Guild Wars 2

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Ascended creation time

We had a lot of discussion pre-releasing ascended armor to make sure the time to make ascended doesn’t blow out, We pull a lot of data and are watching how long it takes players and like we do with everything we will keep and eye on it but with anything with progression there are always a lot of tradeoffs when you make changes but we’re always looking at it.

If you really are looking at ascended creation time I would like to know what do you think because after playing since first betas I played almost daily, and all my characters have ascended amulets, only few rings cause I don’t play fractals that much, as for accessors only one character cause their price is just too high in laurels and guild commendations come slower, as for back pieces I have two. Thats a daily playing since you introduced them.

The way you made with ascended crafting it is really bad.
I could probably craft like 3 weapons and maybe half of an armor is just out of my reach.

I don’t feel like I really gain anything about that.
I only feel that I have to get to the best gear spot so I can be sure I from this point it’s only my skills – if I die or not.

Also I see ti TOTALLY punishing for having alts. It really is bad since for every content I will always choose the best geared character – just because.

So please, I really want to know how should people who play many strategies(stats)/characters(alts) feel about ascended gear and how time and money consuming it is.

I will also say that for me it’s fail to say it doesn’t matter cause you made vertical progression and even that 1% will always matter for many people.
And it really kills my fun – the spot that I’m in.

Especially that going for that limitations you kinda made everyone who spends more time playing TP than any other game mod be at disadvantage. Not to mention that people with a lot of cash just got richer. So they way for little players to earn gold is as I see it a fail.

How about “skill skins”. Finishers are a big hit so why not introduce something similar in PvE.

Each utility skill has a “skin slot” in the hero panel and has several (and more with passing time) “skin options”. Upon completing some difficult challenge (combined with paying skill points/ karma/ whatever currency maybe) you can unlock one new skin for one of your skills, making its casting animation visually cooler.

Examples:

Signet activation picture could be cooler – longer lasting, and surrounded by rays of light or dripping with blood, etc.

All kinds of shockwaves could be colored.

Any field could have a “fence”. From a ring of fire to an actual wooden fence.

Turrets/summons/illusions/pets/conjured weapons/spirit weapons/banners looking cooler is not really a new idea.

And best of all: you dont like it? leave it in default form.

You could start with elites to decrease the workload, then slowly expand.

ZeftheWicked.3076:

6. gem store

The prices – aren’t we a bit too expensive NcSoft? I mean it’s simple economy (which i have master’s degree of) that teaches that if something is cheaper more people will buy it (given it’s attractive to them) and the number of purchases will often outweigh the loss in price. Looking at other mmos i recently played i can certainly say your prices are way above the optimal pricing line.

Skins – it’s epic we’re starting to get good skins, but doesn’t that mean that those go into gemstore instead of ingame? And now people who could get new and cool looking customization options are stuck behind a pay-gate?

I agree with your opinion on prices, very much so.
It has happened to me many times that I refused to buy an item in the gem shop simply because, in my opinion, what I paid was not worth what I got.

For example, the special dye packs. I refuse to pay real money for RNG anymore. 125 gems for one single Black Lion Key? No thanks.
Last year, I bought and opened 45 (!) of the Wintersday Gift Boxes, in the hopes of getting one or more of the minis. 45 boxes later, not a single mini, I was out 50 dollars, and all I had were a bunch of useless turret cannon things.

That made me realize that there was NO way I would spend money on RNG stuff in the gem shop anymore. A year later, I still haven’t.

I bought all the mini packs (with fixed drops), armors, Marjory’s Dagger, I have spent hundreds of dollars in the gem store (I want to support Anet and vote with my money on items I like). But I would buy even more if the prices were lower and in accordance with what I feel like I’m getting.

The ONLY items in the gem shop that are, I feel, at their correct price is the Hair Styling Kit and the Makeover Kit.

As for more armor skins in-game as rewards or at vendors or as drops, YES PLEASE!
I am kind of tired of buying full sets of skins in the gem shop. No feeling of achievement or reward.
Want a new looking armor? Get the gems! Nevermind that I will then see everyone and their mother run around in the same set for the next 2 weeks.

I always thought the endgame of GW2 is all about collecting the best looking armor and weapon skins. I have pretty much settled on being a berserker. I have different sets with other stats, but I mostly use my berserker stats all the time. So I have a few different armor sets, all with berserker stats. I have a full arah berserker set, full CoE berserker set, full phoenix light armor berserker set, full sylvari tier 3 berserker set, etc. The reason I collect sets is not to have a different set with different stats, but just for the looks. I collect armor sets because I like to change my look each day.

So my issue is that each time I want to get a new armor set, I have to spend an addition 70+ gold buying the same runes that I already have on 5 other sets… That is a huge problem. I can’t just use a transmutation crystal to copy the new set onto the old set either, because I still want to wear the old set, just not on that particular day.

In PvE, this needs to be done like the Spvp Armor Locker. So I don’t have to keep buying the the same runes for 70 gold on each new armor set, and I don’t have to use my entire storage on armor sets that have all the same stats.

The endgame is all about collecting skins, but the way collecting skins is implemented, it’s as if you want us to pick an armor set and stick with it forever on that one character. Especially now with Ascended armor, whatever stats and look you decide to have on that set, after spending over a month to craft it, is what you’re gonna be stuck with…..

Please think of a better and more practical way for people who think of character progression as collecting cool skins and want to change between them often.

(P.S: At this very moment I badly want to buy the Trickster light armor set from the gem store, but the thought of having to buy a full berserker set to transmute it on top of and 6 more traveler runes to socket it with turns me off.)

Well personally i am a bit annoyed by ascended armors because i don’t like crafting, however the difference between exotic and ascended is so small that it doesn’t feel like a forced decision and i like this fact.

Oh, I like this one… let me describe my own experience.

Back in 2012, before the game was launched, I had 6 friends who had bought the pre-purchase edition just like I did. Two of them were super-hardcore grinders, so they got really fast to the 80 and after a little time they had their top exotic gear. And at this very point, they had nothing to progress for, so the quit the game.

Three more friends were kinda slower at leveling, they wanted to enjoy the whole content, so it took them more time… we are talking months here… and then the same story like with the first two – they max-geared and had nothing else to do.

One last friend stood for more time in the game, he got first 80 a few days after I did (end of November 2012, I guess)… and he was casually playing along, he did some dungeons, he did some WvW and he was the only real-life friend, who stood in and was playing the LS content with me. This year, he made an alt and leveled it to 80, he again did some end-game content on casual-pace, but somewhere around the beginning of September, he didn´t really log into the game for more than few minutes. I asked him why is that, and his response? “I don´t know what to do in the game anymore.” – it´s translated from Czech language, so it is not 100% accurate, but it´s pretty much what he said.

And it is what I feel about Guild Wars 2 too… I love the world, I love lore, I love graphics, I love the pace you give us new content (2 weeks are amazing for payment-free game), I love combat and so on… I REALLY DO LIKE GUILD WARS 2, but sometimes I just lose interest and skip few LS patches, because of rewards for my time. Don´t get me wrong, I like playing games just for fun, but I don´t like all the content, its nobodys fault, you can´t like everything… but if there were proper rewards, I would do the content even if I didn´t like it. Now I do content just if I want to, and that is what differs my GW2 experience from other MMOs, which had better rewards (Example: opening chest at the end of 1 hour battling through the Nightmare Tower and getting 3 greens? Come on…).

You really did try to improve this end-game stuff, and I mostly like it, but I still expect more to come – how about unlockable PERMANENT dungeons? You have to do a lower dungeons to unlock higher/harder ones with better rewards – but the rewards have to be worth it ofc., or we would return to classic CoF farming. Ascended crafting is a good example of you trying to improve motivation for end-game players – and I appreciate that, but the 400 to 500 leveling is just annoying, discovering xy weapons which I am never ever going to craft again is not the best way imo, but I still do it, because that is exactly what I wanted in the beginning of this year – some progression.

Also don´t forget the Fractals – great end-game kind of stuff, but the rewards… maaan, people do it just if they want to, not for the rewards, if they want rewards (proportional to the time spent in), they would rather do some fast dungeon paths. Same goes with Tequatl, do you know why I didn´t even bother trying to do that new version? REWARDS, there are no good rewards except for 0,001 drop chance for good stuff and some achievements (which is not good enough for me for this amount of effort).

One last example – train farms, somebody from ArenaNet in some video said, that they like it because it´s something they wanted – community doing stuff together, but at the same point it´s not really the way ArenaNet intended community stuff to be. What to do with these trains? If you raise rewards in… everything from dungeons to Living Story, people definitely would do less brainless train running around the map (and yeah, some LS content is about that too), which gives them good rewards compared to the time spent. BUT THAT DOESN´T MEAN “NERF THE CHAMPS”.

My point is, if you want to improve character progression, you have to start with the rewards, they have to match the time/effort spent into content, and if they don´t, people just stick to easier (but with pretty much same rewards) content. Lets give us new permanent dungeons with progression as described above, lets give us proper rewards for doing harder content, lets give us progression which isn´t about farming achievement points.

As I said above, I love the game, it´s amazing, but it has alot of space to improve if we speak of “end-game character” progression. Most people don´t play just because it´s fun, not if we speak about MMOs… they also expect to be somewhat motivated by the game itself. Keep on doing good job, lets make 2014 to be the year in which players return to Tyria! :-)

PROGRESSION IN BEING SPECIAL

I have to add that making things like legendaries buyable and madeable by all tradeable items is kinda very bad for any progression towards showing off some skills and feeling like some kind of veteran or champion.

At first dungeon armors meant something, you had to be expirienced and to hard stuff but they quickly lost that except for Arach armor, but it also faded in time.
Legendaries meant something on the start, now it’s only money grind or being lucky. People who play only or mostly on TP have them easily.

Could it be possible… Well it is possible, maybe would you consider making things like legendaries madeable only by effort and hard work instead of playing TP and mindless grinding?

There is just no progression in feeling special.
If you would have to make 100 charged quarts, every path in every dungeon 3-4 times (spacial tokens for each path or achievement), use all those always BTA crafting items like all obsidian refined materials and raw ecto refined materials, maybe some kind of tokens for making living stories, laurels, guild commendations, fractal relics, gifts of explorations, maybe some special quests (like you are planing for precursor hunt – data mined source).

It would really force people who want to stand out make some real effort with challenges not only time consumption effort.
I loved the system in tribulation SAB that you had to redo that hard experience and you could show of with your skins. This kinda should fit legendaries – how they are made and all that. Making them all tied by resources on TP or buying them from TP kinda killed the idea in the first place.

Now when I see someone with legendary and all I see is someone who got lucky at the start of GW2 or farmed gold by any means.
That’s not the feeling that I should have.

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.

I hope this adds some clarity.

