Swagg.9236

Lmao. This game was dead in 2015. The one caveat on the news is that the guy was more or less forced to say that GW3 was in development because of how pressured he was over NCSoft's constant financial failings. GW2 was never going to last forever, and regardless of what anyone thinks, the player base is anemic but super dense at the top end with all of the people who actually bought into the "Masteries collections, time-gated grinds, and buying expacs to win in PvP is totally real gameplay, guys" farce. People could have an impression that GW2 is alive mainly because it has a lot of overly-invested mouth-pieces. The way that the game is designed now is almost entirely in a way that chases out new players trying out the totally old and busted junk while the people who paid for the powercteep continue to think that nothing is wrong. It's a sun burning iron. Maybe GW3 will actually have GvG lmao.

This is the price you pay for fun, and honestly, the toll is pennies on the dollar when the game isn't outright bad. Basically, nobody cares, and the few opinions against custom map editing don't really matter in the face of the potential.

GW2 had no real roles in any mode. PvE had "roles" but it was more like "25 might stack guy" (happened to be ele) + "guy with buffs that could stack with 25 might" (banner slave warrior who then literally autoattacked with axes all fight) + DPS (all guardians). Every other class was worthless because they not only didn't provide any of these, but they also didn't deal enough DPS. For the most part, all of these "roles" were just DPS at the end of the day. Banners weren't something you juggled, and stacking might generally happened right before an encounter started and then was sustained during DPS rotations. Everyone was just a DPS in PvE. In PvP, GW2 had only two real classes that served the same role: old-school WoW Rogue. Old-school WoW Rogues are defined by a bunch of cooldowns that don't allow a lot of interaction with the user in the midst of PvP. These include invisibility, instantaneous movement, stuns, and other defensive gimmicks that don't really have proper counters and often chain directly into the user's offensive suite. During post-lauch GW2 PvP and extending well into 2014, Thief and Elementalist were always the Rogues by virtue of how they always have defensive options to off-set the risks involved with attacking anything: Elementalist by sheer volume of buttons to press (lmao 25 buttons vs your 15-20); and Thief by sheer volume of buttons to press (initiative). The big issue was that, instead of trying to course correct by establishing actual role options for the game, anet just made everyone else into Rogues. The real question is what is the honest-to-goodness difference between Thief, Revenant, Holo/Scrapper, Willbender, Reaper/Harb, Soulbeast, Spellbreaker, Mesmer, and Elementalist? How do the best builds across all classes engage opponents in PvP? How long do those fights last? Why do those fights last at all? How many hits actually go through or matter in any significant way when two enemies have full cooldowns up? GW2 has no real roles; only long-range Rogues and melee Rogues. Anet made GW2 PvP intentionally frustrating in order that every player could press all of their buttons at least once so that they could feel like they did something. Then, after PvP was revealed for the clown show that it was, they laughed at anyone who took it somewhat seriously, or wanted to see improvements.

I still think that conquest could work if you just had a map editor. It's not like conquest is amazing (especially with how shallow GW2's gameplay can be at a baseline), but there are so many variables and design ideas that people could incorporate into custom maps in order to bring out the best of the game's movement gimmicks. More jump and positioning options build into transitions between points? Putting points closer together but the transitions have way more movement options, no-teleport zones, and line of sight interruptions? All three points are the size of Foefire mid? Make the map more vertical than horizontal? Remove a game-specific gimmick set to spawn on timers and outright replace it with a fourth point? Build out a map with angled and sloping height variance in order to keep a bunch of leaps in mind (lets people with free-aim leaps cross gaps and make transitions that teleports can't)? To stay on the thread topic, though, you probably could make a Jade Quarry mode. As it stands, the game is likely built best to facilitated a payload mode. GW2 is extremely blob-centric. I'm not saying that it would be the most fun thing ever (to play or watch), but I'm just saying that the game is built to run it.

