Guild Wars 2

I have 2,000 hours played and 90% of that is in WvW. I have played in small guilds and large guilds from the beginning and I just want to help the game get better. Here are my changes that I would make. Some are small and some are too large and will not ever be seen. We all want new maps, new strategies, and new user interfaces, but these suggestions are more quality of life improvements that I would love to see one day.

1. Creatures in WvW will no longer allow players to rally off their deaths. Dolyaks, guards, lords, and supervisors will still allow players to rally.
2. WXP system is now account bound.
3. Trebuchets now award players with world experience for each successful trebuchet shot that hits a wall or door.
4. Arrow carts now do %50 less damage to all siege and the range upgrade for arrow carts is now an active ability that lasts 10 seconds and has a 60 second cooldown.
5. AOE limits have been increased from five targets to eight targets for attacks. Boons sharing skills will still be limited to five targets.
6. The WvW achievements have been revamped to provide new incentives for participating with your guild. Over 100 achievements have been added and can now provide rewards based on your progression. Achievement rewards include discounted commander books, new titles, skins, access to cross map chat, new toggleable finishers, new toggleable siege weapon skins, and items used for crafting legendary weapons. Some achievements can be gained more than once, but do not award additional achievement points.
7. Guilds can now use influence to bestow a temporary commander tag onto someone in the guild for 24 hours. Permanent commander tags can be purchased by guild members at the guild armor vendor when they meet requirements such as having earned the required WvW achievements, appropriated the required laurels, and have logged enough time in WvW.
8. Commanders have access to cross map chat and can no longer be oppressed unless they are reported by ten people within five minutes for spamming.
9. Commanders can now change the color and shape of their icon on the map and by default will have their guild tabard icon as their commander icon. Commanders can also choose to hide their icon.
10. Commanders can now invite people to join their squad through chat.
11. Commanders now have a customized UI that will appear with a hotkey toggle to show their squad healthbars and each person’s supply and when the commander selects a player from the list using the Commander UI it will ping the map with the location for the commander.
12. Outmanned buff is now hidden to enemies.
13. Traps now indicate when they have success. Enemies that have supplies drained will have indicators above their heads with the number of supply lost.
14. Siege can now be placed on your hotbar in an additional slot after the elite skill only visible in WvW.
15. The WvW screen will now display which commanders are actively commanding on which map and what guild they are representing.
16. Commander icons now display the full guild name when the player’s mouse hovers over the icon on the map.
17. Cross-map chat is now enabled as a chat that can be accessed by any player who has finished 50 of the 100 WvW achievements.
18. Badges are now accumulated in the same fashion as karma and laurels and gold and will not take up any item space. To convert your old stacks of Badges into new Badge currency, all current badges have been changed into consumables similar to Jugs of Karma except that you can consume an entire stack at once. Character bound currency (possibly).
19. Upgrades to towers, keeps, and supply camps can now be upgraded using upgrade tokens which can be bought with a new merchant at any spawn location. Upgrade Tokens can be bought with any type of currency including karma, badges, gold, laurels, guild commendations, and combination options of each. Guilds can order upgrade tokens to be built using influence and deposited into a reserved upgrade token slot in the guild bank. Upgrade tokens have a decay rate of one month. Players can use their upgrade tokens. Upgrade tokens can also be rewarded as a random drop and also from WvW jumping puzzles.