Chris

Ah, well then. I feel that the amount of time required to craft ascended items is ridiculous. As it stands you can earn 1 piece of armor per 4-6 days, heavy armor is 5 days tops IIRC for the helm 4 for everything else. This doesn’t scale well with the little amount of dragonite you need. Stars and dust are almost irrelevant, but I feel the whole "daily ecto crafting part was just thrown on top to make the experience longer and nothing else. Seeing this, people feel like the time required is too much and they don’t try to achieve getting ascended pieces.

A month of play is too long for a gear set, builds can change, people may (should) have different builds for wvw, and pve. This forces them to chose what they will play more until they finish each set. On top of this you can only work on 1 character at a time, then to cap that off each craft has the same timer. A better solution to this would be different daily mats for each craft, sure it would be more work to add in different storage places, but the pay off for people with multiple classes would be better. And it would still keep the time for 1 set regulated since you would not be able use light mats in med armors, etc.

The crafts don’t feel balanced either, it’s longer and more expensive to gear out light characters, heavy is the quickest, and medium is the cheapest. So really light got screwed. I just feel that the balance of each profession wasn’t suited and the 1 daily mat is just too much, the only limited thing should be dragonite. It is account bound, you can only get a set amount each day, that set amount is only dependent on how much effort you put in to it, and it isn’t just a gimick to get me to log in at reset. It makes players take part in 1 area the game has to offer, instead on sitting in LA waiting., and lastly dragonite would be the only time gated mat. It just should not take more than 2 weeks to get a full suit of armor. I can get a full exotic set in about 3 hours. 1 or 2 weeks is long enough.

As far as vertical progression goes, there needs to be content in that game that would permit this. Bring out tougher dungeons, harder modes, raids? nothing here requires me to get better gear I only do so because it is better, which makes it all the more lackluster when I complete it.
Cosmetic progression? I don’t see how this could be good at all, Person A: haha that’s only tier 3, Person B: but I like how it looks. Person A: haha noob, not tier 5. This would happen, though I wouldn’t really care people will, and people will complain that this doesn’t look as good as that etc blah blah blah. It’s a bad idea.

Skills, we need more USEFUL skills. Swappable weapon skills would also greatly diversify build variation in spvp and wvw, possibly pve. OF course utility and elites as well. Traits, of course new ones; or even fixing old ones to do what they say they will do or change them to say what they actually do. Make us players actually have to work to get these skills or traits too, I have to many skill points as is, no price of a skill will stop me from buying anything new, it takes away from the experience of earning something new. You could integrate earning new skills and traits in to newer more difficult dungeons, or open world bosses in new zones.

Give me something to work for, that I can’t just buy right away, and isn’t timed gated with stupid daily things.

Septemptus.7164:

Now when I see someone with legendary and all I see is someone who got lucky at the start of GW2 or farmed gold by any means.
That’s not the feeling that I should have.

+1, legendaries currently invoke thoughts like “wallet warrior” / “TP abuser” rather than “dedicated player”.

More basic question which probably didn’t even got considered.

Do we even need character progression?

I played Gw1 for years, where in about 10 hrs or so in some campaign you could already be max level with max gear and, with few more money/hrs/effort investiment, go around shopping the “good” skills you needed to run the best builds.

Yet, took 5 years to get bored of Gw1, took 6 months to feel the same in Gw2.

I don’t want the character to progress, especially by a boring “+ 2 Xstat” gear tier system.
I (player) am the one that must progress.

Gw1 was brutal at times. WoC HM quests were, at times, trowing at you 20 mobs of lvl 32 with overbuffed stats/attack+movement+cast speed/armor and (especially for WiK/WoC) top pvp/pve-heroes playerbuilt skillset. Against your lvl 20 8-man team.
Just an example.
The message in Gw1 has always been “Your character reached the peak of power long time ago. Now it’s up to you. Time to get gud or gtfo”.

This is just the base. I don’t think Gw2 ever needed higher stat items.
Ascended brings a LOT of issues with them, because you wanted them so hard.

-worsening the issues of build variety: you’ve bound stats to gear. The longer/harder gets to aquire it, the less sets players will be prone to make, the less builds will be created or even experimented. Even only with exotics it was quite a chore to try out new stuff requiring different stats. (ignoring the fact that for pve you just deck out in zerk and you’re done with it. That’s a different topic.)
-acquisition is totally screwed – timegate, RNG, grind, forcing players trough specific game parts (fractals, guild missions, crafting)
-benefits are not worthy. With current system you’re just kitten ing off both sides.
No-vertical progression players feels cheated and uneasy about ascended gear. Either leaving, ignoring it (which means ignoring fractals, aka content) or putting themself to make ascended but feeling it a chore forced to them.
Vertical progression fanatics get a such small stat improvement that’s hardly noticeable. The only reason for ascended atm is fractals, and not for stats, but for AR. Also, this kind of players will probably leave as soon as the next “Oldschool MMO” comes out, because if you seek properly made vertical progression you’re looking elsewhere from Gw2.
-force players to spend money. I’m not talking about the gold sink part of ascended, which is right to some extent. I’m talking about Real money. Especially ascended armor and weapons are literally forcing everybody to buy fine tstones. Gw2 is still a lot based on cosmetic for endgame items. Making all of them obsolete and forcing transmutation is just low. Nobody in a game like Gw will accept to don’t care of aestetich “because has better stats”.
Also, it devalues the whole exotic skin market and meaning. Infinite Light/Mjolnir can cost 1000g or so in the making (for the skin), but being exotic is automatically inferior to ascended counterpart, thus giving player a “hidden” hint to open their wallet. And so happens for every exotic item.

Overall ascended, 1 year later, still look like a poorly thought out mess, ruining the whole game balance and enjoyement, and most importantly still seems to have been added for no tangible reason aside trying to please the vertical progression players which were already leaving for other MMOs (and you know, it might have been much better to let them gtfo and while staying true to Gw franchise fundations. Vertical Progression based MMOs are everywhere, this game should have been the refuge for everybody who despise it).

(and no, “Bridging from exotic to legendary” doesn’ work. Legendary had exotic-level statup until ascended weapons came out. Exotic armor and trinkets where already BiS items. Fractals AR system could have worked out without the need of a new tier.)

This for the “WTF are you doing” and “Let me tell you why that’s a BS”part.

Now, for propositions:

- build variety + benefits are not worthy: packed toghether cause my proposition is aimed at both. Better benefits shouldn’t be “MOAR POWER”. More utility/convenience. And you’ve done it with legendary stuff so there is no “technical limitations” excuse now.

Downgrade Ascended (and legendary) items to Exotic power level.
Allow ascended items to swap stats out of combat.

Boom, that’s it.
Downgrading means that, unless you’re aiming to high fractals level, you’re BiS with exotics (ascended becomes exotics with AR slots). Stat swapping means that even if you don’t care of fractals, you’ll have interest in chasing it, much more than “for the +5 at power stat”. No more different set for each build/game mode: you’ll have to grind (which is now optional, because exotics are BiS) and as reward you now can use 1 single armor/weapon/trinket set for everything, instead of flooding your bags with 3 copies of same item to accomodate the different builds.
q:“Why bother with legendary items if ascended can swap stats too then?”
a: “Appereance. Like theyhave always intended to be.”

-force players to spend money: introduce the “Ascension” of Exotic items trough game methods. I can be an expensive crafting recipe with turns your weapon from exotic to ascended. A MF recipe. A game quest. A reward for some activity. Whatever you can come up with. But gve players the option to turn exotics in ascended without Cash Shop. You can make it grindy, make the ascended acc-bound on creation, but at least there’s the option.

-acquisition is totally screwed: not going to repeat what other poster said already…but, with first suggestion (downgrade to exotic with AR slots and stat swap) grinding becomes much less a pressure, because as long as you don’t want to delve in high level fractals you’re fine with exotics, and grinding for a convenience (stat swapping) is much more rewarding than doing it for “+5 power”. That said, the acquisition system needs some work.

Btw, if nothing changes in any shape or form, this is probably last time i’m taking all this effort to give feedback on your game. I’ve stopped logging since Oct. I’ve stoppend enjoying the game well before that. And the whole Ascended mess had a quite large role in this.

Sincerely, deluded Gw1 player.

I think you shoud introduce some normal way of getting ascended armor and weapons in pvp (wvw). Like new ascended vendor that needs new badges or the old ones + laurens or something.
It would be cool if the enemy commander (player) could drop some ascended gear. You will get achivment and a new title `enemy commander eliminator`. There can be like few days cooldown because of posible exploits.
The point is i rly dont like crafting, the most satisfying things in mmos (when we talk about gear) is loot.
Make it hard to get but make it posible by playing how u like.

Hi,

Well, touchy subjet here…

In fact, more than providing information what I would most desire is to obtain information from you developpers.

I can understand that you thought the game was lacking ascended tier and implemented it. I do not share this vision, but I can deal with it.

What I would like to know before knowing if GW2 is STILL a game for me is what awaits in the future.

• Is Ascended gear the latest tier that will be ever implemented in this game?
• Will the level cap raise?

Simple and plain questions.
Because introducing a new tier lately or increasing the level cap will mean that when in six months from now, when I get myself geared in ascended it will be useless:

- A new tier will render ascended useless
- New level cap would mean higher level ascended gear, making ascended lvl80 gear useless.

And please, saying that you go for vertical progression because it is ‘easier’ to implement feels somehow cheap for your customers. Even if it is true, hearing this still feels like we were cheated.

So, some points :

• make ascended the latest ever tier in the game
• make ascended switch stats like legendary
• Do not increase level cap

For horizontal, without creating new armors there is already a way to please soem players with the existing one : make an account bound skin locker. At least those like me that don’t care about stats will play the collector’s game.

I am seriously thinking if GW2 is still a game for me. I will be watching closely this thread and I believe it will give me the answer to that question.

Best regards.

What gets me worried is that someday we might get an increased cap level. With the increment in cap lvl there will probably be new armors for those new XYZ levels.

How would you guys find the right balance between the high-end armors we have right now, and future armor.

I had in mind that (talking only about ascended right now) it should level as you gain higher levels.

In my opinion higher level cap with new content is cool and very desirable (despite everyone gonna say how they don’t want to grind more, but yet they’ve completed all their goals and QQ about nothing new for them) so if it comes in future release it is very welcome, but current high-end gear should be addressed too in this mater. I know I’m talking way down in the future (and if it ever happens) but still it should be put out there.

