The Squandered Potential of Guild Wars 2

[Lucarth.4863]

It's well known that the SPVP and WvWvW modes have been utterly neglected by ANET. The potential these modes had after release, especially WvW with its large and dedicated playerbase, is hard to overstate. This would become the endless endgame for a lot of playerbase pre-HoT and a place to test your class and game knowledge to their limits.

Ultimately years of neglect and complete ineptitude in balancing player vs player encounters took an irrecoverable toll.

And the real tragedy is how this ineptitude along with an ignorance of the fundamental issues with the combat system has resulted in a completely butchered PVP experience.

There is far too much spam in boons, conditions, invulnerabilities, evades, blocks, blinds, resistances, passive abilities that grant boons, conditions, invuln, etc. skills that do far too much, low cooldown high damage skills, high damage skills with absolutely no tell, high damage auto attacks, high damage skills with massive utility and/or mobility, high damage skills that spam boons, conditions, invulns, tons of stuns, dazes, interrupts, etc. I could go on and on.

The amount of nonsense being thrown around by tons of skills on every class only makes sense from a PVE perspective and even then it's a hard stretch. In PVP, a lot of these instant, no-tell, low CD, high utility, boon/condi-ridden skills can chunk you for 25-100% of your hp. This is UNACCEPTABLE game design. There is also far too much visual noise when 3+ players engage in combat. You cannot reliably see your enemy, your character, and the abilities that go off even in smaller fights like those fought over middle in SPVP. This gets exponentially worse in WvW.

It's insane how it's worsened over time, the contrast being especially apparent to friends that haven't played since pre-HoT and are now exposed to the damage and spam that abilities throw around. I imagine the only people that can put up with the combat mechanics have been exposed to this power creep very gradually and have therefore normalized it. But WvWvW is a bad joke, with TTKs lower than many FPS games and tons of damage mitigation in many forms that simply prevent the player from being exposed to that laughable TTK. You either get blown up in seconds or out-invuln, evade, block, boon/condi spam your opponent just to be able to one-shot them, with 25-40k damage in <2 seconds being very common. There is no point in balancing your gear stats as getting hit generally means losing the fight. It's this insane damage that necessitates the addition of more and more boons (of which there are TONS), invulns, evades, blocks and passive defenses in order to mitigate instant deletion. The most recent damage reduction merely attempted to treat a symptom of this malignant cancer that ANET has lost control over, and even failed at that. Zerg fights consist of endless boon spam that has a group out-sustaining everything until another group is able to outspam them with boons as they coordinate a bomb with an amalgamation of abilities that all deal damage nearly instantly while also applying conditions, preventing damage, ripping boons, applying boons, putting out CC, etc.

The combat and therefore the resulting PVP is crippled beyond repair. And although that may not directly affect the majority of the playerbase that focus on PVE content, it has cost the game thousands of players, in both veterans that refuse to return, of which I know many, and in newer players that join GW2 for its PVP only to quickly realize it has been neglected into frustration.

As someone that loved Guild Wars 2 more than any other game that came before it, it's just depressing to realize the endless potential that ANET had at their feet and how brutally they squandered it.

On PVE:

The world, music, and atmosphere really sucked me in. I've put in thousands of hours into this game since Beta. If you're looking to simply quest along with friends there are tons of events to complete and plenty of wonderful zones to immerse yourself in.

However, a few things that have put me and many others off:

The amount of screen clutter when 5+ people are on screen is atrocious. You can hardly see what you're fighting or what abilities are going off and when. It was already quite bad at release but with the addition of new effects and cash shop cosmetics it's almost hard to overstate just how ridiculous it's become. It's especially damaging as the main focus of GW2 is the PVE and its group events. The performance even on monster PCs is also unexcusable at times with or without the graphics being made to look like it's 2006.

