Guild Wars 2

Instead of making harder content for EVERYONE. Try what Guild Wars did and put in a toggle for hard mode if its too easy and you want more challenge rather than increase the difficulty for everyone regardless of skill level. Also, if you increase the difficulty, you should increase the rewards in order to make it worthwhile doing the harder content.

I’m confused . . . are you talking about open-world content or instanced content? A world boss can’t be harder for me and easier for the player standing next to me. The amount it takes to fill a heart can’t be more for me and less for you, just because you changed your “difficulty” setting. However, if you’re refering to dungeons and the like, sure. A lot of MMOs are doing “hard modes” of their instanced content.

There are only 2 ways there could be a Hard mode similar to Gw1.

1) Still open world: You’d need to have a separate map for each area where everyone is in “hard mode.” I’d assume let everyone be lvl 80 and scale the enemies between 79-83/85, and keep everything else the same. To help avoid exploiting, the nodes between hard and normal mode would need to be tied (so you can’t get double nodes for gathering), the world bosses would also need to be tied (maybe make it 2 rares or 1 exotic depending how hard these things would be scaled, etc.) and just give an increase to MF and a bump to chests (also tied between normal and hard mode) and each time you entered hard mode, you’d need to be teleported to a set location on each area (or you’d have to do it per character inside of a city) so you can’t get to a chest on normal then switch to hard for the reward.

2) Instanced: 5 people enter to their own instance of a zone, without enemy respawns (so you can still include vanquishing), with no world bosses, possibly no dynamic events either, unless scaled to be actually hard for 5 people. Basically an open world “dungeon.”

I can think of a way it might work in the open world. The toggle downlevels you below the mobs in the area. Currently, iirc, you are downleveled to 2 levels above the mobs. Making the downleveling harsher would be like upleveling the mobs.

The reason you could do HM in GW1 was because everything was instanced which simply isn’t the case in GW2 . This would limit the content to Dungeons /Fractals since that’s the only instanced content in the game and i believe it was said they didn’t want to divide the player base any more than they had to. In other words dont expect HM any time soon