Hello

Im going to be pretty short on this one. Anyway, there is plenty of ways of adding stuff as a reward without turning the game into gear treadmill, like all others MMOs – in short “to stick to your roots”. Here are couple of my ideas:

• REVAMP skill system. It is somewhat too fast to have all weapon skills, for ex., unlocked at level 10 and to have access to elite skills at level 30 (both, which arent even at first half of levels). Make higher level requirement for those. Make more skill points required for Elite skills.
  In addition, do like you did with GW. Make some more unique skills or, perhaps, skill skins that player HAVE to aquire with missions/quests/dungeons. It adds up to immersion, by boundind specific skill to certain task that player have completed. Also, adds up to the feeling of reward, which brings me to my next point
• Add more unique weapons/drops involved at doing specific event or dungeon. Of course, drop chance doesnt have necessarilly to be 70%+. Make it drops more rarely, so that player will definatelly have the feel of accomplishment.
• Add also more dungeons or new paths to already existing ones. Instead of adding “living story” all the time with the new update, make some “new area update” with new dungeon at that area, that would have its story mode and its new 3 unique paths. In addition, those new armor/weapon sets DONT HAVE TO BE increased in stats, in comparison to older ones. Just make them looks cool and unique (which is the main goal for the game in the first place).
• Bring back token farming system from dungeons like it was, back at initial launch. I havent seen anything wrong with 10 item tokens gained per path daily. Why someone, at some point, two weeks after launch, decided that it is cool to increase drops by 200% i dont know. It made gaining of items super easy and lowered the feel of reward. Which, again, brings me to the next point.
• Super-grind (Vindictus, Lineage II etc.) is not okay, which is the goal of GW2, but neither is get-everything-in-a-week. Find a ‘sweet spot’ somewhere in between. Make players try harder, to get specific reward (which many points above would add up to, however). That would make players play longer your game, plus it adds up to feeling of getting reward.
• All those things from above need not to be applied to 80th and to 80th level only. Make players more bussier, both while leveling and while they got to the max level.

I am hoping that someone from Arena.net will read this and take some of these ideas into consideration. Thank you in advance,

Dzoni

I don’t think you need the community to tell you that Guild Wars 1 is a perfect example regarding horizontal and vertical progression, right?

I know that Guild Wars 2 is trying to become it’s own game and that is completely fine. I don’t want GW2 to become the same as GW1, however, taking the succesful things from GW1 and bring those things to GW2 isn’t a bad thing.

To discuss the horizontal and vertical progression some more, I think that the Ascended armor is a good thing. Because it isn’t a necessity but it is still a nice thing to have. You can just play the game and gather the materials slowly or grind events/dungeons and gather the materials some faster. It’s a nice addition to keep me motivated to join that one event or to do an extra path on a dungeon with my guildies.

On the level 80 cap topic, I’m still not sure what I feel about that. When I first heard that ArenaNet was going to raise the level cap from 20 to 80, I really wondered why they would do that. After leveling my thief I can understand why they did it but the question remains, how are they gonna solve this IF any expansion comes out.
Are they just gonna make more hearts/view points without raising the level cap or are they gonna do something whole different? Or will they raise the level cap and with that the vertical progression?

Anyway, I think that the current vertical progession is fine at the moment but I think that ArenaNet could increase the horizontal progession some more. I see customisation as a horizontal progession and we’re still missing the option to dye our weapons. Also, I would like to see some more exclusive cosmetic weapons. A perfect example is the weapons that we can only acquire from Tequatl. I really like it that we can’t buy it from the TP and that it can only be obtained by completing the event. That makes the weapon feel so much more special, if you have it ofcourse. I hope to see more exclusive weapons in the future! Maybe if they revamp Shatterer and Claw of Jormag, those too could have exclusive weapons or armor maybe?

That was it for now. I still want to thank ArenaNet that they want to make their game better with the help of the comminuty, because that is a great thing!

I agree very much with starwatto.

The rewards for the time and effort put into doing content is unbalanced and not worth it currently.

Take GW1 as an example.

I went to the Gates of Madness, because I knew I had a fair chance at getting the crystal stone drops (forgot what they were called… The colored stones from each area). I didn’t particularly like the barren sameness of that area, but I went to play it, had a lot of fun with teammates/guildies/pugs trying to complete it for the stones.

Or the dungeon run for the chance of getting a Frog Scepter drop (let me get totally off topic here: shame on whoever did the GW2 redesign of the froggy. It looks horrible It was my treasured weapon in GW1 and the GW2 version made me drop it in horror).
I never got my own Froggy drop, ended up buying it in Kamadan, but I kept trying for it without feeling like I was wasting my time.
Why?
Because the drops from the end chest made it worth it nearly every time I ran that thing.

Or playing in UW. It was not the easiest thing (no checkpoints at all), but you did your best without feeling like you just wasted an hour and a half of your time even if you failed.
Why?
Because you got the essential ecto drops, a couple of rares out of chests, etc.

All the drops were worth your time

GW1 and several other games (TERA for example) reward you with items that are worth something, and the rewards scale, even if you don’t get what you were after in that chest.

Playing through a dungeon like Arah explorable, nobody asks “ooh, what did you get from the boss chest?”
Why not?
Because everyone knows that unless you ping it, you got blues and greens.

You fight Lupicus for 20 minutes and you get 2 blues and a green.

It’s incredibly underwhelming.

GW1 had the right idea with drop rewards. GW2, not so much. It has changed and not for the better feeling of the gamers.

Given how long it takes to acquire Ascended gear and that in Guild Wars 1 ascension meant something let us make Ascended gear actually Ascended? How about once we acquire it we can combine it with something and make it so that we can choose the stat we want from it? What you plan for legendaries but put it on ascended.

It is not the best idea to make us buy one set and have us stick with it because it is too kitten expensive to buy more.

Home instance

Why dont use this as character progression?
Atm home instance in only for personly story and nodes nothing else.
Give us option to unlock mystic forge, craft stations, bank, portals to ur faction (order of whisper, etc) special merchants (exchange skill points to lvl up alts), etc…
Build ur home! <3

Upgrade ur home instance something like guild upgrades (by using skill points or something else) where you can make some cool events.

The legend

Make panel where you can exchange skill points to unlock new skills, items, and other character options.
-Repair ur armor free once per day,
-Special emotes,
-Upgrade ur finisher bronze/silver/gold effects,
-Special auras for dance, etc…
-Upgrade mini pets to pick up items,
-If you have open Radiant achivment armor parts, unlock Hellfire too,
-Summon merchant once per day,
-Summon trade post,
-Guild Bank,
-More chanse to loot dye,
-Less cost of WP…

I think there is tones of options to add here.

Cliff.8679:

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Ascended creation time

We had a lot of discussion pre-releasing ascended armor to make sure the time to make ascended doesn’t blow out, We pull a lot of data and are watching how long it takes players and like we do with everything we will keep and eye on it but with anything with progression there are always a lot of tradeoffs when you make changes but we’re always looking at it.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Izzy. I just wanted to highlight that last part about ascended creation time. There is absolutely no excuse that it should take 23 days to make a full set of armor if you have all the materials aside from the timegated ones. It’s ridiculous. This isn’t even factoring in not having enough laurels for the recipes. And that’s just for a single stat combination for a single character. We have alts, we have multiple builds, our builds get buffed and nerfed over time and one day we could have an effective build that we enjoy, and then one patch later, it’s useless. The way ascended has been implemented up until now cannot continue in its current form. It strangles our ability to enjoy multiple facets of the game. I’m sure the intention was “it’ll keep people playing longer” and “it gives people long term goals.” All it does is make us angry.

This is the point I was trying to make as well, Cliff just said it better. I have two characters and 2-3 builds with each of them. It taking almost a month to get fully geared just one time for a single character and build is a bit much. Its like he said also, we could make a great build and set and a month later we get nerfed and have to change sets. That means we either suffer with our nerf/change, go back down or go down to exotic gear and neither of those sound good to me.

Thanks again Izzy and all those involved for keeping us updated on what you guys in the office are seeing and discussing. It helps us address further issues and keeps the discussion going strong. Developer and customer interaction is key to a successful game.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Grind
Alts

I group these together because I think they have some relation. Grind well I think grind is a kittene to fully describe because it really comes down to each person own personal feeling of I can only do x action so many times before its fun faction goes down and thus starts to feel grinding. For some this can be do something twice others 100 times, our goal with how to keep grind out of the game is the relation between time based and skill based gating. I think this is an area we are always trying to get a better sense on as we start to make things harder to add more challenge to the game sometimes we cross the time gate and skill gate too much and things feel more grindy then we intend. As for alts why I lump these up is I think often leveling up alts can feel grindy, our goals here are really about how we make things feel a little less grinding for some actions and we’ve been making a lot of steps with that combing WvW xp, adding tradable level up books, birthday gifts that level you up ect..I think we are not done with the initiative to progressing alts being a bit more smooth and it’s something we will keep working on as we move forward.

As a player with 8 characters, my problem is not leveling up my characters. My problem is gearing them when they reach top level.

Leveling is fun and it’s well done: you can raise your character doing a lot of things (events, hearths, crafting, WvW…) and, at the same time, you learn the techniques for playing it properly and for adapting him to your personal tastes.

But, when you reach lvl 80, you must equip him. And here comes the punishment: ascended gear is too expensive to equip every character if you have more than… ¿two?. And it gets worse if you want to change your build someday (After playing some months, I changed my necro from condition to power, my mesmer from staff to mastersword and my engineer from power to condition. I did that with exotics, but now, with ascended, i wouldn’t be able)

So, when you reach lvl 80, due to the amount of gold you need, you are forced to know what build are you going to use. Forever.

If you equip your characters using guides it’s possible (but I found it boring, because you transform a game in a mechanical math-fest), but not if you play using a trial-error method, exploring all the possibilities. And it gets worse if you receive XP scrolls, because you get lvl 80 so fast that you cannot learn about your character before you invest your gold on him.

So, in a few words, I don’t think leveling is a problem because you can play without too much penalty and you can enjoy your leveling in a lot of ways. The main problem is when you are at lvl 80 and your only option for gearing up is to fill an endless laundry list.

P.S.: Sorry for my english, it’s non native
P.S.2.: I have 13 XP scrolls from birthdays, I’ve never used them (by the way, I received some gifts twice. I should have only 8 )

I think other people have said pretty much what I agree on.
No level cap increase
Ascended is fine as a final tier, although make infusions go up to ascended tier as well

One thing that you could really make very nice both as vertical and horizontal progression is Cultural armor.
Just like the fractal backpiece, Cultural armor should be upgradeable.
Cultural armor is the gear that should be desired according to the game but it’s not of the highest tier, it’s not even of the second highest tier.
And given new skins that are put into the game cultural armor feels very outdated.
A simple solution that also gives players something to work with is the possibility to be able to make cultural armor ascended just like you can do with the fractal backpiece. This gives you a very fair and optional, vertical progression.
When cultural armor is on the ascended tier, you can make it able to switch skins just like legendary items can switch stats. That lets you include different ways to unlock new permanent skins for the cultural armor, of which one should be the flamekissed armor for the humans and armor of equal quality for the other races.
Then you can make different versions for the flamekissed with different color gems and flames and they could all be unlockable through some means. This gives you a horizontal progression that lets the player change skins on the fly, outside of combat.
You can introduce a new skin for it now and then that people can get for it.
There could even be a skin progression tree with different base skins that can have different upgraded versions of the skins.
Cultural armor will then be a sort of platform for progression in different ways and will regain it’s status as the most desireable armor to get, as it should be.
When legendary armor comes out, cultural armor could be used as a precursor for the legendary armor keeping all the things you already got for it and adding the legendary tier and legendary skin branch in the skin tree to it.
I would really really like this kind of progression and it won’t make anyone feel that they throw away what they have acomplished, since they will always keep it and be able to switch to it without losing anything.
Horizontal and vertical, completely optional, skin progression without any loss on the way.
And the perfect way to introduce a gold, gems and material sink.

