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Rylek posted:I agree with all of this. For all the cool things GW2 has done it has also proven that the lack of a Trinity type system really limits how interesting your PvE encounters can be. Wildstar has that GW2 type combat but with the Trinity and despite the game being hot garbage overall the bosses were pretty cool in dungeons and raids. They've really tried to incorporate cool boss fights in things like fractals and the Living World bosses, with mixed success. Their most successful bosses are gimmick fights primarily--fun, but in the way a good Zelda boss is fun, where you figure out the gimmick and then repeat it a few times. At least they stopped letting you graveyard rush dungeon bosses a while ago. Some of the elite specs and the new Revenant profession seem to gesture towards more varied tank/support roles in Heart of Thorns, but that's speculation at best right now. I really want them to learn from, like, City of Heroes or something, which had a great nontraditional role system.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 19:05 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 06:26 |
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GW2 added a new taunt status effect in the expansion but it's treated more like an emergency ability rather than something to maintain continuously. I don't get how putting the trinity in GW2's dungeon design would suddenly make everything better. It'll only make it interesting in that it adds a layer of busywork on top of everything, old encounters would still be sacks of HP like in any other game anyway.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 19:34 |
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FFXIV has good dungeons.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 19:42 |
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Rylek posted:I agree with all of this. For all the cool things GW2 has done it has also proven that the lack of a Trinity type system really limits how interesting your PvE encounters can be. Wildstar has that GW2 type combat but with the Trinity and despite the game being hot garbage overall the bosses were pretty cool in dungeons and raids. Honestly I still think the adventures were really fun and could have worked with competent leads and more manhours spent balancing/bugfixing them. Malgraive trail was fun, interesting, and unique. The first time. After that, it was a boring slog that almost always ended in silver or worse because you'd have one loving idiot npc walk into the desert and wouldn't be found. The Dota-like adventure was neat in that you could beat it really fast if your group was good and optimized, and they made it so you had to sit around not winning in order to win the highest tier of items. The tower-defense like adventure was kind of fun since dps had poo poo to do that wasn't just pouring on damage, but it was balanced badly and you basically were hosed if you messed up once, since your soldiers would revert to having no special upgrades. The GTA- style adventure was honestly the most mechanically balanced, but there was an optimal route, so you never did anything else, though at least your mini-missions would be somewhat random and mix it up. The dungeons I could take or leave.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 19:43 |
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Verranicus posted:FFXIV has good dungeons. I like the one where you walk down a hallway and fight 3 bosses.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 21:10 |
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more like dICK posted:I like the one where you walk down a hallway and fight 3 bosses. Hey, that's every dungeon!
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 21:15 |
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Hey now some have completely inconsequential branching paths. Did you know you can go left at the end of Fractal Continuum?
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 21:19 |
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more like dICK posted:Hey now some have completely inconsequential branching paths. Did you know you can go left at the end of Fractal Continuum? Yea talk about choices, you get to pick the order you have to kill the last trash packs! Whats up with all bosses have to have huge circle rooms?
