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If you missed our State of the Game video discussion with ArenaNet developer Jonathan Sharp then make sure to drop by here to give it a read.
If you for some reason aren't able to watch the video version then we are providing you with a transcription of the entire show.
Transcribing these shows take a lot of time and effort which is why we are asking the community for help. If you feel like helping then throw me (Frozire) a PM and I will provide you with a small section that you should transcribe. These sections won't be longer then 5-10 minutes, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when transcribing you usually use 5 times the audio length to transcribe it.
Depending on how many hands we get working, or if we get any working at all, I will be releasing the next 15-30 minutes of the show, transcribed Wednesday.
Hit the spoiler tag for the transcribed text!
Spoiler
DISCLAIMER: Please do NOT use this text for citing ArenaNet or the individuals on the show. This is written by people and with that comes mistakes, not only spelling but also translation mistakes as we translate spoken sentences in a discussion into written sentences. Some things work in speech, while they don’t on text. The entire text should not be quoted out of context as it is a continuous discussion; reading small parts of it might create a false understanding of the opinions/information presented.
Grouch: Hello and welcome one and all to the Guild Wars 2 Guru State of the Game Stream, I am your host Grouch. Today we will be taking a look at Guild Wars 2 PvP its current state and future development. In order to facilitate this we are joined by ArenaNet Developer Jonathan “chaplan” Sharp, jonathan what is your job title specifically and what do you do.
Jonathan: I am a Game Developer here at ArenaNet and I focus on PvP and Balance.
Grouch: In addition we are joined by a few select members from prominent Europeans teams, I will introduce you shortly; if you could respond with your main profession and the role that you play for your perspective teams. That would be awesome! First up we have Lowell from Super Squad.
Lowell: Hey guys. I am Lowell, I main thief and I play a roamer for the Super Squad, Eclypsia.
Grouch: Alright we, have Varee from Onibawan.
Varee: Yeah, hallo I am Varee I am playing for Onibawan main profession as a thief as a roamer.
Grouch: We have Xeph from Team Paradigm.
Xeph: Hey I play Mesmer and I play as a semi roamer!
Grouch: Avalor from Chieftain Ninja
Avalor: Hello I play the roaming Engineer from CN
Grouch: And we have Metor from team eStars
Metor: Yeah hello I play the necro for the team eStars and my role is to support my mates and roll the conditions. Haha
Grouch: Alright, I guess we will start by taking a look at the current Meta, and I guess we will go with Jonathan, right now is what we are looking at the target of the game, is it what we want?
Jonathan: Overall, yes it is. But you got major rolls like the roamer, which is what a lot of these guys play. And the guy that can hold a position, more of a bunker build, that needs to hold the spot that acts more as the anchor for the team. We want to have that as well and we want to have the higher DPS classes, but right now what we want is starting to develop more builds for every single one of the classes. And just make sure that there is a lot of trait balance and class balance and skill balance so there is a more options for each one of those rolls.
Grouch: We will just go around with a round-table, ask you how you feel about the current Meta game. We can just start with Lowell
Lowell: I guess people expect me to talk about bunkers anyway; the problem is not that big anymore because the biggest defender was that the bug block on the guardian got fixed. So yeah the only bunker that seems extremely strong right now is based on scepter dagger ele, but is still nothing compared to the bugged block guardian, and atleast it can be dealt with, but still.
Metor: I agree with what Lowell said, I think the meta right now is correct, it is fine with me.
Xeph: I also agree, I just think that the new ress-timers have actually taken a bit of bunkers now and have enforced more roaming because you just can’t tunnel into a point and have that bunker sitting there.
Grouch: that is actually one of the planned topics; do you guys actually like new spawn timers, is it always the same amount or do you prefer the old timers? I know ArenaNet was going to keep an eye on the situation and adjust it accordingly.
Lowell: To be honest right now the 15 second timer put a bit too much on instant resses, I feel the Meta game is too strong on instant resses. Like the necro has signet of undeath and Mesmer have illusion of life it is just way to strong right now for the meta game, like if you don’t have your ress up you are going to lose the team fight guaranteed, and I am not sure if ArenaNet to put it this way.