Dungeons have been completely ignored since release and instead of adding new dungeons with their own respective lore, characters, and gear sets ANET decided it would pump out new skins and costumes on the cash shop instead, as that's entirely more profitable. This kind of attitude in regards to content isn't exclusive to dungeons and has had a detrimental effect on the game experience

In trying to avoid the "carrot on a stick" philosophy found in many MMORPGs, ANET implemented its own ridiculous endgame grind to acquire currencies and gold (->gems) for cosmetic and convenience items. These grinds are as mindless, monotonous, and repetitive as it gets, almost entirely driven by the allure of acquiring that carrot and feeling that dopamine rush. The reward is not the journey or the overcoming of a challenge, as it should be, and that's a real issue that causes a lot of people to quit once the veil that masks acquiring shiny new digital rewards as content has lifted.

[Hashberry.4510]

It’s not a triple A game, it’s a vehicle to expose eyeballs to the gem shop. The original team made a great game in spite of the business model, so our expectations are too high. Someone realized they were leaving cash on the table.

[Loosmaster.8263]

I did a "Leap of Faith" once on an engagement an died before I hit the ground. I've been doing dailies ever since...

[Sajuuk Khar.1509]

@Lucarth.4863 said:Dungeons have been completely ignored since release and instead of adding new dungeons with their own respective lore, characters, and gear sets ANET decided it would pump out new skins and costumes on the cash shop instead, as that's entirely more profitable. This kind of attitude in regards to content isn't exclusive to dungeons and has had a detrimental effect on the game experienceThis ignores that the reason why Anet didn't make more dungeons is the same reason both raids and fractals have gone ages without a new release.... its because most people don't play them, so its not worth the money to make more content most people don't play.

[Lucarth.4863]

@Hashberry.4510 said:It’s not a triple A game, it’s a vehicle to expose eyeballs to the gem shop. The original team made a great game in spite of the business model, so our expectations are too high. Someone realized they were leaving cash on the table.

It's unfortunate the cash shop gets so much dev time but what's more concerning is how much attention reddit and these forums give to cosmetics and upcoming/returning/on sale costumes, gliders, mounts, and other gem-purchasable items. Almost as if cosmetics have been engineered to be the end-game for players as it's what gives ANET the most money. That wouldn't be completely terrible if the fundamentals of combat and the player vs player experience wasn't as atrociously mismanaged as it has been.

@"Loosmaster.8263" said:I did a "Leap of Faith" once on an engagement an died before I hit the ground. I've been doing dailies ever since...

I actually got hit by a 6k Leap of Faith the other night. Got blinded too. Oh and it healed the guard as well. Nearly half my hp but it felt like nothing next to the 22k Gun Flame and 15k Volley that followed :#

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Poor balance didn't drive players away from WvW. Its hardly a factor in the grand scheme of things because major battles are decided by coordination and skill. What drove players away was the game mode being stale, with hardly any changes since launch.

This thinking that some how unobtainable perfect balance will save the game mode is misplaced. We need new content, fresh blood. We need things to be messy again. Chaotic. Interesting, Thrilling. We need for new players to come to the game mode and go "wow, PvE sucks compared to this" and want to literally just play WvW all the time, because that's what WvW is best at.

That's how you save the game mode, not magical fairy balance. All that does is improve small scale slightly.

Take the other day for example. I was leading a squad and every once in a while an Engineer would unstealth and use Explosive Entrance combined with Big Ol' Bomb and grenade spam to instantly kill five players of my squad, with no downstate.

Even I only survived with like 1k HP out of ~26k HP and 3k armor every time, and it happened so fast I could barely reach my heal skill quickly enough. And yet, despite half the squad being killed and the commander being severely wounded, we still accomplished our objectives again and again, because we supported each other.

Eventually that Engi fell off a tower and died because they miscalculated. Better balance may've saved my squad members, but it wouldn't've saved that Engi. The most significant outcomes of fights are determined by more than that.

[Lucarth.4863]

@"Hannelore.8153" said:

This thinking that some how unobtainable perfect balance will save the game mode is misplaced. We need new content, fresh blood. We need things to be messy again. Chaotic. Interesting, Thrilling. We need for new players to come to the game mode and go "wow, PvE sucks compared to this" and want to literally just play WvW all the time, because that's what WvW is best at.

That's how you save the game mode, not magical fairy balance. All that does is improve small scale slightly.

