This game is terrible

[Aphex]

Why is this game terrible you ask? Well there are a lot of things but let me focus on the systems because they are the terrible foundation of this game.

Stability, Block, Quickness, Regen, Heal, Dodge, Vulnerability, Bleed, Poison, Cripple, Fear, Blind, Boons, Protection, Freeze, Fury, Daze, Knockdown, Stun, Pushback, Taunt. Torment, Stone, Chill, Initiative, Swiftness, Might, Expertise, Vigor, Burn, Slow, Weakness, and Concentration....just to name a few are all systems in this game. Systems you will never hear the game mention once in a tutorial or something because they read all that stuff and said: screw it.

All these systems are tied to abilities wich last a few seconds. If you want to be effective you need to know each and everyone of these, how to apply them, how to exploit them and how to counter them.

Every class in this game has to manage rotations of at least 20 buttons while ALWAYS keeping an eye on effects on you and your enemy because those effects can kill you in under 2 seconds.

Now one would think, with such a big emphasis on all these systems they would design the game in a way that is slow and methodical or at least would have CRYSTAL CLEAR VISUAL INDICATORS but no, in the heat of battle with 50 people on screen all slinging visual effects to the point of everything becoming a glowy blur, YOU need to keep track of everything. And here comes the kicker: While your eyes are glued to the hotbar and on the lookout for the incoming systems that can oneshot you, the screen being an indeciferable mess of stuff they decided to intoduce POORLY TELEGRAPHED oneshot mechanics.

A lot of that could be solved with passives, passive buffs or immunities wich are PERMANENT. It would make building characters more interesting and take a lot of pressure off the player in a game where systems are everything but also require twitch reflexes.

There is a phrase that became quite popular because it works very well in such games:
Easy to learn, hard to master. This game has requires to delve into the wiki for 100 hours to learn and almost impossible to master. I assume all of that is an attempt to hide the incredibly lazy encounter design wich boils down to tunnel player, oneshot player.

Look i am actually a fan of depth in a game but this game is too fast paced for these systems. These two schools of game design completely contradict eachother. That is why this game has no appeal. This is the core of the issue. People will not say it because it just takes too much effort to articulate what's wrong and just quit, but there you go.

Another frustration is the "bosses", golden mobs with 2 moves max. to be specific wich are thrown arround the world. They have a bazillion hp and oneshot you. So imagine fighting one of those for 40 minutes and then getting onetapped. You do not put stuff in the world that the player is not supposed to kill. If you want group content put it into an instance. I cannot imagine how many players have quit over this alone.

[</>]

I'll agree with the (too many status effects), outside of that I dunno what's the issue. Those bosses do kinda boil down to people just killing it with numbers and that's no issue for this game.
Starter map for humans has a world boss that's never below 30 players at least, if someone goes down people get them up with ease. The only real issue I see here is the status effect bloat

[Aphex]

Whoka eredeti hozzászólása:

I'll agree with the (too many status effects), outside of that I dunno what's the issue. Those bosses do kinda boil down to people just killing it with numbers and that's no issue for this game.
Starter map for humans has a world boss that's never below 30 players at least, if someone goes down people get them up with ease. The only real issue I see here is the status effect bloat

Zerging a boss down is just a coping mechanism players rely on to counter poor boss design. Good boss design is a slow methodical fight with clear visual indicators that allow for some failures to be able to learn. It would also help to scale those bosses to playercount so one could solo them and feel good about it. Zerging doesn't feel good and if noone is arround you're just out of luck.

Also just because YOU don't see issues doesn't mean there are none. There is a reason this game is not very popular and i try to explain some of the problems.

[Aphex]

Another issue with the game is the general bloat and lack of cleanup. Every xpac they introduce system on top of system without going back and cleaning up/streamlining old content. WoW stayed relevant for so long because they went the extra mile and overhauled the old stuff regularly.

