Guild Wars 2

Hello!

Originally I decided not to share this post, since I think mass ideas are actually one of the least useful things to share with a gaming company— I’m sure they have TONS of ideas, and are limited more by time.

However, in the last patch, Anet went ahead and did some of the things I suggest in this post, so maybe they’re interested in playing around with Runes more than I had considered. =)

So here it goes:

My summer break is ending soon, and I will be forced back to real work. So over the next few days I will be trying to purge my last few Guild Wars 2 related ideas out of my system.

This post will focus on ideas for improving the Rune system

I. Runes

Runes are one of the most interesting parts of gearing in Guild Wars 2. Well, at least they should be.

Right now, in PVE, the optimal choice for most players is simply Ruby Orbs, or Runes of the Scholar. I cannot imagine a more boring choice than socketing Ruby Orbs—rather than gaining an interesting effect, players simply socket more damage increasing stats.

Runes of the Scholar are a little better, but the margin by which they outclass all other runes will only increase when ascended gear comes out. Due to diminishing returns on stats (hitting 100% crit chance, for example), Runes of the Scholar are only going to become more powerful over time because percent damage boosts scale so well.

II. Some notes on fixing existing Runes:

-Firstly, fix the 6th slot bonus on Rune of Strength and it will become one of the most viable rune choices in the game.

-Most runes that provide a % damage boost are too conservative compared to Runes of the Scholar. Superior Rune of the Wurm, for example, has poor stats, why not bump that 3% damage boost to a 5%? Still not a great rune… but better!

-There are so many Rune choices that NO ONE should take ever—why not make them more interesting? In general, someone just needs to go over all the Runes in the game and, if its super obviously a rune no one is going to ever choose, tweak it.

-Most Runes that improve player speed seem to have been balanced before most classes got a 25% movement speed signet. Bump these up to 10 or 15% movement speed. Rune of Speed and Rune of the traveler, for example. Obviously this is not a massively important issue. (I’m even happier with the 25% movement speed that went down, I just didn’t want to suggest something so Bold!)

II. Rune Ideas

As a basis for comparison, here are the stats of Runes of the Scholar. My goal is to maintain these as the most powerful min/max option in order to avoid power creep, while allowing players to make other choices without sacrificing too much.

I think most of the existing runes could be overhauled to take into the account the very simple fact that runes will usually come down to DPS-emphasizing math, and the math doesn’t look good for most of the Runes in the game under almost any situation.

Obviously the details of all of these are flexible.

Runes of the Scholar (For Comparison):

This represents the strongest pure DPS choice in almost all situations.

+25 Power

+3% Critical Damage

+50 Power

+5% Critical Damage

+90 Power

+10% damage while health is above 90%

Rune of Shared Destiny

A boon duration/DPS option.

+25 Precision

+15% Boon Duration

+50 Precision

+15% Boon Duration

+90 Precision

2% damage for each ally under the effects of a boon (10% max, so 8% damage in a dungeon unless a pet is available, limited more if allies aren’t in range)

Rune of the Hunt:

This is to help wean people off of Signet of the Hunt and Signet of Shadows and to provide another viable min/max option for those who prefer movement speed over pure damage.
The 10% when behind or beside your foe makes it a bit less of an option for heavy armor classes, which is intended to keep this from being a no-brainer choice for all classes.

+25 Power

+3% Critical Damage

+25 Power

+15% Movement speed

+90 Power

+10% Damage when behind or beside your foe.

Rune of the Watcher:

This rune is intended to significantly buff all players who wish to remain at range while still giving/receiving buffs. Not a min/max option, but helpful for some players. Before you imagine this being insane in WvW, remember 5 target AoE caps will almost always be reached in zergs without having to go up to 1000 range. If you really want to play say, a Longbow Ranger or a Staff Elementalist, this rune would help you benefit full from giving and receiving Boons despite your long range.

+25 Precision

+3% Critical damage

+25 Precision

+5% Critical damage

+90 Precision

You can give and receive boons from longer range (600 range, caps at 1200 range max)

Rune of the Hero:

The people really like the idea of “Anchoring”. Give the people what they want.

