New Dungeon, Fractals of the Mists

[Deleted]

I'm really looking forward to the mechanics of bosses in fractals. This will show us if they made any progress in their iterative process on PvE Design.

[Fencers]

I'm not sure about you since you don't care for an equal power level, but this means that the "optional grind dungeon" isn't optional any more in order to get the best stat loot. Quite the contrary: with those infusions (you'll only get in the dungeon (?)) you'll get an advantage.

Didn't the blog suggest that was the case? That's more or less how I read it and assumed this was standard.

They said there were 3 types of stats: Infusion + off/def/omni and that it was a progressive system. They call it their gear progression initiative.

How else were people expecting it to work? I am not sure what the hubbub is about w/r/t this tooltip.

[Enosh]

How else were people expecting it to work? I am not sure what the hubbub is about w/r/t this tooltip.

the new gear is about 5-10ish % better than exotic one+the gem slot thingy

the new gear also has a slot but that one is for the infusion dmg reduction buff, the assumption was that the new slot would only have that buff
the tool tip shows it also has stats in addition to that dmg reduction

given that GW1 never had weapons with better stats just different optimization and anet multiple times said that GW2 will go by the same principle where no gear will even be better than what was available at lvl 80 when the game was released, that's quite a departure for the series and from what they said about the gear in GW2 before

[Fencers]

the new gear also has a slot but that one is for the infusion dmg reduction buff, the assumption was that the new slot would only have that buff
the tool tip shows it also has stats in addition to that dmg reduction

Seems like stupidity.

The blog made it pretty clear that the infusions were also statistical benefits. There is a screen shot which read, "defensive infusion" as example.

[Sylvanie]

The Yogg-Saron fight had mobs you had to tank, and heals were needed so I don't see how the trinity wasn't important in it :/

That you had to tank mobs only mattered because of their damage output. Scale damage down so that a DPS can tank them, and tanks become irrelevant. Heals (and cleansing, lots of cleansing) were needed, but that doesn't mean that you require dedicated healers.

Other than that I think you misunderstood me, I am not saying the Trinity is important to create interesting encounters, I am saying that it is easy to create interesting encounters with it.

No, I understood you just fine. What I'm saying is that the trinity does not make encounter design harder or easier. I'm saying that the trinity is largely irrelevant for encounter design. In fact, it can be make it tricker. For example:

(1) Many raid encounters have artificial tank switch or damage splitting mechanics that have no purpose other than to justify the presence of a second tank.
(2) Lots of unavoidable raid damage that mostly just exists to create busywork for healers (because if you don't keep healers mana/GCD-capped, the only way to kill tanks is via two-shot mechanics, and then we get heroic Gormok and his ilk).

It gives easy roles to play with when designing your fight, you know will have to mitigate damage, who will heal, and who will be busy dpsing, on top of that you can add further responsibilities.

That makes it easier for the players in that they have to worry about fewer things, but does not generally affect encounter design.

In GW2 the only assumption you can make is that everyone will dodge and kite, thats the only role in GW2 right now, dodger DPS, no need for a protector, a linebacker, or anything, there is only a minority of fight where you have other responsibilities than dodge and kite.

What you're describing is the GW2 equivalent of a Patchwerk fight (of which, admittedly, GW2 has too many). What makes a raid encounter interesting/challenging has generally very little to do with roles and more with coordinating non-role related activities. Whether that's the stack/spread mechanic for Unseen Strike/Wind Step on Blade Lord Ta'yak or pheromone management on Garalon, it rarely has anything to do with roles. Whatever you're doing in your role is a fairly rote thing, and it only becomes challenging through multi-tasking when you have to manage both role mechanics and encounter mechanics at the same time (or by doing it non-stop with a very small margin of error for an excessive amount of time, e.g. heroic Spine of Deathwing).

THAT is their problem right there, there is so many encounters you can design around the assumption that people will be able to dodge well or not, or kite well or not.

If you look at World of Warcraft, hardly any raid mechanics revolve around role mechanics, either. Valithria Dreamwalker and Baleroc were exceptions, not the rule (and they arguably relied on major modifications to role mechanics). The vast majority of WoW raid mechanics revolve around movement, killing adds, interacting with an object at the right time, and tanks/healers using defensive cooldowns to avoid getting one-shotted. All of those you can replicate in GW2 (with dodge taking the place of defensive cooldowns). There's no reason why you couldn't port the vast majority of WoW raid encounters to GW2 without much of a problem (where it does become problematic is where the encounters are designed for more than five players, such as Four Horsemen, Conclave of Winds, or Nefarian; but that's a group size issue, not a mechanics issue).