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 21:25 |
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Tenzarin posted:Bright wizards could combo their spells and do insane damage. I don't remember what they did but it was a combination of dots and insta-casts and that they never really had to not be always running. I lvl mine 30-40 in battlegrounds because I could burn people down. Now, in Warhammer factions had their own classes, and the opposing faction had a mirror to that class. But they weren't perfect mirrors, with skills and stuff varying here and there. While Sorcs were still very good, they were missing a skill that made BWs stupid good. If I remember, it was a debuff you put on a healer that damaged them whenever they healed, and it could crit so of course it did stupid damage to a healer. Not healing didn't work, because it could also damage you on hot ticks so you either never used them or just pray they were about to fade. And that's not all! It also put a healing debuff, although I forget the specifics as to whether it limited healing on the target or dampened the healing they did. I think it was really high as well, like 75% or even 100%. Bright Wizards had a lot of dots in general, so their damage was sick in all directions. They didn't start nerfing the class until it became clear that people were leaving for Wrath.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 22:22 |
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Rorus Raz posted:They didn't start nerfing the class until it became clear that people were leaving for Wrath. The class was still king when it was shut down, I started playing after wrath came out and didn't play a BW till a year after that. The mirror classes varied by alot for the casters, Sorc had a huge nuke that they could cast while the BW could run around casting 4 instas and do more dmg. The tank mirrors were close but holy poo poo did the black orc knockback just suck in comparison. Tenzarin fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Aug 24, 2015 |
# ? Aug 24, 2015 22:52 |
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Rorus Raz posted:Bright Wizard (and Sorceress) had a mechanic where each spell they cast would increase their crit chance while also increasing the chance they would randomly take damage themselves. I could see a BW winning a 1v3 (without a tank) since they had ridiculous burst, but it was more about group play since healers could effectively eliminate the risk of the BW/Sorc mechanic while they stayed at 100% crit chance all day. Then you had tanks slapping Guard on them (a % of damage taken would go to the tank instead) and battles kinda reduced into games of "protect your wizard" since losing them meant you lost a disgusting amount of damage. I think Bright Wizards were AoE focused with Sorceresses as single target, which was another point their favor. Order's Ironbreaker tanks were also better than anything that Chaos had. They launched the game without all the classes they had originally envisioned, so the Chaos version of Ironbreakers and the Order version of Chosen weren't in for awhile. There was also a dwarf/orc melee bruiser that neither faction got at launch. The whole "2 factions that can never under any circumstances play cooperatively" is probably the worst thing from WoW that a shitload of MMOs have copied.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 23:22 |
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jjac posted:GW2 added a new taunt status effect in the expansion but it's treated more like an emergency ability rather than something to maintain continuously. It's less about the trinity, but rather anet's inability to design any decent dungeon encounter. Just look at destiny, totally different genre, but the raid encounters in that game are drat good and everyone is just basically straight DPS.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 23:23 |
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The Moon Monster posted:I think Bright Wizards were AoE focused with Sorceresses as single target, which was another point their favor. Order's Ironbreaker tanks were also better than anything that Chaos had. They launched the game without all the classes they had originally envisioned, so the Chaos version of Ironbreakers and the Order version of Chosen weren't in for awhile. There was also a dwarf/orc melee bruiser that neither faction got at launch. Yeah it was incredibly stupid to me that the tank mirror for orcs was with the loving high elves. I mean Warhammer elves loving own compared to anything else, but you'd think an orc would be more like a dwarf in taking a hit and how they fight than an elf. It made it into a sort of shaman/paladin thing doing that. I did love my Chosen, though. Man I miss that game.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 23:25 |
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Mostly I remember putting a call out, setting up a defense, then having the other side pull the boss through the floor.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 23:42 |
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Class imbalance in Warhammer was the dumbest thing because you had two different people handling each of the factions balance. So the poo poo in the order side was almost always far stronger than the chaos one. Then for some reason the only class that was legitimately stronger on chaos than on order side, the witch elf, was nerfed to the ground and its order counter part was buffed to the skies, stronger at 1v1 than any other class in the game.
