Guild Wars 2: Pre-Release Discussion

[Takiwaki]

nice vid of mesmer in pvp lol

[Elrina]

Taki, why don't you just collect all that stuff and throw it into an OP for a media thread?

Even if we don't get a subforum yet, I don't see why we can't split the threads up a bit so that this can be for discussion and another for media, at least.

[Purrrfect]

CHARR DAY 1. Belieb it.

[Cat]

Not impressed with how WvW is looking in the slightest.

Its Warhammer Online all over again. Gigantic zergs to capture a keep, with one side spending n minutes beating on a door, while the other side sit on a the wall raining down AoE. At least every class is viable ranged in GW2 (?).

Yeh, there are other objectives to capture, but when it comes down to it, at some point you are going to want to cap the keep, and thats going to involve however many minutes of RDPS playing healthbar wars at max range.

[Takiwaki]

Not impressed with how WvW is looking in the slightest.

Its Warhammer Online all over again. Gigantic zergs to capture a keep, with one side spending n minutes beating on a door, while the other side sit on a the wall raining down AoE. At least every class is viable ranged in GW2 (?).

Yeh, there are other objectives to capture, but when it comes down to it, at some point you are going to want to cap the keep, and thats going to involve however many minutes of RDPS playing healthbar wars at max range.

You can just tell all this from one video? Do you know anything about GW2? Health bar wars isn't gonna work in this game.

Brilliant

[Meko]

Broken down to it's most basic concept, anything can be related. In this case, I think the WvW stuff looks incredible. Also, Warhammer didn't have a bad model in DaoC so it's not like they were new to it. Sadly, 8 people play Warhammer and the game flopped and floundered.

[Lordender]

This game looks fucking amazing and I almost never say that about an upcomming MMO.

[Cat]

You can just tell all this from one video?

Yes.

As forces on each side become large enough ('zerg level'), there is only so much the good combat mechanics can do. The amount of focused damage that can be put out at range increases to the point where individuals get basically one shot with no time to react. Critical mass principle, most prevelant in RTS games (its the reason that 1 marine loses to 2 zerglings in Starcraft, but 10 marines beats 20 no problem). This leads to either:

A) You have a couple of chars be the super tanks, with an entire raid/warband/alliance/whatever healbombing them. This is healthbar wars. Very unlikely to happen in GW2, since healing appears to be mostly self only.

B) Battle lines are drawn, with one group of ranged sitting on the top of a keep wall, and another group of ranged sitting outside. Anyone who gets within attack range of the opposing blob gets one shot by a volley of spells/abilities.

Either way you have one group spending n minutes beating down a door, while the other group have the incredible advantage of a keep wall. As the attackers, you can't do funky stuff like a coordinated charge to break the lines, because they're on a wall. You can't flank them and hit the squishies from the read, because they're on a wall. You can't do anything but sit there and pew ranged back at them until either you give up or the door breaks.

Small scale combat is great, large scale 'zerg' fighting in the open world is fine too. But putting one zerg on a keep wall and the other outside it is just not fun.

I'd love to be wrong, I really would, but I just don't see how. I can think of hardly any ways for keep zerging to be fast paced, dynamic and fun.

1- Some sort of buff where you can only take x DPS max, so that focus fire from any number of people beyond, oh lets say, six is wasted.
2- A sort of super siege weapon which can quickly (quickly is the key, no half hour waiting games) take down a door/wall, and cannot be destroyed unless the defenders leave the walls.
3- I'm at a blank.

Are there mechanics like that?

[Eanae]

These guys need to hurry up and just take all my money.

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/...&postcount=346

[Dragir]

Nice to see ArenaNet is keeping with tradition



The Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Ends in Crash-Causing Chaos
by Mike Fahey, Feb 20, 2012 9:30 AM

To celebrate the successful press beta weekend for Guild Wars 2, the nice folks at ArenaNet gathered us all together in the main courtyard of Divinity's Reach and killed us over and over again.

The lag was bad enough with somewhere around a hundred members of the press and assorted ArenaNet staff bunched together in one spot. Add a giant or two and things went completely to hell. I crashed right after the giant killed me the first time, logged back in, and then crashed again. Somehow I was able to capture this video before my machine attempted to explode.

[Elrina]

2- A sort of super siege weapon which can quickly (quickly is the key, no half hour waiting games) take down a door/wall, and cannot be destroyed unless the defenders leave the walls.
3- I'm at a blank.

Are there mechanics like that?

Isn't that pretty much what they've talked about with the siege mechanics?