[Nico]

Aphex eredeti hozzászólása:

Whoka eredeti hozzászólása:

I'll agree with the (too many status effects), outside of that I dunno what's the issue. Those bosses do kinda boil down to people just killing it with numbers and that's no issue for this game.
Starter map for humans has a world boss that's never below 30 players at least, if someone goes down people get them up with ease. The only real issue I see here is the status effect bloat

Zerging a boss down is just a coping mechanism players rely on to counter poor boss design. Good boss design is a slow methodical fight with clear visual indicators that allow for some failures to be able to learn. It would also help to scale those bosses to playercount so one could solo them and feel good about it. Zerging doesn't feel good and if noone is arround you're just out of luck.

Well, zerging is just how world bosses in open worlds work. If you want some more strategic battles you probably should do fractals, raids or strikes, where we can't just zerg them to death and where most relevant enemy attacks have pretty good indicators.

But it is certainly true that especially the pre HoT area enemies in general don't have super great indicators, only with HoT they really introduced some more easy to see mechanics and they also reworked many old world bosses to make their mechanics more clear to see. But with 50 players around you it obviously is still a bit difficult to always see them. And those reworked boss fights already feel way better than before, so they clearly had the intention to make those fights better.

And well, those are world bosses, they are supposed to require a bigger player count to be able to beat them, though usually even just 10 people might already be enough to deal with them, at least the easier ones.

Also, fights being slow is neither good or bad, it's just a simple design choice. So just because Anet decided to have faster fights with more action doesn't make them suddenly bad. Though it clearly makes them a bit harder since you need to react quicker. But they still can be methodical, even when they are fast.

[Aphex]

Nico eredeti hozzászólása:

Well, zerging is just how world bosses in open worlds work. If you want some more strategic battles you probably should do fractals, raids or strikes, where we can't just zerg them to death and where most relevant enemy attacks have pretty good indicators.

But it is certainly true that especially the pre HoT area enemies in general don't have super great indicators, only with HoT they really introduced some more easy to see mechanics and they also reworked many old world bosses to make their mechanics more clear to see. But with 50 players around you it obviously is still a bit difficult to always see them. And those reworked boss fights already feel way better than before, so they clearly had the intention to make those fights better.

And well, those are world bosses, they are supposed to require a bigger player count to be able to beat them, though usually even just 10 people might already be enough to deal with them, at least the easier ones.

Also, fights being slow is neither good or bad, it's just a simple design choice. So just because Anet decided to have faster fights with more action doesn't make them suddenly bad. Though it clearly makes them a bit harder since you need to react quicker. But they still can be methodical, even when they are fast.

I raise you bandit bounties. And i raise you the general imbalance of classes. Most classes just don't have the tools needed to do certain content. It's like they made a mob bigger, threw a golden circle on it, pumped the damage up to eleven and called it a day without any playtesting.

There are a couple of golden mobs where i test class performance when i create new characters and if i can't beat them i delete the char and concider it bad. Now compare a Thief with a Warrior. While the Thief has access to permaheals and runs circles arround these mobs a warrior has absolutely nothing to counter them. Mechanics like tunnel and hit or constant ranged hitscan attacks. It's just no comparison. And if you argue that i need endgame builds to do these early area bosses, well....

Not to mention the absolute crapshoot that is powerbuilds compared to condi.

[Nico]

Aphex eredeti hozzászólása:

Nico eredeti hozzászólása:

Well, zerging is just how world bosses in open worlds work. If you want some more strategic battles you probably should do fractals, raids or strikes, where we can't just zerg them to death and where most relevant enemy attacks have pretty good indicators.

But it is certainly true that especially the pre HoT area enemies in general don't have super great indicators, only with HoT they really introduced some more easy to see mechanics and they also reworked many old world bosses to make their mechanics more clear to see. But with 50 players around you it obviously is still a bit difficult to always see them. And those reworked boss fights already feel way better than before, so they clearly had the intention to make those fights better.

And well, those are world bosses, they are supposed to require a bigger player count to be able to beat them, though usually even just 10 people might already be enough to deal with them, at least the easier ones.

