Friday, July 9

GW2 - Healing and Death


No death penalty, instead a new layer of combat in 'downtime' (read: Battle Fatigue). As you get close to death you switch to a new set of skills, these skills give you your last fighting chance


From a PC Gamer article
"The Elementalist has skills like ‘Drafting Earth,’ which will slow enemies who are running by, or ‘Mist Form’ which actually allows them to turn into a cloud of mist and move around slowly so they can try and get away from bad situations.” Like Dracula, then. These skills are exclusive to your downed state – they’re the last inch of your power, they’re everything you’ve got. This impressive range of desperate, last-ditch skills are part of a new plan to give you a chance after you’ve fallen in combat. The other part is just as cool, and if you’ve played Borderlands, you’ll have experienced this wonderful mechanic before. “If you manage to kill an enemy, you will rally, returning to life to fight again,” Jon said. You get up, dust off, and get stuck in."

If you don't succeed with that your dead, everyone has a revive skill from lvl 1, the more you die in combat the longer it is before you can be ressed, if you can't be ressed? then it's to the nearest res shrine for you my friend (if you have the few gold it will cost), beyond that there is no Death Penalty.

Why no healer? We shouldn't need one, while Anet are talking about moving away from the holy trinity they have just replaced it with concepts that sound familier: Support classes that buff and protect, crowd control rather than tanking, and well dps is just dps.

Five man dungeon attempted by three players from gamona.de
"We fought our way into the dungeon fairly well until we got into a fight with 5 boss golems each of whom uses a different type of elemental beam weapon. We were clearly overmatched but pressed on, determined to take some of them with us. Our more tankish warrior would call out targets and our ranged friend would immobilize them while I inflicted as much aoe damage as possible. If one of the warrior went down we’d use the downed skill “Retreat!” to give a speed buff to the others which would further enable them to kite the golems away so we could revive our fallen companion. A few times during the fight the other warrior would also use a downed skill called Vengeance which allows the warrior to get up and act normally for a short period of time before going straight to “defeated.” He’d use this skill to rez a friend or lead the golems away for a short period of time while the others healed. We defeated this encounter with no healer and nobody even playing one of the more support oriented professions in the game. We subsisted solely on self heals, solid tactics, and a little bit of luck"

So we all have heals and we all have skills that could help us escape death, I like the added depth this 'downtime' could bring but they really should think of a better name for it. I thought GW had a great DP system, I know people are split on this one but I like DP, it made you try that bit harder...

You can read more about healing and death at the official site

3 comments:

  1. Ok, this sounds good on one hand and terribly dangerous on the other.
    Uhoh, Lani is at it again... :-)
    I think this will work awesome if you have a well-coordinated group of friends working together. I think pugging in GW2 just became Hell on Earth though. Yes, pugging in GW used to revolve around first finding a Healer, mucking up, then blaming the Healer, but this system just eliminates step one, does nothing to change step 2 (unless revive skills are irrevokably nailed onto the skills bar) and replaces step 3 with everyone blaming each other.

    I do very much like the idea of a different "final breath" combat, it's always irked me that there's really only one strategy for MMO combat during the last decade or so since the Holy Trinity moved from Tank+Heal+Crowd Cotnrol to Tank+Heal+DPS. I'm talking about nukin gthe hardest hitting enemy till his health reaches 0 and ignroing the othe rmobs till he's down. Someone already near death would fight differently, retreat, do desperate things. Some Boss mobs and especially Raid Bosses have had some scripted events, which people would then memorize, but I wish it'd be more common, procedural even. You should be fighting the whole mob if possible, and not just when you manage to body block them with your tank and can AoE nuke them. More Crowd Control I say (btw, a tank body blocking and making use of the terrain to do so is of course awesome crowd control).

    I'm kind amissing a mention of Final Breath skills for the mobs though.

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  2. Oh, and which Final breath skill has a warrior throw his axe into his opponent's groin???

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  3. Then there's the danger that the lack of a death penalty means people will never learn.

    GW was always PuG hell, I offered my healing services fairly frquently at THK, I think I'm prepared for the worst.

    Mutants [MU] will be very active so luckily for us decent groups for the dungeons shouldn't be too hard to come by, I hope they scale and/or their mentor system works well.

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