It's been very clear that they gave up on roles early on. Anet was on a knife-edge when they talked about how GW2 would be a game without any established roles along with things about the closest thing to a "healer" in GW2 would be an elementalist camping in water attunement for passive regeneration (which equated to a non-healer because everyone just ran DPS ele in everything). When they went to go balance on that knife-edge, they basically just stepped up and fell over it instead of giving any effort to their marketed design. Everything quickly orbited around elementalists (by virtue of how many buttons they could press due to sheer button volume) and thieves (by virtue of how many buttons they could press due to initiative and zero cooldowns). Now everything is just an E/A except that shadowsteps don't have aftercasts for whatever reason. It's pretty wild. What's the most unique build in GW2? What are the unique roles? Healers heal themselves and can deal pretty consistent damage instead of remaining a vulnerable team element within the context of a skirmish; so there goes the delineation between tanks and healers. I remember when everyone was trying to pretend that "side-noder," "brawler" and "duelist" weren't just the exact same build with slightly less or more respective teleports. I'm not saying that we need the BLESSED HOLY TRINITY ALL HAIL without any change or further imagination, but GW2 doesn't have any roles that anyone can make which won't just die to what is effectively just a knock-off Rogue.

GW2's pvp isn't built on interactions; the goal is to make combat as one-sided as possible. This generally drains victory of satisfaction and losses lose any potential meaning. On top of this, the PvP zone is riddled with weird dev-written nudges at how they also think that PvP is toxic as heck but refuse to do anything but acknowledge it in a joking, condescending manner (i.e. the Vials and Salt and things like the chat dialogue with the Mini Llama Tender/Raiser whatever that NPC is). Anet made a toxic game, and then they laughed at the people who took it seriously.

Lmaoooo, I saw that guy yesterday. Truly a magical individual.

One gem has been deposited into your Black Lion Trading Post account.

The undead wizard, rogue, and the hunter/beastmaster are healers? And the paladin is a healer twice over? I could go for the other ones two, but do you see the point? GW2 is a muddled mess and makes zero sense to anyone at first glance without going through a bunch of patch notes, wiki pages or videos unless somebody just gives them a full lecture on it (which is an awful way to experience it). Sure, anyone can also play the game to find out at that pace, but there is no initial sense to it at all, and the lines blur over every class. How is every profession DPS but only a few are "support" or "tank" without any real holistic concept behind the reasoning? Why is the thing marketed as a blue mage the tank?? That's not creative or surprising. That's confusing for anyone (particularly because the marketed definition of so many of these classes completely clash with what they generally do in the game).

If only GW2 had actual roles--professions that served actual, tangible purposes--so that anyone who played the game could understand at a glance the intent of other players and how roles could blend in a given situation. How can anyone be justifiably upset at someone for playing a "role-playing game" as if it has any roles outside of a single, generic rogue derivative that's hidden across all the classes arbitrarily (and only if you bought into the expacs)?

The "simple topics" likely allude to the things that ultimately generated the game state that nobody seems to really enjoy right now. Sure, people play GW2, but it never seems like anyone is truly enjoying it. Winning doesn't always feel fulfilling, and losing never feels like it offers anything on the back-end. Why else would that be the case except if combat itself has such a cluttered and esoteric design that all of the most important interacts are generally hidden from players on first impression for no explicable reason at all? Legitimately, if attacks just didn't evade, block, immobilize or blind while leveraging massive damage (or if teleporting players didn't simultaneously inflict CC), you could solve maybe 50% of this issue off the cuff without any further investment. Recycled post? What if GW2 were a game intentionally marketed as a "drop it whenever and pick it up again whenever you feel like it" kind of experience? Holy smokes, that would be craaaaaazyyyy.

The worst part is that I could've said this, but then you'd just get a bunch of people dogpiling their echochamber confirmation bias opinions onto that post because it'd just be me telling them to look into a mirror with nobody else on the line to support. It's actually tragic how that's how it is: GW2 will never change because it's kept the way it is due to confirmation bias. Anytime that anyone wants to legitimately critique something, it's often the "git gud" or "go play another game" or "you didn't design it, though lmao" response. There isn't any real engagement; there never has been any engagement. I wouldn't even call this game great when it launched (and that's often the timeframe that so many people like to refer as the golden age). I tried pretty hard to believe that this game had a PvP future up through 2014, but it never happened, and it only went completely down into the abyss the second that direct upgrades launched with the first expansion. I do at least appreciate that you can pump the breaks and take a step back to have a more holistic perspective on this topic, though.

