Guild Wars 2

I don’t even know if I have the right to post in these threads after not having played for so long, so if that’s reason enough to discredit my opinion, just disregard the rest of the post.

I’m trying to be as concise as possible here to not waste anybody’s time.
Open ended or very long term vertical progression is something that will kill any desire for me to play anymore. One of my core beliefs for gaming is that ideally everyone, no matter how long they have played, should not be statistically inferior to anyone else. The first Guild Wars game was so close to that ideal(minus the reputation titles) that it captivated me for years on end.

There are only two vertical progression mechanics I find acceptable and somewhat fun to experience, and none of them involve raising the bar.

The first one is “prestiging” or “releveling”, where you would be able to increase your character’s/gear’s efficiency by resetting its rank and leveling it up again, only that at the end instead of let’s say having 70 trait points available, you now have 75. Naturally, there has to be a definite plateau for that as well, one that a very dedicated player could reach in a short amount of time. I would say no longer than two weeks. Note that this is just an example to demonstrate how such a mechanic would work in GW2. I’m not proposing to increase the number of trait points being available.

The second and my by far least objectionable method of vertical progression could be described as from balanced specialization. For it to work, the whole gear system would have to be based around a never changing maximum value of distributable stat points. Common gear would have the exact same power potential as the rarest of rare gears, with the only difference being that the rare gear drops with very specialized stat point distributions allowing for far more situational builds compared to balanced common gear. Example: Every piece of gear has 100 stat points available with 4 different attributes to distribute them into. The stat point discrepancy between attributes for common rarity drops cannot exceed 10 points. If we have attributes A,B,C and D, the most unbalanced/specialized point distribution for this particular rarity would be 20,30,20,30. Rarer gear would allow for a higher discrepancy, say 90(5,0,5,90).

It’s very similar to how the trait point mechanic works in GW2. The key point is that no piece of gear is statistically superior to another and that there is a fixed stat plateau that will never move. I know that it’s most probably much too late for these methods to be implemented as they would radically change the way leveling works.

As it stands, the reason I stopped playing GW2 is because I inherently dislike the principles behind vertical progression, which is to give the player a short lived stat high that vanishes quickly and leaves other players without the time or will to catch up feeling inferior.

Fenrina.2954:

Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.

This feels wrong to me. I think it’s “complimentary.” I don’t care that wvw progression doesn’t help me kill a world boss. Having different progessions that don’t stack with each other isn’t a bad thing.

I think he meant complimentary as in “compliments your current role/build rather than obsoletes it with new gear” as opposed to “all forms of progression are tied together.” At least that’s the way I took it.

Improving horizontal progression:

• Skin locker as with sPvP. (One of the reasons that no one is using all these cool backpieces we’ve been getting from the living story is that the next time a cool backpiece comes along, you have to use an expensive stat splitter (which wasn’t even an option until recently) or just lose the skin forever. They’re unlocked by completing achievements, why aren’t the skins sitting there with the achievement-point skins like the Zenith set ready for us to use?)
• Ability to save a few trait builds at retrait: the problem there isn’t the money sink (you could probably even raise the price a little and no one would complain), it’s that it’s a pain to swap between the same builds over and over.
• Ascended gear should not unlock only one stat set for a particular weapon or armor piece if it’s going to be time-gated and heavily expensive. One of the nice things about exotics was that it was cheap enough that if I wanted to try out some stupid gimmick build, I could afford it. Perhaps initially your ascended gear has one statline and then you have to do quests and craft/mystic forge your way to different statlines which you can then swap from, and the advantage of legendaries is that you’re completely unlocked from the outset?
• More traits, with tradeoffs.
• Cosmetic skill progression: if I want all the “smoke” in my necromancer’s skills to be bubblegum pink, why not? (This could be turned off for enemy players in sPvP and WvW so they could read your skills properly, like how you can set them to have team colors rather than specially colored gear.)
• Not all WPs are unlocked for alts when you world complete, but a few key WPs should be: the ones next to each dungeon entrance.

Vertical progression is the “easy” is the more obvious form of progression, and tends to be the universal progression. It’s easier to understand (bigger number = better).
However, it creates disparity between the have’s and have not’s, further aggravated by characters with poor builds.
One of the worst things I find in games is when you progress too far such that your build essentially locks you into a certain style.
For example, imagine spending all you gold to make your zerker build, enter a new content that specifically built for soldier gear (eg. all enemies constantly apply conditions on you 24/7). No back up gear? Tough luck. Just look for a group and hope they’re ok with carrying you.
On another note, selling vertical progression items (for BIS) on the TP further promotes farming as method for “progression”. This game already encourages players to farm gold, not sure why we want more reasons to farm.