"Magical fairy balance" is what you got out of my post? I already explained what I and hundreds of players I know feel is fundamentally broken about PVP and it has zero to do with balancing individual classes to one another, you can scroll back up and read my original post in its entirety this time. Even when referring to balance, if all else was tweaked and dialed to function properly, there is a lot of room between perfect or "magical fairy" balance and what we have now, and it's disingenuous to equate wanting the minimum level of competence in creating a proper PVP system with expecting perfection of balance between all classes. Your claim that it would only "improve small scale slightly" is ridiculous, if you're referring to a state of PVP where the issues I listed are magically ironed out by ANET. The issues present deteriorate all aspects of PVP... 1v1s, small scale, zerg fights - and it's easy to understand how, whether one is willing to look past that degradation or not depends on the person but your story gives me the impression you're the kind of player that refuses to acknowledge the massive shortcomings of this game and any possible suggestion that they can and should be improved upon. I'm glad you can still have a good time in WvW because 100+ of my buddies no longer login anymore and my previous guild entirely gave up on WvW for the reasons that I stated in the op and that you didn't address.

[Super Hayes.6890]

WvW isn't irrecoverable but you are right about it being stale. I go back to it periodically and it almost never changes. Being able to ride a mount is nice for the tiny speed buff and gliding was welcome. I would like to at least see three different borderland maps and maybe even more that rotate weekly. Just simply having additional maps would be a night and day difference for this mode. Balance will always be an issue but is not, in my opinion, the big problem with WvW. The big problem is that the entire mode feels frozen in time on the exact same battlefields.

[Yggranya.5201]

@Sajuuk Khar.1509 said:

@Lucarth.4863 said:Dungeons have been completely ignored since release and instead of adding new dungeons with their own respective lore, characters, and gear sets ANET decided it would pump out new skins and costumes on the cash shop instead, as that's entirely more profitable. This kind of attitude in regards to content isn't exclusive to dungeons and has had a detrimental effect on the game experienceThis ignores that the reason why Anet didn't make more dungeons is the same reason both raids and fractals have gone ages without a new release.... its because most people don't play them, so its not worth the money to make more content most people don't play.

If dungeons were designed for solo play and then scaled for team play so you can play in groups if you want, like with your friends (obviously), i'm confident they would have been at least a little more popular. Same for fractals. Raids on the other hand are like raids in every game, so no surprise that.

[kharmin.7683]

@Lucarth.4863 said:Almost as if cosmetics have been engineered to be the end-game for players as it's what gives ANET the most money.End game is called Fashion Wars for a reason. /shrug

[Hashberry.4510]

Ehh these rants are pointless . The game is better than most of the stuff out there, but it was an accident. Ante has never shown much interest in fixing what they have ‘squandered’. PVPers won’t get what they are looking for; just enjoy what we have.

[Coeruleum.9164]

I don't think PvP and WvW lack balance. It actually seems really well-balanced, since I don't think there's a single class or spec you absolutely can't play in PvP or WvW. I do think they should tweak some things, like making pets more viable in PvP and WvW, but that's not a complete overhaul by any means. I would also like it if normal gear could be used in PvP instead of only a limited selection of runes and sigils on a limited selection of amulets since I don't think that stops most people from picking the same gear but rather makes most people pick the same PvP gear instead of just using the same PvE gear. I mean if most people use sigils of air and sigils of force is that really that bad? It's not like those are the only viable "meta" sigils, just people are lazy so they copy each other. I haven't used sigil of force on any build and I use sigil of air rarely because I like the lightning flash but besides that there are ways to do as much damage as those two sigils that aren't them.

I do think WvW and PvP would be a lot better with more custom arenas though. WvW doesn't really have arenas but being able to customize your borderlands and parts of the eternal battlegrounds you own would make it a lot nicer, as would being in different land setups to begin with. We could have votes on servers to decide if we want our borderlands to be a desert, a mountain, plains, islands, etc. and how we want the buildings to look and every server would have a different land based on what kind of people its members are, and people could buy upgrades which would be balanced because the server fights are balanced as long as a bunch of people don't transfer anyways.

