Guild Wars 2

I freaking love this game, but I think it could be better with a few changes.

In general I feel like DEs feel a little too formulaic and artificial, I’d suggest trying to get them to feel organic. I also think typical DEs should be harder and have better vendor-related rewards.

1) Organic. What I mean by this is that things should feel more natural. For example, when I re-take a waypoint there’s a neon ring indicating where to stand, it glows red if hostiles are within, and there’s a progress bar. That sort of thing makes it feel very quest-like to me. This is also annoying because I can absolutely vanquish all the hostile forces in an area, but I still have to stand there not really doing anything to “really” re-capture it. Even an option to disable the neon lines and progress bar would be a step in the right direction imho. Another thing that might help is having hostiles in the area slain contribute to the progress, not just time spent standing there when there’s nothing to fight. Making the areas bigger would also be good imo.

2) Risk versus reward. I’d highly recommend taking another pass at difficulty in general. The events are great in concept and they’re a lot better than questing imo, but 90% of events feel like experience/karma pinatas, especially on my guardian (-_-). I think things should be a little harder, even at lower levels, and should have more harsh consequences. NPCs should probably have nicer things to correspond with the difficulty, I think that’d tie back in with #1 in making it feel organic/meaningful. Masterwork stuff in general is already easy to obtain early (14 – trading post), so most of the blue “rewards” for keeping a vendor around by protecting a place when it’s invading are pretty much worthless anyway (that, and you can slog through many, many levels with outdated gear if you so choose).

I think the progress bar is essential, as it’s a clear sign—sometimes the only sign—that an event is bugged. Otherwise, people would waste time fighting endless waves of enemies or waiting around for the capture that was never going to happen.

In a perfect world, there would be no bugged DEs to make this a concern. However, while there has been a ton of improvement, I don’t really see the game getting to a point where DEs never bug.