Horizontal progression provides more options, however, this game currently does not encourage you want use those options due to grind/gold/time investment and lack of UI functionality to make it easy to swap between them.

Going back to the previous CDIs, I think that there should be a PvE “global domination” game mode, with the idea to unlock abilities that do not directly impact your class, but rather give options within this new game mode.
Examples such as:
- commanding a squad of NPCs
- use of interactable items (mortars, tanks, etc)
- building offensive/defensive structures
- provide buffs/debuffs to nearby friendly/enemy NPCs
- summon airstrikes, dragons, etc etc.

Perhaps you can only have 4 abilities at a time, and these should take up the keyboard F5-F8 slots.

In my opinion, this might serve as a better type for horizontal progression.

I’ll talk about vertical progression

Thoughts – I personally have no problem with vertical progression a long as its presented correctly and doesn’t leave a to large gap between players. Its an RPG so a little bit will always be needed. Problem is that its current grind/rng form it is way to hard to get and goes against the philosphies and promises the game was built apon as a result. Now Ascended gear should be hard to get It needs to be presitigous but should not feel like a sacrifice of time to do so and people should have the chance to gear multiple alts. The answer is to have more ways of obtaining it. I’m not talking TP or just restricting the gear to fractals but actual chances to get it

Add more ways to get it – In gw1 everybody had the same tier of gear no matter what but could get more stats and skills (Vertical progess) through killing certain bosses or finding them in the Open world. I would support a system like this here. It could work by that when certain conditions are met in a region special 1 man instances opens up which lead to extremely hard challenges that can result depending on the challenge an Ascended wep/armour box, a unique skill or a title that gives you a 5+ stat increase for PvE only. (As an example say you open all the temples in orr at the same time 3 challenges with some lore thrown in are opened. 1 Jump puzzle, 2 boss instances or after you slay the ulgoth 1 is open or for WvW you control 7 keeps and SM castle another instance is unlocked etc)

While it is still hard the thing is its a guarantee, you know the reward and you know you’ll get it. The player will feel good once he gets it and because certain conditions need to be met it’ll encourage people into the overworld thus hiting to birds with 1 stone. Another idea is to make them purchasable through fractals. Pristine relics are just sitting there doing nothing once you have brought your rings. Add ascended armour and weapons to the Vendor for say 15 pristines per weapon and armour or more skills maybe for again 15.

Summary – But regardless of what approach you take its all about choice. If someone wants to grind champs let them, If someone wants to craft there gear do so but if someone wishs to challenge himself for presige in the open world for these weapons or if you choose so unique skills (I really miss that system) or play WvW or Fractals they should be able to get them and have a guaranteed means of getting them.

As for Horisotal progression add more Dyes, skins and Generic titles to the world which like my earlier challenge instance idea could be linked to the as well. Just more options and choices and Less RNG all round

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Personally and note this is not the opinion of Arena but I like the idea of uniquely skinned BiS items dropping in challenging content. My opinion as a player is that the current drop rates could be tweaked.

Chris

That will not remove the RNG factor…. Look at it this way:
Say you increased the drop rate on Tequatl. That means a higher change to get a weapon. But it is still RNG.
Some people will get several drops, others will get nothing, most will get items with the wrong stat combination. Please, please, please: No more RNG!

What if you could sell them? Thus complimentary to other forms of acquisition?

Chris

selling ascended on TP kind of defeats their purpose. The TP and random aquisition is partially what killed exotics as progression, it also limited the amount of rewards you could give out.

Ascended itemization is actually fairly good, it just has a couple problems

Problems

A. crafting should be a choice, not the only way to gear up
1. crafting is niche playstyle, not something everyone enjoys
2. If everyones a master crafter, those that enjoy it dont have as much of a market
B. The amount of raw materials is too huge for the average player to want to deal with.
C. Is fairly prohibitive in terms of build diversity and charachter growth

Good points
Heres whats good with the itemisation
A. gives more valuable rewards to put into the world
B. gives more value to low level crafting items
C. requires actual personal effort (vision crystals) (*this makes it not a tp only task)
D. is a decent mid range term goal

A)one of the best things you can do for ascended aquisition is make the final recipe able to be performed by non crafters. this would eliminate the first problem. it would still allow people to sell the parts, which gives crafting a viable market.
1)the method of crafting could be in places that reward GW2 gameplay. Think ascended crafting stations, or npcs, in hard dungeons, at the end of difficult multi teird jumping puzzles, or guild content.
2)the non crafting recipe could use upgraded versions of the ingredients, which could use a secondary resource like karma/gold/obsidian shards/skillpoints (this makes it slightly less efficient than crafting, which requires leveling to 500, learning recipes etc)
3) as example, instead of needing vision crystal, inscription, handle, blade. it would use. soul inscription, vision crystal, 3 soul deldrimor steel, 3 soul spiritwood planks. The soul items can be made with say 1 deldrimor steel and 10 skillpoints or 1 deldrimor steel and 5 gold etc at the special ascended crafting station.

