Guild Wars 2

I had this posted on Gd but they were largely unhelpful, so I pass it onto you guys, sorry I hope you don’t mind if I just copy and paste it here for convenience.

I’m no expert on this at all, let me get that out there first. I’m not all-knowledgable on everything Anet does or the community knows, but I do read the forums alot, and you guessed it, I just read about how much the general forum-posters think anet is doing wrong.
So what would you do? For example, loot. People hated that in most mmo’s you had to compete for loot with others who also hit the mob/resource node. This made most optimal gear tedious to get for your character, but made crafting profitable since the nodes were contested, and made things more valuable on the trading posts, since there were fewer of them. In GW2, they’ve made it possible for everyone to get the loot and resources hassle and conflict free, however that makes crafting just a levelling tool, unprofitable and makes it incredibly simple and cheap to outfit your character with exotic gear at lvl 80. So what would you do to fix both problems?
Or as another example, dungeon/dragon rewards/precursors. People are complaining that there are too few rare rewards in this game that you can go into LA, link into the chat and have a couple hundred players either be immediately instilled with jealousy or grovelling to kiss your feet (Slight use of exaggeration, but you get my point). But what would you want as a method for rare gear to be introduced in the optimal manner to obtain? Nobody likes RNG, rare 0.0000005% drops from stupidly easy or difficult bosses, because people want to know that for each hour or two they put into the game they are making tangible progress in their pursuit for the thing they want. Nobody likes grinding for tokens either however, they just see it as a repetitive waste of time doing the same achievement over and over again, they want a one time thing to have an epic reward, and be tangibly progressive. However, that leaves us with scavenger hunts/super tough boss battles/one time events that the player has to complete only once or twice to obtain their “Epic” piece of equipment… but that defeats the point, since if it’s just one thing that people have to do, no matter how long it is, people are going to find the optimal or easiest and fastest way to finish that objective, and sooner or later you’ll see everyone running around with epic gear, making them lose their epic feel.
So, as a community, what are your thoughts on how Anet could make rare gear and loot acquisition a fun, progressive, non-gambling yet intensely challenging and truly “Legendary” experience that won’t be immediately exploited and achieved by those with 100000000000 gold?

I believe that the rarest of rare items like Mjolnir, Infinite Light, The Eye of Rodgort, Volcanus and precursors should be obtainable without the use of:
1: RNG only
2: Incredible amounts of farming rare materials and monotonous tasks
3: Moneeeeeeh
Items like these should be EARNED, not farmed. Like imagine, plundering a harpy nest or even better a fleshreaver nest-like dungeon for the opportunity to grab one of their weapons, the prized Infinite Light. Or doing an insanely difficult but aesthetically awesome jumping puzzle all the way to the clouds where you somehow grab the fabled Mjolnir. Or even travelling deeper and deeper into the caverns of Mount Maelstrom to retrieve a fiery fang of Primordus, Volcanus. This concept has soooooo much potential. I also like the concept of a dungeon-esque sort of instance, where you can do multiple segments one by one or go through the whole complete run right up to the end. I think this would be PERFECT for rare loot and skins, even black lion exclusive weapons such as fused weapons.
Imagine this example: A massive dungeon in the Deeps, let’s call it the Fleshreaver catacombs, is discovered by Asuran explorers. They contract you to explore and plunder its depths for a reward. The Fleshreavers reproduce very quickly however, so clearing parts of the cavern would be great for them, but temporary, so your reward would be less but still there. Or you could clear the entire dungeon in one go, severely crippling the Fleshreaver’s ability to repopulate the cave, giving the Asurans more time to explore and catalogue their discoveries within. If you complete seperate parts of the dungeon one by one, you’d be rewarded with tokens that you can turn in for good rewards if you amass enough. However, if you complete the entire dungeon in one go (Maybe completing specific and difficult objectives as well), you will receive not a token, but a freshly retrieved Infinite Light from the depths of the Flesh-matriarch’s lair.
I mean, come on…
HOW COOL WOULD THAT BE?!

I’m torn between the guaranteed drops from achievements and the random drop concept. On one hand it would be cool to get a precursor from a challenge knowing I’m going to get it. On the other hand, these items would soon be very common as everyone and their grandmother finishes the achievement, thus taking away the cool factor. That being said, I wouldn’t want a guaranteed drop for any existing precursor, but perhaps an increased chance for it to drop from completing a more challenging feat. I’m not sure if that is something that is already there, or if I currently have the same chance of getting a precursor from a level 2 bandit as I would from Tequatl. I mean the chances should increase for doing something challenging over doing something really easy, and that increase should be at least somewhat noticeable. Not a 0.0001 over the already 0.001 chance of getting a precursor.

As a thought, maybe that increase could be incremented with each completion of a challenging achievement. For instance, if you complete the flesh matriarch’s lair, as suggested, your chance to get a precursor is +.5% over the normal drop rate. If you don’t get it, then the next time you complete the lair, or another of these major achievements, then your chances are now 1.0% above the normal rate, and so on up to at least a limit. Maybe up to 25% or 50% which are pretty good odds. Once you do get a precursor then your counter resets, and you start over. This way you have some control over getting the precursor without it being overly farmable. I’m sure this would increase the number of precursors out there to a degree, but it would at least not be as dramatic as if it were always a guaranteed drop.