Guild Wars 2

I call this a list of “dirty” suggestions because they aren’t all going to be popular, or in-line with the game’s original visions, but most will need to be addressed by some factor if the game wants to enjoy the same longevity as its predecessor. My proposed solutions are obviously not the only ones to each problem listed, but certainly somewhere to start.

1. Equalize same-level gear. White gear has the same base stats as gold gear at the same level, but higher-graded gear can be upgraded with modifiers (as in GW1 with inscriptions & other weapon modifiers). The skin and rarity of a weapon should warrant its acquisition; not its stats.
2. Keep a fixed, permanent, level cap. Players absent for any duration of time should not be penalized. High-end level discrepancies will only segregate players further.
3. Each class can equip all weapon types, though at a disadvantage for weapons not intended for your class (eg. warriors with bows, elementalists with hammers).
4. Additional weapon skills can be purchased with skill points to replace any of the “basic” skills initially unlocked for that weapon. These skills can then be slotted in/out like other slot skills, though they are specific to a given weapon.
5. Ground-targeting is never the default method for using a skill. Targeting either defaults to the area around the caster or the area near the targeted enemy, depending on the skill. Players can choose to hold an additional key to use ground-targeting, or to leave it on all the time by default.
6. When crafting a known recipe all lesser components are crafted automatically/invisibly (i.e. the two weapon/armor parts & any inscription/insignia do not need to be crafted first).
7. Master crafters still gain minimal experience for crafting.
8. Map travel is free.
9. The armor damage system is replaced with a death penalty system. Players can pay for any accrued death penalty to be removed, or simply wait for it to wear off. Death penalty is gradually removed by killing monsters or completing dynamic events.
10. The magic find system is totally removed. Instead, the drop rates scale with the number of people in the immediate area, or the length of time a group has been together. If there are thirty people participating in an event they will get better drops than if there were ten people, or, the longer one group (even a small one) stays together, the better their drops will be. The former creates an incentive for people to be drawn together; the latter encourages them to stay together.
11. Dungeons scale in difficulty & rewards based on party size. A full party receives the best rewards and faces the dungeon at full difficulty. A two-person group, on the other hand, faces substantially reduced difficulty and gets lesser rewards, but is still able to enjoy the content. At the end of a dungeon, each player is rewarded with one dungeon token for each party member (from 5 tokens for a full party to 1 token for solo players), or otherwise scaled to their party size. This should still keep people from being able to farm the content without barring smaller groups from participating in it.
12. Certain towns/villages/waypoints are clearly indicated as “safe zones,” which can never become contested or have hostile NPCs. Each “safe” town should have access to personal storage.
13. Traits can be freely adjusted when in any town or “safe zone.”
14. Dyes can be exported (not copied) to other characters on the same account.
15. Purchased items and completed orders on the trading post are mailed to the player. Players still need to visit the trading post to pick up profits from sold items.
16. “Town clothes” are added as costume slots which can be worn over other armor.
17. Add “mounts” to encourage people to walk from one place to another instead of simply hopping waypoints.
18. The “order” a character chooses to represent should provide some benefit to them beyond varied story steps. Players should be able to purchase special order-specific skills and participate in order-related activities (events, quests, etc.) beyond their standard story. Players should unlock a title for each tier of their order they are promoted to.
19. All personal story quests should be repeatable, and “bonus” objectives should be added for each quest. Each bonus objective earns a one-time reward.
20. The boon/condition system needs to be overhauled. They need to be able to stack in effectiveness without sacrificing their duration. Players also need the ability to quickly identify boons & conditions in effect, which could be achieved easily by giving each icon a unique color on an enemy/ally health bar.

1. Skill casting should never be interruptible by moving.
2. The crafting level for a given profession learned on one character can be learned by another on the same account for a fee. Players electing to craft on a second character will have the option to start that profession from scratch, or pay to unlock the level & any other recipes already known on that account.
3. All merchants in a zone should carry appropriate gathering tools and salvage kits.
4. Karma is account-wide.
5. The inscription/insignia of armor/weapons can be replaced with another of the same grade and level (eg. a green-rarity level 10 sword with a +3 power inscription could be changed to use a +3 precision inscription). This grants players more freedom to experiment with different gear builds, or to “re-spec” found/rewarded gear. Inscriptions/insignias become possible results of salvaging applicable gear.

1-9: Agreed

10: I’m mixed on this one. Too many players are staying in W3 and Fractals causing your idea to end up punishing players that tend to find themselves virtually alone on the mid-level maps.

11 & 12: Agreed

13: Not too sure on this one.

14: Unlocked dyes should be account wide.