20. World vs World now rewards servers for winning matchups by awarding a chest of Gems to the players that participated in World vs World throughout the week. First place winners receive 50 gems, random lvl 80 account bound exotic, and a keg of wxp. Second place winners receive a random lvl 80 account bound exotic and a keg of wxp. Third place winners receive a random lvl 80 account bound 80 exotic. Exotic rewards cannot be salvaged to prevent inflation, but may be mystic forged. Every ten wins earns the server a server wide buff that gives players that participated in at least 6 weeks of WvW on that server a unique title and three kegs of WXP.
21. Dolyaks now reward players with five supply to ten enemy players in the vicinity upon death.
22. Dolyaks now reward friendly players with five supply to ten friendly players within a small vicinity upon escort completion.
23. Upgrading towers and keeps will now upgrade in a linear path. Bankers and merchants are now complimentary upon waypoint completion.
24. Supply can no longer be taken from a keep that is upgrading a waypoint unless it is under attack by more than 25 people.
25. WXP abilities can now be refunded at a class retrainer in WvW at the cost of one gold.
26. All gathering plants and ore can be found in all borderlands, but have much higher respawn timers than in PvE.
27. Skritt are now powerful enough to take an unupgraded camp and will periodically attack the supply camp nearest their cave until quelled.
28. Centaurs are now powerful enough to take an unupgraded camp and will periodically attack the supply camp nearest their huts until quelled.
29. Skritt and Centaurs will now guard camps after their area events are completed in the same fashion as the Hylek and Dredge do in Eternal Battlegrounds.
30. Several creatures in the borderlands have had their populations decreased.
31. The geography of the citadel has been reworked for better side paths to garrison and more obvious fences to discern invulnerable areas.
32. Workers will now repair doors and superior siege weapons automatically when the keep or tower is fully upgraded until ordered not to by a commander.
33. Commanders can now add up to three attack, defend, repair, danger, and ? marks to the map that can be seen by everyone in their squad. A player can disable them from their map by right clicking on them and a commander can reapply them every minute. Players can toggle all commander icons off in the WvW menu or by right clicking on the commander icon the map and choosing the “Hide all command icons created by this commander” in the menu options.

34. WvW leaderboards are now displayed on a sign next to living story heralds in all the cities.
35. WvW leaderboards will now show top guilds that have contributed in their tier. The WvW Guild Leaderboards will be specific for each matchup and will show which guilds are best at killing the most siege, taking the most camps, taking the most towers, taking the most keeps, and killing the most enemy yaks. Each tier will have their own WvW Guild Leaderboard to show which guilds contribute the most to their server.
36. Siege weapons can now toggle between different skins once unlocked by the player using the siege. Once a guild unlocks guild weapon siege skins, any guild member may change the default look of the siege they drop. Players may choose to change the default skin while holding the bundle and choosing their preferred skin option. Other skins are unlocked through laurel purchases, rare drops, and achievement unlocks. Siege weapon skins are available account wide and are not character specific. Holiday siege weapon skins are temporary, although once earned can be used at any time during the specific holiday time.
37. Finishers are now a permanent addition to your character and can be unlocked through achievements similar to progression in the glory system. Finishers of your choice can be toggled in the WvW menu and have unlimited use. Unique finishers are character bound, but some finishers that are earned through achievements are account bound. Unique finishers may also be sold on the Black Lion Trading Company gem store.
38. Controls and keybinds are now unique for each character.
39. PvE events now reward less WXP than normal WvW events and take less time to complete.
40. Players that are underwater and downed will now be poisoned and die a painful death if they are in combat. Or maybe we introduced underwater finisher moves.
41. Siegerazer will no longer spawn when he should not and has a timer for when he will spawn. His commander icon will also be visible on the minimap, and the radius for which he can be activated from has been increased.
42. Players can now zoom into first person mode while using siege.
43. Borderlands now have 80% less krait, and the quaggan nodes are now built with a thirty second channeling spell and is reduced in time as more people channel it.
44. Ranks can now be visible in PvE and on the guild tab.
45. Guilds can now view when each player was last online.
46. Guilds can now spawn banners that give increased WXP.
47. Guild achievements are now available which bestow rewards for the guild upon completion. Guilds that can perform certain guild achievements will be rewarded with extra influence and certain repeatable guild achievements will award the guild with guild merits. Guild Merit achievements can only be earned a limited number of times per day and week and may involve taking several keeps, towers, supply camps, or more. Guild achievements will be used to rank guilds in a new guild ladder that show which guilds have the most guild achievement points.

