Guild Wars 2

These are suggestions meant to make the Traits, the Attributes, and their interaction, feel more balanced, rewarding and offer a greater customizability.

Most of my suggestions have similar goals, as you can attest through the links in my Signature, specially those regarding Skill Variants and Endurance.

I will be referring to Condition Damage as Malice, and Critical Damage as Prowess.
Those were their names in earlier development stages.

A few things I would like to indicate before presenting my suggestion.

• The Attribute bonuses you obtain by investing in a Trait Line are extremely unbalanced.
  On one hand, we have the “rating” Attributes – such as Malice, Precision, Power, Vitality, Toughness and Healing Power – wich do not scale with Level or Gear, and as you improve, these bonuses become less important.
  Furthermore, they don’t really affect your gameplay besides providing numerical advantage.
  On the other hand, we have the “percentual” Attributes – such as Condition Duration, Prowess and Mechanic Recharge (Burst, Virtues, etc) – wich scale with Level and Gear, and as such remain useful no matter how much you improve.
  Furthermore, most of them affect your gameplay, by changing the frequency with wich you can/need to use certain Skills.
• Out of all means of Support, only Healing requires you to sacrifice an Attribute. You can fully support your teammates with Protection, Blind, Daze, Aegis, Weakness, Condition Removal, Condition Conversion, Stun, Knockback, Dodge, etc.
  But if you want to Heal, you must sacrifice an Attribute to get Healing Power.
  To make it worse, while all the aforementioned types of support scale with the incoming threat (Aegis blocks something regardless of whether it deals 100 or 10.000 damage), Healing does not.
• Vitality is another Attribute that doesn’t really give you much, specially in long fights.
  - You take just as much damage
  - You take longer to heal up (because you have more health)
  Toughness, by comparison, actually scales with incoming damage, and indirectly increases the effectiveness of incoming Healing – since you are reducing the incoming damage.
• The way offensive Attributes interact makes it so there are only a few really good combinations of gear.
  - Malice only interacts with Precision through specific Traits or Item Upgrades (Bleed on Crit).
  - There’s nearly no point in mixing Power with Malice, since it provides an additive increase in damage, while Power and Precision provide an exponential increase.
  - There’s absolutely no point in mixing Prowess with Malice
• Conditions that do not stack Intensity, such as Burn and Poison, don’t really feel like something you can focus on.
  This is mainly due to the fact that it only stacks in duration, and all players share the same condition.

My suggestions

1. Remove Healing Power from the game, and to compensate…
   - Make Vitality (in addition to its current effect) also work as a weaker form of Healing Power for incoming Healing
   - Make Power and Malice (in addition to their current effect) also work as a weaker form of Healing Power for outgoing Healing
   The purpose is keeping a somewhat similar ability to heal, without forcing you to sacrifice an attribute for it.
2. Give all Skills a coefficient for both Power and Malice.
   - Conditions get a 100% Malice coefficient, and a low Power coefficient (25% or so)
   - Single-hit Skills get a 100% Power coefficient, and a low Malice coefficient (25% or so)
   - Multi-hit and periodic damage Skills get a fairly even coefficient for both Power and Malice
   This results in alot more builds, and a greater amount of Equipment variety.
3. Make Prowess % modify damage from your conditions
4. Make Precision % modify damage from Burn and Poison
5. Make each player own one stack of Burn and Poison.
   This means 5 players results in a potential of 5 stacks of Burn and 5 stacks of Poison.
   Obviously, the healing reduction from Poison would not stack.
   This makes Burn – and Combo Field: Fire – less useless.
6. Replace the “rating” Attribute bonuses in Trait Lines with interesting bonuses like those found in some Traits, such as X% of Toughness converted to Power.

Please discuss.

Another thing that should be done is adding a new Trait Type.
Currently we have Minor and Major.
Alot of Minor and even Major traits aren’t really useful.
Others are pretty mandatory for many builds.

So my suggestion is having Minor, Major and Superior.
Minor would be mostly flavorful.
Major would have some importance for build.
Superior would be the most important.

You’d obtain them at smaller intervals, like at 3-6-10 points invested for adept, 13-16-20 for master, 23-26-30 for grandmaster.

I absolutely agree that the trait lines need to be redesigned, together with their linked attributes. Power should go with the class-specific attribute, precision with crit damage, condition damage with condition duration, vitality with toughness, and healing power with boon duration.
It would open up more build options, but I can see how someone could understand that as a flaw. The thing is, you only need to tone down the most powerful combinations, if their power is deemed too much; you don’t need to touch the niche builds.

However, I do not agree with the rest of the “axe healing power, merge malice and prowess into skills” suggestion. I don’t think that would work well at all. Also, zerkers. Zerkers everywhere.