Varee: Speaking for my team, it is like we don’t run ress combos, but we definitively feel it way to strong, the game goes a lot faster and I mean if you lose the first team fight the other team is just getting a way to big lead just by the individual ress timers, we will need at least 2 more minutes to regroup or whatever. I don’t agree with these new individual timers.
Xeph: From a personal basis, I know a lot of people like this, but I like this new system, it can be tweaked and it can be looked at number wise but I like that everybody has their own individual ress timers. In the beginning I was in disagreement but after seeing it in affect it has encouraged a lot more team work and more backing off a point, instead of suiciding into it just to keep it neutralized. Even for a viewer it is a lot more enjoyable to watch that way, watch people back out of a point and try to survive and go for a different point. It has encouraged a lot more team work, as before people ran with individual builds but now people think about the builds that they can best support their team with, I mean the ress signet is one of those. I mean it is a utility that no one picked up before, because the game wasn’t as team oriented as it is now.
Jonathan: And it is the thing too, with the new system, and there is going to be pros and cons with this system versus the wave system and it is one of those things that we can revert if we need to. But we are watching the Meta and we think it is kind of going where you are talking about Xeph, that it is easier for people to understand when they are watching esport that when people are down they are down for 15, that person is out, you get a kill, it’s a 5on4 now, you know what is up with that. The older system you had to watch the wave timers and expert players enjoyed it they could watch the timers and get maximum duration out of each one of those deaths, but for new players it was a lot harder to understand. But on the other side of that, wave timers was a lot easier for new players as they were coming out of the gate with the other people on your team, whereas now they are coming out as individual. So it is a little bit harder for new players when coming out of the gate, but easier to understand that when I get a kill and I succeed in that then I know that that player is out of the game for 15 seconds and they know that! And that is kind of what we wanted to try to see how it would work for both the high level players and the new players.
Lowell: I understand that the 15 second respawn timer is another nerf to bunkers. Like you don’t want bunkers to be able to hold, they can’t hold 15 seconds against 4 people so the teams can zerg back to the point. So it is nerf to bunkers but right now it put too much emphasis on instant resses, you just use that utility slot guaranteed for the instant ress and it kills real diversity in a way.
Xeph: In counter play I can say that it gets redundant the fact that the bunker sits there and people funneling on one point, because if you watch videos of teams constantly fighting for middle that fight could last from the beginning of the game till the end of it, because of people constantly funneling into a point. That ress signet is a one-time thing that you are going to use once every 100 seconds, and it could even potentially miss or be interrupted by players who watch it, quickness stomp, it can even counter-act that. But nothing can stop you from timing resses, but when I watch other teams especially American it became redundant and I became bored.
Grouch: On the subject of being that downed state, how do you guys like the 50% downed state?
Varee: Speaking as a thief, I don’t like it, once you are dead you are dead and there is no point of it. I think the combination of downed state and the new ress system, has for me personally been feeling weird as I am down and down and they will just dps me and I go down again. But for other classes I don’t see the ress anymore, you don’t see someone running around and ressing which was a big part of our game... I don’t like that much to be honest.
Grouch: This is coming from the being revived point of view, but are you guys actually doing stomps or are you just trying to get the damage off?
Joanathan: It depends on the class, right? That is what I assume.
Avalor: This reminds me of something, Elementalist downed state is way too strong as opposed to everyone else. Their downed state is way to wrong. I remember a thread that said something like Elementalist downed state zero to hero, or something like that.
Grouch: Haha Well, it needed to change; the old state was really rough? So I think seeing a change was better than just having them go on with a state that was pretty bad.
Jonathan: yeah, it was really… yeah
Avalor: but right now let’s say you have a team fight 4on4 and you manage to down the elementalist first, and the other team downs your engineer first, the stomp from the elementalist will get off guaranted, you are going to have stabilitiy up and a blind, anything. But elementalist you can’t get him, he will just mistform away and the whole team could be next to him when he respawns and just resses.
Grouch: it is the only, uncountable downed state.
