Guild Wars 2

PopeUrban.2578:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Savoy.6824:

Now, jumping right into horizontal progression. Can the ArenaNet designers begin to design a game that incorporates the orders that we joined in our personal story. The designers may already be doing this to some degree, but it is my opinion that it is lightly used.

Personally, I think they missed a trick with the Personal Story, both as a way or making it relative to the open world and extending the pacing of the story, by not including a Order rep requirement.

For example, you start out as a grunt, and you don’t get the next Personal Story mission until you’ve made yourself outstanding among the new recruits (through doing DE’s and Order Missions [Order Missions aren’t something that’s actually in the game. Rather they are tasks doled out at random – say, every 1 – 3 days]). I mean, I found it kind of disjointed that you start in an order, and 5 missions later you’re quite high in the Order in terms of rank.

VOLKON.1290:

Anyone remember skill books in GW1?

Great horizontal potential there if they come back.

Were they the ones you did for rep and gold?

Or am I thinking of something else?

You’re thinking of journals/storybooks. Skill books were the things you got in hard mode that let you learn any skill already unlocked on your account. IDK how this system would be applicable to GW2 though, as all skills in GW2 are considered “unlocked” when you make the character.

I wasn’t clear, sorry ‘bout that. I just meant as a means to acquire new skills. Maybe a boss drops a ranger skill book that contains one of n new skills. No guarantee that you’ll get the one you want, or even for the profession you want, but it would be a different way to open skills up for your characters. If you get one for a profession you don’t have, either sell it or save it for later. Or maybe toss four in the Mystic Forge for a random book.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Fractal Progression Reset

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of tradeoffs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

As someone who had a high fractal level I jsut wat you to know I think you made the right choice. Getting past 30 feels much more rewarding than before due to the new instabilities and now because many more people are above 20 it’s easier to find nice groups, so ultimately. Thank you for being decisive when you needed to be

With the introduction of ascended gear I gave up. I’ve got 8 chars, all geared in exotics and I enjoy playing all of them. Variation is the name of my game, my main pleasure is trying out different builds/gear on each alt. The investment for ascended weapons was steep, but I managed to craft two for my main. I had already given up on the laurel-locked jewelry for any alt.

There’s no way I’m putting in the effort to gear even my main in a full ascended set, much less three different sets for each character. Not even sure how long that’d take, some say 28 days for one set. So 3 months/sets per char, 8 chars, that’s two years of grinding every single day. It sounds outright insane when I type this, but there you have it. And that doesn’t even include the jewelry, now that I think about it.

But you know what? That’s ok. Most MMOs I play end up the same way. I get good, but seldom the best, gear. I’m fine with that since as long as I’m not at a disadvantage I can afford to try new goofy builds. With the advent of ascended gear that became impossible. To be honest I’m somewhat at a loss for -any- type of progression right now.

I’ve got my exotics. I’ve got my WvW ranks. I don’t do dungeons/fractals since I promised myself I never would again after the vanilla wow grind, and I stick to my promises. That also rules out legendaries due to the token requirement. I would go for achievements but, and I mean no offense, the WvW achievements are dreadful. No imagination, no thought required. Just a constantly incrementing number at the side of your screen that ticks from nothing to 100.000. That isn’t fun. At all.

I’ll still play, this isn’t a rage-I-quit post. I love WvW and I enjoy the living story evolution. Also surprisingly fond of the world bosses to be honest, despite my lack of interest in generic pve. But progression is dead for me. With all that entails.

This discussion is actually one of my primary concerns for Guild Wars 2. I come from the player pool that enjoys vertical progression and continued number progression. However, that said, I also spent some time in Guild Wars (1). So, here are my concerns:

1a) Ascended armor, weapons, and jewelry are tedious to acquire; I feel like I have to complete a list of “chores” before I can do other things in game.

My main issue is the time gating that is involved. Currently, there is too much. A possible solution (and this may not be practical): Each “daily” cooldown craft can be used repeatedly, but the mat cost increases by 50-100% with each use. Example Below:

Spool of Silk Weaving Thread (Ascended)
Cost of first use: 100 Bolt of Silk, 1 Glob, 25 Spool of Gossamer Thread
Cost of second use: 150 Bolt of Silk, 2 Glob, 50 Spool of Gossamer Thread
Cost of third use : 200 Bolt of Silk, 3 Glob 75 Spool of Gossamer Thread

Objectively, this would make it impractical to craft a large amount of daily cooldown items, but it would give the option of reducing the timegate.

1b) Ascended crafting materials are tedious; Champion bags currently over saturate everyone with bloodstone dust. They should have a lower, but non-zero chance to drop Dragonite or Empyreal too. Dragonite comes in at a steady rate, but Empyreal relies too much on dungeon running to gather. Another possible solution is to reduce the lesser vision crystals to 1 of each ingot/star/brick, and the vision crystals to 3 of each.

1c) No more tiers of gear. Maybe, instead, create new infusions…something with proc-like effects (ex: offensive neck infusion, increase damage by 3% for 10s when you apply burning, 30s cd), but avoid making them overly tedious or expensive to craft.

2a) Horizontal progression has staled. Aside from ascended armor, there have been no new armor additions in the game since launch that couldn’t be bought from the gem store. I have purchased many of the gem store armors, but I would prefer there be more options in game to earn. A potential solution is outlined in my concern below.

2b) The difficulty of dungeons (that is, the ease of them) leaves them stale after doing them as many times as we all have; Introduce “hard mode” difficulty – increasing the difficulty (preferably by adding more mechanics and not by increasing their health, damage an obscene amount) would serve two functions: More content for dungeon enthusiasts (outside of FoTM) and potential for more armor appearance progression. The new “hard mode” would reward tokens that allow the purchase or upgrading (via MF) of, or to, “visually upgraded” versions of the normal armor. Example: CoF armor with fire particle effects, Orrian armor with a “undeady” particle effects, etc.

3a) Skill progression is nonexistent; One of the best things about GW1 was the sheer amount of skills available. Sure, many of them go unused, but at the moment we’ve got a small pool of skills and many of them still go unused. The healing skills seem like a good first step, but many of the new skills are almost too niche. This type of horizontal progression is one that most people would enjoy.

3b) A think a “usefulness” pass needs to happen with all class skills and traits. I’m sure you’ve got numbers internally regarding what skills/traits players use, but time should be spent figuring out “why” they go unused and what can be done.

I read Turtle Dragon.9241 and I totally agree with the comments.

The currently implemented vertical progression is totally wrong. There should be a better ladder to work your way in a vertical gear/skin acquisition rather than discarding everything that you worked for to get the next tier of things….

