need a Skill that qualifies you to have your pet. And surprise, Comfort Animal is the best option for that.

In other words, there is no situation you ever want to take Revive Animal. Not in early game, not in mid or end game, not in PvP, not for any farm build, not even for any meme or fun build. There is not even a reason to buy that skill aside from the one title that requires you to learn all skills.

And GW1 is full of such and similar skills.

Edited July 30 by kiroho.4738
typo

[Sobx.1758]

13 minutes ago, kiroho.4738 said:

That's not the case for @SoftFootpaws.9134's argument about GW1.

Just one example: There is one skill in GW1 - Comfort Animal - that:
- Revives your pet when it's dead
- Heals the pet when it's not dead
- Qualifies you to have your pet (in GW1 you need to take certain skills in order to have your pet with you)
- Can be obtained very easily at the very begining at all campaigns
- Has a huge range
- Has a short cooldown (1s)
- Has a short cast time (1s)
- Has low energy costs (5)

And there is a second skill - Revive Animal - that:
- Revives your pet when it's dead
- Does not qualify you to have your pet (so you need a second skill)
- Can only be obtained in one campaign somewhere in mid game
- Has a extremely short range (you need to stand on your pet)
- Has a much longer cooldown (20s)
- Has a much longer cast time (6s)
- Has the same energy costs (5)

In short, Revive Animal is simply a bad skill. Comfort Animal does the same and much more with less costs, less cast time etc.
When taking Revive Animal, you still need a Skill that qualifies you to have your pet. And surprise, Comfort Animal is the best option for that.

In other words, there is no situation you ever want to take Revive Animal. Not in early game, not in mid or end game, not in PvP, not for any farm build, not even for any meme or fun build. There is not even a reason to buy that skill aside from the one title that requires you to learn all skills.

And GW1 is full of such and similar skills.

Clear, thank you for explaining -in my post I defaulted to gw2 skills so mb. 😅 

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Sobx.1758 said:

The thing is that a lot of options considered to be "bad" are mostly "bad for that one job" ("maximizing dps"). Those options aren't necessarily bad for other things, especially when talking about open world.

You are missing the forest for the trees. I wasn't speaking about individual stat/trait/weapon choices. I was treating the whole combinations of those as a "choice". And yes, due to how they are designed, 99% of those are just plain bad.

The system is designed to work around the idea of multiplicative synergy, but most of the build choices you can make lack this synergy. Those choices aren't "good for other things". Most of them aren't good for even a single thing.

Not to mention, you omited one thing: sure, a lot of stat/trait options are at least somewhat useful for some other things (Although there are those that are just bad, and some, that are good when looked at individually, or lack the abovementioned synergy and thus end up useless), but that usually means they are either good for one single thing, or in some specific content. Outside that those theoretically good builds suddenly become bad.

All of the above again brings us to my point: in any single situation ("job") we're offered thousands (actually, more than that) of options, of which only a few are good, and handful are maybe decent. All the others are nothing more than a noob trap. It's primarily due to this that the massive gaps within the community exist. And it's due to this that those gaps will not be bridged.

[Sobx.1758]

2 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

You are missing the forest for the trees. I wasn't speaking about individual stat/trait/weapon choices. I was treating the whole combinations of those as a "choice". And yes, due to how they are designed, 99% of those are just plain bad.

The system is designed to work around the idea of multiplicative synergy, but most of the build choices you can make lack this synergy. Those choices aren't "good for other things". Most of them aren't good for even a single thing.

So... you're telling me that "most of them aren't good even at single thing" and then say "sure, a lot of them are somewhat useful for some other things"? I'd say you're wrong about 99% of those being "just plain bad" (and I'm not taking that 99% literally) -sure, they're not the best/meta, but that doesn't mean they're automatically bad/useless. It's a generalized claim missing the point, which sits right there next to the "system is too hard to use [because the players don't care to read with understanding what each of the components do or because they didn't come up with the top/meta build by themselves]".

 

23 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Not to mention, you omited one thing: sure, a lot of stat/trait options are at least somewhat useful for some other things (Although there are those that are just bad, and some, that are good when looked at individually, or lack the abovementioned synergy and thus end up useless), but that usually means they are either good for one single thing, or in some specific content. Outside that those theoretically good builds suddenly become bad.

