Edit: Oh shit, Wall of Text crits you for 9999, sorry about that. I also kind of threw this together while getting dinner going so if any of it just trails off I'll explain parts better if people ask.
I think I've talked about this with Retro and Zeroth a few times, and it's related to the World Boss discussion we had a while back. The game's combat is sublime, and all of the basic systems already exist to make fights that require in-depth strategies, but the way open-world PvE encounters happen right now is that groups are able to zerg around to events and completely subvert the intended mechanics.
Meg and I were actually
just talking about this because she's finding the dungeons in FFXIV to be much more enjoyable than GW2's. We figured out that it isn't because FFXIV has better combat (unless you're a fan of watching paint dry), but that their dungeon community isn't rancid (more on that in a sec) and their encounter design is tighter. That's
always been one of the benefits of the Holy Trinity though; you build encounters that require a very specific configuration of Tank / Healer / DPS and anything else fails. Maybe things have changed, but I don't remember anyone ever doing solo dungeon runs in WoW because the mechanics just didn't allow it (exceptions; when a class had a broken mechanic like Reckobombing or when they out-leveled the content, even I solo'd Onyxia at one point).
The reason I think so many people were attracted to GW2's premise of a 'soft trinity' is because that tightly-designed approach can also feel very restrictive. All of my raiding experiences in past MMOs can be summarized as; "Learn the dance steps, hope everyone else did too," whether I was tanking (which was often the case), damage or heals (which I will admit I did not do very often), and I wanted something that was more twitchy and chaotic. The most fun I ever had in Trinity MMOs were the crazy moments when something bad happened and you had to think and act quickly to recover. Those moments were usually so binary that it could hardly be described as chaos at all; if the Main Tank died, it was a wipe. If the healer died, it was a wipe. It didn't matter if you had an off-tank who could step up or healers who could try to compensate, because the nature of the encounter design usually meant you needed those people up and around because the off-tank or secondary healers had their own dance steps they had to do and couldn't also fill in for the downed player (only certain classes could rez, only two in combat and one of them had to put a buff on a specific person in advance).
The reason things are so bad in GW2, as I see it, is two fold; the game's encounter design isn't harsh enough and the community's horrible behavior has been allowed to fester for so long that changing it requires a massive shake-up.
As far as the first one goes, I can't say what the developers' intentions are/were, but there's no way stacking should still work and there's no way any of the exploits in the game should exist for as long as they do (some since launch). I don't know if they just don't want to spend time fixing exploits for dungeons because they don't consider it worth the effort or if (more likely) they don't know about them because nobody reports them, but I feel like things like standing on rocks, fence posts and crates to glitch bosses would have been fixed immediately in any other game. Likewise, I think stacking should have been dealt with early and harshly, with a variety of mechanics (everything from bosses having a preference to stay ranged to having powerful AOE abilities that scale up with the number of players in them).
As to the second, a massive shakeup is coming in the form of an expansion, though there's going to be a
lot of screaming if the bar is raised even a little by the "I don't play games to think, I just want to relax!" crowd. The community can't have it both ways though; "challenging group content" is incompatible with the current emphasis on efficiency, speed and a rewards-first attitude. The Berserker meta is going to have to make way for one in which survival is essential
until the content is mastered, not paved over with tricks like stacking.
Of course, everything goes out the window when it comes to World Bosses, even the ones like Tequatl and Wurm, because you can still have a
shitload of people mucking about without gumming up the whole works. Apart from turrets, what part of Tequatl fails if people just stand there and press "1?" Why is it, years later, we still have to yell at people "WP if dead" during Taco?
Because those people hit 1 and went AFK (and I bet they still get rewards too).
I mean, we've been having similar problems during Guild Missions; people are so used to there being a huge blob of GAFers on Saturday Nights that everyone is running straight to the exit and waiting for the door to open instead of getting on a curtain to make that happen. I consider GAFers to be a cut above the average gamer in terms of teamwork and situational awareness, but it's still super easy to fall into the "someone else will handle it" mentality.
That's why world bosses are never going to be "Challenging group content"; the fact that so many people are involved means personal responsibility cannot be tracked or punished. The sooner they move away from those as the main reward schemes, the better. Naturally, as they add more content with (hopefully) better rewards World Bosses will be more like cool, big events if you happen to be in the area rather than something everyone sets their clock to and does in a great big loop.
We'll have to see what this new challenging stuff is, but I'm 90% sure it won't be stackable and 100% sure it won't be zergable. Nothing would make me happier than for people to set foot into this new content and try to stack up, only for the boss to look at them,
laugh at them, and then nuke them all from orbit at once. I doubt it will happen, but I think everyone should prepare themselves for change (probably not to the existing dungeons though).
Semi-related Schadenfreude Alert: Nike's comments on that WP video are
atrocious, seeing his very meek little "Thanks for the Reply, Colin" as he slips back into his snooty little hole after getting told is just... delicious.
I love that comment if only because there's something to finally shut up Nike and his self righteousness. In other news, Brazil has become more of a cool guy in my eyes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajZCyIAVuMg
You know what I'm talkin' 'bout.