Solution: get rid of soulbound and move towards accountbound.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Fractal Progression Reset

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of trade-offs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

That’s all understandable. But it did devalue peoples time and effort that they previously put into fractals themselves. There was no compensation what-so-ever. You took it all away like our “progression” never happened in the first place. We have nothing to show for it. Neither do we have anything to show for all those alt characters that we “grinded” all the way up to level 50. What was done is simply taking the progress and deleting it like it never happened in favor of new mechanics. There was no trade off. We were never offered any kind of trade off. You might mention leaderboards when it’s not really a leaderboard at all, but a list of people that made it to 50 first.
You say that it wasn’t your intention to devalue effort or time put into fractals by people, but yet this is exactly what was done. How else would you see it as?
You said “This is a common practice we do with all releases”, but yet anytime something remotely close to this happens, you somewhat compensate people affected. We were the only ones that were never compensated nor we had any kind of response shown in “fractured” sub-forums for weeks. You left us there feeling worthless and giving you feedback and suggestions that were probably never read to begin with.
So again, compensation. The given explanation doesn’t justify to me all this time I’ve put into fractals over months of playing this game. That is why people are slowly turning away from fractals, since by your explanation something like this can be done again and again.

ADD SKIN LOCKER! (add item to locker, skin is stored account bound and can be used forever), you get back a blank item with stats/runes/shiz tht was on it back).

Allow us to swap skins of gear at any time

Turn transmutation crystals into “take x inscription of same level as your piece of gear, that gear can now be turned into either x or the original stat”

Turn stones into transmute the description/favor text/other random crap on the item onto another (like leftpaws/tybalts berserker greatsword instead of tybalts settelers greatsword).

MAKE FEROCITY DIGNITY AND CHARM DO kitten!

For me, the issue isn’t about how easy or hard it is to reach the next tier of stats/effectiveness but the fact it’s there at all.

Given how vocal people have been ever since their introduction I had hoped this thread would have been about the above not how easy/hard it is to get it.

I’m sorry, but I feel this is a missed opportunity and will do little to recover the good will and confidence that many lost with the introduction of ascended items. The passion by which people feel about H vs V has to show they care more about the approach than the method of acquisition.

As I mentioned previously. Keep the effort etc the same. But
1. No more tiers of gear and say so
2. Add dynamic flexibility of stats to ascended and above. I know for many this would be a far better incentive to play to get it.
3. Revert to horizontal progression asap and don’t use the gem store to bypass the effort to get stuff

taken from a thread I started on vertical gear progression…

Swagger.1459:

“We have never said there would be no vertical progression. We do intend to focus on horizontal but we will have vertical progression moving forward with the focus on zero grind and a very low power curve.”

when you add up statements like “we don’t make grindy games”, “cosmetic only grind”, “we want to reward all gameplay preferences equally”, “focus on zero grind” and do something completely different, it causes resentment towards the development team and conflict among players. i’m sure there were good intentions for the game that didn’t seem profitable or retention worthy, so i’d like to quickly give some tips on how you can stay true to your words while still making money and keeping players logging in.

simplified description below…

step 1- refocus on gear acquisition with zero grind in mind and stick to it. keep legendaries hard to get because of the new stat change feature and ultra fancy looks.

step 2- offer a majority of the weapon and armor skins currently in game on the gem store as well so players have the option to buy them outright. players will still have the ability to earn all gear and skins through pure gameplay.

step 3- main gear progression through a greatly expanded infusion system and make it the go-to thing that players have to “work hard” for or “work hard” crafting. you don’t have runes or sigils beyond level 60, so this would be a great opportunity to develop an interesting secondary stats and effects system.

following these three steps will allow all players to have the gear stats they want easily, and getting a bunch of different armor types would be more desirable and less distressing. regular gameplay becomes way more rewarding through improved loot drops and acquisition. gem sales would boost because of the plethora of cosmetic options available. players will happily log in more to chase after carrots on sticks so they can continuously upgrade and change their gear. players will still have the ability to earn all of these rewards from regular gameplay and not have their time and effort diminished. also, these types of systems would be alt friendlier and encouraging. win-win!

moral of the story, stick to your words and make it so everyone can have their cake and eat it too.

thanks for reading

edit- ascended gear should be far easier to craft and sellable on the bltc as well.

I’ll try and keep it simple.

The primary type of progression we want (and apparently ArenaNet is on the same page with this as evidenced by the post regarding it) is horizontal progression. This primarily means new traits, new skill/abilities, and cosmetics. Let’s take stock of what we currently have with regards to this:

• No new traits (not including the traits added/changed in balance patches, as they’re not tied to progression).

• For skills and abilities, we currently have one new healing skill per profession, and one global healing skill. On the WvW side, we’ve gotten various new skills for siege weapons with the world rank system.

• For cosmetics, we have a single set of armor for each armor class that isn’t tied to the gem store since August of 2012, released this last patch. We have a handful of new weapons that aren’t tied to the gem store since August of 2012, the ascended and fractal weapon sets being the most notable. There were also the various weapons from champion boxes and a few temporary living story related ones (SAB, Wintersday, and Sovereign sets). We also have various backpieces, helmets, and gloves that have been rewarded for living story meta achievements or as rare drops during the living story.

Now, obviously this push towards more horizontal progression seems to be a more recent development, but I don’t think I really need to take too much time pointing out that this is a pretty grim state of affairs. The issue is pretty simple, and luckily, so is the solution. Hopefully you guys are fast-tracking getting new abilities and skills in as we move forward in the vein of these new profession healing skills, and will be extending this effort to new traits as well. As far as weapons and armor go, I don’t know if you need to beef up your modeling team, but for a game where cosmetics is one of the single biggest factors when it comes to progression, the current situation is unacceptable. The gem store is largely to blame. There are some great implementations of the gem store: character slots, bank tabs, collection expanders, makeover kits and name changes, town clothes, etc. But weapon skins? Armor skins? Why weren’t they implemented in the game as rewards for actual content? Just as the playerbase has been clamoring for more permanent content, we need more permanent rewards for said content, which in turn creates a permanent addition to the options for horizontal progression.

VOLKON.1290:

I wasn’t clear, sorry ‘bout that. I just meant as a means to acquire new skills. Maybe a boss drops a ranger skill book that contains one of n new skills. No guarantee that you’ll get the one you want, or even for the profession you want, but it would be a different way to open skills up for your characters. If you get one for a profession you don’t have, either sell it or save it for later. Or maybe toss four in the Mystic Forge for a random book.

Having skill tomes that can unlock any skill regardless of points would help if they are going to keep the high costs of 25+. They could be passed on or sold to new players entering the game, help them catch up.

I also agree that, at the game’s launch, GW2 was not only lacking vertical progression (something that I didn’t mind), but horizontal as well. Without meaningful skill progression, hardly any skill/ skin collecting, a personal story that went nowhere and a dynamic event system that was still at its infancy, there was never much character or even worldwide customisation.

When Anet went full on with the idea of adding vertical progression, several players were justifying that change based on the number of players leaving. But I always felt that players left not because of the lack of vertical progression, but because of the lack of any progression at all.

It’s also worth noting that in the upcoming MMO EverQuest Next, equipments will offer unique abilities instead of stats. How fun and exciting is that? But guess what? This already kinda happens in GW2 with the sigils and runes.

More of a reason for why I think infusions should be removed, and ascended sigils/ runes added in their place. And I’m talking about ascended upgrades with “cool” effects, not just slight stat boosts.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi,

To clarify I am looking forward to hearing the communities thoughts on speed of acquisition such as how long crafting time takes? or drop rates in fractals and other areas of the game etc.