Xeph: I am just going to say that if you compare the different downed states, the eles is a personal downed state while the engineers is more, he can stop a stomp on a friend or pull a target back and he also has an AoE knock back, all which isn’t available to an ele who can’t help a friend from downed state. Mesmer ele and thief has all the selfish downed states, while guardians has AoE knock back and the necro can fear and engineer can pull, so I just think the heal should be removed, the resat to 50%.
Metor: I agree, cus in the current Meta you can just run 4 Eles and 1 mesmer and every time you are dead you just press mist form and you are GG. Haha. We tried it on, we are not main healers, but it worked very well for us, because you cannot stomp us, and I don’t think it is good for the game if one downed state is way too strong the complete downed state of ele and if you run not just one ele but three or four, then four people have this stance and yeah… we found it funny for ourself but I don’t think it should be in the game right now.
Jonathan: This is on our watch list when we are doing another balance meeting today; it is something that we can discuss if it is too much of a buff and if we should bring it back down again. It is the same thing with the 75% right, which should maybe be 80? 85%? Instead of the 75% that it was. There is a number there that is going to make that play a lot better, so maybe 75% is too low, as you say the glass cannons the thiefs and the eles and the mesmers, if they are down you just dps them from a safe range and you are fine. Whereas the warriors and guardians you have to actually go up in close range to actually get on the guy to stomp him to really be safe. So maybe that is too much, 75% might be too much.
Lowell: there is one thing that has not been taken into consideration in this discussion at all, like we talked about the new ress timer, about the new hp in downed state, but the third thing that makes it a real problem from my point of view is how strong AoE is right now, it is ridiculous to try and attempt to ress when you can just throw five aoes and make sure that guy is going to die and never be ressed anyway.
Jonathan: that is also one of our big issues, because as you say if someone has strong aoe and someone is trying to ress a team mate, just hit both with the AoE. You are hitting the guy on the ground and the guy trying to ress him now even if he gets the guy up now he might go down really quickly so you can take that guy down aswell, so yeah AoE might be too strong for some of those sets.
Grouch: You mentioned the watch list and how you keep an eye on certain things that are in the game for how strong they are, can you talk a little about the balance philosophy?
Jonathan: Sure, this has come up a lot on the forums and to anyone that is listening we are reading the forums, I take time of every day to go and watch the pvp threads, balance threads for each one of the classes. A lot of times what you will see on here is people talking about balance, “omg they nerfed this, when are they going to nerf this, they over nerfed this, when is this class going to get a buff”. And a lot of time our philosophy is to do really small tweaks very slowly over time to rate things into equal, instead of basically doing wack-a-mole with doing huge buffs, then huge nerfs, then huge buffs. So doing small needed things, instead of doing really drastic things all the time, which is why if you see us doing adjustment to one class we will try to be careful with how much we are touching. We won’t be touching all weapons of one class plus utility plus traits. We try to pick a few things to put things into alignment with one and another and then spread that kind of out to each one of the classes to make sure everyone is where they are supposed to be. So ideally we want to do small tweaks instead of drastic things, but on the forums you see people talk about, “oohh I want to see this change and I want to dramatically” and if changed everything really dramatically all the time balance would be all over the place. And that is just not the way you want to balance something that is as complex as an MMO like this, so we pick small steps for those things and be really careful. Sometimes things gets through, we make mistakes, sure. But a lot of times our philosophy is doing safe small changes all the time.
Grouch: When you actually find something that you want to change, what is the actual work flow for this inside the studio?
Jonathan: Sure, I posted this on the forum so we can re-iterate this now we have a group of people that help with balance, we have myself, Jon Peters is there, we have Carl, he is one of our Q/A guys that play a ton he is now a designer so he always got a finger on the balance. We have multiple Q/A guys, multiple designers, we have dungeon designer, and we have world v world designers. We have meeting few times a week, two or three times, and we have everyone bringing their issues and we go, hey I got this one skill causing issues in WvW right now, and we will talk about these skills and we talk about different ways that we can fix them. We try to keep everything consistent between PvE and PvP but we do have the ability to split skills if we need to. So we will have this meeting and we will go over the changes that we want to do and the individual people responsible for those different types of content will go away and make those changes, a lot of times it will be Jon Peters, Carl, Myself, Alzaer, if its wvw, maybe its treb damage on world v world this would go onto the world v world designer. So basically we have huge meetings we all talk about and we go away and we all have different things that we do, and then we communicate throughout the week with email, hey this is the changes that we make let’s get them in, lets test them. We put them on the dev. and if we like them we will ship them like that, so quick and dirty that is how we do it.