All of the above again brings us to my point: in any single situation ("job") we're offered thousands (actually, more than that) of options, of which only a few are good, and handful are maybe decent. All the others are nothing more than a noob trap. It's primarily due to this that the massive gaps within the community exist. And it's due to this that those gaps will not be bridged.

No, I didn't omit it, in fact in my previous post I do point out the skill usefulness can vary between the gamemodes (first by noting that "those options aren't necessarily bad, especially when talking about ow" and then by saying that "even though the mobility skills lost their value due to mounts, they didn't exactly lose their value everywhere in the game"). I'm well aware of that fact and it was directly part of the point. Not everything needs to perform evenly in every part or situation of the game. In fact, it's barely possible without overloading options with additional effects -which then leads to the ever so fun snowballing effect because if x is better than y, y needs to be buffed... after which if y happens to outperform x, it's "an argument" to buff x again.

👇

23 hours ago, kiroho.4738 said:

"Complete trash" for what?

For Fractals, Strikes and Raids? Yes.
For Story, Open World, Metas, World Bosses etc. -> 90% of the game? No, because literally everything is viable there.
And I'm not at all generous about that 90%.

[Ashen.2907]

I think that there is a fine line between enough options and variety for a creative and complex build system and option bloat where there is too much chaff to sort through to make solid choices. Sometimes I do feel that we have crossed that line here where redundancy has reached a point that class identity suffers....and then I find a cool trait/skill/stat/weapon interaction that brings new life to a character that has become stale. 

[Astralporing.1957]

2 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

So... you're telling me that "most of them aren't good even at single thing" and then say "sure, a lot of them are somewhat useful for some other things"? I'd say you're wrong about 99% of those being "just plain bad" (and I'm not taking that 99% literally) -sure, they're not the best/meta, but that doesn't mean they're automatically bad/useless. It's a generalized claim missing the point, which sits right there next to the "system is too hard to use [because the players don't care to read with understanding what each of the components do or because they didn't come up with the top/meta build by themselves]".

 

No, I didn't omit it, in fact in my previous post I do point out the skill usefulness can vary between the gamemodes (first by noting that "those options aren't necessarily bad, especially when talking about ow" and then by saying that "even though the mobility skills lost their value due to mounts, they didn't exactly lose their value everywhere in the game"). I'm well aware of that fact and it was directly part of the point. Not everything needs to perform evenly in every part or situation of the game. In fact, it's barely possible without overloading options with additional effects -which then leads to the ever so fun snowballing effect because if x is better than y, y needs to be buffed... after which if y happens to outperform x, it's "an argument" to buff x again.

Yes. because (as you'd know if you were paying attention) in one case i was talking about builds seen as a whole, and in the other about individual skills and traits.

But, if that's too complicated, i will say it in more understandable (i hope) way.

Yes, most of the traits, skills, weapons, and stat sets taken individually have at least some use (even if in many cases that use is quite niche). Most of the builds however, that are made of combinations of those individual traits, skills, weapons and stat sets is not good for even a single thing.

I.E. Trait combinations for power dps are good and useful. Support skills are useful. Condi weapons are useful. Nomad stats are... well, let's say they could possibly be useful in some cases. At the same time a build made of power trait set, with condi weapon, nomad stats and utility skills is trash and not useful for anything.

And it so happens that many of those possible combinations can be even worse than my example. This one at least had a coherent stat set, and coherent trait set (even if they do not match each other). Many options players come up with do not really have even that.

And btw, you are right not treating the 99% literally. Because, in reality it's even worse than that, it's just that most of the choices are so bad you probably never even considered they might exist (even if they do exist).

2 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

No, I didn't omit it, in fact in my previous post I do point out the skill usefulness can vary between the gamemodes (first by noting that "those options aren't necessarily bad, especially when talking about ow" and then by saying that "even though the mobility skills lost their value due to mounts, they didn't exactly lose their value everywhere in the game"). I'm well aware of that fact and it was directly part of the point.

And? A choice that has some use somewhere else, but in this specific case is not useful is still a bad choice. And the game does not restrict you from making such bad choices (like, for example, from doing PvE in a PvP build, or from, say, trying to be a healer in a pure glass dps build.