Also, fights being slow is neither good or bad, it's just a simple design choice. So just because Anet decided to have faster fights with more action doesn't make them suddenly bad. Though it clearly makes them a bit harder since you need to react quicker. But they still can be methodical, even when they are fast.

I raise you bandit bounties. And i raise you the general imbalance of classes. Most classes just don't have the tools needed to do certain content. It's like they made a mob bigger, threw a golden circle on it, pumped the damage up to eleven and called it a day without any playtesting.

Well, I don't know about classes that aren't viable. I just picked a class without knowing if it's viable for anything and was easily able to do any type of content with it, and I'm still mostly using the build I made like 5 years ago without any issues. No idea if I was just lucky that my dps Tempest always stayed viable or if it was something else. But I certainly already saw all classes doing all types of content, so I'm really not sure ...

And yeah, bandit bounties are surely weirdly hard wherever you might encounter them, basically like some secret bosses. Though idk if that's really something good or bad. And I mean, those bandit bounties got added pretty late, when most players were able to dwal with them. But I can surely see how they can be a quite sudden surprise for newer players.

Aphex eredeti hozzászólása:

Another issue with the game is the general bloat and lack of cleanup. Every xpac they introduce system on top of system without going back and cleaning up/streamlining old content. WoW stayed relevant for so long because they went the extra mile and overhauled the old stuff regularly.

Funny, I always thought that GW2 was one of the games who really tried to keep the old content staying relevant by adding new events to the areas, scaling everyone down so they're never overpowered for the areas and them even reworking content, like world bosses.

I at least thought that if in WoW you go to an old area with your max lvl hero you would one shot everything, was I misinformed? I mean, I know that the enemies scale up to a specific level, but from what I know not past it. So how is the startign zone still relevant for a max lvl character in WoW despite you one shotting everything? For me it sounds like pretty boring content to me. and GW2 never have this, even nowadays I often am in the startign areas, busy doing things and never having the feeling that the low level of the area changes much for me. Which certainly wouldn't be the case in WoW ...

[Ashrala]

Aphex eredeti hozzászólása:

Zerging a boss down is just a coping mechanism players rely on to counter poor boss design. Good boss design is a slow methodical fight with clear visual indicators that allow for some failures to be able to learn. It would also help to scale those bosses to playercount so one could solo them and feel good about it. Zerging doesn't feel good and if noone is arround you're just out of luck.

Also just because YOU don't see issues doesn't mean there are none. There is a reason this game is not very popular and i try to explain some of the problems.

I'm thinking you need to explore something to fight other then the world bosses to see some actual non-zerg fighting. By the way, all this------

Aphex eredeti hozzászólása:

Stability, Block, Quickness, Regen, Heal, Dodge, Vulnerability, Bleed, Poison, Cripple, Fear, Blind, Boons, Protection, Freeze, Fury, Daze, Knockdown, Stun, Pushback, Taunt. Torment, Stone, Chill, Initiative, Swiftness, Might, Expertise, Vigor, Burn, Slow, Weakness, and Concentration....just to name a few are all systems in this game.

------is not a system. They are status effects, a lot of mmos have such things.

[Frost]

There's so much hyperbole in this post i had to stop reading through them after a few paragraphs.

Look, if you're going to give some actual criticism about the game, try not to completely over-exaggerate most of your observations.

Rotations of 20 buttons? Buffs and debuffs are not systems, these things exist in every single MMO, some do damage, some provide utility, it's really not rocket science. The game requires 100 hours of wiki study? Cmon. Golden "bosses" are elites, and they can be solo'd with the right build, but generally they are supposed to be taken down as a team. Many can be killed with a decent amount of kiting and decent skill rotations.

All of this reads like you've tried the absolute bare minimum and nothing else, then being surprised that things might require more.