Grouch: Hello and welcome one and all to the Guild Wars 2 Guru State of the Game Stream, I am your host Grouch. Today we will be taking a look at Guild Wars 2 PvP its current state and future development. In order to facilitate this we are joined by ArenaNet Developer Jonathan “chaplan” Sharp, jonathan what is your job title specifically and what do you do.
Jonathan: I am a Game Developer here at ArenaNet and I focus on PvP and Balance.
Grouch: In addition we are joined by a few select members from prominent Europeans teams, I will introduce you shortly; if you could respond with your main profession and the role that you play for your perspective teams. That would be awesome! First up we have Lowell from Super Squad.
Lowell: Hey guys. I am Lowell, I main thief and I play a roamer for the Super Squad, Eclypsia.
Grouch: Alright we, have Varee from Onibawan.
Varee: Yeah, hallo I am Varee I am playing for Onibawan main profession as a thief as a roamer.
Grouch: We have Xeph from Team Paradigm.
Xeph: Hey I play Mesmer and I play as a semi roamer!
Grouch: Avalor from Chieftain Ninja
Avalor: Hello I play the roaming Engineer from CN
Grouch: And we have Metor from team eStars
Metor: Yeah hello I play the necro for the team eStars and my role is to support my mates and roll the conditions. Haha
Grouch: Alright, I guess we will start by taking a look at the current Meta, and I guess we will go with Jonathan, right now is what we are looking at the target of the game, is it what we want?
Jonathan: Overall, yes it is. But you got major rolls like the roamer, which is what a lot of these guys play. And the guy that can hold a position, more of a bunker build, that needs to hold the spot that acts more as the anchor for the team. We want to have that as well and we want to have the higher DPS classes, but right now what we want is starting to develop more builds for every single one of the classes. And just make sure that there is a lot of trait balance and class balance and skill balance so there is a more options for each one of those rolls.
Grouch: We will just go around with a round-table, ask you how you feel about the current Meta game. We can just start with Lowell
Lowell: I guess people expect me to talk about bunkers anyway; the problem is not that big anymore because the biggest defender was that the bug block on the guardian got fixed. So yeah the only bunker that seems extremely strong right now is based on scepter dagger ele, but is still nothing compared to the bugged block guardian, and atleast it can be dealt with, but still.
Metor: I agree with what Lowell said, I think the meta right now is correct, it is fine with me.
Xeph: I also agree, I just think that the new ress-timers have actually taken a bit of bunkers now and have enforced more roaming because you just can’t tunnel into a point and have that bunker sitting there.
Grouch: that is actually one of the planned topics; do you guys actually like new spawn timers, is it always the same amount or do you prefer the old timers? I know ArenaNet was going to keep an eye on the situation and adjust it accordingly.
Lowell: To be honest right now the 15 second timer put a bit too much on instant resses, I feel the Meta game is too strong on instant resses. Like the necro has signet of undeath and Mesmer have illusion of life it is just way to strong right now for the meta game, like if you don’t have your ress up you are going to lose the team fight guaranteed, and I am not sure if ArenaNet to put it this way.
Varee: Speaking for my team, it is like we don’t run ress combos, but we definitively feel it way to strong, the game goes a lot faster and I mean if you lose the first team fight the other team is just getting a way to big lead just by the individual ress timers, we will need at least 2 more minutes to regroup or whatever. I don’t agree with these new individual timers.