The more choices you can make, and the less restrictions you have on making them, the better you can finetune them for your specific situation. the downside of that however is that the freedom to make good choices turns into a freedom to make bad ones. And when in any specific situation out of all possible choices bad ones vastly outnumber the good ones, people that lack either the knowledge to understand why some choices are beter and some worse (in GW2 that's a majority of players) are far more likely to choose badly. Some people solve this by using out of game help, but most do not ever use such sources, so end up getting lost.

2 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

Not everything needs to perform evenly in every part or situation of the game. In fact, it's barely possible without overloading options with additional effects -which then leads to the ever so fun snowballing effect because if x is better than y, y needs to be buffed... after which if y happens to outperform x, it's "an argument" to buff x again.

That has nothing to do with what i was talking about. In fact, in the system we have, it's literally impossible to end up with all potential builds being good, much less good in all situations. That would require at the very least removing completely all the cases of compounding synergy between different individual subchoices. And by then we're talking complete overhaul of the whole system anyway.

The system is not badly designed. It is not flawed. It's doing exactly what it was meant to do. It's just not a system that's a good fit for a huge majority of this game's population.

[Linken.6345]

37 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Yes. because (as you'd know if you were paying attention) in one case i was talking about builds seen as a whole, and in the other about individual skills and traits.

But, if that's too complicated, i will say it in more understandable (i hope) way.

Yes, most of the traits, skills, weapons, and stat sets taken individually have at least some use (even if in many cases that use is quite niche). Most of the builds however, that are made of combinations of those individual traits, skills, weapons and stat sets is not good for even a single thing.

I.E. Trait combinations for power dps are good and useful. Support skills are useful. Condi weapons are useful. Nomad stats are... well, let's say they could possibly be useful in some cases. At the same time a build made of power trait set, with condi weapon, nomad stats and utility skills is trash and not useful for anything.

And it so happens that many of those possible combinations can be even worse than my example. This one at least had a coherent stat set, and coherent trait set (even if they do not match each other). Many options players come up with do not really have even that.

And btw, you are right not treating the 99% literally. Because, in reality it's even worse than that, it's just that most of the choices are so bad you probably never even considered they might exist (even if they do exist).

And? A choice that has some use somewhere else, but in this specific case is not useful is still a bad choice. And the game does not restrict you from making such bad choices (like, for example, from doing PvE in a PvP build, or from, say, trying to be a healer in a pure glass dps build.

The more choices you can make, and the less restrictions you have on making them, the better you can finetune them for your specific situation. the downside of that however is that the freedom to make good choices turns into a freedom to make bad ones. And when in any specific situation out of all possible choices bad ones vastly outnumber the good ones, people that lack either the knowledge to understand why some choices are beter and some worse (in GW2 that's a majority of players) are far more likely to choose badly. Some people solve this by using out of game help, but most do not ever use such sources, so end up getting lost.

That has nothing to do with what i was talking about. In fact, in the system we have, it's literally impossible to end up with all potential builds being good, much less good in all situations. That would require at the very least removing completely all the cases of compounding synergy between different individual subchoices. And by then we're talking complete overhaul of the whole system anyway.

The system is not badly designed. It is not flawed. It's doing exactly what it was meant to do. It's just not a system that's a good fit for a huge majority of this game's population.

Dident an Anet dev say sometime back that 60% of people did not even select traits and have 6 of the same rune.

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Linken.6345 said:

Dident an Anet dev say sometime back that 60% of people did not even select traits and have 6 of the same rune.

I don;t remember that comment too well, but i think they said that a large amount of players never changed their traits again after selecting them once during leveling.

Still, there's a good reason for why in one of the traitline reworks they added that big red exclamation mark pointing you towards trait selection tab if  you don't have some of them filled.

Edited July 30 by Astralporing.1957

[perilisk.1874]

Builds are only half the problem, though. A lot of it is that nearly every encounter is a DPS check, so that is why people set their build up for DPS, and support mostly exists to support them in maximizing DPS. If there was a meta that just required running bundles around while the boss throws damage at you, then people might gear for defense, mobility, healing, etc. The build and the tactics are the solution to a problem, and the less variety there is in new problems, the less people will change their solution.