48. WvW portals have been added to every city.
49. If a player is disconnected from WvW, the player now has five minutes to reconnect before losing their place on the map.
50. If you are in queue for a map, it will show what place you are in queue and estimated time of entering the map. You may also queue for more than map at once, but you cannot enter a map while in combat.
51. Squads can now support every person on one map and person can be listed in the squad UI with page toggle controls available.
52. By default, everything a commander says in team chat or squad chat will have chat bubbles above the commander’s head. A toggle to change this is located in the options menu.
53. Keep Lords and Tower Lords can no longer be resurrected by utility spells or elite spells more than once every 10 minutes. Upon resurrection they will receive a debuff that prevents resurrection from utility and elite spells that will last for 10 minutes.
54. Commanders can now hide their icon on the map and choose to display it only for their guild.
55. Guild members can now join another guild member in WvW by right clicking their name in the guild tab and choose “Join in WvW” which will queue them for the map that their fellow guild member is in.
56. New superior siege recipes have been added so that superior siege can be created in bulk amounts.
57. Up to 10 trait builds can be saved per character and may be toggled for a small fee. Trait builds can also be tied to gear in your bags that is account bound or soulbound.
58. Guild tabards on supply camps, towers, and keeps will now show the name of the guild who claimed the keep when moused over and on the minimap.
59. Supply camps will now have visible timers on the map that show the supervisor timers.
60. Keeps, towers, and supply camps are now worth more world experience the longer they stand and fully upgraded keeps will award players with a guaranteed rare or exotic when taken.
61. Players can now choose to kick offline players in their groups in any borderland or map.

combo breaker?

EDIT dangit.

tldr – everything everyone has said in WvW sub-forum for the past 3 months…

LilMcGinley.3890:

tldr – everything everyone has said in WvW sub-forum for the past 3 months…

Apart from anything at all about discouraging zergs? =P
@OP: I guess you’re not in favour of re-distributing WXP based on how many players took part in an event, then?

Yes, I would love to discourage zerging and redistribute wxp. I wouldn’t want to discourage people from coming to help take objectives though. That isn’t easy to balance. I would say that cracking zergs is easiest when there are more chokes and creative geography to help smaller groups. Zergs flourish on open field, but tend to crash on chokes that can be held by smaller forces. The geography can be changed when we get new maps and map design should reflect anet’s attitude towards zerging.

61 changes, but maybe 10 that are actually any good and most of those are quality of life improvements. Nothing would significantly improve WvW gameplay and a few actually hurt it.

First, just leave off commander changes (other than adding guild tag to map UI). Few people use squads because there’s little reason to do it. PUGs just group up on a single commander into a giant ball and follow the pin. It’s the most efficient way to do things because numbers are the biggest increase to power. Fix that and then you can improve the commander UI.

The PvE aspect, including rallying is fine. They just need to clean up places in borderlands that have too many or out of place mobs (Griffins at SW supply) or ones with annoying abilities. They talked about removing the borderlands lake in the future, so I’d just leave that alone for now.

WvW rewards are great, but shouldn’t necessarily be for placement. In most matchups, placement is decided in the first couple days, so there’s little incentive to come back. You want to encourage keeping the game active, so the rewards should be based on score accumulated by your server like the current bonuses (which few people notice).

Battletorn.4102:

Yes, I would love to discourage zerging and redistribute wxp. I wouldn’t want to discourage people from coming to help take objectives though. That isn’t easy to balance. I would say that cracking zergs is easiest when there are more chokes and creative geography to help smaller groups. Zergs flourish on open field, but tend to crash on chokes that can be held by smaller forces. The geography can be changed when we get new maps and map design should reflect anet’s attitude towards zerging.

Perfect answer. Zerging shouldn’t be actively discouraged so much as dangerous to perform correctly on various parts of the map imo.

