Guild Wars 2

I’d like to make a suggestion to add some sort of intro to the combo-field mechanic. The mechanic is a very important and deep part of the game, so it just seems natural to add an introduction to it besides tooltips.

My suggestion is to add an extra quest to the personal storyline (perhaps optional) that “accidentally” introduces the importance of a mechanic.

For example, say you have an npc with you and you’re hunting down a monster that’s weak to a certain kind of poison that your NPC has a bottle of. The NPC says, “This should be easy!”, throws the bottle, misses entirely, and agros the monster, who then continues to do tons of damage and take very little. The player panics, perhaps kites, and the npc is saying things like, “Dang my clumsy hands!”, offering no real assistance. The player accidentally shoots or swings through the poison cloud and gets a combo field, thus killing the monster.

This would give players a sense of accomplishment, naturally introduce the combo field mechanic, show that the mechanic can be significant, and still give plenty of room for exploration in the mechanic along the way. I think something this simple would make players much more aware to combo fields without some direct hand-holding.

Anyway, just a suggestion.

+1

Combo fields seem like a cool idea, but it’s really hard to know a) what they’re doing and b) is it actually helping.

A tutorial, or even just some kind of a practice area with target dummies and maybe some kind of consumable for testing would be nice. e.g. vendor sells potion of <combo field type>. You throw it on the ground and it mimics the type of field a player skill would do for 10 minutes, so you can shoot stuff through it, stand in it, whatever. Obviously, this could only work near the target dummies. Wouldn’t want us making our own combo’s out in the wild and ripping poor unsuspecting mobs faces off.

IMO an introduction to more of the basic GW2 mechanics should be worked into the opening quest. The first part when you are on your way to the boss you could run into a group of NPC’s who are fighting a veteran type boss that does weak damage.

This mini boss can be used to introduce the basics, and the last boss you can put the things you learned into practice. The NPCs can be used to give you hints on what to do.

-boss is coming at you
NPC: look out he is coming right for you, dodge to the left/right/away etc

-boss took a little bit of your hp
NPC: hit your heal button

-NPC lays down a combo field
NPC: gives you instructions on how to use the combo field, and its purpose

-NPC wants you to lay down a combo field
NPC: tells you what the other NPC’s are doing in the combo field

I dont know if each profession has access to a combo field from their weapons. It could be easy enough for a dev to switch what weapon a profession starts with. But if a certain prof can only lay down fields with spells, then it might be a bit tricky.