Originally Posted by
ControlBlue
I stumbled upon that post while browsing the GW2 Dungeons forums and I have to say that was the only that actually had a clue what was the real downfall of GW2's PvE, not just dungeons!
They used the absence of a trinity as an excuse to not have roles in a fight.
To put it simply, I suppose that they got so focused around the idea that they had to get rid of the Trinity that they decided to make PvE encounters purely "action", a bit like a FPS fight.
Then they went the "Action" route so much that they ended up with a "headshot" gameplay, one mistake and you are dead. How do you create a PvE challenge out of a gameplay like that? Runbacks! You make death a part of the encounter instead of an end to it! No problems if the effects thrown at you are lethal, you can come back right? Of course as a punishment for "failing" you take Armor damage.
I also think that the Downed mechanic played a pretty big role in convincing Anet that death was an acceptable mechanic to use, after all you shouldn't ever die even if the effects are lethal since you can be revived!....
Instead of a direct failure signal, Death becomes a mechanic to get you closer to failure.
The problem with that is that people don't like dying! For evident reasons and after decades of games telling you that dying is bad, you kinda get it hardwired in your head.
This end with two really bad things for the game:
- Encounters that need no coordination to down. All you have to do is survive. You have no enrage, no responsibilities, just keep moving and keep firing like in a FPS!
- Encounters that are infuriatingly frustrating because you have to go through that very very negative signal that death is, countless of times.
Personally, at first I thought PvE would be focused on "surviving" the attacks of the Big Bad Boss until your self-heal was off-cooldown. Supports would ensure that you could last a little longer without popping your self-heal, Controllers would debuff and control him, and the Damage would do.... damage, but still be responsible for their own well-being (no 'HEAL ME!!!'). You wouldn't need the Trinity to create tense and interesting fights.
I think the only hope for the PvE is to have encounter resets when everyone dies. It might seems like an horrible thing to do as it would make dungeons INSANELY difficult to complete!
Yep it would, IF the system is kept as it is.
Doing that change would force them to challenge people through a different mechanic than death and runbacks. They would have to use enrages, they would have to force roles and responsibilities, and they would have to fix the way aggro is managed.
It would also force them to bring those health bars back to reasonable proportions.
What do you think? Am I just being stupid? are GW2 dungeons and PvE encounters just fine?