Putting this here, ’cause why not?

My Tl’dr crude summary of a rather well written post
(in 3 points)

1. All PvE content within Eternal Battlegrounds and Boarderlands is decreased by (lets say…) 90%.

2. Commander tag is now much harder to earn as now respect from peers and a significant amount of time (and now rank) spent in WvW is met (and also now costs badges not gold) Commander pin can also be toggled off by players, Commanders can also toggle the degree of visibility of their pin
ie: Party, Guild, map, all (as in EB and all BL’s) (see point 3. below)

3. 101 life changing UI’s and buttons that everyone wants but won’t get 3 years to late.

I’m drooling at the UI suggestions for commanders…

GIEF NAO!!

Left out one of the most important changes.

Remove the brief window at the end of defend keep events that allows zergs to waypoint into besieged keeps.

This artificially makes maps smaller, and allows one zerg to move quicker and more rapidly from hot spot to hot spot.

Or alternatively remove waypoints in WvW altogether. Increasing travel time from place to place will cut the effectiveness of zergs more than anything else.

Sorry, I forgot to put something about waypoints in there. They absolutely need to change. Originally, waypointing into a keep was considered a bug/exploit and now it is a sloppy feature. It definitely needs a second look by devs.

Battletorn.4102:

Sorry, I forgot to put something about waypoints in there. They absolutely need to change. Originally, waypointing into a keep was considered a bug/exploit and now it is a sloppy feature. It definitely needs a second look by devs.

They’ll fix it, but first they have to figure out how to prevent a lone player(s) that smacks the gate from contesting it. There are many variables to consider. Also, the 30sec window before swords pop up needs to be factored in.

I agree that the commander system could use a redo.

Most of the rest of it I could do without.

Devon, can this guy take your job for just a week? You guys should seriously consider some of these suggestions.

Lots of quality stuff here, wouldn’t mind seeing most of these.

Nice suggestions, almost all of them, but for the love of god, please stop asking about increased AoE limit. Do not fix what is not broken.

Exedore.6320:

Battletorn.4102:

Sorry, I forgot to put something about waypoints in there. They absolutely need to change. Originally, waypointing into a keep was considered a bug/exploit and now it is a sloppy feature. It definitely needs a second look by devs.

They’ll fix it, but first they have to figure out how to prevent a lone player(s) that smacks the gate from contesting it. There are many variables to consider. Also, the 30sec window before swords pop up needs to be factored in.

They should only be contested when the inner gate is tagged, not outter,

You put a lot of time and thought into this, lot of great suggestions here.

did he mention not making siege disappear anymore after long time of disuse and it stays forever until destroyed?
if not then he should add that.

Lots of great suggestions.
#1-4 awesome

1. I would want this as a WXP ability. Maybe reduce the manual cost for people who trained it. #8 That is too lenient. 5 people is plenty. #9 plz yes. #13 Yes plz and some WXP for crippling the supply of an army #20 Improve it more then talk about victory rewards. #21 #22 awesome
2. This chance of the quaggan camps is dumb. Plz, no. I like the idea of real risk in flipping a quaggan camp. These little things are great and you don’t endanger yourself by sitting on a node for 3 minutes. Change them? sure, just not simple clicking.
3. The WXP banners is a great idea. What I would like to see better is a guild tower buff that increases it, like the supply carry buff.

Yeah, I don’t know what to do with quaggan or creature camps. They serve a small amount of utility, but become more tedious than anything after a few hundred times of collecting pearls, killing skritt etc.

Thanks for implementing the hidden outmanned buff. Perma finishers next?

Too much bonuses are given to guilds and not individual players. Yes pugs can be annoying sometimes but there are people in WvWvW which are not part of any guild and still play very well.

My two cents.

Installed collision in WVW. Now zergs will actually have to play strategically and more balanced.

Note: This would inherently nerf Thieves in zerg.