I hope this adds some clarity.

Chris

With these premises, I feel that this discussion will not lead anywhere.
All I get from this is that you think that the current mechanical of acquisition of ascended items and the grind required are ok, but you can tweak a bit the time-gating and/or the ubermegararerngbased reward.

What the anet that I knew would have done to fix what has already been done?

1. Multi set-stats ascended: Crafting. Sellable.
   Grindy, but with the ability to switch stats and (I can’t say less beautiful because beauty is subjective so…) with less particle effects.
   People who already spent money on them would not be upset.
2. Single set-stats ascended: Dungeon/Fractals/Guild’s Missions/JP/Exploring/DE/LSLW/WWW.
   Slightly (imo currently they are not only slighlty) harder than Exotics to obtain, Account Bound-Soulbound on use.

Vertical rewards: tough on friend groups

Edit: a quick TLDR of the stuff below: You need to ask the question “how do our vertical progression system create a social experience that brings players together, not segregates them”

One area where I think vertical awards need addressing is their effect on friend groups. The bonus stats separate me from my friends without ascended gear, and add a little tension when we’re doing anything together. I say something like “ok, this fight is tough to stay alive during” and they say (or think) “if it’s tough for you, what chance do we have in our worse gear.”

I’m going to step in and anticipate an argument: that the stats on ascended gear “don’t matter” since “everything can be done in exotics”. If the bonus stats don’t matter, then it should be painless to remove them, right? Nobody would complain if the next patch turned all ascended items into exotic-stats but pink text for prestige. Of course not, the stats do matter, even if they don’t create an impenetrable barrier.

Agony resist is the worse offender here, since that stat matters more than any other in fractals, which is something I quite like doing with friends.

I’d love to see a solution where, instead of my ascended gear separating me from my friends, it boosts us all together. A straightforward solution would be to apply the bonus stats to the whole party, though maybe people would gripe about that.

Other off-the-cuff ideas:

• Guild ascended crafting. Donate Globs of Dark Matter to the guild to produce ascended guild missions which drop materials and “vials of craft XP” for all participants.
• Even better, take out the guild requirement for these missions, and make “ascended world bosses”. One player sacrifices a piece of ascended gear (probably a surplus ring) to summon a harder version of a world boss that drops ascended gear for everyone.
• Shared ascended gear drops. Instead of asc. gear chests dropping for one person in the party, have a single chest drop that everyone can loot.
• Party infusions. These go in infusion slots and have /negative/ stats on them, but offer a buff to the whole party that compensates the individual player’s loss.

I left WoW not fleeing a “gear grind” but because the game put obstacles in the way of playing with my friends. “You should be happy to play with other people” is a cardinal rule that ANet follows when designing content (e.g. shared gathering nodes) and could use some more application in the realm of vertical rewards.

Skillprogression:
How about a way to tweak weapon abilities.
For example:
Thief sword autoattack does cripple and weaken at third hit.
Make this tweakable, so that we could choose to ditch the weaken part of the skill and increase the cripple – or the other way around.
Or ditch a burning condition from an elementalist skill for more damage. Or choose to do less dmg and a longer burning. My scepter skill doesn’t get to cause burning, I’d like a knockdown there.
Make this achieveable by exploring the world, place swordmasters etc around the world who can teach a special technique to the swordwielders, turning us into individuals and satisfying us/those numbercrunchers who want to tweak their char to a maximum.

I like the new ascended gear system. Those of us with 15K+ AP, 8 level 80s, and etc, need things to do at End Game. Crafting new gear is something.

Personally, I can’t wait for Legendary Armor, and how about some Legendary or Ascended Runes.

Expand upon the Home Instance for horizontal progression. Let us customize the home instance to benefit from and reflect our character’s accomplishments. Do it account-wide.

How about meaningful, unique skills from each order? Say, use Luxon / Kurzick models, but with some more variation reflective of an order’s nature? Have us do order-unique quest for cosmetic and skill achievements?

Our character should reflect our chosen order.

The world should reflect our character’s progress. If I’ve helped slay an elder dragon, people should notice.

Give us more armor and weapon skins that reflect in-game accomplishments, as opposed to our ability/desire to buy things.

More skills, earned in-game, to show that we have done something. Don’t assume everyone has hundreds of skill points unspent from grinding champs.

Give us skill choices (earned via points or gameplay). Surely my character has learned some new moves / attacks / skills in the last year, showing that I know more than a fresh level 80.

Have the personal story progression grant skills, and PvPers can buy those skills?

Do not add another tier of gear with arguable “improvements” in stats. Ascended / legendary gear is enough grind, and does not reflect character accomplishment.

No more vertical progression. No more levels. I quit WoW because I got tired of chasing an ever-moving target. Let me chase new things. Don’t throw away my existing progression to give me and illusion of progress.

What we need is more compelling reasons to do content to get things like skins / rewards. I would LOVE if we started getting quests (even time-sink quests like do X for 10 days straight) to get rewards of a cosmetic or unique variety.

Example would be the Tequatl weapons…..people do Teq just for the weapons…however, I have yet to see someone get the weapon / stats that they actually wanted. If they could somehow be guaranteed the stats they wanted after X amount of kills, everyone would be doing it that likes those looks X amount of times…the RNG sucks for this.

An example of something I would like to see in the game: Someone suggested above unique skills or even unique looks to skills based off of fighting a particular boss. That would be amazing! If you are worried about skill-creep how about just changing the look of a skill….like you do with PVP finishers, but for other things….for instance, if you beat X boss, you gain the “Bamf” teleport on your Mesmer or Theif….now when your theif or Mesmer (or other class with tele) uses a teleport it puts the comic “Bamf” in the place you teleported from. Or maybe change the smoke to purple, or grant you the ability to Dye the smoke…

Or a quest to go defeat the Ogre pet trainer champion (in Fields of Ruin) solo…if you do this as a ranger, you get your choice of one of his pets (like the rock-dog or a unique Moa, or unique crawler). This rewards skill with a vanity item that while not increasing their stats, does let someone show off that they accomplished something that is difficult to do.

I just see so many possibilities for horizontal progression that I would love to see in this game…things to do that would grant titles or unique skins….ANET needs to give players something to do…but they need to do it in a way that doesn’’t alienate the other players away from content.

First though, they DO have to fix ascended…there is no way you will get anyone to grind towards a cosmetic upgrade while they are already grinding to get the materials to make ascended and the time-gating is ridiculous. Being able to make only 1 of a certain material you need per day (and then requiring 18 of those) not to mention laurel cost is absurd….when you start adding up different stats / combos / armor types / weapon types…it will take years to outfit a set of characters with this method…unless of course you buy everything from the TP…which is also absurd to expect people to buy things from the TP.

Which reminds me. ANET really needs to stop making players HAVE to go to the TP for things. The Halloween recipes are a prime example of this. If you were to play 24 hours a day / every day for the entire Halloween event, you would not have been able to get the 10,000 candycorns required (not to mention the other mats)…so the only way to achieve that was by buying things through the TP. This is wrong, it is rewarding players for gold-farming rather than playing the content. It was easier for someone to champ-farm throughout the Halloween event and buy the materials than it was to do the content to earn the materials…that is the wrong way to do it.