[Thornwolf.9721]

I think this comes down to merely the staleness and almost simplistic design, while PvE has been basically added upon and made better and better we've stayed the same. I think very much that as it stands now WvW maps need a overhaul/remake. I put up a suggestion called WvW reborn where I go into how PvP and PvE are integral to the game mode as its a hybrid of the two. Which means it needs both and it needs constant content, or at least patches that keep things fresh.

[Lucarth.4863]

@Coeruleum.9164 said:I don't think PvP and WvW lack balance. It actually seems really well-balanced, since I don't think there's a single class or spec you absolutely can't play in PvP or WvW.

Again, the bloated neglected mess of a combat system I addressed in my post has little to do with balancing individual classes.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

@Coeruleum.9164 said:I don't think PvP and WvW lack balance. It actually seems really well-balanced, since I don't think there's a single class or spec you absolutely can't play in PvP or WvW.

Actually, this is where I disagree.

When you look back at guild wars 1, every class was playable...but it was more than that...there were hundreds of viable and competitive BUILD combinations...and on top of that hundreds of competitive and viable TEAM COMPOSITIONS, that varied so much in functionality that they warranted their own build pages with instructions as to how they were played.

Meanwhile in Guild Wars 2, we have about 90% of build options per class which are nearly unusable.

When you say thief is viable...you are saying that only two or so thief builds that are viable, instead of what should be hundreds of thief builds...where’s the competitive PP thief build? How bout the competitive Double Condi Shortbow? Where’s the competitive X, Y, Z number of possible builds one could make on thief that are actually viable?

Same goes for every other class. Given how many options there are only so few of them are actually capable of doing SOMETHING remotely useful. This was not the case in Guild Wars 1...

[Shiyo.3578]

@Hannelore.8153 said:Take the other day for example. I was leading a squad and every once in a while an Engineer would unstealth and use Explosive Entrance combined with Big Ol' Bomb and grenade spam to instantly kill five players of my squad, with no downstate.

Even I only survived with like 1k HP out of ~26k HP and 3k armor every time, and it happened so fast I could barely reach my heal skill quickly enough. And yet, despite half the squad being killed and the commander being severely wounded, we still accomplished our objectives again and again, because we supported each other.

Big ol' bomb has a THREE second fuse time and 1/2 a second cast. Toss elixir is THREE seconds of stealth. Pressing W counters this entire strategy.

[Lucarth.4863]

Seriously what the hell is going on in WvW and SPVP...

Endless boon/condi application, invulnerabilities, blocks, evades, stealth, reveals, passive damage mitigation, passively triggered damage/boon/condis and in-between all that some ridiculous no-tell, low cd, high damage abilities that're instantly deleting people.

Jumped into small-scale WvW for an hour and was hit with 6.5K auto attacks from soulbeasts (4.3K + wolfpack), 23K rapid fires with constant quickness, a single instant ability granting 10 seconds of burn for 4K damage per second, 25 stacks of confusion stacked within a daze duration, maintained and dealing 7K damage per skill activation (LOL), gravedigger (spammable AOE) for 12K, CnD into backstab for 15K, tons of insanely long duration CCs (in a game where TTK is lower than most FPS games)

Then hopped into SPVP for a single match to immediately be one-shotted (16K+ damage) by a single grenade barrage from stealth.

And everyone that still plays darn well knows there's an endless array of similarly toxic garbage throughout WvW and SPVP that has completely destroyed the integrity of GW2's PVP.

There is ZERO excuse for any of this. Without cycling their numerous invulnerabilities in PVP, players drop faster than a lot of the common trash mobs found in PVE. It's mind-blowing. Class balance is not the primary issue. It's just common sense to find these numbers and the game mechanics that enable them beyond appalling if you care at all about a healthy PVP scene. It's bad game design 101 and if pressing a single button wipes out a third or a fourth of your enemy's HP, LET ALONE one shots or kills him twice over, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Adding more boons, evades, blocks, invulns, etc. just so you don't get instantly deleted IS NOT HOW YOU FIX THIS ISSUE. You're propagating the very cancer that needs to be treated by adding more destructive and unhealthy mechanics just to avoid the ridiculous damage, through that process justifying the need for absurd numbers.