Nurvus.2891:

My suggestions

1. Remove Healing Power from the game, and to compensate…
   - Make Vitality (in addition to its current effect) also work as a weaker form of Healing Power for incoming Healing
   - Make Power and Malice (in addition to their current effect) also work as a weaker form of Healing Power for outgoing Healing
   The purpose is keeping a somewhat similar ability to heal, without forcing you to sacrifice an attribute for it.
2. Give all Skills a coefficient for both Power and Malice.
   - Conditions get a 100% Malice coefficient, and a low Power coefficient (25% or so)
   - Single-hit Skills get a 100% Power coefficient, and a low Malice coefficient (25% or so)
   - Multi-hit and periodic damage Skills get a fairly even coefficient for both Power and Malice
   This results in alot more builds, and a greater amount of Equipment variety.
3. Make Prowess and Precision increase damage from Burn and Poison
4. Make each player own one stack of Burn and Poison.
   This means 5 players results in a potential of 5 stacks of Burn and 5 stacks of Poison.
   Obviously, the healing reduction from Poison would not stack.
   This makes Burn – and Combo Field: Fire – less useless.
5. Replace the “rating” Attribute bonuses in Trait Lines with interesting bonuses like those found in some Traits, such as X% of Toughness converted to Power.

Please discuss.

1. Well, I don’t see how that would work at all. Firstly, all classes have different amounts of base hp, so that’s an issue. Secondly, if you heal yourself, it’s both outgoing and incoming. So that would basically make Soldier’s gear god tier in terms of bunkering, since it adds Power and Vitality. Not to mention that it would give an unnecessary boost to the tankiness of a full zerker setup.
2. I don’t really get what you’re trying to do here. Physical damage and condition damage already benefit from Power and Malice, respectively. Some skills just have higher physical damage than others, while some have stronger conditions. And that’s done on purpose.
3. So now Burn and Poison benefit from condition damage, condition duration, Precision and Criticals? Ok, that’s insane. They’re already very strong conditions, they don’t need to be able to crit. Especially not since its easy to build a high crit rate condition build.
4. That would add to the amount of burden on the servers, so it might not even be possible. Not to mention that it would have to come with a pretty serious nerf to their damage. And that in turn would mean revamping every single skill, trait and utility that deals with either of those conditions.
5. I have no clue what you’re talking about here. Clarify please?

1. First, Base HP doesn’t affect anything of my suggestion. Only Vitality itself would increase incoming Healing.
   Secondly, the rate at wich Vitality, Power and Malice affect healing would be about half (or less) than currently, such that, for example 100 power and 100 malice would be equivalent (or weaker) than 100 healing power.
   A pure healing build, would effectively be Power+Malice, and if you wanted alot of self-heal as well, Power+Malice+Vitality.
   Note that power, malice and vitality would affect healing as coefficients, just like healing power does now. They would NOT multiply healing. So power+malice+vitality would not provide exponential healing growth. They would provide linear growth.
   Everyone would have some more survivability, but you’d still need to slot healing skills to focus on healing.
   Just think about how healing power stat currently skews gameplay, and how vitality is just a filler stat.
2. The thing here is that there are alot of stat combinations that simply don’t do anything.
   Power + Crit + Crit damage scale exponentially, as they multiply each other.
   However, Power + Malice scale linearly.
   This creates a great unbalance.
   Assuming there is a point where they are balanced, berserker will be overpowered beyond that point, and underpowered before that point, since it’s the highest scaling combination in the game.
   Currently, we are pigeonholed into full direct damage with crits, or full condition damage.
   There is barely any point in mixing both unless you have skills that do extra damage per condition on target.
   And even those can be maximized in a group without requiring you to apply conditions yourself.
   Would be nice to see builds that focus around poison & physical damage, by utilizing power + malice. But that is barely viable due to the linear scaling and heavy condition removal.
3. Burn is too short, and Poison is too weak. They’re just blanket effects. No one focuses on them.
4. Not at all. The server already handles ALL stacks individually and separately.
   When a condition stacks duration, each stack is actually “queued” one after another.
   All I’m suggesting is that each player gets a separate queue.
   The number of stacks being handled won’t change.
5. By “rating” Attribute bonuses I mean power, condition damage, etc.
   Rating is something that decays as you level, such that you need more to obtain the same effect. Such is the case of Precision.
   But Power, Condition Damage, Healing Power also count as rating Attributes, because they indirectly decay as you gain more of that stat.
   If at first you have 100 power from gear+base & 25 power from Traits (25% bonus), later on you may have 1000 power from gear+base & 50 power from Traits (5% bonus).
   The trait bonus effectively became 1/5 as useful.
   By “percentual” trait bonuses, I mean those that retain their usefulness as you level.
   “Virtue Recharge Rate”, “Critical Damage %” and “Condition Duration” are just as good at level 11 as they are at 80.
   So all Trait lines should have bonuses that retain their usefulness.
   Better yet, they should have fun bonuses.
   Those Major Traits that give you “Power stat equal to X% of Toughness”, are perfect for Trait bonuses.

The Boz.2038:

I absolutely agree that the trait lines need to be redesigned, together with their linked attributes. Power should go with the class-specific attribute, precision with crit damage, condition damage with condition duration, vitality with toughness, and healing power with boon duration.
It would open up more build options, but I can see how someone could understand that as a flaw. The thing is, you only need to tone down the most powerful combinations, if their power is deemed too much; you don’t need to touch the niche builds.