DiogoSilva.7089:

• Create new content and new stories with the purpose of obtaining ascended gear.

This is my biggest problem with whole acsended tier introduction. Instead having them tied to some lore, with some gameplay around it they were just thrown on to crafting list and poof they are in the game. Its very shallow way of adding new tiers of gear.

It would be much more fun to have a quest to reach some lava pit full of destroyers where you can forge your dragonite ore into ignots, or have a magical cave where you have to force giant into submission so he has to forge your ignots into acsended sword blade which you then take along with other parts of weapon to some third place where you overcome another challenge to finaly create weapon of your acsension.

Or just stand in Lion Arch and do same thing at crafting station. Which sounds more fun, you tell me…

It often feels like the gem store is hurting the sense of progression too.

While I understand it’s an important source of income, I do feel like it interferes with the progression stuff.

The balance between in-game acquired or through gemstore is way off. And while most of us don’t mind a hat or broom stick, and some other items it seems that the “item-creation” focus lies on the gemstore. This is all logical from a business point of view, but in the end you’ll look way more awesome as an avid gemstore user than an ordinary player. :p

Try and balance in-game only and gem-store only a bit, because it feels like the focus is on the gemstore. From a pvp point of view, those finishers are all nice and fun. But can’t have a few finishers that aren’t tied to the gemstore and apart from the rank-finishers?

I think before you guys even begin to address the issues with progression you need to focus on the disparity of rewards between the different aspects of the game. Time spent in WvW, PvP, or PvE for “equal” effort should be rewarded the same. It’s not fair to people who WvW, and arguably benefit the server as a whole, to be rewarded FAR less than what they would receive for the same time/effort in PvE.

As far as character progression goes: you won’t see me working on it until you go back to your original plans of horizontal progress and you make things alt/build friendly. I’m not here to be locked into one class; if I wanted that type of game I’d go play WoW or something else with the trinity. I like being able to alt/change my build to fit different roles, but the current “progression” system is INCREDIBLY against that(especially wrt fractals).

There isn’t much you guys can do now wrt Ascended gear, aside from making it sell-able on the TP. There never should have been Ascended gear in the first place: it should have been Exotic and Legendary(with selectable stats) only.

Oh well, lesson learned(hopefully).

tl;dr,
OPTIMAL changes I’d like to see:

• change Ascended to selectable stats(I would actually craft then, as it would be build friendly)
• even the rewards across all areas of the game(X hours in Y activity = X hours in Z activity)
• Account-wide AR, this would allow for alts to be easily put right into fractals(without having to spend tons of gold on re-ARing them), plus allow for people to try out different group comps without leaving people behind
• Allow for Ascended gear to be bought/sold, or at the very least, change the ways of obtaining it(ie: decrease the time-gate, add-in some “challenge” to it instead of only crafting/rng drops)

P.S. The current system is going to lead me to spend LESS on gems in actuality, as Ascended forces you to focus on one or two characters max(due to time-gate/money). If they weren’t time-gated or had select-able stats, then I would get them for my other builds/alts as well, thus spending more money on transmute stones, etc. You are losing out on sales by forcing strict and honestly boring systems on the player.

Two major things I want to touch on:

(1) WvW getting shafted. I don’t understand why this has to be an issue every time something new comes out. A higher tier of gear, a new stat combination, whatever it may be – PvE players get it 10x faster. Then a dev posts about wanting to add an acquisition method to WvW and a tolerable alternative shows up a few months later. It’s just painful that this process has to happen every time. Why can’t I get ascended armor pieces for 800 badges + 5g or something? Vertical progression that heavily shafts part of the playerbase is not fun. Even if I was a big fan of vertical progression (I’m kinda lukewarm on it), it should be available to every part of the community, not “Oh, go do this thing you don’t enjoy to keep up.”

(2) I really want to know if Ascended is the end of the road. It’s going to take me several more months to get my two mains in fully ascended gear. I’m not super happy about that, but I’ll grit my teeth and get it done. If it provides a lot of other players something to do and progress towards, maybe that’s the lesser evil. But it can’t be a new tier or armor every year or two. I’m not going to sink farther and farther behind as ANet adds Respendent gear in 2014, Exalted gear in 2015, etc. I’m okay taking my time to slowly be one tier behind (exotic vs ascended) but it gets unacceptable to me if more tiers get added beyond that.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Fractal Progression Reset

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of tradeoffs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

Thank you for a response. That is all we were asking for in the fractured forum (and countless threads) since this release. I do though still think that this could still be addressed as a retro-active title or something for the people that did lose levels, similar to what is being done with the PVP levels.

This was an area where we had vertical progression, but then that vertical progression was taken away…that hurts…and some acknowledgement of this goes a long ways in any discussion of vertical vs horizontal progression….

I have 8 characters. It is going to take me over a month to get one set of armour done, even if I had all the money for it. If I /ever/ decide to change my build, I am screwed.

It costs me like 30 laurels just for the recipes for that alone, for one armour type. Its going to take me months of saving laurels to be able to afford the armour recipes for all three armour types.

All if this is not taking into consideration the heavy cost of even leveling one of the crafts to 500, let alone all three of them.

For those people with one 80, Ascended is a lengthy task. With those of us who have many (those of us who flourished during the days of exotics) we are being crippled by this.

It is going to be almost next year by the time I am done outfitting my characters with this new patch, and it is going to take most of my time and money in the game to do it.

Those people who say ’its only a 5% difference" really need to look at how things add up, it actually does matter.

SIDENOTE IN EDIT: All exotics that require gifts to make, wintersbark/bite, feathers of dwayna, mjölnir… those should become Asccended weapons. They take far far far longer than exotics to make, and really should be bumped up.

Vertical rewards: conflicting with horizontal rewards
One of the big unaddressed drawbacks with many of the current vertical reward schemes is that they compete with horizontal rewards for limited resources. Want Mjolnir? Better hold off on ascended crafting. Love minipets? Going to be hard to get the laurel ones if you also value agony resist.

Ok, it’s fair I can’t have all the rewards all the time, but it has the effect of making my long term horizontal goals less exciting, because they keep getting pushed back by short term ascended gear goals. My suggestion is to move some rewards around so I can progress on vertical and horizontal rewards at the same time. A good example of this is how it’s possible to get ascended weapons in fractals, so while I chase a fractals weapon I can also feel like I’ve got a chance of getting pink stats to go with the skin—though perhaps the drop rate numbers mean this is a bit of a fantasy.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Fractal Progression Reset

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of tradeoffs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

I’m still having a hard time facing the fact that you guys think it’s ok to reset progress and don’t offer anything for it. New fractals are not a compensation since everyone is getting it regardless of what level they were. I just wanted to say I’m disappointed. Weeks of discussion in “Fractured” sub-forum ended up being a total waste of time just like leveling my alts to level 50 in fractals. Just wanted you to know that I believed in you guys till the very end to at least attempt to make it right.

The horizontal progression could go in many directions.

