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Originally Posted by Hippie Crack
My only problem with large scale battles are things like EoE bombs. In 8v8 its not really that hard to pick out an ebomb team and prepare for it. If the opposing team is 30+ players doing an ebomb, they could hide it much better and you would never see something like that coming. Large scale battles would have to be broken down into say teams of 4 or 8. Then those teams of 4 or 8 get grouped to form each side of the battle. If it were all 30+ players on 1 team list then skills like orders/aegis/heal party really get thrown out of wack as far as skill balance goes. A monk could never spot heal a list of 30+ players, but a single skill(heal party) healing for thousands of HP per cast is just rediculous.
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Sadly EoE bombs are pretty much the weakest link in PVP right now, the unfocused damage and the ability of a human player to just run around make a useful EoEer a lot harder to take advantage of. Having more players might make it easier and thus more important. I still think the idea is unworkable, although good, but more so because spike is already way overpowered in PvP than because EoE would become so.
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Originally Posted by unreal_uk
An extension on this could be story-driven PvE battles, that seems more doable on the surface anyway.
Imagine a 30 strong team, with Archer NPC's, defending a fortress against a Charr raiding force, with ambient war sound to heighten the sensation of being in a much larger battle, while a village burns on the horizon and the night sky is lit by roaring fire.
Man...
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Now... unlike the big-team PvP idea, I really love the big-team cooperative idea. Not only would it prolly be far closer to feasible (in terms of people being able to run it at playable framerates and latencies and whatnot), but it would add something I've really been missing from Guild Wars. I expected a lightweight MMORPG that put more emphasis on teamwork and skill than on how badass your character is (meaning how long you farmed for your armor) and... well, more than 8 players on a team. Everything has been fulfilled but my vague ideas about huge ass battles. What I got from the demo was basically: big terrain! big parties! big spells! big monsters! diminutive character models! Well, 8 players is nice and it is really the max right now that does not completely break PvP in terms of skill balance.
However... a big ass battle against some super deadly army would add alot to the replayability of the PvE experience, which right now is lacking IMO. I expect it wouldn't produce as much ridicularity (frozen soil -> rend -> spike --omg lol) as a big group PvP battle. Whether a situation breaks the skill balance in PvE isn't really a question with a meaningful answer, since people will always intuitively take advantage of the AI anyway.
In fact, for this reason, I'd say to make big-team-PvE truly fun would require that the players be more varied and more coordinated (not 30W/Mo, for example), which would require the monsters to be more varied themselves (physical, ranged, elemental damage, hexes, enchantments, etc. to pressure the human players to be flexible), harder to kill, and it might not even work without monsters having better AI and more than 4 skills to choose from.
Better AI? Harder monsters with more skills that work together better? Anet can always do that stuff without breaking anything existing in the game, except maybe making the single player more challenging... maybe of course the new AI and monsters wouldn't be used except in big battles. Either way, I'll just stop here and wonder aloud, what might Anet have planned for GW2?
...Something like this, possibly? I'd bet so.
EDIT: Were it technically feasible to have a playable game experience in a 16v16/32v32 big-battle PvP scenario, the skill balance issues could probably be fixed by placing restrictions on skills that wouldn't affect their behaviour in normal-size play. For instance, putting a range on orders, combining skill ranges with a maximum number of targets, perhaps the closest 8. That would actually increase the value of formation and thus I'd think make people involve the terrain more as a factor in their strategy, as things like Aegis would have to be a bit more coordinated to be fully effective.
Especially if the big-battle maps had combinations of flat expanses, lava, ice, cliffs, and choke points (narrow connections between two areas basically) that would introduce a lot of variety into the gameplay.
Excuse my rambling... stayed up chain-smoking with nothing better to do than brainstorm GW 2. ;D