If everything was rebuilt from the ground up

[Fipmip.7219]

I thought I'd throw this topic into the air and see what discussion comes of it. I'm talking specifically about classes and skills. There is no perfectly balanced game, but you can get close enough to retain a sizeable playerbase that is more or less satisfied with the way things tend to play out. I believe that at the core, guild wars 2 is an extremely solid game that is fun to move in, fun to fight in and fun to interact with. If I was to rebuild everthing, I'd look to games like overwatch as a goal for game state. You can take out anything with anything in overwatch, as long as you have a good combination of skill and strategy to place and execute a play. There are a few exceptions to this, like extremely focused dedicated healing or other support, but on the whole even if you can place one character above another, it is ultimately a well rounded team that will win the match, and there is no one team comp that will always prevail in all situations.

[Swagg.9236]

If everything were rebuilt from the ground up, all we'd need to do is look at the systems established in Guild Wars 1 and adapt some of the more interesting Guild Wars 2 things into the game: the smoother movement, jumping, the movement skills, the ground-targeted abilities, and some of the more underrated mechanics such as those featured in the PoF mounts (i.e. the Springer charge jump and Raptor charge leap).

At that point, it'd just be a matter of shedding the excess and homogenizing the things that should be equally balanced and accessible:

• Stealth was never necesssary.
• Either all classes get Initiative or nobody gets it; and just because Initiative exists doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't still be paired with cooldowns.
• Every class should have homogenized options when it comes to healing, stun-breaking and condition cleansing to the point where they are for those purposes only and they are just stapled to the bar. Something like, every Mesmer has Blink fixed somewhere on their bar, and that's their stun-break.
• Self-healing could just be different flavors of Dark Souls Estus: nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and it keeps the player responsible for his/her own healing without making certain classes baseline better at it than others (of course, "healing specs" can get other skills that increase their team-based healing output, but self-healing should just be similar across the professions). The same could be easily done with condition cleansing.
• Cull the presence of hard CC and stability in equal measure. Stability has never been in a good place in GW2 given how baseline powerful its effect is. It could easily be done away with so long as layers of (often instant) hard CC weren't included in every player's basic rotations. The game would benefit from making blocks, dodges and stun-breaks the only consistently effective counterplay against hard CC.
• Just give the player less skill slots, but broaden the skill bar customization. Increase opportunity cost. Cull player skill totals from anywhere between 16-30+ down to something like 10-20 max across all classes. The problem isn't that having "too many buttons" is "difficult," but rather how GW2 loses all sense of flow and pacing when multiple players simultaneously chain multiple instant or near-instant abilities along with passive procs. The latter is just a mess to visually interpret, and it often chases away new players trying to do something like PvP for the first time. It's an issue when the winning move in PvP is to read up on what the hell is going on instead of just playing the game and naturally learning to match cues with effects.

[Burnfall.9573]

@Swagg.9236 said:If everything were rebuilt from the ground up, all we'd need to do is look at the systems established in Guild Wars 1 and adapt some of the more interesting Guild Wars 2 things into the game: the smoother movement, jumping, the movement skills, the ground-targeted abilities, and some of the more underrated mechanics such as those featured in the PoF mounts (i.e. the Springer charge jump and Raptor charge leap).

At that point, it'd just be a matter of shedding the excess and homogenizing the things that should be equally balanced and accessible:

• Stealth was never necesssary.
• Either all classes get Initiative or nobody gets it; and just because Initiative exists doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't still be paired with cooldowns.
• Every class should have homogenized options when it comes to healing, stun-breaking and condition cleansing to the point where they are for those purposes only and they are just stapled to the bar. Something like, every Mesmer has Blink fixed somewhere on their bar, and that's their stun-break.
• Self-healing could just be different flavors of Dark Souls Estus: nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and it keeps the player responsible for his/her own healing without making certain classes baseline better at it than others (of course, "healing specs" can get other skills that increase their team-based healing output, but self-healing should just be similar across the professions). The same could be easily done with condition cleansing.
• Cull the presence of hard CC and stability in equal measure. Stability has never been in a good place in GW2 given how baseline powerful its effect is. It could easily be done away with so long as layers of (often instant) hard CC weren't included in every player's basic rotations. The game would benefit from making blocks, dodges and stun-breaks the only consistently effective counterplay against hard CC.
• Just give the player less skill slots, but broaden the skill bar customization. Increase opportunity cost. Cull player skill totals from anywhere between 16-30+ down to something like 10-20 max across all classes. The problem isn't that having "too many buttons" is "difficult," but rather how GW2 loses all sense of flow and pacing when multiple players simultaneously chain multiple instant or near-instant abilities along with passive procs. The latter is just a mess to visually interpret, and it often chases away new players trying to do something like PvP for the first time. It's an issue when the winning move in PvP is to read up on what the hell is going on instead of just playing the game and naturally learning to match cues with effects.

This

[Lyger.5429]

@Swagg.9236 said:

• Either all classes get Initiative or nobody gets it; and just because Initiative exists doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't still be paired with cooldowns.

There are many things wrong with the reworks you've proposed, but this just shows a lack of understanding of how the initiative system works.

[feetpicenjoyer.6418]

@Swagg.9236 said:If everything were rebuilt from the ground up, all we'd need to do is look at the systems established in Guild Wars 1 and adapt some of the more interesting Guild Wars 2 things into the game: the smoother movement, jumping, the movement skills, the ground-targeted abilities, and some of the more underrated mechanics such as those featured in the PoF mounts (i.e. the Springer charge jump and Raptor charge leap).

At that point, it'd just be a matter of shedding the excess and homogenizing the things that should be equally balanced and accessible:

• Stealth was never necesssary.
• Either all classes get Initiative or nobody gets it; and just because Initiative exists doesn't mean that it can't or shouldn't still be paired with cooldowns.
• Every class should have homogenized options when it comes to healing, stun-breaking and condition cleansing to the point where they are for those purposes only and they are just stapled to the bar. Something like, every Mesmer has Blink fixed somewhere on their bar, and that's their stun-break.
• Self-healing could just be different flavors of Dark Souls Estus: nothing fancy, but it gets the job done and it keeps the player responsible for his/her own healing without making certain classes baseline better at it than others (of course, "healing specs" can get other skills that increase their team-based healing output, but self-healing should just be similar across the professions). The same could be easily done with condition cleansing.
• Cull the presence of hard CC and stability in equal measure. Stability has never been in a good place in GW2 given how baseline powerful its effect is. It could easily be done away with so long as layers of (often instant) hard CC weren't included in every player's basic rotations. The game would benefit from making blocks, dodges and stun-breaks the only consistently effective counterplay against hard CC.
• Just give the player less skill slots, but broaden the skill bar customization. Increase opportunity cost. Cull player skill totals from anywhere between 16-30+ down to something like 10-20 max across all classes. The problem isn't that having "too many buttons" is "difficult," but rather how GW2 loses all sense of flow and pacing when multiple players simultaneously chain multiple instant or near-instant abilities along with passive procs. The latter is just a mess to visually interpret, and it often chases away new players trying to do something like PvP for the first time. It's an issue when the winning move in PvP is to read up on what the hell is going on instead of just playing the game and naturally learning to match cues with effects.

You basically described GW1. We can't have that, the geniouses of Anet improved on that as you can see :relaxed: /s

[Allarius.5670]

As unpopular as an idea it might be, I think I would have considered designing sPvP in such a way as to limit build selection to a number of presets defined by the developers that are dynamically adjusted, expanded upon, and added over the game's lifetime based on developer/community interaction. It would have been a design decision made before release that emphasized the "structured" part of "structured player versus player", allowing for more fine tuned balance on a per build level rather than having to account for all possible combinations available to players. This would've meant PvE was a more standard mmo interpretation, WvW was free-form PvP, and sPvP emphasized balance, role, etc. more than it already does.