This is not that complicated, why hasn't it ever been addressed? Why doesn't ANET stop and think what the hell went wrong instead of stacking one issue on top of another in this ever increasing amalgamation of bloat and neglect?

[Mega.5791]

@Shiyo.3578 said:

@Hannelore.8153 said:Take the other day for example. I was leading a squad and every once in a while an Engineer would unstealth and use Explosive Entrance combined with Big Ol' Bomb and grenade spam to instantly kill five players of my squad, with no downstate.

Even I only survived with like 1k HP out of ~26k HP and 3k armor every time, and it happened so fast I could barely reach my heal skill quickly enough. And yet, despite half the squad being killed and the commander being severely wounded, we still accomplished our objectives again and again, because we supported each other.

Big ol' bomb has a THREE second fuse time and 1/2 a second cast. Toss elixir is THREE seconds of stealth. Pressing W counters this entire strategy.

Big Ol' Bomb also does like 15 damage when critting. :wink: I guess his main focus was (or should be) EE + Grenade Barrage. Which in WvW I am sure can still hit for 20k easily from stealth and is actually instant without any warning. Would like to see some screenshots here.

[Thornwolf.9721]

@Lucarth.4863 said:Seriously what the hell is going on in WvW and SPVP...

Endless boon/condi application, invulnerabilities, blocks, evades, stealth, reveals, passive damage mitigation, passively triggered damage/boon/condis and in-between all that some ridiculous no-tell, low cd, high damage abilities that're instantly deleting people.

Jumped into small-scale WvW for an hour and was hit with 6.5K auto attacks from soulbeasts (4.3K + wolfpack), 23K rapid fires with constant quickness, a single instant ability granting 10 seconds of burn for 4K damage per second, 25 stacks of confusion stacked within a daze duration, maintained and dealing 7K damage per skill activation (LOL), gravedigger (spammable AOE) for 12K, CnD into backstab for 15K, tons of insanely long duration CCs (in a game where TTK is lower than most FPS games)

Then hopped into SPVP for a single match to immediately be one-shotted (16K+ damage) by a single grenade barrage from stealth.

And everyone that still plays darn well knows there's an endless array of similarly toxic garbage throughout WvW and SPVP that has completely destroyed the integrity of GW2's PVP.

There is ZERO excuse for any of this. Without cycling their numerous invulnerabilities in PVP, players drop faster than a lot of the common trash mobs found in PVE. It's mind-blowing. Class balance is not the primary issue. It's just common sense to find these numbers and the game mechanics that enable them beyond appalling if you care at all about a healthy PVP scene. It's bad game design 101 and if pressing a single button wipes out a third or a fourth of your enemy's HP, LET ALONE one shots or kills him twice over, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Adding more boons, evades, blocks, invulns, etc. just so you don't get instantly deleted IS NOT HOW YOU FIX THIS ISSUE. You're propagating the very cancer that needs to be treated by adding more destructive and unhealthy mechanics just to avoid the ridiculous damage, through that process justifying the need for absurd numbers.

This is not that complicated, why hasn't it ever been addressed? Why doesn't ANET stop and think what the hell went wrong instead of stacking one issue on top of another in this ever increasing amalgamation of bloat and neglect?

Simply put... Its because our money, and the money the game amassed went to other projects. Up until recently the studio was hands off with the game and only I believe did PoF as a way to generate money; Everything and anything else was ignored. Living world was used to keep us invested while they tried to pump out new IP's, products and so on and it all failed and came crashing down. (From what we understand, its what we know as its what happened leading to the layoffs.) Do I think now that they are invested they are trying to fix the mess that has been left for years? Yes indeed. Recently CMC said on a stream that they want to bring back WvW tournaments in a healthy way to try and prevent burnout.... well to have tournaments of any caliber this stuff needs to be dealt with.