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# ? Aug 24, 2015 23:49 |
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Rorus Raz posted:Bright Wizard (and Sorceress) had a mechanic where each spell they cast would increase their crit chance while also increasing the chance they would randomly take damage themselves. I could see a BW winning a 1v3 (without a tank) since they had ridiculous burst, but it was more about group play since healers could effectively eliminate the risk of the BW/Sorc mechanic while they stayed at 100% crit chance all day. Then you had tanks slapping Guard on them (a % of damage taken would go to the tank instead) and battles kinda reduced into games of "protect your wizard" since losing them meant you lost a disgusting amount of damage. Bright Wizard's also had a PBAE stun. So they would run into a group of Destro, drop the 5 second stun, blast through their massive AE damage and decimate a Destro team on their own. But it was totally cool cause Destro had all those abilities as well, sure it took 3-4 classes to match up to one Bright Wizard but it wasn't balanced 1v1 so it was totally cool right? And if I recall correctly, population balance was heavily slanted in Destructions favor at launch, so to counter this they decided they would just buff the Order classes so they were stronger so if 15 Order met 30 Destruction in a RvR lake the fights would be balanced, of course that led to the obvious result of people rerolling Order and steamrolling through Destro, and if I recall at least while I was playing they never really reverted the buffs to order. So they had classes that were already generally stronger in design that were buffed to be even more so. Then they had the horrible RvR design where it was more efficient to run around taking keeps and pve objectives in the RvR lakes than actually participating in RvR. That added to the generally poor engine performance and some other headscratching decisions it is no wonder the game failed. WAR had some good ideas and I wish it were still around but it failed because there were just a lot of terrible design decisions and poor development going on with that game. By far the biggest MMO failure, even worse than Wildstar because the potential was so much higher.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 01:24 |
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Lyer posted:It's less about the trinity, but rather anet's inability to design any decent dungeon encounter. Just look at destiny, totally different genre, but the raid encounters in that game are drat good and everyone is just basically straight DPS. I don’t know what you're reading into but I am saying that dungeons are bad and are the absolute last thing you should do when you want to play with people, and cramming the trinity in there won't suddenly make everything better. On a side note are there any actual interesting MMO encounters where A) enemies aren't scripted to break off the tank to do a thing and B) there aren't any environmental hazards that keeps everyone on their toes? Because it seems that the better raids are designed the more the trinity becomes this increasingly vestigal mechanic that devs try to shove aside.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 02:12 |
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jjac posted:I don’t know what you're reading into but I am saying that dungeons are bad and are the absolute last thing you should do when you want to play with people, and cramming the trinity in there won't suddenly make everything better. I think my favourite boss encounter ever was Ruby Sanctum heroic but that is essentially environmental hazard the musical. Having the raid split in half and have to keep track of players you couldn't see so you wouldn't step in close to instadeath puddles made for a really interesting fight.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 03:22 |
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The Moon Monster posted:The whole "2 factions that can never under any circumstances play cooperatively" is probably the worst thing from WoW that a shitload of MMOs have copied. Having two factions in a PvP game was real stupid though. You need a third faction to at least force the most populated faction to stretch itself a bit thin.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 05:09 |
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Rorus Raz posted:In the game's defense, it was a huge stretch even having the two factions since everyone in Warhammer hates each other with very few exceptions. poo poo, in the g ame's lore the dark elves had to basically mind control the greenskin leaders because there is no other way to explain why an orc is playing nice with a servant of chaos. I was ready for the dwarfageddon when the dwarfs would withdraw from the order and rule all of the races. Dwarfs had everything best tank, best melee slayer, good healer rune priest. Humans would be the closest threat because of the witch hunter, bright wizard, and warrior priest.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 07:53 |
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jjac posted:
I'm not 100% what you mean. FFXIV throws a lot of stuff in to disrupt the trinity, and I'm sure WoW has done it too. Almost every raid has some environmental hazards though. Things like DPS needing to tank adds for certain phases, fights with no tanks for portions of them, etc. To me its less a relic and more a thing to base class balance and mechanics around. It also allows players to have radically different styles of play on different classes, and try to be the best at them. On a side note, the thing that confuses me most about Wildstar raids though, is that most of them actually look relatively easy compared to the ones in FFXIV, and WoW raids are supposed to be harder than that. They actually look pretty easy even compared to the more casual endgame content, like EX Primals. Is there anyone who has raided Wildstar and another big game and can make a comparison?
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 09:43 |
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The Trinity was healer/tank/crowd control, anyway, so there hasn't been a game with the Trinity in years. And get off my lawn you drat kids!