In theory, it would've cut down on many problems the community has had over the years: balance, balance responsiveness, undefined roles and game-mode dynamics, out-of-meta professions, perceived low developer/community interaction, game modes, etc. There is a tremendous amount of enjoyment I get from exploring build possibilities, but it almost never takes terribly long before a meta is defined and community members rant and rave in an attempt to force you into the defined niche. At least with this option there would've been the possibility of better defining multiple roles and builds for each profession and keep them balanced within and between professions.

[Jekkt.6045]

something i would do is rework conditions completely. remove 1 player stacking but keep 2 player stacking (2 people using burns = 2 burn stacks, double the damage, same effect) make the damage of it secondary but not obsolete, and add strong effects to conditions similar to how poison and chill work / conditions worked in gw1. remove condition damage stats but keep condition duration. conditions have a light scaling with power, conditions of a dps should deal more damage than conditions of a tank, but not much. the overall goal would be to shift them away from a main damage source without making the damage worthless, and make them heavy utility oriented.

remove conditions from auto attacksincrease power scaling of condition weaponspoison = samechill = samebleed = reduce max hp by 20%burn = reduce power by 150torment = ramping up damage the longer you move, ramping up negative movement speed the longer you move. you're in torment, how can you move at normal speed?slow = sameweakness = sameconfusion = damage + interrupts next non auto attack skill.fear = samecripple = sametaunt = sameimmob = sameblind = attacks miss for the full duration (with balancing blind durations in the game)vulnerability = make it baseline 25% but with shorter duration. cannot go beyond 25%.

[ibThuggin.1758]

ANet should have kept the game design of the first game. Basically you had 8 skills that you could slot that made your "deck" out of a pool of multiple skills for each class and the ability to dual spec. That was their first mistake, there is barely any build diversity where you had tons in GW1. Also allowing 10v10 "guild wars" again would be nice instead of 5v5 stand on circle with AOE spam heavy classes. Underwater combat seems like it was a huge waste of time for the amount of resources they used and how under utilized it is with all game modes. Downed skills should have also been scrapped, they are so unbalanced between the classes it's a joke. A mesmer with all the clones and what not can actually sometimes spike someone down. An Engineer....throws junk at you and pulls you in to them so you can spike em faster...It should have just been an incap timer instead.

[Swagg.9236]

@Allarius.5670 said:As unpopular as an idea it might be, I think I would have considered designing sPvP in such a way as to limit build selection to a number of presets

This is one of the biggest improvements that this game could receive. Both conditions and power each respectively deal un-typed damage; there is really no functional difference between the two of them. However, the way to combat them is entirely different, and if a player builds to counter a power opponent but said opponent turns out to be condi, that player can get bodied without much to do about the situation. The same goes for the reverse given how astronomically powercreeped damage has become on all fronts.

GW2 needs less choice and less skill totals per assembled build. It needs higher opportunity costs across all classes and less passives. Pigeonholing build selection to an extent can actually give players a glimpse into what they're going to face when they open up the scoreboard and look at the profession line-up on both teams. Even set-ups like how the current Firebrand gets 3 books is excessive. If we wanted a balanced Firebrand with unique play-styles, they would just have one F1 slot with which they selected one of the three total books to use. Opportunity cost and draw-backs are what generate play-styles. If players get to do everything that one can do in the game, then there is no play-style or role to be found.

[Miocast.2657]

Well, on topic i would state following:

Damage should be toned down, by meaningfull measure. Its not fun if the TTK float around 2,5 seconds.

Passive defences must be toned down (See warrior, elementalist, ranger). Its not fun when 90% of time enemy is immune to any damage.

Stealth should not stack.

DoT conditions should be toned down and should be able to crit, crit multiplier should scale from expertise.

Engineer, mesmer and revenant should be reworked, their core traits and overall mechanics are not up to date for a most part.