For better or worse its being looked at and worked on but the backlog of things they likely ignored, and just let go have built up to such a degree that they need to have some finesse when making changes unless they destroy something utterly (Warrior comes to mind.) I believe we likely will see something come, whether for better or worse for us there will be a change. It is coming. Do I think it will solve our issues whatever their solution is? Not likely. Most of us likely will be put off by whatever change they make, or worse yet we might just come to dislike the mode. Frankly Im hoping for more maps for WvW as thats what I want, more biomes and maps that are ever present along with what we have. Which honestly in my mind is not asking for a lot on that end, they do this all the time for PvE and taking a map and repurposing it or even dare I believe they take some assets from raids (The underworld maybe?) and use them to make a themed map?

I want fresh and new, I dont want more of the same. And with how balance has been handled.... im not sure I have much faith in their design or machinations on the notion of what balance is or what they desire it to be. Just make the game fun, bring back that passion and fire and I hope we can weather these uncertain and otherwise unsettlingly murky seas in one piece.

[Swagg.9236]

The real wasted potential of GW2 is the fact that this game somehow manages to shoehorn in things like gliding, raptor leaps, griffon swooping, skyscale wall-clinging, charge-up jump height, mid-air teleports and eurobeat-tier land speed yet the PvP is still as tab-target as Runescape while the PvE meta is "Simon Says" with rehearsed red circles. Mount movement would have been the best way to define classes, but it came far too late, and it's far too isolated to have any real gameplay impact.

[Burnfall.9573]

@"Lucarth.4863" said:Seriously what the hell is going on in WvW and SPVP...

Endless boon/condi application, invulnerabilities, blocks, evades, stealth, reveals, passive damage mitigation, passively triggered damage/boon/condis and in-between all that some ridiculous no-tell, low cd, high damage abilities that're instantly deleting people.

Jumped into small-scale WvW for an hour and was hit with 6.5K auto attacks from soulbeasts (4.3K + wolfpack), 23K rapid fires with constant quickness, a single instant ability granting 10 seconds of burn for 4K damage per second, 25 stacks of confusion stacked within a daze duration, maintained and dealing 7K damage per skill activation (LOL), gravedigger (spammable AOE) for 12K, CnD into backstab for 15K, tons of insanely long duration CCs (in a game where TTK is lower than most FPS games)

Then hopped into SPVP for a single match to immediately be one-shotted (16K+ damage) by a single grenade barrage from stealth.

And everyone that still plays darn well knows there's an endless array of similarly toxic garbage throughout WvW and SPVP that has completely destroyed the integrity of GW2's PVP.

There is ZERO excuse for any of this. Without cycling their numerous invulnerabilities in PVP, players drop faster than a lot of the common trash mobs found in PVE. It's mind-blowing. Class balance is not the primary issue. It's just common sense to find these numbers and the game mechanics that enable them beyond appalling if you care at all about a healthy PVP scene. It's bad game design 101 and if pressing a single button wipes out a third or a fourth of your enemy's HP, LET ALONE one shots or kills him twice over, then something has gone terribly wrong.

Adding more boons, evades, blocks, invulns, etc. just so you don't get instantly deleted IS NOT HOW YOU FIX THIS ISSUE. You're propagating the very cancer that needs to be treated by adding more destructive and unhealthy mechanics just to avoid the ridiculous damage, through that process justifying the need for absurd numbers.

This is not that complicated, why hasn't it ever been addressed? Why doesn't ANET stop and think what the hell went wrong instead of stacking one issue on top of another in this ever increasing amalgamation of bloat and neglect?

answer,

[Lucarth.4863]

It's downright depressing when you put it in perspective... the utter mismanagement of PVP and the massive potential washed down the drain because basic principles for sound PVP didn't take precedence over cash shop-marketable ventures. In terms of comparing the game to runescape I'd say it's a massive disservice to OSRS where the tiny dev team made it clear from day 1 that they will poll any proposed changes (that occur at lightning speed in comparison). New and fresh won't fix what's broken (on the contrary, it'll fuck things up further) and that's been clear since HoT released.

@"Burnfall.9573" said:answer,