"Mechanics" are another problem, since they're usually disconnected from any consideration of build, other than really generic stuff like defiance bars. "Use this special skill when X happens" is a challenge, but it's not going to get you to change up your build. Compare it with the fight against Shiro in GW2, where he had a lot of overpowered skills, but many either acted as counters to player abilities or could be countered by player abilities (e.g. stance removal).

[Gehenna.3625]

7 hours ago, perilisk.1874 said:

Builds are only half the problem, though. A lot of it is that nearly every encounter is a DPS check, so that is why people set their build up for DPS, and support mostly exists to support them in maximizing DPS. If there was a meta that just required running bundles around while the boss throws damage at you, then people might gear for defense, mobility, healing, etc. The build and the tactics are the solution to a problem, and the less variety there is in new problems, the less people will change their solution.

DPS checks only happen with raid bosses and technically encounters like world bosses/bounties that have to be killed within a certain amount of time. I say technically because as soon as you have a decent group size most of these world bosses/bounties can easily be beaten regardless of builds. So you're speaking from a very niche point of view. My point here is that the vast majority of content in GW2 is NOT a DPS check aka you can take as long as you need to kill it. 

7 hours ago, perilisk.1874 said:

"Mechanics" are another problem, since they're usually disconnected from any consideration of build, other than really generic stuff like defiance bars. "Use this special skill when X happens" is a challenge, but it's not going to get you to change up your build. Compare it with the fight against Shiro in GW2, where he had a lot of overpowered skills, but many either acted as counters to player abilities or could be countered by player abilities (e.g. stance removal).

In most content in GW2 you can bypass mechanics, mostly due to power creep and especially in the OW the bar has to be set really low because of the enormous difference in output between someone who barely has an idea what he's doing and someone who's got a pretty good grasp of the combat system. And especially story and OW content has to be set down to accomodate most players.

Personally, I feel that the combat system including builds are far too complex for the vast majority of content, which is why I think that casual players, who are the majority of players in GW2 just set things once and forget about it. And it's the lack of DPS checks that equally keeps them playing as well as allows them to not learn the combat system further. And

Astralporing makes a good point when he's saying that red exclamation marks were added for a reason. If it was a rare occasion that a player would not equip traits (also runes, sigils, etc.) these wouldn't have been added. A lot of players just aren't interested in build wars and min maxing simply because they don't care or feel it's overwhelming and the traits aren't necessarily self-explanatory. Think of it: there's a reason why there are websites with builds that are playtested that many players just copy paste on their own characters and then follow the rotations suggested. Surely it means that people cannot easily figure that out by themselves and that there are a TON of sub-optimal build variations.

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

On 7/27/2024 at 5:23 PM, Kozumi.5816 said:

It doesn't really have any. It wasn't until EoD it joined WoW in having 3 playable specs per class.

The trait system is just an illusion of choice. Weapons are the real variety. There's actually weapon variety in builds now, so I think adding more weapons and updating old ones is better.

In WoW a spec was limited to mostly one role, yes, you could technically heal as BM Hunter, but noone was dumb enough to seriously do it.

Before EoD Revenant alone had 5 builds on Renegade(Power, Condi DPS, Power, Condi AlacDPS and HealAlac) as an example. Guard had 2 flavors of DH, condi FB, CQ FB and Heal FB. This is just 2 out of 9 classes in PvE.
Traits are not exactly an illusion, if a HFB was a HFB because of an Axe, a Shield and a Staff then I could just grab my DH and heal just as well just by using those weapons or vice versa. Traits allow a "spec" to go down any path, a core Guard can be DH Lite or straight up be a healer through the COMBINATION of traits and weapons, same applies to Ele for example, choose the right traits and weapons and you can be DPS, or heal on core, or even more on an elite spec.

[Sobx.1758]

20 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Yes. because (as you'd know if you were paying attention) in one case i was talking about builds seen as a whole, and in the other about individual skills and traits.

But, if that's too complicated, i will say it in more understandable (i hope) way.

Yes, most of the traits, skills, weapons, and stat sets taken individually have at least some use (even if in many cases that use is quite niche). Most of the builds however, that are made of combinations of those individual traits, skills, weapons and stat sets is not good for even a single thing.