15 & 16: Agreed

17: NO! This is not WoW, or any of Perfect World Entertainment’s MMOs.

18-20: Agreed

21: They should take another look at the skills and add more to the “Cast on the move” list, but some spells need concentration hence the need to stand still.

22: Dunno…

23 & 24: Agreed

25: Insignias, Runes, and Sigils can already be done this way by just upgrading with a new one to overwrite the current one. I would blend this idea with number 1 and make the higher tier armors allowed to have an Insignia and a Rune added while allowing higher tier weapons to have a Rune and a Sigil added.

1,4,7,9 – approve. Death penalty shouldn’t be as pain in the kitten as in GW1, 15% is way too high, but I like morale system. It could fade in max 10-15 mins on full cap, or you’d have to pay/kill mobs. And here comes 10. Brilliant idea for me. I hate MF stqt, every kind of this mechanic destroys MMO games. Do same as in WoW. Make some specific drops from specific bosses with one % drop chance, other zone or world drops. MF is broken, hated mechanic and I 11, 13 and order missions (same as Zaishen missions) could be a ery nice add to game, they could made end-game players to visit other areas than Orr and FOTM, and give some life to other zones, while doing these missions daily.

1. Won’t happen, there are already a few gear qualities in the game and they just added a new one (Ascended) won’t ever happen.

2. Agreed

3. Let them fix the skills first, after that why not. The idea of having a fixed set of skills/weapons for each profession was meant to help with balancing/fixing. I guess it didn’t work that well in the end…

4. See 3 above, no more skills until the current ones work correctly

5. You can disable ground targeting already and let the skill drop at your cursor location or if you have a target on your target, that’s already in the game

6. Agreed, that would save so much time.

7. Why? So you can get to 80 only with finishing one crafting discipline? Not needed

8. Waypoints are so cheap this isn’t an issue, unless you use them all the time, try walking/running a bit and enjoying the journey instead of complaining about travel costs. Removing the price will just make people teleport all over the place = dead zones = not needed. Again, try walking, the more players do that, the fuller zones will be, the more events will be completed. IF anything they should either increase the cost a lot or remove waypoints altogether.

9. No reason, repairs are cheap, almost unnoticable. You just want a way to remove costs from the game?

10. No absolutely not. So a group of 30 players zerging all events in Orr one by one, no risk, no effort, just 11111 spamming, will get more rewards than 5-6 players trying to clear a difficult event in a hidden area, in a less-visited zone? If anything they should remove drops when the number of people is high, if more than a certain number of people get “credit” on a mob, then that mob drops nothing for any of them. You know, so people spread out and not stay farming penit/shelter/plinx forever?

11. No need. That will only need to solo farming and nobody grouping to do content, unless they also implement a “once per day” option. Otherwise dungeons will die, everyone will be solo farming them… (or duo-farming them etc)

12. That would be nice, but, towns/villages that have crafting stations (they also have personal storage) are never attackable, so they are always safe zones. Towns with TP merchants also in the vast majority are safe zones (maybe all of them I haven’t tested each one) so it’s not hard to know which zone is safe or not.

13. Not happening, like 8 and 9 you just want to remove some very small and barely noticable fees/gold sinks in the game, I don’t see any reason to do it.

14. That could work, but if you want it on another character, use it on another character…

15. No reason for this….

16. So a Guardian/Warrior will be moving around in cloth but in reality be in heavy armor? Not needed, there is a small button in your character screen that switches between the two instantly

17. See 8, first you want to remove map travel cost and then you want to add mounts to “motivate” people to walk? How do these two suggestions of yours work together? Hint: they don’t

18. See any of the “skill-specific” numbers.

19. No, why would they ever want to do that? Unless of course it’s just a replay and nothing changes afterward, for example lots of quests require player choice, if that choice stays the same then a repeat can be possible, otherwise it will only cause a huge mess. The personal story quests aren’t like the missions in GW1 that always have the same outcome.

20. Stacking effectiveness of boons and conditions gets a big NO… I can’t believe anyone who actually played the game wants this, it will make so many boon-based builds immortal. They only have to “fix” stacking of conditions in parties, increase the cap when you are in a group so having lots of condition dealers doesn’t lower the party effectiveness.

21. It depends on skill, lots of skills aren’t, some are

22. Why? Everything you craft isn’t soulbound so you can give anything to any character without a fee. Unless you want to exploit your idea and move all maxed crafting disciplines to one character then delete the others… Not happening and not wanted, fully exploitable.

23. That’s a bug… some merchants carry level appropriate salvage/gathering tools instead of zone specific, find another merchant until they solve this bug.