This is one thing that I think progression should be about.

This can be combined with the idea to unlock upgrade components and stats described further down in the thread.

ColinJohanson.2394:

A question to help direct the discussion a bit:

What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others? Be they horizontal, or vertical, just which ones really got you excited and were fun for you to continue to progress in?

For me, Final Fantasy Tactics is one I loved, where I was able to continue to unlock new jobs and advanced professions for my characters, as well as level up their abilities within those professions. It remains one of my all time favorite games, and one of my favorite systems of progression in any game. I’m also pretty darn fond of that Guild Wars game and skill collection.

For horizontal progression Path of exile has a great skill tree which is very fun to progress. Or Skirim. I was never big fan of TES but skill system of Skirim is nice.
For vertical I enjoyed gear progression of Gothic series where you get better gear as you progress thru story and completing challenges. And you do it becouse you want to defeat those challanges, gear feels more like bonus then goal.
Did you ever had in any game some feeling like this? – ,,What is that broken tower on mountain i see from here? Maybe i should check it and see what is there." And then you go you find out that way to that tower is full of hungry beasts, dangerous enemies and King kong like trolls. And when you finally reach that tower and kill the last beast that sleeps in it’s ruins (it’s probably already night and it is raining) you will find there chest and some nice piece gear in it. And best is that whole time you are driven by desire to know what is in that tower and not becouse of that gear. But still you got something that is valuable piece of gear.

For me, character progression stopped entirely months ago. I cannot do anything except Legendary crafting with my skill points which can stack up and that’s good, but there is literally nothing to do with them expcet Legendary crafting which is definitly not good.

Character progression isn’t about +5 stats on my armor for me. It’s about the character as a whole. An evolution of a “person” and a “game mechanism”. I feel like I’m controlling a dead pixel body right now, because after completing the main story I have no chance to hear my character talk to anyone – bad one liners like “for great justice” doesn’t counts.

From mechanism side, there is also no progression after getting to 80 and unlocking all weapon skills. I was always looking for an alternative weapon build for my thief, because double daggers got boring. Dagger pistol was fun for a while, sword / pistol is definitly not fun because it swaps the main imagine of a thief (being dodgy, fast) for numbers, gets you rooted and only the skill description makes you a “thief”, mentioning smoke etc. But in fact you are rooted and watch numbers. Pistol / Pistol could be almost good, but I hate to see myself holding two pistols and using only one for autoattack, maybe ANet could change the animation so thieves can fire one, then the other? Like P/P skill 3 just slower, since it’s an autoattack. Then the shortbow, and here we are at the end of our build diversity. The shortbow might be fun for some as a combat tool, but honestly it’s nothing more than a teleport (which is too expensive right now and I’d prefer using dagger skill 2 spam to move faster, anytime. And there is nothing wrong with dagger 2, but definitly with shortbow 5), and a bouncing attack to get the loot from more mobs, making the system recognize you as you dealt with all of them, so you don’t have to manually hit every single one with daggers.

Overall:

• I really miss a good ranged thief build. I definitly want to use a longbow or a rifle for long range dps something like the ranger can do with a longbow.

• I really miss my character as a person. She is just dead to me after completing the main story. I don’t know what’s the deal with all the voice actors behind our characters, but ANet should definitly hire them and create a post-mainstory system that is still part of “our story”, like that game advertises. Like, doing missions with our choosen faction (Vigil etc.). Changing faction. Adding a reputation system for these factions AND races, so I can work my way up in the sylvari ranks, earning respect of my people (if taking down a dragon wouldn’t be enough ^^), making NPCs recognize me, earning new racial / faction only skins with a new currency based on reputation. And all this filled with full voiceover quests, somehow made infinite. Like, 20 different type of quests for the Grove, 20 another for the Order of Whispers etc. with story-like discussion videos with characters talking (including my own). Making decisions at the end of the conversation about how to deal with the situation, flank the enemy camp while some others do the frontal attack, join to the frontal attack, stay behind and use catapults and defend them when the enemy comes out from that camp under siege. THIS would be a “Living World”, because I feel like that I, and my character as a person, live in it. The current living world never gave me this feeling, it’s like I’m a bot waiting for events to happen and grind them for achievements until I get the meta. It became boring and repeating.

And for something completely different – why do you even bother with character progression. Unless immense amount of resources is put into it, it’ll always go either way – hardcore grind or current GW2 model. The RPG part of MMORPG is completely covered by GW2.

But what about the MMO part? Real incentive of MMORPG games is interaction with players. Players, not computer-controlled monsters. If game is about to be alive, one needs to feel emotionally involved with it. How the hell are you going to bound with virtual allies, with whom you don’t share anything special, no laugh, no anger at some hard content (unless, of course, you’ve lost your grip on reality, but i don’t think that’s the case for most of the players, although the flashy ones with their “omg i love rytlock” posts are quite visible). And i’m not speaking of another sPvP modes. Who cares about them. It’s still the same old thing – developers telling players what they are allowed to do while playing with each other. This game is called Guild Wars. Have we seen ANY war between guilds here? Anything? Political alliances, backstabbing, treason, double agents, triple agents, whole forum blocks on fire, when people interact with each other. This is what drives numbers, this is what makes, for instance, EVE Online, the game that constantly gain active players – because players create the world. Not new content, not new, flashy pixels you can farm and make your own, but the awareness of being part of a group – when mutual trust and dedication is a reward on it’s own, when your wit and cunning is what places you at the top, not the fact of how fast can you click buttons (hello sPvP).

So, this is so called Guild Wars 2. We have no guild management, no guild interaction, no wars. What we have is 5 man sPvP modes and 300 people per borderland, which, when compared to 1k+ players assaulting a castle or 5+ hours of constant, massive, guild based PvP over a grudge for killing a single mob on a farming spot in old Lineage 2 seems a bit…I don’t know…older-than-old-gen? This was supposed to be a next-gen MMORPG. What we got is COOPRPG. Game suited for playing kitten man parties, when guilds don’t matter (the only content available for them is guild missions, which are laugh in themselves, and WvW, which is a disappointment at best).

Character progression is irrelevant. This is an MMO. Not a single player. We already have a character progression, and this part is what ArenaNet did well. What you had not done, is this tiny little part of your game when it becomes massive multiplayer. A true Guild Wars.

I don’t really have too many ideas to share.

But i’m super glad that the developers are asking the community and that they are focused on progression (Vertical and horizontal) because I love the game, the combat, the art style, the mechanics, the friends but some times there just isn’t much to do.

I’m a little worried about gear progression mainly because I don’t want all the time I’ve spent gathering Ascended gear and trinkets to go to waste. It would be good if the developers could spend the money and use the time to talk to the community and come up with really great progression ideas and put some into the game.

EDIT: I’ve just had a thought, some kind of horizontal progression could be competition between guilds on the same server (Rather than WvW, which is server vs server). Because of the tight communities on each server, people could get really competitive and try to earn their guild the way to the top. Whether through influence points or a guild vs guild tournament (Not the PvP tournaments with 5vs5, the whole guild vs the whole guild).

It could be possible to arrange challenges at mutually benefital times for both of the guilds then battle it out whether to capture points or kill the most of the other guild.

Another type of horizontal progression would be the possibility to save certain upgrade components in certain kinds of gear. And perhaps save different kinds of stats in gear.

A good item for that would be the earlier described cultural armor platform but it should work for all ascended gear and legendary gear (the upgrade components part).

Basically you should be able to “save” or “unlock” different upgrade components for a certain piece of gear.
This means that after unlocking it, you will be able to change upgrade components on the fly between the ones you have unlocked when you’re out of combat.

Upgrade components are expensive and nobody will remove their 5 gold rune to place another rune there for the moment and then go back to the 5 gold rune because that’s a waste of money. So that basically locks a player into a certain path.
Making it possible to unlock upgrade components in a piece of gear gives the player the possibility to change builds to fit what’s needed at the moment and could be an incentive to craft ascended gear.

So no wasted money and easier to change builds.
Legendary gear could come with all those components already unlocked.

It could also be possible to unlock stats for gear by combining ascended gear.
Basically if you craft a berzerker ascended staff and a cleric ascended staff, there could be a way to combine those two into one single item that can change between their stats like a legendary item can. Except that a legendary item can change between all stats and ascended can only change between the stats you have combined.

It makes it easy to change build completely on the fly and it makes bigger use of the possibility to change upgrade components on the fly. It would also give the earlier mentioned cultural armor platform a way to change stats without losing anything.

Personally, a lot of the current “Progression” is what has driven me away from the game, and the continued addition of more only serves to keep reinforcing the likelihood that I won’t be returning to the game any time soon.

For me, current GW2 progression breaks down to:

Vertical Progression:
*Levels
*Geared Stats

Horizontal Progression
*Cosmetics
*Achievements

Levels
While I have one of every profession at 80, I increasingly found the levelling process more and more tedious. After I’d levelled my first 3 characters, I found I’d seen all of what the open world and personal story had to offer. My remaining characters increasingly relied on crafting to level.

I also found that the trait and skill system is far too reliant on having everything unlocked, and you really can’t get a proper feel for your character until you’ve reached level 80. Restricting skill slots and traits based on character level may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but instead, the player isn’t able to fully realise a profession’s potential until they’ve reached level 80. You can’t plan skill and trait synergy properly unless you’ve unlocked everything, and to that end, 80 levels with milestones every 5 after 10 is far too restrictive.

I think it would have been better to have a lower level cap in order for every level to feel like a milestone.
At the moment, a trait-line’s progression relies on trait points in increasing multiples of 5:
5 ,10, 15, 20, 25, 30
You don’t even start earning trait points until you’ve reached level 11.
The maximum trait points you can earn are 70, allowing for 2 trait-lines to be maxed out and one to reach a third (or any mix thereof). That means you only get a significant milestone every 5 levels, making those in between feel redundant.

I think it would have been better to make every level feel like a milestone, allowing a trait to be unlocked every level.
This would mean that maximum level should be 14, as this is the amount of traits available to a current level 80 character. Call it 15 and allow a character to start gaining trait points at level 2.
That cuts out a LOT of the unnecessary fluff. It would also allow for players to reach top level quicker, meaning more of the maps could be balanced for top level characters increasing dramatically the amount of “End Game” content.
At the moment, you have a high level simply for the sake of having a high number, and unfortunately this dissuades people from experimenting with other professions, as it takes too long for them to get a handle on how the profession feels. It also means that there are very few maps that feel balanced for end game.