I.E. Trait combinations for power dps are good and useful. Support skills are useful. Condi weapons are useful. Nomad stats are... well, let's say they could possibly be useful in some cases. At the same time a build made of power trait set, with condi weapon, nomad stats and utility skills is trash and not useful for anything.

And it so happens that many of those possible combinations can be even worse than my example. This one at least had a coherent stat set, and coherent trait set (even if they do not match each other). Many options players come up with do not really have even that.

And btw, you are right not treating the 99% literally. Because, in reality it's even worse than that, it's just that most of the choices are so bad you probably never even considered they might exist (even if they do exist).

Except that's still wrong, since most choices aren't bad. Once again, they could only be considered "bad/useless" if you're specifically aiming for min-maxing whatever it is you want to min-max (which in most threads like this one will come down to dps). Those choices -whether it's about individual components or full builds- aren't "bad/useless" just because they aren't best/meta. The repeated claims in threads like this one (and already even in this thread itself) is that "maxing out dps would be better!" or "options are bad because dps checks can exist here or there". The last claim (which is made a few posts above) might have a point if it wasn't for a fac that those occasional "dps checks" aren't anywhere remotely close to being at the "best/meta" choices/builds. And without change most of the other choices still add other utility/value to the build. Not to forget that bad choices exist, but it's not anywhere in the ballpark of what you're attempting to make it in your posts, as it's repeatedly being pointed out.

20 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

And? A choice that has some use somewhere else, but in this specific case is not useful is still a bad choice. And the game does not restrict you from making such bad choices (like, for example, from doing PvE in a PvP build, or from, say, trying to be a healer in a pure glass dps build.

The more choices you can make, and the less restrictions you have on making them, the better you can finetune them for your specific situation. the downside of that however is that the freedom to make good choices turns into a freedom to make bad ones. And when in any specific situation out of all possible choices bad ones vastly outnumber the good ones, people that lack either the knowledge to understand why some choices are beter and some worse (in GW2 that's a majority of players) are far more likely to choose badly. Some people solve this by using out of game help, but most do not ever use such sources, so end up getting lost.

Ah yes, the legendary "AND?!" type of response. You said I omited something, I pointed out I evidently didn't omit it, while bringing up the mentions about it in my previous post... and you're responding to that with a supposedly cheeky "and?". And nothing more than that -you said I omitted something, I informed you that you were evidently (because we can read both of those mentioned in my initial post which I brought up again in my next response) wrong when you said that and... that's it.

No, it's not necessarily a bad choice, it's useful for things other than maximizing specifically whatever you think about in whatever specific and yet unspoken context. It doesn't mean that there aren't bad options that would need improvement (there absolutely are), but it's not what you're writing and it's not 99% or close to it.

20 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

That has nothing to do with what i was talking about. In fact, in the system we have, it's literally impossible to end up with all potential builds being good, much less good in all situations. That would require at the very least removing completely all the cases of compounding synergy between different individual subchoices. And by then we're talking complete overhaul of the whole system anyway.

Which is why what you just quoted literally said: "(...)In fact, it's barely possible without overloading options with additional effects -which then leads to(...).". Somehow you're telling me that's not what you're tlaking about and continue with basically repeating what you just quoted.

 

18 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

I don;t remember that comment too well, but i think they said that a large amount of players never changed their traits again after selecting them once during leveling.

Still, there's a good reason for why in one of the traitline reworks they added that big red exclamation mark pointing you towards trait selection tab if  you don't have some of them filled.

So it's almost as if those specific players simply don't care about a specific build, but just clicked something once and kept happily going through the story or whatever laid back activity they wanted to keep doing. One could think that they'd do the same thing regardless of the implemented build system.

Edited July 31 by Sobx.1758

[Fipmip.7219]

we're in way to deep now. But i think this type of design philosophy is valuable in terms of giving options to the consumer when choosing an MMO. if they all had a homogeneous class system we'd never know what could be. we here at guild wars do it. for science. 

[Astralporing.1957]

5 hours ago, Fipmip.7219 said:

 we here at guild wars do it. for science. 

Game testing is usually not something you pay for, but something you get paid for instead.

[Fipmip.7219]

3 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Game testing is usually not something you pay for, but something you get paid for instead.

that hasnt been true for a decade. also, the test is finished, and the results are here for all to see.