• More trophies from LW or world bosses for your home instance
• Methods to pimp up your gear with cosmetic effects like glowing or spikes etc.
• More exploration
• more story to read and more lore to learn
• new skills (here we could fall into vertical progression very easily if the new skills are too powerful or effective)
• new traits
• new weapons unlocked for the classes
• customisation of the home instance
• more skins via crafting or dungeons

I really believe that vertical progression should end with the ascended armor that was just released. Let me elaborate. A character can now be decked out in head to toe of Ascended gear from armor to weapons. Ascende is the ceiling until the game closes (may it never happen).

I do like horizontal progression. If you guys want to release new Legendaries (weapons and jewelry and Armor) I am all for that.

I am all for new gear that has new stat combinations, but capped at the ascended stats we currently have..

I am all about Ascended Cooking (Cuisine?) Recipes.

New conditions.

New weapon Sets, More weapons for different classes be they new or ones that exist that a class didn’t have access to before. All of that is OK with me.

New Utility skills with new ways to acquire them outside of how it has been done before.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Fractal Progression Reset

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of tradeoffs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

Let’s not argue about the reset (it’s done anyway), I can understand your point of view and why you decided it was needed.

However, the way it was handled is worse than poor. You did devalue people time and effort, by not giving any kind of compensation in exchange for the reset. And you didn’t even answered our feedback for weeks, like that feedback we were giving wasn’t even taken into account.

While we’re talking about Fractals, let’s talk about character progression there.

The way Fractals were when it was released, it was a dungeon where players could test their skills, to progress in levels. Agony Resistance was a kind of vertical progression designed to help players progress through those levels, but it wasn’t absolutely necessary. If you had enough skill and knowledge of the fights, you could complete the fractals without any AR at all. This was good ! Players should be able to progress by improving their skill, their profession mastery, …

The way Fractals are now, after Fractured, it’s completely different. Some fights, as well as some instabilities (40, 50 for the moment, but with this pattern we can expect to get it every 10 levels), now absolutely requires a high level of AR. So, whatever the skill of the player, if he didn’t farm (or buy) enough AR, he won’t be able to make it. Progressing through fractals, which before was a matter of skill of the player(as the max possible AR, 30 at the beginning, wasn’t enough if you didn’t play well enough), has now become a matter of farming / grinding for stuff.

The “leaderboards” that were to be implemented are therefore a complete joke. What they would record is not who’s the best player, but who’s the ones who spend hundreds of golds to buy their AR first (the first players who beat level 50 said they spend around 500 gold to buy their AR from the TP). And we now have the same with those buying their mats for crafting the ascended armor. Am I the only one finding this kind of recording on a leaderboard stupid ?

Progression Lost :

My biggest gripe, refreshed by the talk of the fractal reset, is that when SAB came back, several of us lost our bauble-purchased upgrades. Some lost most, I personally lost all (even the wallet, all I had was the stick, candle, and 4th heart).

We never got feedback on this other than a dev posting “Are you sure you’re on the right character?” – when things like this happen, especially for living story content, more feedback is needed. The lack of any real response other than T1 Helpdesk killed the SAB for me this time around. Which meant that any sense of progression it could have given me didn’t exist. It became an immediate chore to try to regain lost footing.

Thread : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/archive/sab-bts/Missing-Upgrades/first#post2857915

I can understand that sometimes things happen that can’t be reversed, but this stunk of never looked at. I guess I’m trying to say that progression lost due to a bug that’s never acknowledge just makes me feel that I can’t progress. Some of us have real bad luck with RNG (it took me a long time to get my jade weapons, for example) – so to have progress that we can mark, not due to RNG, taken away just hurts.

I for one would love to see the rest of ascended accessories being released asap, namely ascended shaman accessories

maybe then id be a bit more motivated to get the weapons and armor.

also it probably has been mentioned but

why can we only craft the new stuff? i understand you want us to grind a bit and crafting is one way to go to make sure -everyone- has to work for their gear but, what about people like me who got almost 4k badges, 1.1 mil karma and like 90 laurels and nothing at all to spend it on?

im sure a huge amount of people have 10 times more than what i got for those currencies so i know you dont wanna make it available through them cause people will just insta buy all their gear but, come ON make it expensive i dont care but just something

right now its massive pve to craft or massive pve in fracs and its rng, for people like me who only really care about pvp and wvw, it feels very very very inaccessible and that shouldnt be the case

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Romo regarding your last post I am going to spend some time thinking about how you feel and get back to you if that’s ok?
Chris

Chris, it would be greatly appreciated if someone finally looked into the issue. Better late than never

I posted the threads relevant on that topic on my first post on page 1, if that can help you a bit.

Vertical Progression
I join the group that is unhappy with Ascended Weapons and Armor. It is a ridiculously long grind that is nothing more than a search for tons of materials. It is also very alt-unfriendly as well as build unfriendly. Overall, it makes me feel like I get to build one character to max and the rest can languish. I can also never change that character’s build type or stats. The same argument is true for legendary weapons. Why is there no quest for them? Why no long story chain where you learn the history and power behind the weapon? Instead, you get a precursor based upon luck and then combine it with a metric ton of materials. Why all this boring grind? Where are quests and flavor for progression?

Horizontal Progression
When I bought GW2 over a year ago, I was led to believe that there would not be vertical progression beyond exotics and that the progression would all be horizontal. I took this to mean that there would be tons of skins, some easy to get some hard to get. I also was led to believe there would be additional skills.

If you look at the amount of skins available beyond the initial release, there are deplorably few. This goes double for complete sets. I am looking to get a nice armor set to skin out my female charr. I was surprised upon looking online to see very few armor sets that were made post-release. What happened here? There should be new armor and weapon skins released every bi-weekly update. Some should be time-limited and LW themed, but many should just be out there for the future. Imagine mark 2 versions of dungeon armor. Or new sets of cultural armor. Or new fashions and styles being sold in all parts of the world. Isn’t this world supposed to be alive? Well, fashion changes over a year and a half.

Also, please make a skin bank for pve. It is far too punishing to acquire a one-use skin and the never be able to replace it because you’ll forever lose that rare skin.

The same is true for new skills. It took over a year for the first new skill to be made, and it was really just a story skill. The second skill came soon after, but it’s just a healing skill. I imagined there would be new skills released quickly, like once a month per job. These could be bought with skill points, money, karma, or obtained on a quest.

Overall, I feel like GW2 has entirely abandoned horizontal progression. I had hoped that horizontal progression would send us on quests to gain hard-to-find and rare things. Whether it be many quests for a legendary or a simple quest for a new skill, GW2 would keep me busy with fun quests and long-term goals that aren’t just grinding. And, yes, in this dream, there are still many grindy skins and skills so completionists can be at it all day for weeks.

Addendum to my prior post:

Ascended armor should have selectable stats. The current grind kills any interest in build experimentation.

Yes, this is about progression. Making ascended == progression.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Really good start to this topic folks. Excellent discussion, and really good ideas.

I am blown away, thanks everyone you have made my day. I love the CDI and so far this is a really good example of how I imagine it should be.

Romo regarding your last post I am going to spend some time thinking about how you feel and get back to you if that’s ok?