Geared Stats
I think this is the biggest mistake ArenaNet made when moving from GW1 to GW2.
In GW1, gear affected armour level, health and effectively, traits (minimally).
It did not limit a build as it didn’t affect the end result of skills massively. It was a nigh on perfect disconnect between gear and stats. A player was free to change build at will if they found their current build wasn’t suited to the current situation. They weren’t restricted by having to invest heavily in multiple sets of gear.

In GW2 this changed to be more in-line with other, more traditional MMOs.
Gear contributes massively to stat distribution. As there are so many potential distributions of traits, gearing for every last potential scenario becomes ridiculously expensive.
And this affects certain classes more than others.
For example, an Engineer only has 3 potential weapon combinations from a total of 4 weapons (rifle, pistol & shield, pistol & pistol)
A Warrior, at the other end of the scale, has 16 potential weapon combinations from a total of 11 weapons (2 swords, 2 axes, 2 maces, hammer, greatsword, rifle, longbow and shield)

There are currently 20 triple-stat combination listed on the wiki.
For every eventuality at Exotic gear level, this would require 80 weapons for the Engineer and 220 for the Warrior.
Armour and trinkets similarly would require 20 sets of each for full flexibility.
And I’m completely ignoring underwater gear and weapons.

So is it any wonder that people find the most effective stat combination and stick to that?
Gearing for every potential scenario would be prohibitively expensive, even at Exotic level (let alone impractical; you couldn’t buy enough bank space to outfit a single character for all potantial scenarios).
Don’t even consider thinking about Ascended.
As people settle in to playing with only one set of gear, the predominant balance feedback for the game will be centred around that gear combination, therefore over time, the game will tilt more and more towards being balanced around the most popular gear combination.
This is why only DPS counts and why the game is seen as being shallow.

I contend that at the very least, all levels of gear should allow you to choose your stat combination in the same way a Legendary weapon does. Ideally, gear shouldn’t affect stats outside of armour rating for armour and damage for weapons (with some special effects from runes and sigils).

Cosmetics
I understand that this is probably the most expensive option for ArenaNet to fully implement, but at the same time, I feel that this is what would be the most rewarding system of progression. GW1 was far better than GW2 at this, and even then it wasn’t perfect.

First problem with GW2’s cosmetics:
There’s just not enough variety in the appearance of crafted gear.
I propose that instead of materials affecting stat combinations, they should affect the appearance of gear. Yes, this would mean a massive amount of work for the art team, but it would result in a much more satisfying experience for the players.
In addition, some profession-specific cosmetics would really help.

Second Problem:
Changing appearance is a destructive process. If you have a very rare look for your one set of gear and another becomes available that you like, either through gameplay or the gem store, you completely lose the old look if you apply the new one. To retain multiple appearances requires a massive investment of time and money.
This results in some appearances being rarely seen as they sink further down the perceived desirability scale and characters appearing increasingly homogenised.

GW2 needs a cosmetic system like the one in DCUO, the best one out there at the moment.
In DCUO, you unlock styles for each gear piece as you play. At any time, you can change the appearance of any given gear piece to one you’ve previously unlocked. This feature doesn’t cost a cent. The cost is in acquiring the cosmetic appearance in the first place.
I feel that if it was implemented this way, this would be the best form of progression in the game.

Achievements
I feel that over time, this has become the most poisonous form of progression in the game.
It funnels players into grindy activities.
It fosters a sloppy development process where it’s simpler and cheaper to release “content” that focusses around easily implemented numbers-oriented activities rather than content that relies on rich lore and artwork.

In addition, making a lot of these temporary through the two-week Living Story cycle ensures that if a player does burn out and leave the game, they’re less likely to return, as they’ll feel they’ve missed out on achievements they’ll never be able to acquire.

Giving rewards for achievement tiers simply reinforces bad behaviour in both players and developers.

Over time, the game has become almost entirely about chasing achievements instead of the gameplay itself. If you’re not logging in daily and doing the daily achievement list, you’re not getting your laurels or APs, which means you’re falling behind on Ascended gear and you’re not progressing towards the next achievement tier.
With the 2-week cycle of temporary achievement driven content, this only amplifies, potentially leading to burnout and resentment (as in my case). The game starts to dictate that you spend a certain amount of time playing every day, otherwise you don’t deserve its rewards.

My proposal is to lessen the focus on achievement points and attempt to untie rewards from them, with titles being the only reward.
In addition, allow us to turn off the display of titles on ALL players, so we don’t have to be reminded of the achievement point system if we’d rather not participate in it.
Completely remove the idea of achievements that require excessive amounts of repetitive and unfulfilling gameplay, such as smashing dragon piñatas.

I think this would all dramatically improve the game and allow me to consider playing again.

Shadow Blade.1324:

im disappointed its taken this long for this to be posted:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-skinner-box
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/power-creep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zn81sY7pqI

Part 1/2:

I do think that Shadow Blade has some very salient points, not only in regard to those links he posted, but also on what he thinks is fundamentally wrong with the game and needs to be addressed.

However, I’ll of course add my own thoughts to the discussion.

Horizontal Progression:

At one point in the game’s marketing strategy, that was well before its launch and has gradually shifted towards increasingly corny gloating and bait-and-switch manoeuvres, you prided yourself with getting away from vertical progression and the archetypical grinding that was usually involved with them in games that we all played and knew before.

I feel like this model, at one point, has been partially abandoned, because it has proven to be a lot more expensive than originally thought.

As has been pointed out in this thread, a core trait of horizontal progression, for players, still happens to be a unique look and style for their characters.

Now, that is also where the problem starts to rear its ugly head.

If I want horizontal progression in this game, I won’t get past the Cash Shop because that is the place where new armor sets are obtained from, where I can gamble my every last penny to get one of the new weapon sets that keep getting added and added and completely take advantage of people who long for that sort of progression in one of the most vile and consumer-exploitative RNG-fests I have seen to date.

Now, of course I can also obtain these things with ludicrous amounts of in-game gold but that’s hardly progressive, is it? I mean this game seems to be solely built on the acquisition of gold in order to compete and achieve anything the game has to offer, that should really be more, than a question of how deep your pockets are.

It’s more a treadmill than anything else I have ever witnessed in a game, because not only will you never catch up, you will be devastatingly behind if you stop playing the game for even a month. Inflation is spinning out of control, if I had 1000 g 3 months ago, I could have bought myself the world, now I’m lucky to get 1 pre-cursor out of it.

There is just not satisfaction in playing the game, because it rarely ever gets rewarded. I’m giving you an anecdotical example now:

I’m sitting at 3.800 hours of gameplay. That’d be a 158 days of 24/7 madness.

And you know what?

I opened almost every single unidentified dye I ever got (maybe 20 sold in the TP total) and guess what? None of those ever were Abyss or Celestial, nor did I get any new dyes whenever I TRIED to obtain them from the cash shop.

I had 0 precursors drop for me. 0. The only ones I got I had to spend well over 500 Gold on in attempts, or just bought from the TP, because I simply gave up.

0 Weapon Tickets from Black Lion Chests. Though, knowing my luck, I never invested a lot of money or gold into those, because it seems like exactly the kind of system that would have me ending up with a skin for maybe a 100 € or none at all.

0 Ascended Weapon Crates

An inventory full of fractal weapons and none of the ones I wanted: Mace, Sword, Scepter.

Do you see where I am going with this? I played well more than any person should ever play your game within a 1.5 years span and I still would have never gotten a single legendary, wouldn’t I have played along and made GOLD my single purpose, playing your game.

I feel like there needs to be a fairer way of acquiring certain things, because there’s nothing that feels more jading than seeing others build legendaries out of thin air, because they happened to have two precursor drops and basically selling one, financed the other. Yay them!

Horizontal progression would benefit a lot from being tied to challenging content instead.

If I beat this encounter with however many people it requires me to, I want to have something to show for. I would love an encounter in this game that requires both mastery of my class’ abilities and coordination on a bigger scale, but as the past has taught us, without the holy trinity in a MMORPG, this seems to be a lost cause, because boss mechanics have to be dumbed down a great deal, in order for the ‘every man for himself’ philosophy to have a grip on it and it’s still beatable, as long as everyone indeed, cares only for himself during the fight.

Not to delve too deep into this, but have you looked into more challenging mechanics that would work for your class-setup yet?

Part 2/2:

Take DEFIANCE for example. I feel that the upcoming Wildstar does a way better job with that, despite having a trinity to fall back upon. In Wildstar you’ve got something called ‘Interrupt Armor’ and it’s basically the same thing, a certain amount of stacks which swallow CC effects that need to be taken off, before a boss can be interrupted.

However, theirs has the additional complexity of TIMED CC attached to it. Meaning that each member of your group has to apply their crowd controlling effects at the same time, for them to come through and actually have an effect on the boss. Which leads to more challenging encounters on the one side, but also to more build diversity on the other. If people are encouraged to bring CC abilities to certain encounters in order to prevent them from dying or to enable them to beat said challenge – you’re already one step closer to the DPS, Control and Support alternative you’ve tried to pull off with Guild Wars 2.

TL;DR1: Anyway, I feel that horizontal progression should definitely be the focus of your game design, it should at least partially move away from the cash shop and instead reward skillful play in PvE, PvP or WvW alike.

Vertical Progression:

I will keep this very brief: There are developers who have a very firm grasp on this. They offer vertical progression but it never seems to be the obvious focus of its playerbase, but instead some underlying motivation to do it.

It’s almost grotesque to name World of Warcraft as an example of how to do this right, because it’s probably best known for its continuous and frequently reset gear treadmill, but hear me out!

All the time I have played that game, I spent preciously little thought on rewards, as compared to Guild Wars 2. There was always a place, depending on my character’s progression, where I would go and complete challenges for, in order to obtain something that would make my character either be more powerful (Vert. Progression) or look better (Horiz. Progression) and it felt good to overcome those challenges either in a group of 5 or one of 10/25/40. People bonded with one another and became friends in a way that often transcended pixels.

I do strongly believe, ANet suffers from a reverse Midas Touch when it comes to vertical progression, because everything you touch, in that regard, turns to kitten.

Fractal Levels were heralded to bring greater reward for greater difficulty. I don’t know if you ever played higher tier fractals, but in 99.9% of the cases you leave them with Greens and Blues, poorer loot than you’d have gotten if you ran circles in the world, joining massive Farm Trains.

WvW Ranks – shouldn’t ever have been character bound and the stubbornness on that regard was an absolute insult to your players. But that’s not even the worst about them yet. The amount of time required to progress in that system is cynical at best, deeply misantrophical, if we’re more honest.

Don’t believe me? Do the math. How long would it take a person, playing 8 hours a day to at least meddle with the higher echelons of that system? 10 years? Awesome! Well-balanced!