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 10:45 |
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wild star raids seem pretty simple mechanically. Of the vids posted here nothing seems batshit insane. Most of the problems seem to stem from severe over tuning. Where raids weren't flat out impossible they were tuned to exhaust everyone but the most stubborn raid groups.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 10:48 |
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Tarranon posted:wild star raids seem pretty simple mechanically. Of the vids posted here nothing seems batshit insane. Most of the problems seem to stem from severe over tuning. Where raids weren't flat out impossible they were tuned to exhaust everyone but the most stubborn raid groups. Make boss mechanics interesting and hard enough that surviving them is the reward, dont require people to hit a magic number of damage by minute X or die. This is like 99% of the problem i have with mmo raiding.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 13:35 |
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Tarranon posted:wild star raids seem pretty simple mechanically. Of the vids posted here nothing seems batshit insane. Most of the problems seem to stem from severe over tuning. Where raids weren't flat out impossible they were tuned to exhaust everyone but the most stubborn raid groups. Overtuning and poo poo like almost the entire floor becoming a deathzone.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 14:05 |
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Lyer posted:It's less about the trinity, but rather anet's inability to design any decent dungeon encounter. Just look at destiny, totally different genre, but the raid encounters in that game are drat good and everyone is just basically straight DPS. I want them to take cues from games like City of Heroes or, well, Phantasy Star Online. Both games lacked a traditional role system, but both also rewarded good group play and had interesting and fun PvE design. City of Heroes, especially, was interesting, because of its lack of a traditional healer role, and because the "tank" role was more about cooperating with the controller to do crowd control than it was about face-tanking things. Whatever this "challenging group content" they're unveiling soon is, I hope they're going to try to move in that direction. Make crowd control important, and make it so that you need someone capable of putting out defensive boons/Aegis/Regeneration just as much as you need someone capable of putting out tons of Might and Fury. I know Colin Johansson recently said something in an interview about how they never intended there to be no "trinity" in GW2, but rather a "soft trinity," where every profession could do every role and players would be able to change roles as the situation demanded. Maybe he brought that up because they're going to take another stab at making that actually work. I dunno. I'd love there to be more involving PvE in GW2 for sure. I think they can do it. Like, Mai Trin would be a really cool boss if she wasn't such an HP sponge. That's true of the Season 2 Living World bosses, too, especially the ones in that Glint cave or the Shadow of the Dragon that all had cool gimmicks to them. If those fights were just shorter and you only had to repeat the gimmicks a handful of times, rather than having to whittle down a huge bag of HP and do the gimmicks ad nauseum, they'd have been excellent.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 14:32 |
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Gw2 made the mistake of going full retard and making every heal ability (outside of your actual hotbar self heal ability) worthless. The healing power stat scales worse than any stat ive seen in an mmo rpg (full on stacking it will net you a total of maybe 50% increase in healing vs someone with 0) Not to mention all the abilities which heal or support are just garbage. Guardians have the largest direct heal in the game (virtue) and it heals for about 2.2k, plus another 600ish if you have a trait with gives it a HoT. This has a 45 second cooldown. The average melee auto attack crit is around 2.5k. A thief can backstab a lightly armored target every 4 seconds for 8k damage.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 14:58 |
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One prominent GW2 YouTuber suggested merging Healing Power and Boon Duration into an all-purpose support stat and I think that's actually a pretty solid idea. That, and making outgoing healing not universally garbage. Healing Power doesn't even have to be that good if it comes bundled with other good things, like noticeably increased Might, Fury, Protection, etc. duration. I'm sure ArenaNet was afraid that they'd undermine their "the best way to stay alive is to avoid damage" paradigm if they made outgoing healing too strong, but given how most professions can't exactly heal non-stop, I don't think it'd be a bad idea to turn it up a bit.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 15:01 |