Chris

Thanks. That’s more than I was hoping for. (:

You were already informed about the problems Ascention gear and vertical progression would bring into the game before fractals. There were also numerous suggestions on how to improve horizontal progression in a meaningful matter without the gear treadmill.

This is coming from a player who has not played the game for a year. If you wish to see me and others who like a stable design philosophy towards horizontal progression, i suggest you get on with it.

The core of this all is that at some point you lost the vision for this game and made bandaid “improvements” on the expense of the previous design philosophy.(Which was actually the primary reason why people wanted to play this game instead of something like WoW)

You already know what to do. It´s not really that hard to figure out if you actually have people working on this game and taking this seriously. In my opinion this whole “discussion” is the same type of smoke and mirrors tactic used by Blizzard.

I really think that so many players would be satisfied with far more in-game content being released that had unique rewards for completing it. I’m not talking about living story 2-weeks and it is gone (better earn that backpiece quick) content…I am talking about adding challenges (could be another tab under achievements). A Challenge could be something like “defeat X champion solo” and the reward could be a unique item….I’ve mentioned before like a new pet for a ranger, or a unique looking piece of armor. Another challenge could be “complete X dungeon with only 3 people in your party” and this could reward ascended versions of the regular dungeon armor…or even a “hard mode” that people are asking for where every dungeon mob has 2x hps and hits for 2x damage…and this would reward ascended armor.

Horizontal progression (which it sounds like the majority wants) means having things to do, which grant you things for the things that you do….standing in lions arch and crafting is not my idea of fun….give me a challenge, or a quest, or a puzzle to get my ascended armor! Give me more ways to get it other than grinding for materials and then standing in lions arch!

It seems like a lot of recent updates are catered to removing gold from the economy by making people buy a lot from the TP. Rather than doing that, how about giving us ways of getting things that CANNOT be done through the TP. Make me do a quest for that armor….instead of buying the mats and crafting it….if the only way to get it is by doing a “hard mode” dungeon, or doing a specific quest, it doesn’t affect your economy one way or the other. The problem with making things be acquired from the TP is that it means that gold-farming is the most important aspect of the game….and if that is true, then that is all people will do….gold farm…which then means that you have to somehow get rid of the gold from the game…its a vicious cycle that can only be ended by getting people to do things other than gold-farm.

horizontal character progression…

I’ve never played gw1, but many have consistently mentioned that it had a great amount of profession options and flexibility. this game is in desperate need of profession development, so mirroring what was offered in your original game would be a good start.

in addition to the above, gw2 could use more buttons to press on the bar. I suggest something like this…
*#1-10 would be used for individual or multiple weapon skills.
*f1-f4 mechanics bar
*f5 heal skill
*f6 aoe/team heal skill
*f7-f10 utility skills
*f11 &f12 elite skills

a 3rd weapon swap option would be great as well.

last but not least, get rid of combat movement suppression and provide an option to pan out the camera more like you do for certain encounters.

thanks and make it so!

Belenwyn.8674:

The horizontal progression could go in many directions.

• More trophies from LW or world bosses for your home instance
• Methods to pimp up your gear with cosmetic effects like glowing or spikes etc.
• More exploration
• more story to read and more lore to learn
• new skills (here we could fall into vertical progression very easily if the new skills are too powerful or effective)
• new traits
• new weapons unlocked for the classes
• customisation of the home instance
• more skins via crafting or dungeons

Absolutely more armor sets and weapon skins.. and these should be rewards for completing dungeons, (living) story instances and achievements. And hopefully not via meta achievements we grind. And certainly not gemstore skins we simply farm gold for. But some achievements like weapon master, that require a lot of time to acquire, could have a weapon skin as reward. Especially the WvW and PvP ones should grant rewards that can be worn in PvE as well.

I’m not against ascended gear and items, but I believe the acquisition of new skills and new game mechanics makes for a more worthwhile progression in any game; even if the new skills and mechanics aren’t more powerful. They offer more diversity and change the way you play. Ascended gear is just meh.. same old same old and I’ll get it eventually.

I’d also like to see guild instances of world bosses. We do something similar now by finding an overflow and inviting guildies to it, but instanced versions for organised groups would be great.. and these instances can be more difficult and offer different rewards like tittles, leaderboard ranking, minis, influence and toys like banners and trophies. Rewards don’t have to be currency and gear.

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I find too many good looking skins are tied directly to the acquisition of wealth. So instead of getting these rewards by playing different aspects of the game, the easiest path is to grind champions in queensdale for gold and somply buy them off the TP… Not sure how that can be solved though..

Sytherek.7689:

Addendum to my prior post:

Ascended armor should have selectable stats. The current grind kills any interest in build experimentation.

Yes, this is about progression. Making ascended == progression.

Thanks for agreeing with me.

To me that stat-switching idea hits the right ‘sweet spot’ between not being forced on players, and being very attractive. I’d also feel far better about a grind if it were less about a sense of falling behind as stats progression is. Combine it with convenient trait swapping and you’ve got something everybody apparently loved in GW1 – the build experimentation and flexibility.

My personal feelings…

Ascended Gear

• Acquisition Amulets, rings, and even my first back piece ended up being rather fun to earn. The back piece was the funnest, as upgrading the Fractal Capacitor felt rewarding and was progression in it’s own right.
• Acquisition: Armor and Weapons I gave up on weapons when the math was done out and it was clear just exactly how much gold was needed to craft to level 500. I would need to get at least two crafting professions up to 500 to complete my set – a task not deemed worth it for the cost. Although armor is more reasonable, and I only play one character, I play multiple builds, and I don’t want to open that can of ascended worms.
• Conflict of Interests Before ascended armor and, I believe, weapons came out, it was Legendary weapons changed to be stat-swappable. It was also announced to expect legendary trinkets and, eventually, legendary armor to boot. Legendary equipment takes an incredible amount of gold. I want to save gold from crafting ascended armor and weapons, and skip right to legendary.

I have also put off working on my legendary weapon (all material earned, save for the precursor, to which I have the gold to purchase) because I could have a stat-swappable ring or back piece instead. The weapon I may or may not use depending on the build, where as I will always be wearing the trinket or armor piece regardless of what I’m doing in the game.

But what if… there was a way to earn stat-swappability? Maybe I have to make a Knight’s coat and a Berserker’s coat, and throw them into the mystic forge to combine them, and out pops a Knight/Berserker’s coat. This would be amazing horizontal progression for single-character, multiple-build players like myself! (And boy would it clear up my inventory.) I will say, if the recipe conflicts with legendaries, I won’t pursue (i.e. Knight’s armor + 250 Vials of Powerful Blood).

Also as someone mentioned on page 1, and I lightly mentioned already, I would LOVE to see more progressional items in this game, like the Fractal Capacitor.

Swagger.1459:

horizontal character progression…

I’ve never played gw1, but many have consistently mentioned that it had a great amount of profession options and flexibility. this game is in desperate need of profession development, so mirroring what was offered in your original game would be a good start.

in addition to the above, gw2 could use more buttons to press on the bar. I suggest something like this…
*#1-10 would be used for individual or multiple weapon skills.
*f1-f4 mechanics bar
*f5 heal skill
*f6 aoe/team heal skill
*f7-f10 utility skills
*f11 &f12 elite skills

a 3rd weapon swap option would be great as well.

last but not least, get rid of combat movement suppression and provide an option to pan out the camera more like you do for certain encounters.

thanks and make it so!