24. No, there are threads about this all over the place but all get a big no, no reason for this

25. That would ruin crafting (a lot) fully exploitable and unneeded.

3 & 4: Absolutely! I loved the skill variety of GW1, and am disappointed in the lack of it in GW2.

5 – 9: Yes. Especially 6. Having to make 4+ items before you can make the final item is just annoying.

10: No. You’re penalizing solo players.

11: Yes. Allow soloing or smaller groups to enjoy content.

12: No. Kills some of the immersion.

13: Yes. Traits should be free to switch at any of the 6 cities once you’ve unlocked the manuals.

14: Dyes should unlock account-wide. Shouldn’t have to pay 25 gold so that each character can have access to the same color.

15: No.

17: NO!

18: YES!! I’d love to be able to rank up in the order and unlock more content.

23 & 24: Yes and YES.

1. An interesting idea, but this will never happen. I would be fine with the way it was at the release as long as they don’t continue to add more tiers (which obviously currently doesn’t look very likely…)
2. Yes.
3. I think it would be better if they were slowly adding more useful weapons to the professions than to dump them all there and creating useless skills.
4. Certainly!
5. If it stayed as an option, why not.
6. As a chef I would love to see this, perhaps with a prompt listing all the base materials just to be safe.
7. If the skill points get more use, such as with 4, sure. Otherwise I don’t really care.
8. I wouldn’t say free (it’s an important gold sink after all), but it should scale better: slowly or not at all with level but more with distance. Travel to cities should be free, though.
9. Maybe.
10. Magic find should certainly be removed from equipment, but I’m not sure about the big groups. I’m fine with magic find consumables, though.
11. That’s a very good idea!
12. There are safe zones on each map and I’m not entirely sure if it’s necessary to indicate them as such. There should however be access to the bank, TP and possibly crafting stations on each map, just like at the low levels.
13. I don’t really care either way. Two separate togglable build configurations might be enough.
14, 15. No opinion.
16. Yes.
17. No. There’s no need for all MMOs to do the same things over and over again.
18. Perhaps, but it would be very difficult to pull off well.
19. Yes.
20. Yes for stacking, no strong opinion on the UI change.
21. No, it should just be clearly noted on the tooltips if you will do so.
22. Perhaps.
23. They mostly do, but it can be frustrating to look for a gathering tool only to find an omelette trader, so yes.
24. Certainly.
25. Perhaps.

Great comments!

Just to clarify, I’m one of those players against the idea of something like mounts in this game, but the suggestion to add them, even though I feel dirty saying it, is to simply fill a void where players are opting to hop waypoints instead of walking from one area to another. Lower-level areas, especially large ones like Lornar’s pass, are so sparsely populated with players that we need to get more people running through there. Maybe if you were on a mount and you saw someone in trouble you’d be more inclined to help. Maybe it would add some excitement in WvW. Maybe it would encourage people to explore beyond their standard map completion. Maybe not. I’m not personally a fan of the idea, but it’s a means to an end where I see there is a void in the game.

I also want to mention that it is never my intention that a solo player should be penalized. Scaling loot tables for groups is trying to make the system more similar to the way loot works in the original game; a full group of human players is going to get more drops than the same size party with a single player and heroes/henchmen, but they are still getting good drops — just not as many. We don’t want to ever penalize solo players, and we can do that while still rewarding people for working together.

I’m surprised to see people disagreeing with completed trading post orders being mailed to a player…not only does this solve an enormous crafting nuisance, but typically when a player buys something it’s because they want it, so why force you to wait until you return to the trading post before you can use it? If there’s a problem I’m not aware of, perhaps just add this as an option when purchasing.

Agreed on most of it!
Exspecially skill point replacable skills.
Trough, more skills would help a lot to…..there are like 4 elites only ? -_-

mdoucet.8735:

Just to clarify, I’m one of those players against the idea of something like mounts in this game, but the suggestion to add them, even though I feel dirty saying it, is to simply fill a void where players are opting to hop waypoints instead of walking from one area to another. Lower-level areas, especially large ones like Lornar’s pass, are so sparsely populated with players that we need to get more people running through there. Maybe if you were on a mount and you saw someone in trouble you’d be more inclined to help. Maybe it would add some excitement in WvW. Maybe it would encourage people to explore beyond their standard map completion. Maybe not. I’m not personally a fan of the idea, but it’s a means to an end where I see there is a void in the game.

As I stated on my comment above, why are you “suggesting” removal of WP costs while also suggesting mounts, those two can never go together. Reducing the WPs or instead increasing the cost to use will prompt more people to run through the zone instead of teleporting around… Teleports need to be reduced.