OK, that's a fair point. Leaps are trash, and Guardian GS 3 will often literally turn you 180 on a target and fling you off in the exact intended direction. If GW2 wasn't a mega spaghetti mess, then maybe leaps wouldn't have such a problem. I'd imagine it's likely due to how player movement is so erratic nowadays between superspeed, swiftness, knock-backs, teleports. Then again, my favorite instance of leap inconsistency is when using Sanctuary's bump (which has to be, like, 100 units at most) to snare a target into a window where a leap SHOULD land, and then the GS 3 leap will simply kickflip 360 me like I'm some kind of cross between a boomerang and a ping-pong ball. If leaps weren't trash, then ask the question: How bad would it be for us to lose a bunch of teleports in exchange for leaps? You can at least weapon-swap cancel leaps for some extra distance or trick jumps. Teleports are so boring. That's a fair question. I mean to say any teleport that has an attack tied to it, or one which generally lends itself to chaining an attack. JI is a great example of a cheesy one because it's basically just Guardian Steal except without 14 different passive trait bonuses loaded into it. It's still terribly gross to fight for the sake of legibility, and nobody who gets caught by it will ever feel like they were within some kind of engaging PvP exchange. Sure, can you pop a few buttons to negate that user's JI pop? Sure, but then who's having fun? The point is that, by design at this point, GW2 is anti-engagement. There is generally only going to be one person having fun in a PvP engagement, and nobody who loses is going to feel like they have something to learn or change in most cases. Often, the best solution to losing any given match-up is to just be more passive in the next engagement (which isn't fun to play, and it isn't fun to watch). This passivity eventually grows so stifling that sometimes the best way to play PvP is to avoid a lot of PvP entirely by just walking around fights and going to points or getting some random map objective first.

Most people do looking at the game's condition lol, although, to be perfectly honest about it, the things discussed above aren't that far off from what everybody else does with their nitpicky, onesie-twosie number cuts and increases now. Only real difference is whether or not there's anyone left at anet who could actually deliver on an increase in ammo skills or changing something from a laser beam to a ground-targeted AoE. Defaulting to "theme" as the justification for your class is that same core problem. It's not just the devs at this point; it's the players who also think that flavor should define the function of a class and not the other way around. Whatever you're playing, it's just a knock-off rogue.

Less teleports in general, offensive teleports replaced by leaps, a possible GCD on teleport usage, more ground-targeted AoEs or linear cascade attacks (i.e. rev hammer 2), smaller AoEs, shorter duration AoEs, WAY MORE ammo system attacks to counteract AoE reductions, less weapon bar blocks/evades, no more blocks/evades on attacks, everybody now gets more dodges (endurance totals possibly tied to profession/armor weight). Honestly, you could probably delete an entire weapon bar skill slot, and end up with a better canvas to establish this kind of design by function and opportunity cost than trying to fill five slots per weapon combination. You'd probably have to do something drastic to the state of auto-attacks, though, since they're mostly just over-tuned filler/fodder right now rather than something that really compliments the holistic flow of any given weapon set to which they're attached. Blind and aegis are also dumb. I'm not saying that GW2 is going to change, and I'm not saying that I am going to fight for GW2's PvP (because it's a lost cause). I'm just putting out an observation based on how people play GW2's PvP, eternally complain about it, yet continuously lobby for the exact same """design"""" decisions which sunk them into the hole that the game is in right now. You'll never have a thriving population because GW2's PvP has a deceptively low skill ceiling which suppresses creativity and denies any emergent gameplay; it is impossible to shoutcast PvP from more than a wavetop viewpoint; PvP is entirely antithetical to the average or new, curious spectator (because none of it will make any real sense); and, despite its stunted skill curve, the gameplay is esoteric enough (due to all of its glut of passive, risk-mitigating gimmicks), that a new player's first experience on it is almost certainly skewed toward a bad impression. If you think that adjusting numbers will save a class or "balance" a build, you're so far off the target that you're basically shooting the other people next to you at the range (which is probably what it feels like for anyone who just wants to have fun but keeps seeing all of these people crying about how GW2 PvP is fine but just needs X nerfed or Y buffed). You're all trapped in your own ivory wizard's tower. Edit: Oh yeah, this game should've had a map editor, like, 8 years ago lmao. It doesn't seem difficult to use, and anyone can tell that even the anet devs abuse it regularly in awful ways (just go to the Silverwastes and check out the stretch scaling on any of the bigger rocks in the area). Adjusting stuff on old Skyhammer looks like something that anyone with a little bit of free time could do. If players could just make their own maps, then even this game's current combat could maybe improve a tiny bit by virtue of more jump tricks and no-teleport spots present all over the place.