Xeph: From a personal basis, I know a lot of people like this, but I like this new system, it can be tweaked and it can be looked at number wise but I like that everybody has their own individual ress timers. In the beginning I was in disagreement but after seeing it in affect it has encouraged a lot more team work and more backing off a point, instead of suiciding into it just to keep it neutralized. Even for a viewer it is a lot more enjoyable to watch that way, watch people back out of a point and try to survive and go for a different point. It has encouraged a lot more team work, as before people ran with individual builds but now people think about the builds that they can best support their team with, I mean the ress signet is one of those. I mean it is a utility that no one picked up before, because the game wasn’t as team oriented as it is now.
Jonathan: And it is the thing too, with the new system, and there is going to be pros and cons with this system versus the wave system and it is one of those things that we can revert if we need to. But we are watching the Meta and we think it is kind of going where you are talking about Xeph, that it is easier for people to understand when they are watching esport that when people are down they are down for 15, that person is out, you get a kill, it’s a 5on4 now, you know what is up with that. The older system you had to watch the wave timers and expert players enjoyed it they could watch the timers and get maximum duration out of each one of those deaths, but for new players it was a lot harder to understand. But on the other side of that, wave timers was a lot easier for new players as they were coming out of the gate with the other people on your team, whereas now they are coming out as individual. So it is a little bit harder for new players when coming out of the gate, but easier to understand that when I get a kill and I succeed in that then I know that that player is out of the game for 15 seconds and they know that! And that is kind of what we wanted to try to see how it would work for both the high level players and the new players.
Lowell: I understand that the 15 second respawn timer is another nerf to bunkers. Like you don’t want bunkers to be able to hold, they can’t hold 15 seconds against 4 people so the teams can zerg back to the point. So it is nerf to bunkers but right now it put too much emphasis on instant resses, you just use that utility slot guaranteed for the instant ress and it kills real diversity in a way.
Xeph: In counter play I can say that it gets redundant the fact that the bunker sits there and people funneling on one point, because if you watch videos of teams constantly fighting for middle that fight could last from the beginning of the game till the end of it, because of people constantly funneling into a point. That ress signet is a one-time thing that you are going to use once every 100 seconds, and it could even potentially miss or be interrupted by players who watch it, quickness stomp, it can even counter-act that. But nothing can stop you from timing resses, but when I watch other teams especially American it became redundant and I became bored.
Grouch: On the subject of being that downed state, how do you guys like the 50% downed state?
Varee: Speaking as a thief, I don’t like it, once you are dead you are dead and there is no point of it. I think the combination of downed state and the new ress system, has for me personally been feeling weird as I am down and down and they will just dps me and I go down again. But for other classes I don’t see the ress anymore, you don’t see someone running around and ressing which was a big part of our game... I don’t like that much to be honest.
Grouch: This is coming from the being revived point of view, but are you guys actually doing stomps or are you just trying to get the damage off?
Joanathan: It depends on the class, right? That is what I assume.
Avalor: This reminds me of something, Elementalist downed state is way too strong as opposed to everyone else. Their downed state is way to wrong. I remember a thread that said something like Elementalist downed state zero to hero, or something like that.
Grouch: Haha Well, it needed to change; the old state was really rough? So I think seeing a change was better than just having them go on with a state that was pretty bad.
Jonathan: yeah, it was really… yeah
Avalor: but right now let’s say you have a team fight 4on4 and you manage to down the elementalist first, and the other team downs your engineer first, the stomp from the elementalist will get off guaranted, you are going to have stabilitiy up and a blind, anything. But elementalist you can’t get him, he will just mistform away and the whole team could be next to him when he respawns and just resses.
Grouch: it is the only, uncountable downed state.
Xeph: I am just going to say that if you compare the different downed states, the eles is a personal downed state while the engineers is more, he can stop a stomp on a friend or pull a target back and he also has an AoE knock back, all which isn’t available to an ele who can’t help a friend from downed state. Mesmer ele and thief has all the selfish downed states, while guardians has AoE knock back and the necro can fear and engineer can pull, so I just think the heal should be removed, the resat to 50%.