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Harrow posted:City of Heroes, especially, was interesting, because of its lack of a traditional healer role, and because the "tank" role was more about cooperating with the controller to do crowd control than it was about face-tanking things. Are we remembering the same game here? Defenders had Empathy which was NOTHING but heals and regen, and most every power pool had some kind of heal/regen/revive. Yeah a couple of the other pools were primarily buffs, but I think only two of them had no heal whatsoever. And then all of the Tanker pools were basically 'have more defense or resistance' and the best pools were the ones that had poo poo like mudpots from Stone Armor because of how it dealt with threat and kept poo poo on you. CoH tanks were TOTALLY about face tanking poo poo; there were reasons ones like Super Reflexes were seen as crap early on, because they were squishy when they got hit. I think CoV Brutes and Corruptors had more of what you're thinking but Defenders and Tankers were totally Trinity level poo poo.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 15:51 |
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John Dyne posted:Are we remembering the same game here? Defenders had Empathy which was NOTHING but heals and regen, and most every power pool had some kind of heal/regen/revive. Yeah a couple of the other pools were primarily buffs, but I think only two of them had no heal whatsoever. Admittedly it's been a long time since I played, but I remember Empathy being the only Defender power set that focused strongly on direct healing, and the others being more about preventing damage than healing it. I could be super wrong, though, but that's really what I meant--it wasn't so much about reactive healing as it was about buffing and using defensive skills to prevent damage in the first place. The heals were there, but they weren't the focus of any set other than Empathy. That'd mesh fine with how GW2 does support, if they wanted to move in that direction; every profession has a least a couple of ways to heal others, some more than others, and also ways to prevent damage for allies.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 16:14 |
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Rorus Raz posted:Bright Wizard (and Sorceress) had a mechanic where each spell they cast would increase their crit chance while also increasing the chance they would randomly take damage themselves. I could see a BW winning a 1v3 (without a tank) since they had ridiculous burst, but it was more about group play since healers could effectively eliminate the risk of the BW/Sorc mechanic while they stayed at 100% crit chance all day. Then you had tanks slapping Guard on them (a % of damage taken would go to the tank instead) and battles kinda reduced into games of "protect your wizard" since losing them meant you lost a disgusting amount of damage. From a non-balance standpoint, this kind of dynamic is pretty interesting in terms of fantasy castle sieges and army battles. Having a small regiment of rear end in a top hat beardwizards to belt out fireballs while big beefy meat-sponges pad the frontlines is like some sort of weird D&D strategy taken to its logical end. That, or it's a clever way to implement the style of gameplay from the warhammer tabletop. What I'm saying is that I miss player collision and tanking in pvp.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 17:02 |
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Commissar Budgie posted:From a non-balance standpoint, this kind of dynamic is pretty interesting in terms of fantasy castle sieges and army battles. Having a small regiment of rear end in a top hat beardwizards to belt out fireballs while big beefy meat-sponges pad the frontlines is like some sort of weird D&D strategy taken to its logical end. That, or it's a clever way to implement the style of gameplay from the warhammer tabletop. SWTOR has tanking in pvp. Taunts and aoe taunts lower everyones damage except if they attack you.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 17:39 |
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John Dyne posted:Are we remembering the same game here? Defenders had Empathy which was NOTHING but heals and regen, and most every power pool had some kind of heal/regen/revive. Yeah a couple of the other pools were primarily buffs, but I think only two of them had no heal whatsoever. That isn't really true, there were a lot of other support power sets that were wildly different from "THE HEALER" and Empathy was frankly one of the least effective ones. Kinetics, Dark, Radiation, Storm all had a much more dramatic impact on party offense and defense, they were just not quite as good at sticking hitpoints in people. And while yes Tankers were all about holding aggro and not dying, they were totally unnecessary if you had a good combination of other forms of support for very nearly all of the content. Champions has a lot of interesting approaches to support characters as well, for subscribers (not really so much the free-to-play archetypes). e: On top of that, a lot of party combinations didn't particularly need anyone to stick hitpoints in people at all if you had e.g. a really good crowd control person or a well-designed tank. CoH had a lot of legit brilliant and diverse game design with respect to character options for all that it was a dumb superhero pretty princess dressup game for fags Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Aug 25, 2015 |
# ? Aug 25, 2015 17:52 |
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As a rad defender, I remember terrible pubbies demanding an empathy defender because they could not fathom utilizing buffs and CC to reduce damage.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 18:13 |