So 22 skills available at any one time? What would it add to the game?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Felbryn.5462:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

The two main areas for discussion will be Horizontal and Vertical progression, however please understand that the commentary and ideation we are really looking for regarding vertical is around its accessibility in game.

I’m not sure I understand this bit; could you clarify?

Hi,

To clarify I am looking forward to hearing the communities thoughts on speed of acquisition such as how long crafting time takes? or drop rates in fractals and other areas of the game etc.

The speed of acquisition of ascended weapons and armor due to gating and high cost (10,800 silk scraps for 1 set of armor!) is far far too slow IMHO. And for no good reason when those with gold can simply buy the intermediate mats and gear up quickly anyway. This is also the case of legendary weapons when the game for a year now has not had a reasonable alternative in game method of obtaining precursors other than be subject to the whims of extreme RNG. This cripples those with alts and who want variety in terms of builds.

Drop rates are too low, I’ve never had an ascended weapon drop and its been a substantial time period since they were introduced, in the same time period I’ve had many exotic items drop. Many in my guild are exactly the same. I wouldn’t mind the drop rates, and what I consider the extreme RNG, if there were reasonable alternative methods of obtaining the items. I don’t consider a long and expensive (considering what it takes to get to 500) crafting option a reasonable alternative given the cost to get to 500 and the gating and the fact that probably the majority of players dislike crafting. I would consider items being available for sale on the TP, a token system, or some sort of quest system a reasonable alternative.

Plus in the open world there is the issue of DR to make it worse, which is simply an anti player measure. You’ve ostensibly said its for botting but it ends up punishing individual players.

As for RNG you can’t just look at the overall game economy ( as I think John Smith does). You have to consider the effect on individual players when drop rates are so low it appears that a player can play for thousands of hours and legitimately never get a precursor or an ascended item. This is exacerbated when we see others get multiple precursors dropping either from drops or the mystic forge.

Most other games have reasonable alternative methods of obtaining high value items arenanet is hugely inconsistent on this point to the point where IMHO one of your design rules for every piece of content should be to provide reasonable alternative for obtaining rewards.

You’ve ended up with a worst of the world approach, BiS items are so grindy to get that those who want horizontal progression are turned off but the time gating, the low drop rates and the sheer length of time to obtain ascended items (unless you have gold) also turns off those who want a bit of vertical progression.

I’ll end with repeating something I’ve said a few times on this forum:

“My best time in the game was early this year before world XP was introduced in WvW and when the events in Orr hadn’t been nerfed. I had karma to outfit my lvl 80s, I was easily able to experiment builds and easily gear up for new builds and just play and experiment to my hearts content.

I had to make sure I did dailies and monthlies for laurels but whilst they were something of a job it wasn’t that bad. I was able to use some mats to make some vanity weapons like abyssal scepter and the anomaly.

Now I have to do dailies and monthlies, I have to do my daily ascended crafting, I have to make sure I mine my quartz and convert it to charged quartz, I have to farm for mats required for ascended crafting in Orr and other areas or grind for gold to buy them. I’m restricted in the builds I can experiment with cause BiS is so hard to get.
Everything is a job or we’re restricted from playing how we want."

For a short TLDR of this entire post: I’m mostly OK with the progression systems we have in place, but the options – and especially the methods of acquisition – need to be expanded.

Part One: Vertical progression:

Stop. Right here, right now. I don’t want any more vertical progression.

That may sound awfully harsh and close-minded, but I’ll do my best to explain.

I totally understand the introduction of ascended gear. Exotic was very easy to achieve. As a Guild Wars 1 veteran with over 2200 hours and a full Hall of Monuments, I was fine – no, enthusiastic – about easy-to-achieve top-tier stats. As a result I was a little disappointed with the introduction of ascended gear, which requires a lot more time and effort. That’s not to say I’m against it – I also understand that a lot of players come from other games with different philosophies, and some of these players want or need a lot of vertical progression to feel like they’re making progress, while some others just don’t understand horizontal progression at all.

All this is fine. I don’t even mind that ascended gear is untradeable. The problem I have with ascended gear (and celestial exotic gear) is the time gating. It makes sense as a way to slow down acquisition to make it feel more like a quest or genuine undertaking, but the implementation of the time gate is clumsy. The game presents no explanation as to why I can only craft one Lump of Mithrillium per day, or fuse one Charged Quartz Crystal per day – it simply throws a timer in my face. It’s a blatantly artificial restriction completely unrelated to game lore.

I would love to see time-gated crafting worked directly into gameplay, as opposed to simply slapped with a timer. Tie this crafting to actual game events out in the world! Keep the timer on the crafting stations, but also allow us to go out into the world if we want to craft more quickly or with more flavour attached – repeatedly running an event that lets me craft something once per completion allows me to work for my armour, rather than just clicking “craft” once per day for thirty days. Here’s an example I came up with on the spot to illustrate; I’m sure that better events could be conceived with more effort.

The only place in the world with the tools to craft Mithrillium is an ancient dwarven smithy in Mount Maelstrom, hidden under the ruins of Droknar’s Forge. The dredge now occupy the smithy, trying (and failing) to destroy the durable mithril machinery of their oppressors. They have figured out, though, that you need a special hammer to get mithril to react with ectoplasm, which they’ll use to break down the oppressors’ technology. A dredge smith has learned to craft such a hammer, but it’s fragile, and can only be used once before breaking. To prevent others from interrupting their work, the dredge have set up traps and checkpoints defending the forge.

All this comes together to create a multi-stage event to obtain a hammer used to craft Mithrillium: defeat the dredge guards, puzzle through their traps, and finally defeat the dredge blacksmith to steal his hammer. The guard groups and puzzles would change at random each time the event runs, so it’s somewhat different every time you do it. Maybe the actual location of the event changes as well, to keep players exploring and moving around, instead of just waiting for the next spawn. Better still, allow us to trigger the event ourselves with a personal cooldown – many players working together could craft more frequently than one player working alone.

So, slowly coming around to how that relates to vertical progression: adding more levels or another tier of gear would break the systems we have now. It takes a month to craft all the required ingredients for a full set of ascended armour – imagine how players would react if a game release pushed the max level to 85 or 90, or if another tier of gear was added above ascended, and suddenly the ascended gear that took us a month of real time to craft is no longer best in slot.

To put it simply, that would be bad.

Whew, that was a lot of words. Now I’ll move on to part two: horizontal progression.

