Guild Wars 2

Hello Forumers and Anet,
I have a whole bunch of suggestions on varying topics, I thought I’d post them all in one place. Firstly I will tackle some ideas about customization, then replayability and then some odds and ends suggestions. Some of these suggestions are likely to never happen butI thought I’d mix up some wild creativity with some serious suggestions.
Also pelase bear in mind I am mostly referring to PvE within my posts.

Incoming multipost!

Classes and customization
Firstly, this game is absolutely brilliant surface wise, but if you try and scratch past the surface there’s just nothing there. If you really examine your character you’ll find they are the same as every other character and class. And this is extremely sad and disheartening. I mean what is the point if everyone else can do the same thing, and no one is individual?
This problem comes from the brilliant idea, (which is actually a good idea) that all classes are self sufficient. In practise this means everyone can do everything at the same time and do nothing well.

I propose to let all classes be good at everything, but only one thing at a time. Each class has the ability to fulfill 1 of 4 roles; The tank, the damage dealer, the healer and the support role. If we assume that skills are still tied to a weapon, except that now each weapon has 4 sets of skills. (This isn’t the ideal way this would happen but I’ll keep it like this for the moment) Out of combat you can assign one set of skills to your weapon, but both your weapons don’t have to be assigned to the same thing so a gaurdian could have a damage greatsword and a support staff, a mesmer might have a healing staff and a taning weapon set.
Each class would have a unique way of doing the same thing. When tanking the elementalist would use earth shields and magic barriers to absorb damage , the warrior would have extreme toughness boosts and shouts like “It’s just a sratch” which would remove bleeding. The mesmer might redirect damage to illusions and clones, or crate a clone that taunts to draw aggro away from something else.
When healing the Necromancer would gain superior abilities to eat conditions, to be able to remove them from their allies and feast on them for benefits, they could also channel their own health directly to another ally or sacrifice their own health for the benefit of others. The warrior would have moral boosting banners and shouts like “I’ve got your back!” which might directly heal one ally.

I think the idea of being entirely self sufficient is a good idea, but it leaves players unsatisfied and unaware. Having the choice to fulfill specific roles still means that everyone can do everything, but that they can also only do one thing at a time and do that well.

Another way to create class variation, (slightly more creative suggestion) I thought about being able to break down each class into 3 distinctive denominations. For example;

Ranger:
- Natural magic/ druid type: Really focusses on the usage of animals plants, springs and wells. Can use a staff.
- Neutral: the ranger pretty much as it is now.
- Petless ranger: This ranger has no pet, can use rifles and has some extreme long ranger sniper skills that become useless at close ranger.

Necromancer:
- Minion lord: really focuses on growing and maintaining a minion army. Is more interested in building armies of minions and minion bombing. Does not have death shroud as they are not so interested in cheating death.
- Dark monk/ conditionomancer: Spreader of conditions, cheats death, sacrifices lots of health for varying effects. Almost emphasises seeking out specific conditions in order to gain different benefits.
- Neutral: the necromancer as it is at the moment.

Elementalist:
- Purist: focuses entirely on one element, gains specific pros and cons depending on which element. Example: Water purist may have a buffs that come into effect whilst underwater.
- Summoner: Summons weapons and various elementals. Summons hordes of tiny rocks to move around underfoot, is able to have a permanent elemental familiar (resummon when it dies) Is much more reliant on their summons to do damage.
- Neutral: the elementalist as it is now.

These are some examples, I wont do one for every single class.
Either one of these customization types would be good, but ideally both would occur so that within each class there are 4 role types, and 3 class flavours, giving a total of 12 kinds of each class.
Racial abilities
In PvE I really don’t understand why these are so bad. PvE is a celebration of role playing and getting really into your character, so why are these skills not more useful? At the very least they could be tailored so that every race basically has the same abilities but with different visuals.

I’d also hoped for a bit more synergy between race and class. With different combinations of race and class resulting in different racial skills, or maybe racial skills that feel more relivent to the class.

Replayability
Before this game came out, I heard the term ‘replayability’ a lot. In the interviews it was said that the game would be highly replayable, that there was so much to do etc…
However the reality is this:
You create your character, you progress to level 80, you progress through the story, you complete map areas and eventually the entire map, you level up crafting, you do dungeons.
Out of all those things only the dungeons are replayable. Something that saddens me is the amount of effort that went into making each story mission fun and different. I can’t remember who said it or when but someone said something like: “In other games you go through all the hard and boring missions and occasionally you get one thats fun. Well we want every one of our missions to be like that.” Now that my character is level 80 and has long since finnished her story I keep finding myself thinking… “ooh that mission where I became the avatar of balthazar in lions arch, that was quite fun I’d like to go and do that again. Or the mirror mirrior mission just because the dialogue is so hilarious.”
Such diverse and fun missions and we can only play them once Yesturday I did the Whispers mission where you have a drinking contest with pirates, that was really fun. But I have no way to play it again unless I make another character and level them up just to do that mission.

Heart quests are not replayable, I would also like the option to be able to re-100% a map area and get a similar reward. I’d much rather re-100% map areas than do dungeons.

Odd and ends

- Bring back sickness as a condition. For non GW1 players, sickness was like poison, a health degeneration, except it would spread between members of the same species. In some instances this was really great because if you were fighting trolls and you made them sick it would spread amoungst them. If you were fighting bandits you had to be really careful that the sickness didn;t spread from them to you. In this it was interesting because you had to think about when to use it.

- Poison and burning should stack, maybe up to 5 rather than 25.

- Travel should be free to the main city of your characters race. From a rolplaying perspective this would mean that you would find each main city populated with players of that race and that other races would be less common. This doesn’t change anything that’s already in the game as via this option you could still get to LA for free but instead of going through pvp you’d go through a main city.

- A pet peeve of mine that is actuially ruining my exerpience with engineer is that each race has highly distinctive archeticture, and unique ways of building but all engineers buildings look exactly the same? Why don’t an asura have asuran looking guns and charr have gritty steam punk looking guns? Shouldn’t the sylvari engineers use plant based things? The effects should remain the same but the skins really ought to reflect the race of the engineer.

- There ought to be more titles. The lengths that people will go to in order to display a title by their name is ridiculous. But it gives a purpose to keep playing, without being vertical progression.

- Dyable weapons. (I so want to dye my sylvari cultural weapons black and red to match my armor but they are bright green and blue.)

- 3 or 4 new crafting professions that require you to have previously maxed out 2 others + reached level 80. These crafting professions also allow you to craft ascended rank stuff.

- The longer someone stays in an event chain the better rewards one gets.

- Better rewards for explorers, this is just a different way of playing the game not necessarily easy mode.

- Money should be obtainable anywhere, unique skins and rare effects should be rewards for doing difficult things.

- Skills really really need to be split for PvE and PvP. It’s impossible to balance for both, PvPers dislike the limitations placed on them by PvEers and vice verca.

Thanks for reading, if you did