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Mayor McCheese posted:I like unique healing mechanics and it's a shame you don't see them too often. I feel AoC doesn't really get enough credit for being decentish eventually. Especially in how they designed healers. In AoC healers put out group/raid wide hots instead of doing actual spot healing. And then they had a minute cooldown big heal. That was it for healing. So their hots just happened naturally, like with bear shaman I think it happened from you beating things to death, no extra thought or bother required. It was really cool. Tempest of Set, another healer, was more a lightning mage first and healer second. They had some extra utility too but, Bear Shaman in particular could do a TON of damage, more than many dps classes. I...really liked AoC for the year or so I played it during its expansion, but well :Funcom:
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 18:36 |
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Flesh Forge posted:That isn't really true, there were a lot of other support power sets that were wildly different from "THE HEALER" and Empathy was frankly one of the least effective ones. Kinetics, Dark, Radiation, Storm all had a much more dramatic impact on party offense and defense, they were just not quite as good at sticking hitpoints in people. And while yes Tankers were all about holding aggro and not dying, they were totally unnecessary if you had a good combination of other forms of support for very nearly all of the content. You misunderstand what I was getting at; I was saying every power pool had one or two heals, except maybe two pools exclusively, which is contrary to the idea that City of Heroes' didn't have a traditional healer role. You still had a guy who was expected to heal when healthbars dipped low, and an entire archetype was set up to prevent those bars from dipping and to bring them back up when they did dip. It wasn't 100% the health bar whack-a-mole of other games, but you took the heal powers and you used them with your other poo poo. Only like force fields and I can't remember the other didn't have, or need, a heal of any kind, and they were so good at providing +def that poo poo just didn't hit you. And I can't think of a time it wasn't easier just to have a tank AND the other support poo poo. I don't remember what they were called but there were little mini-raids like where you fought evil Positron, and those were much easier with a tank or a scrapper who was tanky as gently caress to handle the boss. CoH was great and it had some awesome poo poo but it still stuck to the notion of the trinity; it just had power combinations that could give you two of the three in one person. Hell an old school regen scrapper pretty much could cover the tank and healer part on their own.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 18:36 |
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Rorus Raz posted:As a rad defender, I remember terrible pubbies demanding an empathy defender because they could not fathom utilizing buffs and CC to reduce damage. I remember a friend rolling a forcefields defender at launch, and making the vanity supergroup 'No I don't have Empathy' to get all of the EQ refugees off his rear end for not being a straight healer.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 19:30 |
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John Dyne posted:You misunderstand what I was getting at; I was saying every power pool had one or two heals, except maybe two pools exclusively, which is contrary to the idea that City of Heroes' didn't have a traditional healer role. You still had a guy who was expected to heal when healthbars dipped low, and an entire archetype was set up to prevent those bars from dipping and to bring them back up when they did dip. It wasn't 100% the health bar whack-a-mole of other games, but you took the heal powers and you used them with your other poo poo. Only like force fields and I can't remember the other didn't have, or need, a heal of any kind, and they were so good at providing +def that poo poo just didn't hit you. Well, I guess my point is that: CoH had a somewhat nontraditional trinity and it was awesome, and Guild Wars 2 could learn from that. All of those things you said about the Defender power sets are true of most Guild Wars 2 professions, especially the Engineer, Elementalist, and Guardian. They have plenty of ways to heal other players. They're fairly weak at the moment and the content isn't designed to support it, but it's there. What I'd like is for GW2 to have more of a niche in PvE for actual support players, who help prevent damage (and cover for everyone else's limited dodges) and put out boons while occasionally throwing down a heal. The same is true for a limited "tanking" role, though I think it'd be more interestingly implemented as crowd control. Different professions can crowd control in different ways already, but there's not much call for it in most PvE content at the moment.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 19:34 |
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So I just randomly got key in my email for the free-to-play closed beta. After reading these last few pages I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't bother installing it at all.
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 19:43 |
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# ? Jun 6, 2024 06:26 |
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Atheist Sunglasses posted:So I just randomly got key in my email for the free-to-play closed beta. After reading these last few pages I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't bother installing it at all. yes
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# ? Aug 25, 2015 19:46 |