And what do you get for every level you do? Well, preciously little – Season 1 rewards were an absolute joke for a 7 weeks meta, but it’s long become a dictum that Guild Wars 2 rewards are not worthy of the name. I won’t rehash on that, again.

Luck System: Up to 150% it is tolerable, you progress on a steady pace and then all of a sudden, it becomes absolute madness. Who is responsible for those sort of numbers? Are you gauging what would be the brink of acceptability for your Q&A team and then multiply it times a million?

To give a brief example of what I mean:

Your MONTHLY achievement gives you an essence of luck worth 500 Luck. Something you can only do ONCE per month grants you 500 Luck. Now how much does it take later on to advance a level? Of the top of my head I think it was something like 30.000 Luck. Who made the decision that this would be proportionate?

It’s the common theme of the game though: Be so unrewarding to your players, that they feel the only way they can progress in it, is to buy gold or dedicate their lives to grinding.

TL;DR2: And I think that’s the crux of the matter. As long as you don’t reasses that balance, it will mean preciously little whether you do vertical or horizontal progression, it will both feel equally unsatisfying and people at one point, will just move on to something that rewards them more for their time invested.

In my opinion, Ascended stuff is such an useless thing to add to this game, it doesn’t make the game any more interesting.

There are many features you have left out from original guild wars that could be really awesome to have in Guild Wars 2 like Challenge modes. Missions with bonus stuff (imagine replayable Living Story with extra bonus and Hardmode), Vanquish areas (hard with a persistant world though).

And much more.

Just look back to Original Guild Wars, really, all your good stuff is there. There’s nothing wrong with that game at all, but much seems to be and become with this game.

Xar.1387:

GEAR PROGRESSION WITHOUT A GEAR PROGRESSION IN THE MAIN GAME
For now we’ve got Exotic Armors, what’s great, cause thats the basic, what every person should gain, if that person want to be pretty good, and able to do some PvE/WvWvW stuff easier. Its ok. We can gain it in the different ways, what’s cool, cause IMO exotics should be just a set, which allows u to do some ingame stuff. We can get it from dungeons, wvw, bla bla… OK. In time, you guys have added ascended gear too, and its a good addition to these exotics – we’ve got better stats, but that’s still similar. It’s fine. And people who have these exotics, or even ascended armors ofc should be able to enjoy the most of content. Like… They should be able to do some dungeons without a problem, fractals, guild missions, story, WvWvW, and this all kinds of normal, fun content.

And at the same time there should appear a gear progression. Yeah, do not be afraid of it. IMO well-done gear progress can be really successful.
Dont u think, that it would be enough, if u create a huge mode called “RAIDS”, and then you’ll make special armors, that people can gain, and wear just there? They would use these armors only in this mode – like in PvP we’re using other items. But in this PvE mode called Raids players would progres items which have better, and better stats. Players would progress first raids, gain these items, and then they would be able to get next, and next – and lets give them a reward for it (exept items… like… titles, leaderboards etc). Let them progress it.
And what’s more, all this will not affect the main game content If some people dont want to play it, then they’ll dont – like right now, not every1 is playing PvP. They will not feel deprived, cause entire game will be free of difference statistics, and gear progression. But ofc u can ask how about people who want to raid, but they just cant do it well. That’s simple – they’ll work on it – maybe slower, but hey! They’ve got a challenge!
But what’s important – when we’re talking about raids, then you have to know one important thing: People must have a role there. Clearly defined role and if they’ll fail, then all raid fails. This mode must be well made. And whats interesting – when its going to be a separate mode like pvp, then ur able to make some changes there – like add some special skills, traits or smt (just for this mode). And what’s interesting – imo these raids would be a content for guilds. And let every member of a guild join there – dont limit it for some players. Just make any scaling system or smt. Then guilds would appear on leaderboards.

Then you’ve got professional made PvP, and PvE mode in your game.
And at the same time we’ve got open, fantasy world too, where we’re able to do a lot of things I think it could work. Think about it too.

Open world: story, dungs, fractals, guild missions, puzzles, wvwvw, etc, etc…
PvP: like right now – separate mode, where every1 is using gear with the same stats, and people have to practice. Leaderboards, seasons, titles, etc, etc…
*PvE: separate mode, where people have got raids, where they can progres their raid gear. Also there should be leaderboards for it, titles, etc etc… *

Now this ladies and gentlemen is a winning post. I’ve always dreamed of raids, but didn’t see them possible in GW2 and this guy comes and tells that you can have them simply as that When i think about it, it’s the same sPvP principle… I just can’t hold my excitement that the raids are really possible ^.^
Addressing the progression systems topic, I really like ones where you get something special to wield as a bonus to go deep in a tree (I guess FF XII is something similar).
For example:
Profession goes x points in a specific tree – BOOM ! You can now wield bazooka.
Prof. goes x in one tree and y in another – WHAM ! You mastered how to use nunchakus.
I think this would add more uniqueness to a play / player style.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Basically:

• How easy it is to attain the Ascended gear?
• Is the balance of acquisition of Ascended out of whack between different game-modes (i.e. Easier in PvE than WvW, easier in the open world than it’s intended game mode [Fractals])?

after playing this game since beta and attaining any best in slot item (for my main and some of my alts) i can give you my 2 cents on ascended gear.
how hard is it to attain? well if you’re a new player i guess the answer is, you’ll never have it. the recipes cost in laurels and gold is way too high and the mats to up your profession are pricey as the economy is going crazy right now, so if you’re new or newish and never had time to hoard tons of cloth and ore you gotta be prepared to spend half a year grinding 12 hours a day and get your ascended armor just the day before they release something better. not to mention that it’s basically impossible to gear your alts with ascended armor (and we all have alts, we love to play something different from time to time, anet should be aware of it)
to the question ‘’how do i progress then in this game if everything takes so long and so much gold?’’ the answer is one and one only. have a credit card. sad but true. i hear more and more people actually buying gold as the time goes by, since there’s no real way to earn it without spending your day on a map feeling like a bot. 1-2 g reward in a lvl 40-50 fractal is preposterous, and so are the account bound exotics which we can’t even sell. add to that that you either break items for luck essences or vendor them, either way you’re losing.
the dev’s asking about the drop rate in fractals. i do fotm 40-50 every day several times, challenging with a guild group, impossible to do with pugs and the reward, if you manage to reach the end, is …. no rings? 4 out of 5 high lvl full fractal runs usually give me the daily pristine and nothing more. hard to see a ring, and generally it isn’t infused. basically impossible to see a weapon box or a fractal skin. not to mention if you reached fotm 40+ i doubt you still need rings, and probably you can get so many with pristines that your alts are all ringed up as well.
ascended items should be breakable, and if not they should have a much higher value (in gold) if sold to a vendor (had i spent 3 hours in frostgorge i’d have made at least 15g. no point running a fractal if all i get is time lost).
i never understood why ascended necklaces and earrings can’t drop in fractals. to me that’s where they belong and it’s imperative they are added to the fotm vendor.
after 6 months we still have champ trains in every server (= mad mindless boring grinding), or trains in wvw (thankfully i’m in a good wvw guild so i get heavy bags from zerging every night, which adds up). we’re still talking about grinding tho, which is not how a game should be played and certainly doesn’t match with my idea of ’’fun’’.
i also don’t consider fun rerunning the same old dungeon (AC, SE mostly) to get soldiers exotic gear and break it to make some money out of the insignias. it’s another way of grinding.
crafting isn’t and never was a way to earn gold. you could reply that selling deldrimoor ingots and other ascended mats is a good way to earn cash, but it’s either i sell them or i make my own armor.
we’ve had a million biweekly patches, anet should have given us the chance to make some profit out of them instead of just getting a skin for a backpack.
i had to accept losing all my progression in fractals prior to the patch, but doing them for no actual good reward is just a waste of my time.
so many people quit cause they felt trolled by anet and i can totally understand how they felt.

Character progression for most of us, who are now in the end game stage, is the goal of obtaining ascended gear. I am a casual player and I used to invest 1 hour a day doing my dailies and on weekends I spend my time in WVW and completing Living World contents. I soon came to realize that, such routine has brought me little progess in achieving my goal of getting ascended items. I hate grinding for materials. I’m sure the repetition in real life (eg. jobs, study) is enough for most of us and the last thing, the majority of us want is to slave away grinding for materials in a virtual world. And ANET is well aware of this I am sure, so this is where, the trade post comes into play.

Issues
As of this moment, 800 gems would get us about 45 gold and I am an unlucky player, I have never gotten a drop worth more than 10 g on the TP, so 45 gold is a great deal for me. 45 gold is enough to buy mats to get one to the level 500 in crafting and fund half of the mats needed to craft an ascended weapon. This is the power of 10 dollars in the real world. I have a job and an hour of work would enable me to safe hours and hours of grinding in this game. So if this was ANET’s initial intention, I would say they have successfully convinced me to purchase gems.

I have always love ANET’s concept of purchasing cosmetic items using gems but to purchase mats as well, it is basically telling the players that half the cost of an ascended gear can (or more in a more practical term, should) be purchased through gems. Let’s not even talk about legendaries here. Inflation in gw2 has been so bad, I do not feel its worth running the fractals anymore. 2 hours doing PVE in the fractal awards me with 1+ gold and probably 1+ gold worth of mats and ANET has given me a reason not to do this. I do occasionally run fractals, but only just for breaking routine and never for farming mats.

I love WvW and I never think of it as grind. It is slightly more dynamic in some sense because its PVP. However, amount of mats rewarded in WvW has not change even with the introduction of ascended gears. To put this into perspective, this is the amount of certain materials one will need for a tailor full set ascended gear.

(Reference from Dulfy.net)
1440 wool scrap
720 cotton scrap
1440 linen scrap
10800 silk scrap

I am sure ANET’s intention here is to create a new end game objective for players who hit the cap and they want this to be a LONGGGGGGGGGGGG term objective. But to most players, we want it ASAP. So the grind begins, and for those who cannot afford gems, they grind hopelessly away for that 10800 silk scrap, 1440 linen scrap and so on. Demand for mats increase, prices shoot up, gold loses its value and gems take over.

Solutions and Ideas
1. Reduce the dependency on raw mats for ascended items. Enable tokens to buy materials need for ascended gears. This will stop inflation from going out of hand. A good example is the ascended accessories and trinkets.
2. Another option is to increase the drop rate for materials. At level 80, I would think getting 720 cotton scrap would be more challenging than 10800 silk scrap. In WVW, please increase the variety and amount of mats in a loot bag.
3. Rather than having a seperate set of ascended gear, it would be nice if we can upgrade our exotic sets to ascended gears. Maybe introduce a little cosmetic upgrade as well (eg. fractal back piece). It would be dull to see everybody in the same ascended gear.

ColinJohanson.2394:

A question to help direct the discussion a bit:

What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others? Be they horizontal, or vertical, just which ones really got you excited and were fun for you to continue to progress in?