+25 Vitality

+15 Toughness

+50 vitality

+35 Toughness

+90 Vitality

+When you use a utility skill, enemies are more likely to target you.

(I would also consider adding something like this to certain Traits, like Guardian Altruistic Healing and Warrior Vigorous Shouts.)

Rune of the Healer:

+25 Healing Power

+20% Regeneration duration

+50 Healing

+5% Chance to grant nearby allies regeneration for 10 seconds when hit

+90 Healing

+10% of overhealing is granted as a shield that absorbs incoming damage.

(only applies to direct heals from Q moves, Weapons, and utilities). (10 second duration of shield/internal cooldown). Percent could be tweaked.

To be honest, I think something like that mechanic should just be added to the game to make healing more useful (more akin to toughness… it could prevent damage before it occurs), but that’s a whole different conversation.

The healing bubble generated would need to have some fairly steep diminishing returns so that heals generated by, say, Shout Heal warriors could remain useful compared to large Guardian and Ele heals.

Rune of the Nearsighted:

(Mostly intended to buff Axe/Deathshroud Necromancers, but has applications for other classes and buffs a lot of generally weak ranged weapons like Ranger Shortbow while excluding those with high range requirements because it would make them overpowered.).

+25 Power

+3% Critical Damage

+25 Power

+5% critical damage

+90 Power

+Medium range abilities (500-900) do 20% more damage, but their range is reduced by 33%.

Exact details might have to be tweaked, but I think I thought of all the weapons that would become overpowered given something like this and managed to exclude them (Warrior Rifle, Guardian Scepter).

One additional caveat is that for Deathshroud, the 20% damage boost (and range reduction) would need to be added to the “within 600 range” part of Deathshroud, but not when it is used from longer range. I also would have liked for this Rune to be viable for Staff Elementalists, but I couldn’t do that without including ranged weapons that would become OP given this rune.

Combo Field Runes and Sigils:

I’m not going to get into specifics here, but I think there is tons of potential for Rune Sets that synergize specifically with certain combo fields.

For example, damage boosts when standing in a certain kind of field (light, fire), chance to create a specific kind of field when hit, % chance for Critical hits to become specific types of Finisher, etc. And as the 5th slot bonus “Your finishers will prioritize fields of x type” to give people a bit more control over the combo system.

And that’s it!

Those are my fun ideas for some Runes that would make Rune choices a lot more interesting without adding any Power Creep— it was not my intention that any of these runes ends up beating Rune of the Scholar. Obviously the exact numbers are probably off and would need to be tweaked, but these are more proof of concept for some fun runes that would shake things up and get (more) people doing something other than socketing Ruby Orbs.

Reddit Thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1lwump/some_thoughts_and_ideas_on_rune_design/

First of all, great post idea and good reasoning behind the addition of such runes. Some notes that I would like to add.

• There could be technical limitations to the implementation of these runes. The first example that comes to my mind is the Rune of the Hero: it would require messing around the aggro table for mobs, and who knows if and how this is possible right now.
• Rune of the Healer: the concept of using the overhealing is interesting, but the shield-thing would probably require to add a completely new status. Why not reusing something that already exists? One could give Aegis or Frost Armor, and the limiting factor could be the usual “can only trigger once every X seconds”. Moreover, one should also think that there are three different environments to balance. E.g., I see healing as already very useful in WvW with some classes (perma-regen rangers, engineers and their healing turret + multiple combo finisher on it, eles), and buffing it even more could unbalance the situation, and degenerate fights in a perma-healing challenge :-).
• Being somebody very interesting in the design of Magic cards, something I learned is about that cards (runes) should be easy to understand. The easier they are, the more used they will be. Something like “Your finishers will prioritize fields of x type” would probably not be understandable by a great majority of the players.

That said, once again, there are very good ideas in here! The addition of Perplexity Runes displayed how a mechanic (in that case, confusion), which was mostly abandoned, would suddenly come back as a very strong one, so this could make some mechanics and techniques again very useful.