Guild Wars 2 has done a reasonably good job of horizontal progression. There are a variety of different skins obtainable through a variety of methods. I actually really like that some skins are exclusive to Living Story updates -

The one feature most sorely needed to help skin collection is some sort of renewable skin storage locker. At the moment, if I have a character with a set build that uses certain gear stats, and I want more visual options for that character, I’m forced to buy/craft multiple sets of gear for each visual set. This was at least not too difficult with exotics, if kitten bank space; but now with ascended armour it’s completely infeasible to craft multiple sets of gear just for the sake of skins – even if you have all the materials, it still takes a month for a full set of ascended armour due to the time gating (see above). A locker would effectively solve the problem of having to keep multiple gear sets for appearances. Even better, while we’re at it, allow us to unlock stat combinations the same way – use a crystal on a berserker light coat, unlock berserker stat option for light coat slot (though if that happens, maybe unlockable gear stats should be character bound and not account bound – not sure how I feel about that one yet)

Of course a skin locker with unlimited skins would cut down on transmutation sales. I think a reasonable compromise would be to require a transmutation stone or crystal (depending on gear level) to unlock a skin in the locker – for example, to unlock a level 80 coat skin I have to use a transmutation crystal to put that skin in the locker, and afterwards I have unlimited withdrawals.

And while we’re at it, why not put Living Story achievement skins in the locker too, so that we can have multiples instead of only one?

So that’s got gear covered, but gear is only one element of horizontal progression. I’d also like to see more character customization options in the form of traits and skills.

Before launch there was talk of having to go out into the world to find new skills and traits. I don’t recall exactly why it was scrapped, but I think it was something about class balance – like, you don’t want the elementalist’s skills to be harder to unlock than the warrior’s.

BUT, we now have a pretty strongly balanced core set of skills and traits, and have had that core for a year. Why not add future skills/traits by tying them to world events or locations? The new healing skills were a great addition, but just dropping them into the menu at a cost of 25 skill points, while accessible, is pretty uninteresting (and that’s leaving aside the problem that such a high SP cost, on a level with tier 2 elites, can easily lead new players to think that these are best-in-slot skills, as opposed to simply extra options). It would be great to see a jumping puzzle set in an ancient ruined library, where the reward is a skill or trait tome that unlocks one (or more!) new option for your current character’s class. To start, ANet could place these in easy-to-find areas in the starting zones, to immediately show new players that exploring can reward them with new skills and traits.

Finally, there’s one area of build customization that could/should be improved: decouple stat bonuses from trait points. Make the two separate, or at least give us some flexibility in which stats we get from which trait lines. Some classes have problems with traits in stat lines that are completely unrelated to those traits, or restrict builds by tying traits to certain stats. Maybe I’d like to run a glass cannon elementalist that uses signets as a complement, but the way things are set up now, if I want to invest traits in signets I have to go down the Earth trait tree, which is defensively oriented. A couple more examples include Water Magic’s Shard of Ice and Vital Striking traits, which would be cool offensive options but are stuck in a support line.

In addition to our 70 skill points, give us 1400 stat points that we can allot in increments of 10 (or for stuff like crit damage or condition duration, 10 points = 1%). Or if that much freedom is too powerful, at least give us some choice as to which stats a trait line assigns – for example, the elementalist’s Fire Magic line could give us two of Power, Condition Damage, or Condition Duration; Water could let us choose Healing, Vitality, Toughness, Boon Duration; etc.

I think that’s it for now!

When I first played Gw2 on that last beta weekend prior to launch I was on the fence about buying and getting into yet another standard MMO, so I did some research and once I saw the Dev comment “Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game. We want everyone on an equal power base. The rare stuff becomes the really awesome looking armours. It’s all about collecting the unique looking stuff and collecting all the other rare collectable items in the game: armour pieces, potentially different potions…” I was sold, I was so tired of stat progression type games that I have been playing for 10+yrs. So I started playing and I was hooked instantly, I loved being able to try new builds and earn gear sets quickly on all my characters without the worry of being behind statistically, sure many of my sets were ugly looking at first but it would just lead me to the gem store to buy transmutation stones and skins.

Once Ascended gear was announced I felt like I was kicked in the ding dong and was immediately saddened knowing that if i were to attempt to earn this gear I would be unable to play around with gear sets at a max statistical level, I would now be forced into one character using only one build forever until I was able and willing to put forth the heavy time gated grind to earn another set. Now this grind would be worth it IMO if it was ONLY for the convenience of being able to change your stat setup at anytime and anywhere not for a stat increase. Many players say its only a small stat increase and not needed to play the game, exactly the point the stats are not and were not needed in the game.

I personally feel all progression should be horizontal, ones boost in power should be based on their skill and experience not by the +5 power on their axe.

I really just wish progression wasn’t stat or gear based. I love acquiring new skins and all, but I really honestly don’t care if I have +2 stats or not, yet I feel inclined to get ascended gear so that I can be really well prepared for WvW and the content I like.

I hate crafting, I loathe it. Having Ascended armor & weapons only truly acquirable through crafting frustrates the ever living heck out of me, and much of the WvW crowed to be honest with you. Being forced to do a type of content that we absolutely do NOT like is frustrating. I’m not saying ascended should be super mega easy to acquire but there should be more avenues/options for acquisition outside of crafting it. It’s account bound anyways, so you can’t even sell it so it really has no market viability in any way shape or form.

I’m tired of having to worry about additional stats, it’s an exhausted method of progression in MMO’s and not what this game was advertised to be about at all. Especially coming from experience in GW1 and this whole “manifesto” thing that was basically thrown out the window when the game launched.

Give us other forms of progression to pursue, go back to the skin acquisition method in some form rather than stats progress. Let us work towards prestige skills, unlocking new weapon types for classes (such as dual pistol mesmer) or something that’s really fun & different.

Giving us factions to join and do quests that are very story driven, or progress/rank driven through jobs within said factions would be fun. You could start with the orders, giving us order missions with a diverse variety of types like espionage, diplomacy, war/combat. Do more with our personal selections such as (using human as example)

Nobility – Queen’s Court // Ministry Guard

Streets – The Underground // Something Else Street-like

Etc, so on so forth. Each one can have different ranks to acquire that come with titles. For nobility you can start out as a Lord/Lady, work your way to a Baron/Baroness, etc and even allow avenues within each sect to converge and allow for more freedom of like a “poor person” to climb to the middle class, and possibly even a lower tier of nobility under the right circumstances (but obviously limit how far 1 character can go with multi-factioning, and obviously if someone were to stick to one primary sect/faction they will be able to attain the highest rank possible whereas if you’re from 1 of the others, you can only get so far inside another one.

Lheimroo.2947:

Sytherek.7689:

Addendum to my prior post:

Ascended armor should have selectable stats. The current grind kills any interest in build experimentation.

Yes, this is about progression. Making ascended == progression.

Thanks for agreeing with me.

To me that stat-switching idea hits the right ‘sweet spot’ between not being forced on players, and being very attractive. I’d also feel far better about a grind if it were less about a sense of falling behind as stats progression is. Combine it with convenient trait swapping and you’ve got something everybody apparently loved in GW1 – the build experimentation and flexibility.

I will also throw my vote at this…it would put more meaning into me making ascended gear for my characters and I wouldn’t feel so stressed about picking the right set of stats to work for my character in “most” situations that I find myself in.

People would still go for legendaries simply for their looks! (face it, twighlight looks a heck of a lot better than the current ascended sword and when legendary armor comes, it could have amazing looks as well to get people to go for that over “vanilla” ascended armor).