Why doesn't ArenaNet use such mechanics more (it's not that they don't, but usually much more sparingly, and rarely exploit how they can interact with one another)? No idea.

---------- Post added 2012-11-16 at 04:59 PM ----------

And something I forgot to mention:

You don't even need to provide high enough dps since you can just graveyard zerg your way out and there are no enrage mechanic...

The graveyard zerg is something that will not be available in the new dungeon, and I suspect that it won't have much of a future, as ArenaNet has indicated that they aren't too fond of it.

Enrage mechanics are otherwise really only relevant for trinity games: They prevent stacking healers past the "pain threshold" of an encounter. Most raid encounters would become an order of magnitude easier if you could just add a couple more healers beyond the maximum you can afford to still hit the enrage timer.

[ControlBlue]

As much as much you might not agree with this, I think healing, dps,and tanking are fundemental act in RPGs, the first RPGs didn't have those role but players organically created those roles by specializing. As long as you have an health bar on players and mobs, an important part of the gameplay WILL be about how fast you can down the bar of a mob, how fast yours can go down, and how fast you can replenish the health bar of someone.

The trinity is merely a model where people have to specialize along the most easily recognizable functions in most games.

The trinity makes encounter design easier in that you can challenge players in more ways, and GW2 is a perfect examples of the ills you can avoid by using he simple framework of the trinity. You don't have to put one-shots to challenge people, you can keep players on their toes through constant powerful damage that will keep them tense, you can create a management gameplay through the right application of heals at the right moment.

Personally, I have nothing against the trinity and recognize its merits, the only thing I don't like about it is that the specialization it causes divides players both in gameplay and outside the game (for example by not letting you take your friend healer because YOU will be the healer). Other than that it is a proven framework for interesting gameplay, or else guess what, people wouldn't be using it, duh.

[Sylvanie]

As much as much you might not agree with this, I think healing, dps,and tanking are fundemental act in RPGs, the first RPGs didn't have those role but players organically created those roles by specializing.

Eh? D&D did not have tanks, for starters (for lack of aggro that could be manipulated). NPCs attacked whoever the GM thought was the most tactically opportune choice. Interestingly enough, the opportunity cost for movement was high enough that this meant that melee opponents generally preferred targets close to them, unless a far away target posed a significant threat; not unlike part of the GW2 aggro system.

Healing was also quite different in that it was much weaker and limited to a certain number of casts per day (Vancian magic). The opportunity cost for healing an ally combined with the limited number of heals per day available meant that it was often smarter to use offense to take an NPC out so that they couldn't do more damage rather than wasting a limited resource and a round's worth of actions. That led to healing being used more often to patch players up between battles than during them.

The tank/DPS/healing trinity did not really come into being until DikuMUDs evolved to that point. And WoW and Rift are still very strongly reminiscent of their DikuMUD heritage (which, to be clear, has been considerably refined and improved over the years).

As long as you have an health bar on players and mobs, an important part of the gameplay WILL be about how fast you can down the bar of a mob, how fast yours can go down, and how fast you can replenish the health bar of someone.

That does not mean that you have to assign each of that to a different role. A GURPS or Champions player of the 1980s would find the very notion absurd.

The trinity is merely a model where people have to specialize along the most easily recognizable functions in most games.

And generally to the detriment of the depth of the game mechanics, to be blunt. Roles in trinity-based games are extremely narrow. Absent encounter mechanics (i.e. in a patchwerk fight), the basic gameplay is extremely limited and for tanks and DPS largely consists of pressing buttons in the right order without reactive elements; this also results in solo play in these games often being very mechanical, too (though there are exceptions, such as Tera).

The trinity makes encounter design easier in that you can challenge players in more ways,

You have yet to explain what exactly it is about the trinity that makes it easier; in a non-trinity model, players still deal damage, take damage, and heal damage. There is nothing that you can do in a trinity game that you can't in principle do in a non-trinity game also.

and GW2 is a perfect examples of the ills you can avoid by using he simple framework of the trinity. You don't have to put one-shots to challenge people, you can keep players on their toes through constant powerful damage that will keep them tense, you can create a management gameplay through the right application of heals at the right moment.