Metor: I agree, cus in the current Meta you can just run 4 Eles and 1 mesmer and every time you are dead you just press mist form and you are GG. Haha. We tried it on, we are not main healers, but it worked very well for us, because you cannot stomp us, and I don’t think it is good for the game if one downed state is way too strong the complete downed state of ele and if you run not just one ele but three or four, then four people have this stance and yeah… we found it funny for ourself but I don’t think it should be in the game right now.
Jonathan: This is on our watch list when we are doing another balance meeting today; it is something that we can discuss if it is too much of a buff and if we should bring it back down again. It is the same thing with the 75% right, which should maybe be 80? 85%? Instead of the 75% that it was. There is a number there that is going to make that play a lot better, so maybe 75% is too low, as you say the glass cannons the thiefs and the eles and the mesmers, if they are down you just dps them from a safe range and you are fine. Whereas the warriors and guardians you have to actually go up in close range to actually get on the guy to stomp him to really be safe. So maybe that is too much, 75% might be too much.
Lowell: there is one thing that has not been taken into consideration in this discussion at all, like we talked about the new ress timer, about the new hp in downed state, but the third thing that makes it a real problem from my point of view is how strong AoE is right now, it is ridiculous to try and attempt to ress when you can just throw five aoes and make sure that guy is going to die and never be ressed anyway.
Jonathan: that is also one of our big issues, because as you say if someone has strong aoe and someone is trying to ress a team mate, just hit both with the AoE. You are hitting the guy on the ground and the guy trying to ress him now even if he gets the guy up now he might go down really quickly so you can take that guy down aswell, so yeah AoE might be too strong for some of those sets.
Grouch: You mentioned the watch list and how you keep an eye on certain things that are in the game for how strong they are, can you talk a little about the balance philosophy?
Jonathan: Sure, this has come up a lot on the forums and to anyone that is listening we are reading the forums, I take time of every day to go and watch the pvp threads, balance threads for each one of the classes. A lot of times what you will see on here is people talking about balance, “omg they nerfed this, when are they going to nerf this, they over nerfed this, when is this class going to get a buff”. And a lot of time our philosophy is to do really small tweaks very slowly over time to rate things into equal, instead of basically doing wack-a-mole with doing huge buffs, then huge nerfs, then huge buffs. So doing small needed things, instead of doing really drastic things all the time, which is why if you see us doing adjustment to one class we will try to be careful with how much we are touching. We won’t be touching all weapons of one class plus utility plus traits. We try to pick a few things to put things into alignment with one and another and then spread that kind of out to each one of the classes to make sure everyone is where they are supposed to be. So ideally we want to do small tweaks instead of drastic things, but on the forums you see people talk about, “oohh I want to see this change and I want to dramatically” and if changed everything really dramatically all the time balance would be all over the place. And that is just not the way you want to balance something that is as complex as an MMO like this, so we pick small steps for those things and be really careful. Sometimes things gets through, we make mistakes, sure. But a lot of times our philosophy is doing safe small changes all the time.
Grouch: When you actually find something that you want to change, what is the actual work flow for this inside the studio?
Jonathan: Sure, I posted this on the forum so we can re-iterate this now we have a group of people that help with balance, we have myself, Jon Peters is there, we have Carl, he is one of our Q/A guys that play a ton he is now a designer so he always got a finger on the balance. We have multiple Q/A guys, multiple designers, we have dungeon designer, and we have world v world designers. We have meeting few times a week, two or three times, and we have everyone bringing their issues and we go, hey I got this one skill causing issues in WvW right now, and we will talk about these skills and we talk about different ways that we can fix them. We try to keep everything consistent between PvE and PvP but we do have the ability to split skills if we need to. So we will have this meeting and we will go over the changes that we want to do and the individual people responsible for those different types of content will go away and make those changes, a lot of times it will be Jon Peters, Carl, Myself, Alzaer, if its wvw, maybe its treb damage on world v world this would go onto the world v world designer. So basically we have huge meetings we all talk about and we go away and we all have different things that we do, and then we communicate throughout the week with email, hey this is the changes that we make let’s get them in, lets test them. We put them on the dev. and if we like them we will ship them like that, so quick and dirty that is how we do it.
