Quote:
Originally Posted by KZaske
Very true.
I miss the days when PuGs would form and go after a goal. These zones were ment to be Elite, players needed to understand how thier skills worked and how to work as part of a team or they failed. For example; warriors had to wait for the monks & eles in thier team to recover engery before charging forward. Rangers played high guard spreading discontent in the mobs and rezing the all too often over zealous warrior and some times the entire group. I remember when we use to designate a runner for each and every PuG. It was the runners job to running away when most of the group was down, wait for the mobs to clear the area and rez the dead. The runner was usually a ranger or a monk. At the time; team work was the path of least resistance. Solo play was possible, but not easy. You needed to take your time when using henchies. Today, everyone wants to get whatever they are doing done as quick as possible, they don't want to take the time to build a PuG and adjust builds to support the team. They want to go now and get it done as quickly as possible.
To me the decline of team work can be marked by the introduction of Heros which allowed a player to have a full team without any other real people, the over use of SF made every 'elite' area possible without much effort.
I am not saying that heros are all bad, they are not. I am not saying that SF is all bad, it is not. I just miss the team work that use to be an all too rare part of the game.
In short, the popularity of the current abuse of SF can be attributed to each and every one of us. Some for paying the outragious prices they want, other because of greed. The greed of wanting to get every elite thing in the game as quickly as possible. Is that bad, not really. I just don't see how paying someone else to do my job as a player is good for me, the game or anyone else.
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I believe that where we are now with the game is the result of general dismay to a few vital things: 1. Poor enemy AI, and 2. Poor enemy build structure.
In WoW I remember a moment where I was able to solo a raid boss as a lock for like a few days. Blizzard *hates* that, they hate it when you're able to accomplish a task with a very limited selection of classes.
This is something I was hoping to see in Guild Wars, but ANet didn't take much advance to encourage a balanced game. If enemies were configured to ignore certain build combos then farming wouldn't be nearly as effective as it is now. If you were in a full and balanced team group, what would you do against an SF sin? Well for one everyone
wouldn't be wasting all their spells on him. This is also why h/h is so successful: being "good" in PvE is easily achieved, and hence why soloing is such an accessible route. No need to micro-manage anything your heroes are doing - which is what *should* be required - just aggro a mob, spam SY!, loot, repeat.
But I had a pretty good feeling that balanced and smart play was forever dead when I saw them remove the AoE scatter. That right there was one of the biggest pieces of evidence of the route that ANet was heading down with PvE. The PvE/P skill split made it worse.
If ANet wants to fix PvE, it's going to take a LOT more than just fixing the thing that's the most overpowered. Enemy behavior and build structure will need a massive overhaul. Otherwise we'll be stuck in a sea of gimmicks and unintelligent play.
Most new players I talk to say GW is the hardest RPG ever just because their "firebolts" (flare) can't one hit KO and "rape monsters"....and apparently these people are the majority. I even over heard a random guy in post-searing ascalon saying he's "mislead" in that this game should be labeled a strategy game and not a RPG :P
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