PAX East Preview: Izzy on Attributes and Iteration

[Butcher_Pete]

We often mention iteration in interviews, at trade shows, and here on the blog. But what does it mean when we talk about the iterative process? I’d like to walk you through some changes we’ve made to the Guild Wars 2 attribute system to give you a better idea of our design philosophy.
Let’s start with a brief history of our character attribute system. We wanted to add attributes to Guild Wars 2 in order to solve a few problems we saw in the original Guild Wars. Frankly, we felt our item system was lacking when compared to other games we’d played. We found that our item system had become more about skins than it was about stats, which made the system cool, but limited our ability to make interesting items. We love to get systems in early and play around with them. Because our perception of a system often changes as we play with it, this is a key component of our iterative process. So, we started work on adding attributes to Guild Wars 2.
The first implementation of attributes was as a limiter for skill tiers. For example, a player looking to unlock the fourth tier of the skill Sever Artery could only do so after raising the character’s strength over 600 points. We quickly found this version of the system to be too confusing, as it added extra complication to the process of buying skills.
The next implementation of attributes saw them feed into the combat formulas for various types of attacks and damage mitigation:
*Strength—increased melee attack damage.
*Agility—increase ranged attack damage.
*Intelligence—increased magic attack damage.
*Vitality—increased health; increased defense against melee attacks.
Perception—increased critical strike chance for melee and ranged attacks; increased defense against ranged attacks.
Willpower—increased critical strike chance for magic attacks; increased defense against magic attacks.
This is how the attribute system functioned for a while, but a few things continued to bug us about this implementation. When we went to make the attribute UI for the hero panel, it appeared overly complicated and hard for people to understand. Because it was similarly difficult to tell what damage type was generated by different skills, we had to give creatures the same defense values against all the damage types. Also, under this system, defensive bonuses both affected armor and reduced critical strike chances. This made for confusing moments when a player with a huge bonus to critical strikes fought something with high defensive bonuses and delivered few critical strikes.

After playing with this system and seeing all its flaws, we overhauled our combat formulas and the attributes. Below is how the attribute system appeared at gamescom and PAX Prime 2010.
*Strength—increased melee attack damage.
*Agility—increase ranged attack damage.
*Intelligence—increased magic attack damage.
*Vitality—increased health.
*Perception—increased critical strike chance.
*Willpower—increased energy.
When coming up with this system, there was an ongoing debate over combining strength, agility, and intelligence. We decided to keep them separate since we found it made an interesting decision about focusing on ranged or melee attack power.
This attribute system worked pretty well, but the decision that we were originally excited by proved to have major downsides. You could make a warrior carrying a sword and bow in your two weapon slots, which was not uncommon for players to want. Unfortunately, if you split your attribute points between strength and agility, you were less effective overall than someone who carried two melee or ranged weapons and specialized appropriately. Our first solution to this problem was to add traits into the system that forced your ranged attacks to use your melee attribute and vice versa. This added some neat traits to our system, but it didn’t solve the underlying problem that someone could very easily roll a bad character. The other problem we found was that this system limited experimentation and discovery. We want players to have fun trying out new weapons. If a player with a warrior locates a rifle, we want them to enjoy testing out its different skills and possibly working it into their active weapon set. We discovered this experimentation isn’t nearly as much fun if you didn’t spend your attributes properly to take advantage of this new weapon. Finally, we determined that willpower was fairly unexciting as attributes go, as many people avoided putting points into it. Recently, we’ve changed the attribute system to be simpler, and it solves many of the above issues.

*Power—increased attack damage.
*Precision—increased critical strike chance.
*Vitality—increased health.
*Toughness—increased defense/armor.
These new attributes solved all of the old problems, simplified the system, and made already-interesting choices more meaningful for the players. We added the toughness because we felt three attributes did not give us enough diversity in the item system, and its straightforward use complemented the others well. What choices will you make when assigning attribute points to your character in Guild Wars 2?
Power or Toughness?
You can choose to deal more damage upfront or you can last longer in the fight, dealing more damage over time. Both are valid options with strengths and weaknesses in many situations. Which you choose may also depend on the role you want to play when grouped with other adventurers.

Power or Precision?

While power and precision both increase your damage output, we didn’t want to make this a purely mathematical choice of which does more damage for your character. Investing in precision means you deal overall less raw DPS, but many triggered effects happen only when you score a critical strike. For example, a guardian could favor raw power so his Orb of Light does more damage, or he could go higher in precision and use a trait that causes burning with every critical hit. Going this second route, the guardian could also wield a weapon that caused a short cripple with critical strikes. Now, with a high enough chance for critical hits, his Orb of Light will often snare his target, setting up a following attack, and apply burning, making up for the lower raw damage. Precision ends up the trickier but more combo-friendly attribute, earning you more reliable effects and conditional damage.
Power is raw damage and the choice for those who just want to hit hard. For example, a ranger who specs high in power and wields a longbow is hedging his bets; he’s looking to do more damage with each hit even if his target dodges a few projectiles. A ranger who specs high in precision and wields a longbow is aiming to use the increased chance of secondary effects to apply pressure to his target.
Vitality or Toughness?
Both of these attributes reduce damage done to your character, letting you deal more damage or support your allies for longer simply because you can persevere to do so. Toughness helps a character deal with pressure, reducing the damage from numerous small hits and giving him more time to heal or use a defensive skill. While toughness does reduce the damage from large hits, it’s overall less effective than vitality in doing so. Vitality increases your health, allowing you to absorb a large blow and still slink away to recover. It also protects you from effects that ignore armor, such as conditions.

One Attribute or a Mixture?

With our current implementation of the item system, items raise single attributes higher than when they raise a pair. However, the total number of points will be higher for a two-attribute item than for an item affecting a single attribute. For example, a Rare Ruby Ring gives +40 power; an equal level Gold Topaz Ring gives +33 power and +25 vitality; and a Pearl Ring gives +25 power, +25 vitality, and +25 toughness. This item system enhances another choice: do you max out one attribute or raise the total effectiveness of all your attributes? The character who deals the highest raw damage is someone who has maximized the offensive attributes, but the character who diversifies becomes a jack-of-all-trades while mastering none.

Ultimately, this new attribute system is easier to understand, easier to balance, more flexible, and improves combat and character progression. Is this the last time we will change attributes before release? We hope so, but we will make sure the system we establish is the right one for the game we release. Just as we have an iterative approach to our content, we want to continually reevaluate our systems, helping us make them simpler and stronger.
If you have the chance to play at PAX East, you’ll notice other examples of our iterative process. We changed the necromancer skill Grasping Dead to be a ground-targeted AoE spell because it was hard to hit in its original line-of-attack form. We moved took necromancer’s Shadow Fiend off the Death Shroud skill bar, making it a utility skill and creating a new skill in its place. The elementalist skill bar has been reorganized and the skill effects themselves have been tweaked. We also went through a major revision of the warrior’s rifle skills, making Rifle Butt daze your target but removing the backward roll, removing Penetrating Shot entirely, and changing the effect of the primary adrenaline skill. For some who’ve played the demo before, these changes will add up to a new experience with content they’ve already seen.
The more we implement and then test those implementations, the better we understand the impact of our changes. As the rest game evolves, so should the way it’s played. We’re proud of how we constantly improve our skills and the systems that underlie them in order to bring you the best game we can.

[Halfgrin]

Awesome post. very interesting read, also glad to see their really putting in a lot of thought and effort into how their systems work instead of just assuming "if it worked for those guys it'll work for us".

Looking forward to play GW2 when it hits the shelves.