For me, Final Fantasy Tactics is one I loved, where I was able to continue to unlock new jobs and advanced professions for my characters, as well as level up their abilities within those professions. It remains one of my all time favorite games, and one of my favorite systems of progression in any game. I’m also pretty darn fond of that Guild Wars game and skill collection.

FFT’s job system was pretty cool. To be honest, a mix of that along with Final Fantasy XIII’s paradigm system was almost what I envisioned at the very beginnings of GW2 talk, with the removal of the trinity and characters being able to adopt whatever role they needed in combat as opposed to being locked in by their character class.

I can’t go without mentioning GW1. Easy capping of stats through cheap max gear meant focusing on dressing up your character and improving your build diversity instead of an every upward grind for bigger numbers.

Final Fantasy X-2’s dressphere system also hit this cool juxtaposition of cosmetic and skill-based progression. I absolutely hated almost 80% of the rest of the game but I kept playing because the progression system was just stupidly addictive and enjoyable. I really looked forward to seeing what each character would look like whenever a new dresssphere was unlocked, and unlocking the character-class-flavoured skills associated with that dressphere.

I love being able to dress up my characters, okay? :‘D Character aesthetic is super important to me and skill-based development is also more interesting that number increments to me. That, in principle, is why I was so excited when GW2’s vision included everyone being at the stat cap by level 80 in max gear.

I won’t lie – I am still extremely, extremely bitter about the bait and switch.

I have 3 level 80s and 4 more that I’m working on, slowly, since release. 2 of those level 80s have a full set of exotic gear, and I’m unlikely to be able to get any other sets in a reasonable timeframe to improve my build diversity. I have about 3 crafting professions at 400. That should give you an idea of how much I can play. I class myself as a casual player who can play about 10-15 hours a week on a leisurely week, 5-10 more regularly. I am not even trying to acquire ascended gear because I do not have the time for it, and for that, I have to accept that I am unlikely to ever get ‘max gear’ – something that was promised as part of GW2 sales talk for hardcore and casual players alike. I’ve accepted it, but I do not like it, and it has soured my opinion of the game overall. I will not be convinced otherwise that it wasn’t a plain and simple bait and switch.

I wanted to see skin wardrobes and town clothes development/expansions and player housing and guild halls and new races and other fun, cosmetic stuff that I could work toward while simply playing the game. Alts are almost a form of character progression for me. For combat-based progression, I want to see new skills (reasonably priced!) and new weapons and new content to play in. I didn’t want the whole game to be about vertical character progression. It’s fatiguing to be on that constant crawl upward, and it’s not the kind of game I thought I was buying.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Ascended Gear
So then why did we add ascended gear, well the reason is we wanted sometime between the transition and what we shipped with was very little time turns out global trading post has a lot more effect on this then we had original thought which made us need a non-tradable gear step. We still have some progression to smooth out around the rare -> exotic area as mostly you just jump from leveling greens to exotics and rare is really only used for salvaging into ecto. We have been spacing out adding each slot of ascended gear to make sure we don’t make our original mistake again and I’m sure we’ll need to continue to evaluate the time to gain this gear like we do all things.

The problem for me is that you saw this as a problem. Easy acquisition of max stat gear was touted as a benefit, pre-release, and that’s one of the reasons me and many other players bought into this experience. Horizontal and vertical progression simply do not work well side by side, and in my opinion, pandering to both very different goals has resulted in a very muddy character progression system that I feel I will never be on top of until it narrows its focus and decides which way it wants to go.

I almost feel like you guys need to decide who your audience is before you will effectively sort this out. A jack of all trades may shallowly pander to a diverse audience, but it can’t grip anybody the way that GW1 gripped its devoted audience.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Ascended Gear
So then why did we add ascended gear, well the reason is we wanted sometime between the transition and what we shipped with was very little time turns out global trading post has a lot more effect on this then we had original thought which made us need a non-tradable gear step. We still have some progression to smooth out around the rare -> exotic area as mostly you just jump from leveling greens to exotics and rare is really only used for salvaging into ecto. We have been spacing out adding each slot of ascended gear to make sure we don’t make our original mistake again and I’m sure we’ll need to continue to evaluate the time to gain this gear like we do all things.

Ascended creation time

We had a lot of discussion pre-releasing ascended armor to make sure the time to make ascended doesn’t blow out, We pull a lot of data and are watching how long it takes players and like we do with everything we will keep and eye on it but with anything with progression there are always a lot of tradeoffs when you make changes but we’re always looking at it.

Hi,
So I am confused. The way you make it sound is that you realized after the fact that people were obtaining exotics too quickly and needed something else to reach for. But back in November 2012, Chris Whiteside said ascended gear was always intended for the game. Well, if that is also true then why wasn’t this information shared with the playerbase at launch? People obtained exotic gear and many were content with their gear progression in its current state. We were then blind sided by ascended gear, and here we are now. There is still a big question mark as to 1.) Was it always intended? 2.) If so, why wasn’t this info shared at launch because in doing so, you avoid a storm of irate posts.

Regarding ascended creation time… To craft up to 500 is very time consuming and expensive. To obtain enough dragonite, is extremely difficult and time consuming. If you wish to evaluate how long it takes to craft these items, please focus your efforts on the glob of ecto requirements throughout, dark matter requirements, and dragonite. In addition to dragonite, I also say the glob of ecto and dark matter because we are then forced to salvage the exotics we created when leveling to 500. Unless you have a Black Lion Salvage Kit, you are at a huge disadvantage for a return of an ecto or dark matter. It is VERY VERY frustrating to even have a master salvage kit, salvage a level 80 exotic you just spend several gold to craft, and have it return 1 mithril ore.

The way you have ascended materials acquisition set up, I feel like it is more of a kick in the stomach than a rewarding experience.

Vindicated.3491:

Character progression for most of us, who are now in the end game stage, is the goal of obtaining ascended gear. I am a casual player and I used to invest 1 hour a day doing my dailies and on weekends I spend my time in WVW and completing Living World contents. I soon came to realize that, such routine has brought me little progess in achieving my goal of getting ascended items. I hate grinding for materials. I’m sure the repetition in real life (eg. jobs, study) is enough for most of us and the last thing, the majority of us want is to slave away grinding for materials in a virtual world. And ANET is well aware of this I am sure, so this is where, the trade post comes into play.

Issues

Solutions and Ideas
1. Reduce the dependency on raw mats for ascended items. Enable tokens to buy materials need for ascended gears. This will stop inflation from going out of hand. A good example is the ascended accessories and trinkets.
2. Another option is to increase the drop rate for materials. At level 80, I would think getting 720 cotton scrap would be more challenging than 10800 silk scrap. In WVW, please increase the variety and amount of mats in a loot bag.
3. Rather than having a seperate set of ascended gear, it would be nice if we can upgrade our exotic sets to ascended gears. Maybe introduce a little cosmetic upgrade as well (eg. fractal back piece). It would be dull to see everybody in the same ascended gear.

While I agree that theres way too much crafting going on, and forced upon you if you want/need BiS gear… I do not think adding another currency into the game is the way to go. Theres way too much of it as it is. Have the items cost Karma instead, since its one of the universal currencies.

I’ll be pretty straightforward.

Just look at the title of this thread. “Character progression”, it says. There, in those two words, you have the main problem around this topic.

Character-bound progression is outdated, something from the past that doesn’t make sense anymore. Everything except some minor things should be accountbound, because the player is the account, not each character.

So we have two discussions here: What should be accountbound, and what should be added to make stuff to work for. Let’s start with the second.

==Progression: Things to work for==

The game, right now, has no progression after an early point. Not vertical, and not horizontal. People feel like they have nothing to work for. The few progression systems rely too much on time gates and just playing daily, instead of actual skill and challenges.

Now, explain to me, what’s supposed to be “exciting” about crafting one piece a day for 30 days to craft an ascended armor? Long-term goal? And what about my own-term goals? Don’t get me wrong, I’m okay with ascended stuff being crafted this way, but I’m not okay with it being the “only thing left to do”.

There’s many fields that we could cover when we get into progression discussion:

• Collecting stuff: Way too punishing. Lot of people would play and replay dungeons just to collect every single skin; except they don’t because it’s useless wasting of space. Collecting stuff, specially skins, should be easy, should be encouraging. No one would catch all the Pokémon if you could store just 10 of them or if the Pokédex didn’t track them and unlock lore tidbits each time.

• Dividing the playerbase: This is always mentioned with some kind of apocalyptic tone. Adding daily special objectives, that differ from player to player, focusing them on making the players visit specific places would be fine. Like guild bounty missions, but for single player. For example: Someone needs help solving a crime in Snowden Drifts. You have to go there and work alone or with the other players that share your mission, and interrogate people, fight drunkards that may know something, etc. Kinda like an ARG, with lot of random factors so it’s never the same. Give many hints so it doesn’t turn into a boring scavenger hunt, and players never feel like alt tabbing to a guide is better than playing the game. Also, give different players different hints. Other mission ideas: A gang of Flame Legion charr assaults towns across Diessa Plateau using portals, you need to predict their movements (which are different each day) and then ambush them and use their portals to follow them back to base. Another mission in Gendarran Fields could force four teams of players working against each other, each helping a champion train for a tournament. The social factor is VERY important on these, too. Make people want to go out there, to have fun and get some unique reward tokens.

• Reward-dedication-skill ratio: You get more money for farming while watching a movie than for doing Arah or Fractals of the Mist level 50. You get more final reward money at Ascalonian Catacombs than in Crucible of Eternity. These things are terrible for those wanting to do dungeons, because they feel they’re losing money and time. I’m not asking for Arah being 10 times more profitable than AC, I’m asking for balance. Right now 1h of champion farming is much, much more profitable than doing some dungeons. The gap is way too wide, and it needs balancing so you don’t feel forced into an activity, and so you can play as you wish with the playerbase switching between different activities easily and healthily.

• Skill achievements: Add more of these, please. Tons of them. They make people want to replay content, even when it’s hard. Dungeons and guild missions needs them.

• Time-gates and temporary content: These hurt the game in two forms. The first is making all players want to do them, leaving other activities with lower populations. They fear missing the timeline, because when the event ends they will never be able to work towards them. Super Adventure Box achievements were great in this regard, because all of them returned. Wish something similar was done with the rest, specially festivities. For example, the WvW title should return each season. What if a second is added? Well, if you’re missing the first title then you’ll have to work harder to get both, but they’re still available and you can work towards them each season, slowly. People that get 50% of achievements on each season get no title if each season’s achievements are locked once it’s over.