The thing I’m talking about is the fact that giving flat Precision, Power, Condition Damage, Toughness, Vitality or Healing Power is not fun or interesting, and as you obtain better gear, becomes less important.

On the other hand, bonuses such as Condition Duration or class mechanic are interesting and do scale as you improve your gear.

The Boz.2038:

However, I do not agree with the rest of the “axe healing power, merge malice and prowess into skills” suggestion. I don’t think that would work well at all.

Healing Power is an unfair stat.
I can pick my favorite stats while using Protection, Blind, Aegis, etc.
But if I want to heal, I need to sacrifice 1 stat – this is unfair.

As for my suggestion on Malice, Precision and Prowess, let me explain again why.
Currently – you either build for condition damage or direct damage.
Some direct damage builds may have bleed as an extra, but still use Berserker gear.
Condition damage builds will almost never have Power.

And even if they do, it’s kind of unfair.
Berserker damage scales to the power of 3 – you have 3 stats multiplying each other.
Condition damage only scales to the power of 2 – you can have precision proccing additional bleeds.
Even if you mix power+precision+condition damage, it’s still 2 types of damage scaling to the power of 2, each – since direct damage increases through precision+power, and condition damage increases through condition+precision.

You don’t see viable builds combining Power+condition without precision.

So my suggestion is actually increasing the number of viable combinations you can make with stats, by making skills use more than 1 stat.

Allowing burn/poison to crit or scale from precision %, and allowing all conditions to scale from prowess, will give condition damage users an equivalent scaling to Berserker users.

The Boz.2038:

Also, zerkers. Zerkers everywhere.

This happens because only direct damage has access to 3 damage stats.

My suggestion makes it so that all types of damage dealing can benefit from at least 3 stats, so that your gear choice actually starts becoming a choice – for everyone.

You say zerkers everywhere, but condition users also have their gear pretty much set in stone – condition damage + 2 defensive stats. Or if you use bleeds, condition, precision + 1 defensive stat.

There’s nearly no -real- customization.
When you pick a weapon, it’s almost like the Traits, Gear and Upgrades are picked for you.

I’ve always felt the game would be better if the trait lines were adjusted and made uniform across all professions. I’d have paired the attributes in each trait line as follows:
– Power/Profession-Specific Attribute
– Precision/Critical Damage
– Condition Duration/Condition Damage
– Toughness/Vitality
– Healing/Boon Duration

I’d simply remove Power, Precision, Condition Damage, Toughness, Vitality and Healing from trait line bonuses, and replace them with interesting bonuses instead.

Different classes have different themes and flavors, so it makes sense they have different pairings available to them.

Let me give you an example of what I would do to Necromancer.
I would change the Curse Trait Line to provide something along these lines:
1 – Critical hits have a 3.3% chance per point (99% at 30 points) to cause bleeding.
Note: This is equivalent to the bonus granted by the Adept Curses Trait Barbed Precision, which would be removed with this change.
2 – Your conditions deal X% more damage per point to Bleeding targets.

Nurvus.2891:

…

• Vitality is another Attribute that doesn’t really give you much, specially in long fights.
  - You take just as much damage
  - You take longer to heal up (because you have more health)
  Toughness, by comparison, actually scales with incoming damage, and indirectly increases the effectiveness of incoming Healing – since you are reducing the incoming damage.

…

man that’s an important point… i was thinking about it all the time and that’s real… you take much damage … but you need more to heal… so the solution is easy:
- to really improve the importance of vitality is necessary to make each heal to heal in % of max hp.

for example:
1- you get 10000hp so your heal (wich scales 50% with your hp) heals you for 5000hp; half of your life
2- you get 6000hp so your heal (wich scales 50% with your hp) heals you for 3000hp;
half of your life and 2000hp less than a build with 10000hp.

that will make a real difference.
Anyway the general formula:
healing skill = x% of hp + (z% of healing power)
can create a great unbalance in classes… since there is a too great difference of base HP among classes.
Also to remove this HP difference among classes and add a trait which allows them to keep up the same (almost the same) advantage will be really important.
Just an example:
→ warriors get high hp pool… so give them a normal base HP and a trait (grandmaster maybe) which give them +300 vitality
→ so they can get back their “peculiarity” or simply look at more

Well, Kjeldoran, my suggestion is “almost” the same as healing as a % of HP.
However, Healing as a % of HP would make Vitality too good.

So I suggest something halfway:
Vitality gains the role of Healing Power, but ONLY for Healing you RECEIVE.

So someone (including yourself) tries to heal you for 4000. Depending on your Vitality, you might increase that to – hypotetically – somewhere between 4500~6000.

While reading all of Nurvus’s posts all I could think was:

which
/(h)wiCH/
Pronoun
Asking for information specifying one or more people or things from a definite set: “which are the best varieties of grapes?”.

ObsidianSaint.1079:

While reading all of Nurvus’s posts all I could think was:

which
/(h)wiCH/
Pronoun
Asking for information specifying one or more people or things from a definite set: “which are the best varieties of grapes?”.

Maybe he’s German. Or was talking about crafting.

Nope, I’m portuguese.
And thanks for the correction.
What about the thread?

Is there any particular reasoning of mine you didn’t understand or agree with?