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GW2 combat
Odinthedark1
Member Posts: 330
Plain and simple, why do people think this combat is so great you get 5 skills per weapon and then ur healing skill and utilities which are consistent and changable. all in all you get one action bar of skills and people i continuously see argue about how you're not rooted, im not saying the combat is bad but why is it so over hyped i played it this last beta weekend and thought it was better than ur average mmo but it wasnt that great...is this pure fanboyism as to why its so hyped or are people just clinging to hope as all other mmo's that have come out recently have been mediocre at best? the combat is tougher in that theres no rooting but if you play smart its still easy to pull a few mobs, tho i dont see it being possible to pull tons in this game, as long as you stick within a couple levels its not that bad...not trolling, serious thread. Am i missing something?
Comments
It actually quite a basic combat system, but that's not a bad thing. It means it doesn't distract from actually playing the game, which allows for more movement, which leads to a sence of more control over one's character.
the combat is ordinary youre right. i think the movement and response time on when you do an action or skill is very fine tuned.
what i really like is how youre able to change skills, lots of possibilities
but i kinda wish the whole bar could be customizable. I think gw1 was like that.
I don't know if its overhyped, but its certainly fun to play. Mobility while fighting and the dodge mechanic introduce a strategic element. Seriously, try playing a light armored class, and take on an enemy while standing still vs actively moving around. It makes a huge difference to how much damage you take.
The limited number of skills on your skillbar add two things. First there's a small element of planning which skills/weapons to equip, and testing their various interactions to get the best effect. Since you can't just pile all your skills on skillbars you have to actually think what you'll need in combat.
The second and more important thing is, I think, that with a 10 skill limit, and fixed skill location, you can focus more on playing the game and less on playing the UI. What i mean is that you would memorize key presses quicker which lets you use skills intuitively instead of fumbling to find them on your skill bar (for example, if I need healing my fingers jump to 6 without much thought, just instinct)
It's not a completely revolutionary system, but it still introduces enough changes to make it far more fun than the typical stand-in-one-place-and-mash-buttons fighting.
Agreed.
And what little skills you have on your bar you should always be using. it's not cluttered up with 30 skills with 20 of them being situational.
Its pointless arguing with them,once they see this thread they will jump all over it and tell you how awesome it is.I even tried saying the same about GW1 vs EQ2 but they don't listen,apparently the 5 skills you pick and use in that game is far superior than having 40-60 to use and one of the best systems ever created.
Strategy vs. clusterfuck/button mashing.
Wrong,just because you fuck up and can't manage more than 5 buttons dosn't mean others have the ability to.
Edit: How can having less abilities to use at any given time be more strategic? The mind boggles with these casual pew pew I shot you your dead I want the loot now! type players.
If you don't like hearing it maybe you shouldn't come to the guild wars 2 forum.
See now this is just me but i never sit still in ANY mmo...im more of a pvp'er than a pve'er and when i do pve the pvp habbits kick in IE playing smarter, constantly kiting even on melee, and watching cooldowns to make sure i always have an o-shit cd ready for when something goes wrong or unexpected, and after playing WoW for so long i dont have problems with a ton of keybinds :P even tho its useless since i quit WoW i still have my cata WoW mouse with 15+ buttons that i can still vaguely remember from my rogue. the things you say arent necessarily wrong maybe for some people but the UI, and memory and movement are all instincts to me now and take up split seconds of my time so i lose no fun with mmo's that have said features.
Edit: And to people who say it takes strategy and it takes a bit of intelligence, thats true. but at the same time its just an excuse for an otherwise pointless limitation in my view
Why would anyone ever play a game like chess when we have games like football and baseball?!
Some people have different tastes, you should figure that out sometime.
don't forget combo fields. makes playing with others that much more fun.
None of what you were doing in that case really meant anything though, since WoW doesn't really have any action based elements to it, besides the distance between your character and the enemy... In GW2, that kinda stuff matters a lot.
and to your edit: people LIKE strategy more, sometimes. Your supplied argument is kinda like saying that it would always be fun to play the magic the gathering, pokemon, or yu-gi-oh card games with an infinitely sized deck vs. a 60 card deck.