Now you're wrongly equating GW2 with non-trinity gameplay. What you're seeing is a difference between the more twitch-oriented gameplay of GW2 and the more strategic gameplay of a GCD/resource-based game. Note also that even so, you can and could put pressure on players through constant damage; it just has to be matched to the more limited healing available (apparently, the Agony mechanic is meant to do that, though we'll see how well it will do that). Though, from a personal perspective, constant powerful damage stopped keeping me on my toes about a couple of WoW expansions ago; it's just so omnipresent in raid encounters that it stopped creating a visceral reaction: At one point, heroic Gormok mostly became about making sure to chain heals perfectly and hope that there wasn't a .5 second latency gap that would result in the tank being two-shotted. Numbness from overexposure, if you will.

---------- Post added 2012-11-16 at 06:34 PM ----------

Other than that it is a proven framework for interesting gameplay, or else guess what, people wouldn't be using it, duh.

People are using it because it's the MMO equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM/Microsoft". not because it's necessarily the best approach. Developing an MMO can easily cost north of $100 million these days; so, obviously, MMO developers try not to take too many risks. At the same time, this can blow up in their face, too, because it can be difficult to convince players to try their game over their competitors if it looks too much like a clone.

[Gray_Matter]

And generally to the detriment of the depth of the game mechanics, to be blunt. Roles in trinity-based games are extremely narrow. Absent encounter mechanics (i.e. in a patchwerk fight), the basic gameplay is extremely limited and for tanks and DPS largely consists of pressing buttons in the right order without reactive elements; this also results in solo play in these games often being very mechanical, too (though there are exceptions, such as Tera).

I agree but would also say that the whole trinity capability is not a very logical one from a AI point of view. A monster would keep beating down on the toughest looking player while all the others are beating down on it.

[ControlBlue]

To sum up, you are living in and referencing a world before people discovered the trinity, and since nobody used it at the very first beginning everyone using it now must have no idea!?

The trinity makes it easier to design encounters because you can more easily challenge players around how good they are at specializing. And it gives you a easy way to manage aggro and AI, a dumb one, but yet an easy one!

On top of that, you can then add movement, utility and all that jazz.

If someone was motivated enough, they could create a game all based around how much healing/mitigation/dps. It would be boring, as boring as basing a game solely around dodging and kiting (think about that one).

The trinity has drawbacks, hopefully we can at least agree on that, however it also provide obvious benefits for someone building encounters, it easily provides roles you can work with, you don't have to re-invent the wheel everytime trying to figure who should specialize in doing what, you know some people will dos, others will haeal, others will tank, from there you can add to the list of things to do for each of theses roles,

It might sound limiting but sometimes constraints actually allow you to be more creative.

I see no reasons why all the problems you cited would not happen in a non-trinity MMO.

[parcus]

No more graveyard zerging in the new dungeon, you stay dead until the rest of your team wipes, that's improvement, IMO (although staying dead isn't that fun, maybe you should get ported to the entrance).

---------- Post added 2012-11-17 at 01:23 AM ----------

I agree but would also say that the whole trinity capability is not a very logical one from a AI point of view. A monster would keep beating down on the toughest looking player while all the others are beating down on it.

Agreed, it seems more like a play than an actual fight to save the world (but it can still be fun).

[zito]

How did this become a "add the trinity" from discussion on the new dungeon?

[Valeron]

How did this become a "add the trinity" from discussion on the new dungeon?

see post 479

where the conversation deviated really

[Deleted]

Sooo...back on topic:

I have seen 6 of the fractals now and must say, although it's still not perfect, I see a definite improvement to the old dungeons. in starting difficulty bosses don't hit too hard, the mechanics are comprehensible, in most cases if you screw up you know why. And I thank god the almighty for trash that actually feels like trash.
no graveyard option, although it can result in being dead for a very looong time - or the rest wipes on purpose. not ideal, but better.

Definitely a step up from my perspektive.

[Valeron]

Seems a lot of people are happy with the dungeon (aside from the D/C bug). I won't be touching it. I much prefer the open world part of this mmo, I have no desire for 5 man instances any more.

[Ravenblade]

Yeah, WoW taught me to actually fear dungeons. It's hard to shake off the constant anxiety when going into dungeons.

The trinity you know from WoW is a trinity which is diluted by so many things already. While it has merits on teamplay basis it doesn't make players think in terms of teamplay. Strategy does not involve key strengths of players in such a concept but merely the current assignment of the role. It's a bottom-to-top approach of many things and developed that way because in early days it was assumed that in a MMO it's hard to multi-task/multi-role unlike say in a turn-based D&D RPG where you can have your clerics cast a devastating spell in one round and a group heal in another. Hence roles got split over many characters in order to justify many players participating at an event, the thinking was if 5 players could kill a large world boss on their own then there is no real reason for making it a massive multiplayer game.

