I’ve always felt exploration could be so much more in this game, you have shown off your beautiful scenery very well and I have always longed for something that allowed/gave me a reason to explore every nook and cranny of the game. Sure, I’ll explore a map just for the heck of it once in a while, but when I mean explore, I mean something other than just killing enemies and grabbing skill points.
I propose two new ideas, the first being vanquishing.
Vanquishing: In Guild Wars 1, we had this, and I actually loved it after a while, it was relaxing in a way. What it consisted of in GW1 was going back to an area you’ve already visited and killing all of the enemies in the zone AND it they were a much harder difficulty than normal while their aggro range was much larger as well. Imposing this feature I believe could really help add some depth to the game and give that challenge to those who want it.
Obviously people want a higher reward with a harder challenge, so for this my recommendation is something like 10-25 tier 6 materials for each completion of a vanquished map, make it very hard to complete, similar to a dungeon, but for the map.
Exploration Mode: I love to explore, this game has an endless amount of nooks and crannies that have yet to be discovered. This exploration mode could work a little like this:
~It would be like your regular exploration of the map without the following:
-No Enemies
-No Skill Points
-No Points of Interests
-No Vistas
-No Hearts
This exploration mode would consist of four parts:
-Node Hunting
-Puzzle Jumping (a puzzle or two unique to this map, YES I realize this would add a lot more jump puzzles, but at that point I don’t think they’d need many more)
-Diving (diving goggles could be incorporated into this)
-Unique Map-Based crafting challenges (sort of like GW1 equivalent of the canthan new year), these could act as the events in the zone
So you’d have to gather every node in the map, jump a puzzle or two, find the diving locations, and complete some of the crafting challenges, this would be free of enemies so you could explore the zone for as long as you wanted and not be bothered by those pests.