I also want to mention that it is never my intention that a solo player should be penalized. Scaling loot tables for groups is trying to make the system more similar to the way loot works in the original game; a full group of human players is going to get more drops than the same size party with a single player and heroes/henchmen, but they are still getting good drops — just not as many. We don’t want to ever penalize solo players, and we can do that while still rewarding people for working together.

That’s not quite true. A single player is getting less loot while playing with heroes/henchmen only because some of the loot is “reserved” for the heroes. If a player goes SOLO in GW1 they get the same drops as a party of 8 people, that’s why solo farming builds are so popular. A player going solo gets 8 times the loot of a player in an 8-man party.

Another way to “force” players to group together is to make rewards increase, the more events you do in a row, like all the events in a chain and beyond. Increasing the rewards when there are more people around isn’t something good… some events are already camped by lots of players, getting rewards with zero effort, instead they should split the players around instead of forcing them to form a massive mindless blob (like what happens often in WvW) this ISN’T desirable.

I’m surprised to see people disagreeing with completed trading post orders being mailed to a player…not only does this solve an enormous crafting nuisance, but typically when a player buys something it’s because they want it, so why force you to wait until you return to the trading post before you can use it? If there’s a problem I’m not aware of, perhaps just add this as an option when purchasing.

I know it’s a “cheap” excuse, but it will make the permanent trading post access and/or the consumable versions worthless… I don’t like them, but it is one of the reasons for having the requirement to talk to the npc to get your items.

How many read this thinking it might be other kinds of suggestions?

Maddoctor hit the nail on the head for the solo player vs. group drop rate.

I have a few issues with the instantaneous trading post mail system:

1. It makes the game a bit less realistic. You buy something from the trading post and it’s instantly delivered to you in the middle of Orr?

2. I’m not big on the instant gratification aspect—both with crafting and general purchases. It makes sense to me that you shouldn’t be able to camp the crafting station and go from 1 to 400 without a hitch. Also, if you finally get enough gold to buy a big purchase, you shouldn’t be able to get it in a second and keep on farming (again with the realism). The same goes for replenishing your consumables.

I know those two points are not that important, nor are they easily defended, but that’s how I feel.

Agree on almost every point.

Especially account wide karma. I don’t know how some people get all the karma needed for the exotics on one char. Karma grinding is a total chore.

I agree with 4, 6, 14, 18 and 24. I am either neutral or disagree with the rest.

• 4 needs to be seriously looked at. Weapon skills NEED more variety. Your starter skills begin to get remarkably stale after your ‘teen’ levels and the fact that your slot-able skills are pigeon holed into specific slots limits variation as well.

It would allow for build variance across the board without breaking the current system they have in place.

Take the Elementalist for example; No one can deny it is already a good class. What I will say, however, is no matter what weapon you are using there is currently a ton of overlap between attunements and as a result your versatility in PVE is crippled. Even though there are 20 skills to choose from [technically] I would argue that being able to tailor your weapon skills further would be a welcome addition to this end. [As far as the Elementalist is concerned I would honestly prefer weapon swapping + choosing 2 active attunements. I think that would be pretty kick kitten – but that’s another topic altogether.]

I understand that it’s a challenge to balance but this needs to be explored for PVE at the very least in some form.

• In addition to more ‘Order’ content I would say the ability to change orders would be important [suspending any benefits you had currently obtained with said order until you switched back.] for those of us who have already aligned multiple characters with different orders.

I also feel, should this change be implemented, that Order armour should be available to players based on their rank [much like GW1 EotN Armor] and available via Karma. This would potentially make all Order armour skins available to a given character, which I’m guessing would be a welcome addition assuming I’m not the only one who was a little disappointed by my Order’s armour after the fact.

Your suggestions, like the same countless posts before you will fall on blind eyes as the devs will do as they have planned in the short, medium, and long range plans already in place. Nothing you listed is original, excuse my pointing that out.

The devs have already stated, and this goes back to any number of MMO’s, if they can shoehorn some suggestion in that is doable they will, but do not look forward to it. The devs made choices, clearly they thought these were the best choices in the beginning, now, finding they have been wrong in many aspects of the games mechanics and it will take a long long while to change things as other projects in the game take precedence.

Who knows, they may not change a thing or they may change something to support their gemstore such as the dye issue you pointed out. Dyes were to be account wide, but it was decided by the devs to make profit from them in the gemstore with real cash, this was a hugely unpopular move and something the devs ignore in regards to complaints to this day.

Be careful what you post, a free idea you give the devs may end up costing you real cash in that gemstore.

Not to burst your bubble OP.