Sometimes the limitation of a build, and the strategy that is involved in crafting a build with limitations is more fun than just having dozens and dozens of abilities to people.
It's not that combat is great. For example I like better TERA Online combat. But still GW2 combat system is something between TOR where you sit in one place like idiot smashing button doing "rotation" and TERA where you have dynamic combat system that require you to adapt (dodge, time your attack, change possition etc).
This way skill do matter in combat. Not just stats, and gear. That's make this combat system great. Other games that I like because of that (and only because of that) are TERA and DCUO.
Thats true too, but at the same time its a single action bar it feels so small, i honestly wouldve been fine with 2 i dont need 4-6....but just 10 skills is rather....no very limited to me, ill re-use your example...as a kid i used to play with yu-gi-oh cards with ym friends and the set up if i recall goes by a deck of 40 cards....in comparison this game feels like instead of 40 cards id be using 15 or 20.
1.You can move while casting most skills, even most channeled skills and those with longer cast times.
2.The game has active dodging via hotkey, with an endurance bar to limit consecutive dodges.
3.There is no mana bar in the game. A couple professions have a resource pool, but there is no "Out of Mana" syndrome in GW2.
4.Position matters and you can dodge some attacks just by moving out of the way.
5.The game has tab targeting, but you can also use most skills with out a target and hit things with in range, based on the facing of your character. (I only very occasionally tab target).
6.Your equiped weapon determines half your skill bar, so you actually chose the right tool for the job. Most professions gain the ability to swap between two weapon sets during combat. The two that don't have their own mechanisms for changing up the 1-5 skills during combat.
7.Your 1 skill is your basic, repeatable damage skill. By default it's auto-attack, but you can turn that off by shift-clicking the button, There are some burst skills in the game as well. However, most of your skills are situational skills. For most weapons and most builds, face rolling will lower your DPS. There is a tactical element to skill use and weapon swapping in GW2 that just doesn't exist to the same degree in most other games.
8.There is no "Holy Trinity" in GW2 combat. There are no dedicated healers or dedicated tanks. Builds can tune each profession to be good at a number of different roles, Offensive, Defensive, Control, Support, etc..., but no one will be tanking encounters and no one will be sitting back doing nothing but healing.
9.Every Profession has a dedicated healing slot and can self heal.
10.Healing/support/boon(buff) skills that do exist never target a particular ally, nor do they require allies to be in the same party. They utilize GTAoE, PBAoE, Caster based proximity-radius or offensive target based proximity radius effects. No more staring at party health bars so you know who to click next as part of your healing spam rotations. Even what passes for a healing spec in this game still only casts maybe two or three heals in a 15-30 second period, so theree is no heal spamming at all.
11.When you reach zero health, you don't die, you enter a downed state. You only have limited endurance before you are defeated and a limited range of skills, but if the enemies fail to finish you off, you can self channel a heal and recover; or, if an opponent is near death and you can finish them with your limited down state offensive skills, you will recover.
12.All players have the default ability to help a downned player recover, or revive a defeated player on the battlefield. No more needing X-class for rez, or standing helplessly by when an ally goes down if you forgot to slot a rez skill.
All of those features and probably some I'm forgetting combined make for a very unique form of combat compared to what is foind in most other MMOs. Some have dabbled with one or two of a few of those before, but some are unique to the game and no one has combined even half these elements before in any MMO.
I'd add in that the AI can be pretty good in this game. As you get deeper into the game, some mobs start making proper use of their own dodge skills, the range of advanced skills and tactics starts to pop up with greater frequency and battles become a lot more than standing in one spot, spaming hotkeys until something dies.
And how many games let you pick up a branch or a crowbar in the environment and actually use it against foes, with unique skills attached?