[Carnasid]

We have 10 skills during combat. 1-5 are weapon skills, 6-10 are utility. Now, back in my day (pulls up suspenders) we had 12 hot bars of 12 skills each that were part of a full rotation that we had to hit flawlessly to meet dps checks to not wipe the raid.

Old school mmos were a hell of a thing, kids.

[DarkSlayer197]

I hate to be this guy but um... if a boss can one tap you.. you wanna either evade or block. At the very least evade. Each starter map does teach you how to evade with the evade tutorial that gives you a chest.

[</>]

Aphex eredeti hozzászólása:

Whoka eredeti hozzászólása:

I'll agree with the (too many status effects), outside of that I dunno what's the issue. Those bosses do kinda boil down to people just killing it with numbers and that's no issue for this game.
Starter map for humans has a world boss that's never below 30 players at least, if someone goes down people get them up with ease. The only real issue I see here is the status effect bloat

Zerging a boss down is just a coping mechanism players rely on to counter poor boss design. Good boss design is a slow methodical fight with clear visual indicators that allow for some failures to be able to learn. It would also help to scale those bosses to playercount so one could solo them and feel good about it. Zerging doesn't feel good and if noone is arround you're just out of luck.

Also just because YOU don't see issues doesn't mean there are none. There is a reason this game is not very popular and i try to explain some of the problems.

It works because it's an open world boss thing, even though things are quite telegraphed.

Also just because YOU have an issue with things in the game doesn't mean it's an issue for all.
I agreed with the only valid thing in your essay, which is 90% of it.

[Tiberius]

Visual noise has always been a problem in this game since its initial launch. On max graphic setting, you cant see sht because of the stupid amt of particle effects. If you turn the lod setting on, you will still have problem identifying the red circles (whether its covered by friendly/personal aoe or because its blending with the orange/brown ground).

Then there are skills that have very small visual effect (like thief pistol skills). Its almost impossible to anticipate those skills during team fight.



Its so bad that they even had to add a new option for cursor visibility.

[mysaga]

Carnasid eredeti hozzászólása:

We have 10 skills during combat. 1-5 are weapon skills, 6-10 are utility. Now, back in my day (pulls up suspenders) we had 12 hot bars of 12 skills each that were part of a full rotation that we had to hit flawlessly to meet dps checks to not wipe the raid.

Old school mmos were a hell of a thing, kids.

To be fair, you have to take all the "ability swap buttons" into consideration as well: Weapon swap, class / elite spec abilities (like ele attunements, necro, druid avatar, ...) and toolkits (engi toolkits, ele summoned weapons, ...), which replace your 1-5 with another set of skills. Also the class/elite spec mechanics themselves on F1-F5, In addition to that, you have some chain abilities, which automatically get replaced (like the autoattack skill on 1 in most cases).

There are usually a lot more skills in use than you see on the UI. Old school MMOs would just have thrown every single skill at you to place them on a single hotbar instead of trying to keep the UI minimal. And I like it the way GW2 does it much better. But it is still a hidden complexity that can throw new players a bit off when trying to learn it all at once.

[Tiberius]

I think what makes tracking boons and conditions more difficult in gw2 is that you can have perma uptime for all of those boons.

In other mmo, while the game also has tons of boons, boon uptime is much much less than gw2. You cant really maintain perma boons and there are less status effects to track at the same time.

[mysaga]

Tiberius eredeti hozzászólása:

I think what makes tracking boons and conditions more difficult in gw2 is that you can have perma uptime for all of those boons.

In other mmo, while the game also has tons of boons, boon uptime is much much less than gw2. You cant really maintain perma boons and there are less status effects to track at the same time.

I think it might depend on the game, but in general my observation is that both boons and conditions in GW2 are more short lived but also more powerfull, than buffs and debuffs in other games. Leaving direct hots and dots aside. At least there are many cases were buffs last minutes up to one hour. Debuffs were more short lived, but could last to 1 minute.

Sure, you can achieve permanent boon uptime, but working towards that is part of what makes builds, rotations and group compositions more complicated and tactical.