Guild Wars 2

If you played Guild Wars 1, then you already know about Hard mode. If not, here’s a brief summary:

When your character completed a campaign, you unlocked “Hard Mode” which could be turned on before you went into an instance. When selected, any instance you entered had tougher foes and larger mobs to face in exchange for increased rewards, more valuable drops, and the opportunity for titles.
More about it on the GW1 wiki: Guild Wars 1 Wiki – Hard Mode

This could be easily implemented into Guild Wars 2:
- Hard Mode available after completion of your Personal Storyline
- Could only be activated in the main cities (Rata Sum, Black Citadel, Divinity’s Reach, The Grove, Hoelbrak) or Lions Arch, and then you enter whatever instance through a way point on the map.
- Can be played solo or with a 5-man party, and zones now become instances (like Dungeons)
- Mobs don’t respawn; once dead, they stay dead until you re-enter the zone.
- All hearts/events can be completed and are played through once and don’t appear again until you re-enter the zone. Probably would want to exclude the Dragon bosses as they are really meant for larger groups of players.

Rewards
- Receive a chest after completing a zone, similar to that of completing a Dungeon, just with more gold and higher chance of more valuable drops.
- Rare and Exotic item drops are increased in Hard Mode
- A Vanquisher title (given once all zones have been completed in Hard Mode)

What are your thoughts?

Zones I don’t know, never had such a thing before, but dungeons for sure!

You say it wouldn’t be hard, well it wouldn’t in theory, server for something like that would be a bit of a nightmare, for zones that is.
As for dungeons, sure thing, make it like fractals, drops chance increases directly with the stats of the enemies, it’s just a little bit of math and it’s done.

The only problem is the all eternal farm/exploit, CoF P1?

Direksone.3867:

Zones I don’t know, never had such a thing before, but dungeons for sure!

Zones would allow for vanquishing. They could cap the amount of times you can vanquish a specific zone to something like once a month for each zone unless you vanquish everything.

This would be awesome for dungeons if they added in all new armor sets specifically for hard modes.

It would be nice to have a normal mode for instance areas first!

Esplen.3940:

Direksone.3867:

Zones I don’t know, never had such a thing before, but dungeons for sure!

Zones would allow for vanquishing. They could cap the amount of times you can vanquish a specific zone to something like once a month for each zone unless you vanquish everything.

In GW1 this worked because zones were instanced and the number of foes was finite. In a persistent world where the mobs respawn 60s later, this would not work. Can’t make it “Just kill xx number of foes on Hard mode” because then you can just farm the same wurm or something for an hour.

I’d be all for it but I don’t see it happening any time soon.

I can’t say I agree with further dividing up the population, since this is supposed to be a persistent world MMO, and not an Instanced Co-op like GW was.

I could, however, see Vanquishing working in Dungeons and Fractals.

Just to quickly clarify: the zones would be instanced only in Hard Mode. Just think of the zones like GW2 dungeons without the paths.

Just a suggestion. I could see it work, personally, but that’s just my opinion.

I do hope some kind of hard mode (outside of fractals/dungeons) comes eventually, but I’d rather have Heroes/Mercs first.