I remember when players declared that the trinity as failed in WoW (even though WoW was not the first game to use it!) that was when many players - and I am talking really the lots of them - preferred DPS over tanking and healing because players playing those roles felt like being treated rudely by developers and players a like. In late 2006 there was a real role crisis actually. But - and that's the most important thing of it - developers realized that and over the course of the years iterated on the concepts and decided that nothing was set in stone and no principle is eternal and they changed it to accommodate the needs of the players.

So, here were less than 3 months after release and people already want to go back to WoW concepts - gear grind, trinity, mounts and what have you - it's that 'first try and perfect OR bust' mentality which many people seem to prefer over a possible long-term haul with many iterations on the way. There is no doubt the current system is flawed. But I would rather work out the issues rather than early admission of defeat and becoming the next generic MMORPG.

[aevitas]

Yeah, WoW taught me to actually fear dungeons. It's hard to shake off the constant anxiety when going into dungeons.

The trinity you know from WoW is a trinity which is diluted by so many things already. While it has merits on teamplay basis it doesn't make players think in terms of teamplay. Strategy does not involve key strengths of players in such a concept but merely the current assignment of the role. It's a bottom-to-top approach of many things and developed that way because in early days it was assumed that in a MMO it's hard to multi-task/multi-role unlike say in a turn-based D&D RPG where you can have your clerics cast a devastating spell in one round and a group heal in another. Hence roles got split over many characters in order to justify many players participating at an event, the thinking was if 5 players could kill a large world boss on their own then there is no real reason for making it a massive multiplayer game.

I remember when players declared that the trinity as failed in WoW (even though WoW was not the first game to use it!) that was when many players - and I am talking really the lots of them - preferred DPS over tanking and healing because players playing those roles felt like being treated rudely by developers and players a like. In late 2006 there was a real role crisis actually. But - and that's the most important thing of it - developers realized that and over the course of the years iterated on the concepts and decided that nothing was set in stone and no principle is eternal and they changed it to accommodate the needs of the players.

So, here were less than 3 months after release and people already want to go back to WoW concepts - gear grind, trinity, mounts and what have you - it's that 'first try and perfect OR bust' mentality which many people seem to prefer over a possible long-term haul with many iterations on the way. There is no doubt the current system is flawed. But I would rather work out the issues rather than early admission of defeat and becoming the next generic MMORPG.

This. A thousand times THIS.

I remember that 'role crisis' in 2006. Gave me lots to do as a warrior tank. I really, really, really hope ANet manages to get their stuff together and fix the issues some classes have.

[freeforumuser]

Just some advice Anet, whoever thought locking out players out of their group in Fractals because they DCed, you better fire them now because they don't deserve to have the job. Don't get me started on instadeath puzzles that don't even respawn players or giving things 10 billion HP like the dredge final boss and giving it self heal just because you can.

And yes, turn GW2 into another WoW clone, because that is clearly the target audience for most GW2 players.

[zito]

fractal weapons do exist in the deeper part of the dungeons:

they are not sold. they drop in the higher scales of the Fractal dungeon.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...rst#post768648

---------- Post added 2012-11-17 at 12:03 PM ----------

New MF gear with vit and toughness. So you don't have to be glass cannon oriented for MF:

There is also a new MgF/Vit/Tuf in the Fractals. It’s called Wayfarer.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...rst#post768604

---------- Post added 2012-11-17 at 12:05 PM ----------

Looks like tier difficulty are every 10

Intended, next tier starts at Fractals Difficulty Scale 10.

https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/foru...rst#post768034

[ControlBlue]

No more graveyard zerging in the new dungeon, you stay dead until the rest of your team wipes, that's improvement, IMO (although staying dead isn't that fun, maybe you should get ported to the entrance).

Now that's a GREAT NEWS!!

Anet is learning, kudos to them!

By the way, I am NOT asking for them adding the trinity, on the opposite, however that is no reason for me to get biased on the actual existing merits of the trinity.

[zito]

Now that's a GREAT NEWS!!

Anet is learning, kudos to them!

By the way, I am NOT asking for them adding the trinity, on the opposite, however that is no reason for me to get biased on the actual existing merits of the trinity.

No trinity is fine if we keep getting encounters like lupis. Well not exactly like lupis but you know what I mean.

However boss fights like ascalon catacombs? No... just no...