GW2 combat is easy to learn at a basic level, but most professions will take some time before the player is adept and some will never be able to claim mastery. I honestly could not ask for much more from the combat in this game and, imo, no other game comes close to offering a comparable experience.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
I get that a melee fighter can move around the field and kite, but last I checked in WoW and a lot of other MMOs, any skill that has a casting time (i.e. shows a cast bar) requires you to stay still. I call that a pointless limitation.
As for the ton of skills, sure, I'm not saying that EVERYONE likes having less skills, but consider that you bough special hardware to play WoW. Not everyone is that dedicated, and some people don't have money to spend on that stuff either.
Even if you accept that limited skill set requires intelligence, but still think its a pointless limitation, you have to admit, that having only a few skills at a time is certainly less overwhelming to the casual player. Hell, some people like me, who're semi-casual, semi-hardcore players, DON'T like to have over a quarter of my screen covered by Skills, most of which I barely use all the time, but I keep there because I might eventually need them, and I'm allowed to.
Just pointing out that with the exception of the Elementalist and the Engineer that have different mechanics, all classes have 10 weapon skills (2 weapons and you need to switch, if you're not... you're doing it wrong and gimping yourself). Also the f1-f4 class mechanics and then the healing, utilities and Elite as mentioned. All of which you have to use, and use at the right moment.
However, if you like to have loads of skills - which in most games you use only very situationally - to rotate, play elementalist with their 4 attunements. That's enough to give you a headache.
^^ This!
I honestly do not see the appeal of having 40+ skills which you have "customized" to be all the way around your screen (left, right, top , bottom) You spend 75% of your time looking at these bars trying to find that one situational skill that would pwn in this exact situation. If you added the dodge system to a game with this many skills people who never dodge, because they wouldn't even see the attack coming because they were looking at the UI and not the action.
The class's I played go way past 10 sklls though, once you get into mechanic that makes that class special you start to realise that with a quick weapon change and skills that have 2 or more uses, you have a hell of a lot of strategy at your fingertips and you don't have to learn 50 skills to master it. Call it casual or whatever but this system is way more fun for me than the systems in SWTOR and WoW.
If you continue to make sweeping statements like you know what everyone everywhere thinks about a certain topic then I am going to shout at you.
It easy to type 'I think this is the worst game ever'
Rather than the 'This is the worst game ever'
Do know that engineers and elementalists get a lot more than the 15 bar skills that other classes get.
Since those classes don't have a weapon swap button their f1-f4 keys change their 1-5 buttons. So there's that if you REALLY feel like 15 skills isn't enough.
But I still feel like, the emphasis here in GW2, isn't just hitting buttons to do things, it's about movement, dodge, and reading your opponents.
Having a ton of skills buys into the "playing the UI, vs. playing the game" mentality that arena net has openly opposed. With less skills in the way, you focus on the game. Rather than looking at a health bar, you're looking at your opponent and his animations, rather than focusing on your macroes/key combinations, you're focusing on your distance and position from the enemy, etc. Plus, having a ton of skills pretty much guarantees you won't use a lot of them, useless skills are no fun.
The massive skill selection, I believe is a product of a less action oriented game; I think we needed more skills in WoW and ToR and most other mmos, to make the combat feel more dynamic, less boring than just sitting there watching our character swing/cast.
Well, there are a number of things.
1) you get cool skills from the get-go. Ok, by BWE3 you might have forgotten about this because we're used to it, but being able to rain meteor showers and phenix projectiles on your ennemy by lvl3 is really nice. Grinding is also having only two skills to spam for hours before getting the third one (or worse, a better version of the same).
2)The skills are different from one another. It's just no use spamming them: 90% of the times spamming auto attacks works better. No skill I found was "do your attack but with +50% damage". It's condition-applying abilities or AoEs etc... so a good player, one who masters the weapon, is just so much better than the noob using it. It's very MOBA like in that perspective: 4 skills+auto attack, but you have to use them well.
3)using only your skills when you need them and knowing where they are makes you take your eyes away from the UI, and watch the battlefield. A good player uses the combo starters (fields, walls, all that stuff), he dodges, etc... and the whole PvP is based on this idea: killing is ok, but taking and holding a position is key, and controlling the map is the way to the minor objectives.