There are like five different siege weapons they've talked about to help take walls (and any part of them, not just the front wall/gate), and defenders would have to either allow them to batter the walls and gates, or send people out to destroy them (and a couple of the siege weapons were designed specifically to take out groups of enemies coming to do that very thing, iirc, like the arrow machine thing). Meanwhile, they would have to guard each section of wall that was being attacked.

Also, defenders need to keep a steady stream of supply resource coming. Meaning that they'll need to continue sending people out on supply runs for it, to guard it. They can't just pen themselves up inside the walls indefinitely without concern because of the wall.

I don't see why you would need to be able to zerg down a wall faster than it could possibly be defended either, that isn't very fun. Fast =/= fun, in and of itself. There's got to be a way to defend the walls successfully, otherwise what's the point of the wall? Also, the keeps are only one part of the WvW, there are also smaller towers/holds, and resource camps, it isn't just about a half dozen or so scattered keeps. There seems to be a pretty huge amount of stuff going on at once that both attackers and defenders have to balance. If you don't want to zerg the wall, take over all the resource camps nearby and "starve them out".

Each WvW lasts 2 weeks long and involves 3 factions (so you're always going to be worrying about the third guy butting in, it isn't just one faction vs the other), being able to zerg down a keep within a matter of a few minutes, even if it had adequate defenders, would be stupid and eliminate the entire point in having keeps to attack/defend in the first place.

Slower, but organized and strategic fighting can be just as fun as fast paced and hectic, it's just different, and I doubt that attacking/defending keeps will always be a drawn out boring affair when there are so many other factors involved in it.

[Celeras]

Retarded opinions

I guess it's a benefit for you that WvW isn't the only attraction then, but rather one of many. Though comparing it to a failed DAOC clone like Warhammer is pretty asinine when you could just be comparing it to DAOC. The third faction keeps everything in check balance wise, so your poorly thought out script goes to shit when green decides to crash red's siege attempt on a blue keep.

It sounds like you just don't like large scale PvP and won't be convinced of anything otherwise, so feel free to stick to conquest/PvE and leave the theorycraft to people who know what theyre talking about.

[Fairy-Killer]

Please check this link about WvW.
http://www.arena.net/blog/mike-fergu...world-vs-world

[Alderaan]

There's so many objectives and capture points in WvW that just turtling in your base will not be viable.

[Cat]

I guess it's a benefit for you that WvW isn't the only attraction then, but rather one of many. Though comparing it to a failed DAOC clone like Warhammer is pretty asinine when you could just be comparing it to DAOC. The third faction keeps everything in check balance wise, so your poorly thought out script goes to shit when green decides to crash red's siege attempt on a blue keep.

It sounds like you just don't like large scale PvP and won't be convinced of anything otherwise, so feel free to stick to conquest/PvE and leave the theorycraft to people who know what theyre talking about.

Hey man, theres no need to be a dick about it :\

I do enjoy large scale PvP, just not when one side is sitting on the top of a wall.

[tol]

I was a little disappointed that every ranger shot looked very generic in that video, will there be some sort of "on hit" animation displayed for those? He wasn't actually hitting anything but firing them out into the open.

[Rhyis.]

The third faction keeps everything in check balance wise, so your poorly thought out script goes to shit when green decides to crash red's siege attempt on a blue keep.

I think that was the main reason WAR failed. The game really could have used another faction in there to keep things in check.

[Takiwaki]

Hey man, theres no need to be a dick about it :\

I do enjoy large scale PvP, just not when one side is sitting on the top of a wall.

The reason why you are getting dicked on is that if you have researched a bit at all on the what will be going on on GW2 wvw, I really doubt you will have an issue.

[Meko]

I think that was the main reason WAR failed. The game really could have used another faction in there to keep things in check.

That and all the horrid development/programming. Getting stuck in the starting zones while running on flat ground...NPC's gettings stuck inside of tables etc. All these things more than a year after initial launch/release makes for a bad game. I, more than anybody, thought that game had a ton of potential but it flopped.

[vrumpt]

It's important to realize that in the real game, the second i see a huge group all bunched up in a giant bro-squad of doom, i'll be grabbing a blueprint for an arrow cart so i can take advantage of the fact that these guys have kindly all bunched up for me. Same thing goes for when they are beating on the gate of a keep, only with cannons or mortars that are so kindly placed on the walls of said keep or tower.

In all of the WvW vids i've seen so far, nobody really seemed to be taking full advantage of the supplies that are available to them; be it repairing a wall or building siege weaponry, probably because nobody really knew how to capitalize on that stuff yet. Your counter to massive zergs of players is arrow carts.