• Parallel accountbound leveling systems: Fractals of the Mist and WvW accountbound levelling systems are great, in my opinion. They add progress, while the core level cap stays at level 80. We could have more of these systems, that give small bonuses for those who want to progress their level, and reward those who play it usually, too. Imagine if each classic dungeon had 10 levels, and to level up you need to complete all paths in each level. Each level enemies get harder, new mechanics appear, and you get better loot. These could help balance all dungeons for everyone, making them easier or harder without screwing a part of the playerbase. Story Arah at level 1 could stay as easy as it is now, and Story Arah at level 10 could be a nightmare. You decide which you want to play. Also, each region could get its own levelling system. For example, Kryta. Kryta has 40 levels, similar to normal levelling in cost. Each time you get xp on Kryta, you level up Kryta, unlocking special stuff like extra karma/magic find/gold find/experience, or resistance to enemies there. For example getting into Orr could be dangerous, so you should level up a bit to get Risen-resistance, or some of the champions could be more dangerous. Things that don’t break the game, but add some flavor to it, all while encouraging not to rush across the content (a problem for future expansions if the level cap stays at 80). New abilities could be unlocked through this, too.

• Unlocking new abilities: New ability! Pay 25 skill points to get it. Not exciting at all, I’m sorry, and also way too expensive. Why not make players do something specific, skill-related, to get their special abilities? The above region-level system is an idea, but specific “guild bounty”-style missions? Remember Modus Sceleris? Those villains have new abilities! What if I learn them after punching their faces? Another option would be creating some kind of sanctuary for each profession, where champions gather. Some kind of “secret schools”. You get there, and can fight NPCs or do stuff and profession-related missions to unlock profession-themed armor and weapons, new skills, etc. Instead of just spending 25 skill points, which you get by farming. Ifyou want a skill point sink, then make people pay 3 skill points each time they try to fight the NPC to get the skill.

Just some ideas, some are simple to do, others require work, but I believe all of them would help create a feeling of progression, horizontal, without needing to alienate the playerbase.

==Things that should be accountbound==

If I do something once, in a character, I shouldn’t be doing it again. I, the player, already did it. The only thing that should always be character-bound is PvE character level.

Now, what should be accountbound?

First, crafting. What’s the point of it being character-bound? I know you can switch between crafting disciplines, but it’s pointless. It’s too expensive, so I’d rather make a new character, and level them there, with the bonus of getting xp and levelling.

How would accountbound crafting work? Very simple, every crafting discipline is accountbound now. Switching between them in a single character? Much more cheaper, people should do it naturally like they waypoint around, so it’s an effective gold sink.

But wait, what about using crafting to level up? Is that gone? Are my new characters excluded from crafting in their levelling experience? Yes and no. You get experience when you level up crafting. Now, instead of that, you get experience when you craft stuff of your character level.

Need a sword? Just go and craft one, and get some bonus xp, even if you already have the discipline at 500.

Another thing that should be accountbound: Dyes. The game should encourage a “collector” feeling much more, and dyes get a very short stick here. To compensate, lower the drop rates, or add new valuable recipes that make them more expensive.

Stat swapping should be more alt-friendly, too.

So that’s it. I’m all for horizontal progression, parallel leveling systems, adjusting difficulties as you wish, and collecting stuff; all better with skill and playing varied content than with mindless farming and repetition of the same content again and again.

All I’d like to know if with the release of Ascended Armor, this is the end of vertical progression as far as new items. I’m tired of working towards bis items only to have the new items release that offer “new stat increases!” This is exactly one of the reasons I left the “other games” to play this one.

Here’s my idea for Horizontal progression.

Legendary Amour + Character Progression + Personal Story.

After getting to lvl 80,having 100% map completion and completing the Personal Story, we should have a continuation of the Personal story which is linked to the creation of Legendary Amour,which should be account bound.

For example,after Orr has been cleansed and Zhaitan defeated, Trahearne went back to the heart of Orr and the Ancient Kings thanks the heroes for their victory and aid.
To show their appreciation,they revealed a secret on the art of imbuing amour with legendary power and to seek the lost art.

We then need to find the clues to the lost art,which leads to Zommoros. He is able to craft the legendary amour but he requires some legendary materials,especially the ancient tomes that describe the art of crafting it.

The quest should be a hard but repeatable solo quest and the mats should be account bound.

Final materials for Legendary Amour,E.G Legendary Helm= 1 Ascended Head Gear + 1 Dragon Heart(solo combat quest) + Ancient Tome(solo puzzle quest) + Phoenix ashes(solo time gated quest)

Please make the quest interesting and filled with relevant lore, No scarlet please,thanks!

AndrewSX.3794:

Now, for propositions:

- build variety + benefits are not worthy: packed toghether cause my proposition is aimed at both. Better benefits shouldn’t be “MOAR POWER”. More utility/convenience. And you’ve done it with legendary stuff so there is no “technical limitations” excuse now.

Exactly.
Character progression in Dungeons is not progression.
Current dungeon running requirements are DSP & dodge well or kick.
And it’s reasonable because it’s the best /fastest/ way to do them.

• Support skills/traits should be improved further or more should be added so it’s worth to bring them to dungeons – like guardians’ empower. (thief venom share is not viable because mobs die faster than they could be reapplied to the next mob)
• In the current meta if some profession does not have needed skills (reflect/projectile block at necro? anything beyond stealth at thief? massive aoe dmg at ranger?) they are excluded from certain parts of the game.
• Dungeons’ / later Elite Dungeons’ (fow, uw etc) mobs and bosses should be more defensive and deal more damage than being able to faceroll by 5 berserkers. Don’t make them defensive by invulerable buffs, but add them high healing power and constant boons that should be removed/counterplayed by players. Like… the Legendary Imbued Shaman in Fractals, or Kanaxai in GW1. Maybe allow them to dodge, but not like rolling in a place if the are immobilized…. that’s just not counterplay.
• Defiance should be a 10sec long boon applied by CC, stacking up 5 to 10 times and when reaching the maximum it would gain stability and outburst for aoe dmg and 500range aoe blowback in 100range radius. Maybe use this in PvP too?

I think every suggestion I could make has been made by someone already, so I won’t re-list those here.

What I will do is list some of the strengths you have and some basic principles (combined with suggestions) I hope are kept in mind.

Strengths:
1. Active combat.
2. Lack of competition for kills and harvesting materials.
3. Harvesting gated by your level and the harvesting kit level you can buy rather than a skill you have to tediously level up.
4. The ability to work together while not having to be grouped together.
5. The combo skill system where players skills can complement each other.
6. All maps remain relevant due to the automatic level adjustment of the player.
7. The experience required to reach a level is consistent instead of being exponential.
8. The maximum level cap is available now and not something that will be increased later.

Principles to keep in mind:
1. Keep true to the strengths of the game.
2. Avoid introducing anything that is “alt unfriendly” and work towards being alt friendly in all things.
3. Avoid introducing things that create competition for kills and harvesting nodes.
4. Think about progression in ways that aren’t necessarily tied to levels or gear. Many suggestions were made here. Two that really appeal to me are wardrobe skin unlocks and weapon skin unlocks.
5. Work with what you have in the game. The karma vendors for example are present. Update them. Karma heart vendors should have a “unique look” armor set and “unique look” weapon set per map that isn’t obtained elsewhere. You could add recipes to all karma heart vendor maps for skins for town clothes that are unique to that map. This should be coupled with the wardrobe skin unlock system. Karma vendors that just have the same few foods on them should be updated to have regional or town specialties.

Since I read a couple of people who want even better stats than we’ve got with ascended through some sort of “raid” model – why do you want that?

For me, it’d be perfectly awesome if those raids or bigger scale challenges (read Anet: not stupendous zerging, but actual mechanics that want to be beaten) would reward me with unique skins that others can not have access to, if they don’t compete the same way.

Whether that’s WvW, PvE or PvP – doesn’t matter. The principle stands.

I am purchasing bragging rights by skill and everyone is encouraged to do the same, if they want what I have.

That’s a concept that has worked for as long back as I can remember when it comes to MMORPGs and better stats don’t always had anything to do with it.

I am pretty convinced, if there were something like that in GW2 – it’d be flourishing, because people are both, reward- and challenge-starved with the current check-liste & gold grind purposes the game exclusively caters to.

Horizontal Progression

- The visual customization in this game is gorgeous. Still missing are dyeable weapons and custom animations for skills (Path of Exile for example sells custom animations for skills in their item shop). And after a while you should srsly add the Makeover faces and hair styles to the normal character creation. Otherwise people have to automatically pump 30g worth of gems into their lvl1 characters just to get the face they want. (I think its okay to have a timespan where said options are exclusive though.

- Gif us mor skins. No, seriously, more weapons that don’t belong to a set à la Aeterized Weapon series. Maybe as the new, Ascended materials are added to the game, new recipes can be discovered. I really liked the champion skins

- push bad but fun builds so they become actual choices in competitive PvP. (Thanks for the Aether signet)

- Please more runes that have a lore based theme – like the Golemancer rune. I love that one and can’t wait to get a Husk rune where I can have my own little husk to push around enemies.

- Let each class use a new weapon like Mesmer – Maces or Hammers // Ranger – Rifles // Warrior – Pistols // Necromancer& Elementalists – Swords or Two handed Swords // Thief – Rifle // Guardian – Axe or Longbow // Ingeneer – Hammers

- More instruments in the Gemshop – Im waiting for a Violin

- More stat variety of course.. like Toughness/Vitality/HealingPower or Crit Damage//CondDuration//Healing Power

Vertical/Horizontal progression

- There could be ways to costumize skill effects – like after ascension – which hopefully takes place in the near future. In prophecies we mastered our class in this part of the story. (A class-based short storyline would be nice). Costumizeable skills would mean, that we could fine tune our skills. Choosing between 4 options of a skill where we could rebalance the ration between burn duration and initial damage of a skill or something of that sort.

Vertical Progression

- Seriously, Ascended perfectly fills the gap between exotic and legendary so please, don’t do more Item Levels.

- Adding more Item progression means more tension in the end game. Id love to just be able to unwind and go to the obsidian sanctum with some friends without knowing that I miss valuable farm time in which i could farm the 5 gold I totally need to craft one more exotic item so my Weaponsmithing gets from 426 to 428 and I get a liiiittle closer to an ascended great sword.

- Let the living world be as rewarding as doing Dungeons.

- Ascended Runes that need use the slot on the breathing mask (7/7)

- An Exotic Breather… or an Ascended one right away.

- With further progression, id suggest to add more Squirrels. This game is seriously lacking squirrels and I can absolutely not understand how Arenanet pays so little attention to the rodents that are most connected to the bloodstones and the dragons. Seriously, Arenanet. Squirrels please. Maybe the next Dragon or a Norn Spirit or something, just something…

ebrown.8193:

All I’d like to know if with the release of Ascended Armor, this is the end of vertical progression as far as new items. I’m tired of working towards bis items only to have the new items release that offer “new stat increases!” This is exactly one of the reasons I left the “other games” to play this one.

I would like to know this as well, specifically as it pertains to sigils, runes, or any other future enhancements to gear and weapons. The amount of materials and $$ you need to sink into ascended armor effectively pushed me out of the ascended armor circle. If ascended ends there, I can live with it. If there are plans for ascended upgrades such as sigils or runes ,then