All in all, I think it's not just average or not something worth talking about. It's not the second coming, but it's a very strong point of the game, and different from the other types of gameplay (not A-RPG, not static tab targetting). It's just fine.
Guild wars 2 combat is more dynamic than teras. with tera you are stuck in place while executing abilities, in guild wars 2 you can move while they are executing. this gives guild wars 2 a much more dynamic feel. i don't have to wait for the animations to finish so that i can move.
Sure, others have the ability to. Now, some of us have the ability to solve differential equations too, while you probably can't at all. That's absolutely no reason to include solving differential equations into gameplay. Your years of playing MMOs give you skills others don't have, and while some games will accept that and give you an advantage, a lot of games try to just cater to regular players instead. If you don't like it, either suck it up and just play, or find a game that you do like.
How can having less abilties to use be more strategic? Boggles the mind? You're obviously not familiar with what Strategy (not tactics) means.
Suppose you had an army of 4000 soldiers to take a city of 200 people. Each soldier has some somewhat unique ability.
Now if you were allowed to just march in all 4000 of them in the city, you'd easily overwhelm the enemy, even if you make a few mistakes like using the wrong soldier for some task.
However, if you were only allowed to take 100 soldiers with you to take over the city, how you use your soldiers becomes a far more important part of your strategy. What if you picked the wrong ones? What if the city was all fire-based beings that can't be set on fire, but all you brought is guys with torches? What then? You have nothing to fall back on.
That's strategy. Limited skills means you have to plan more carefully and think ahead. Unlimited number of skills, sure, you still have to figure out which one to use, but it doesn't require any planning since you have all of them at your disposal.
That's a horrible example. If yu-gi-oh is anything like other CCGs, a third of the deck is resources and the rest is made up of up to 4 copies each of various "skill" cards. You'd end up with maybe 8 or 9 different cards to draw and cast. The guy or gal who playes with a deck containing all unique cards would never have a focused enough strategy to beat the person who has a more limited range of "skills", but with four copies of each to increase the odds of pulling what you need, when you need it.
With weapon swaps, most professions have at least 15 skills they can draw on during battle. Many professions have at least some other mechanism to access additional skills. You are also forgetting the F1-F4 keys, which for some professions act as additional abilities!
If you really want more abilities to juggle, you can always play an Elementalist. They have no weapon swapping, but they do have elemental attunements, which essentially quadruple the number of weapon skills they can access, plus they can fill their 3 utility slots with up to 3 different Conjure Weapon skills, which each allow access to an additional 5 weapon skills.
(4x5)+5+(3x5)=40 skills for the most conjure heavy Elementalist builds! Take something like Avatar of Melandru as you elite and that's another 5 skills, for a total of 45!
Most professions get along just fine with 15-20, but if, like me, you like things even more complex, the game does have options for those who want access to even more skills during combat!
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
Rarely do melee fighter's have cast times is the thing tho, in WoW i did it simply because it helps reduce damage intake if even a little, IE they cant hit you if walk through them and are behind them while they are spamming a keybind, they have to turn around. in this game it actually helps for pve to have the habbit because if you're moving the mobs can and will miss if theyre not directly in front of you, that is of course if they're not using an AoE in which case you would utilize the dodge to escape the radius or stun to prevent the skill. And no offense to you when i say this, but GW2 seemed like a more hardcore player game so it would make no sense to appeal to the casuals as most would be turned away by the difficulty of the game, unless theyre stubborn. as i said in a post recently you probably didnt see i would be fine with 2 bars just so im not conistently using the same 5 skills, it will likely get better later on in the game where you HAVE to switch weapons, but even then switching weapons would be purely situational.
If you only want mindless button mashing then more power to you, EQ1 combat system is far superior to EQ2 combat system for example, mashing a ton of buttons that all of them do the same thing is just stupid and its only there because the gameplay of that type of games is subpar.