Also instead of increasing the drop rate of case ascended items, you can put account bound (upgraded)material drops(like the soul deldrimor steel) into harder content. This reduces the dependency on massive amounts of gathered materials, or at least cuts them down, it also means people can get some via drops, and go to market for the missing pieces. You can drop soul major inscriptions, which become specific when you click it. This reduces the amount of unwanted stat drops, but still allows some variety in drops but allows people to be more likely to get a usefull stat combo.
for example. you find soul power inscription, which you can select to become berserker, soldiers or valkyrie.
let the soul inscriptions be salavageable for decent amounts of mats (this way its always of value)

The advantages of this solution:

1)More ways to obtain ascended in various game modes
2)Still makes crafters relevant (they can provide the most stable predictable means of 3)getting ascended recipe parts)
4)Still makes gathering valuable
5)Still makes dragonite/empyreal/bloodstone serve a purpose
6)Adds new valuable drops(rewards for challenging content) that dont have to be insanely rare, since they are only a part of a whole, but wont glut the tp too much because they are soul bound
7)creates better incentives for certain content. For example lets say the obsidian ascended crafting station spawns after defeating incendio temple dungeon champion. This gives a reason to do the whole quest chain, and adds flavor to the world, makes ascended feel more like an adventure. Even if you bought deldrimor ingots, spiritwood planks an inscription and the shards, now its something to do in the world to get it.

To begin with, I don’t believe it’s good faith to begin this discussion mere days after the final introduction of ascended. It doesn’t look good to ask for input on vertical progression when you’ve just released the final stage of vertical progression. That’s like asking someone what they want for dinner as you’re serving it up on the table, it’s too late – you already cooked dinner. This discussion should have come before ascended armour was introduced at the very least, doing it this way shows ArenaNet had no intention of being flexible and placed little priority on player feedback.

I have lots of problems with ascended but you guys shrugged off all the negative feedback so now we have to deal with it. I feel it’s important to state (despite it being unable to be removed) that I still don’t approve of ascended progression. Participation in this discussion isn’t an endorsement of ascended, it’s an unhappy reality.

With that out of the way.

• Areas of Acquisition: One of the good things about exotics compared with many other games was the many paths to acquisition. Run dungeons? Exotics. Like crafting? Exotics. Want to farm gold? Exotics. Like to WvW? Exotics. Exotic acquisition was designed to be inclusive of multiple play styles and didn’t force content on people. This is in stark contrast to ascended. You are forced to do certain content (including crafting, which many people loathe and which is nothing more than a gold sink with no redeeming game enjoyment for us, watching a progress bar fill and reset as we file through spread sheets and blow our gold to pointlessly level something we wanted nothing to do with). Why doesn’t ascended follow a similair formula to the original exotic implementation? No content required, all content rewarded. Why do we have to craft?

• Time gate and resources locking you to choices: Why does everything have to be an account bound time gate? I feel immense pressure (to the point where I gave up) because of ascended. I have 8 level 80s, I have played many hours and I still haven’t experienced everything in the game. I struggle to outfit my characters in exotic sets, I certainly can’t afford to do it for ascended sets. I also have great difficulty building alternate gear sets for the game. There is a build I’d like to play in WvW with my guild but I can’t afford another exotic set. Sometimes I think I might like to gain an ascended set but what if my build gets nerfed? What if a better one comes out? What if I want to play something different? Ascended is flawed from a really obvious problem – it locks you into a character and a build that is chosen for it. Similair to WvW ranks, you are choosing to make progress on a single character with a single build choice. The resource and time cost for ascended is too high and it hinders players’ abilities to experience a variety of classes and builds. It’s a soft limitation (technically you can just use exotics or choose to play less classes/builds) but ascended acquisition would feel really pointless if you don’t end up using the ascended items and it feels bad to use an exotic rabid set when you have an ascended berserker set. Your vertical progression systems (WvW, Ascended etc) seem to consistently herd players away from build or class diversity and into specialised roles. It’s not flexible for experimentation, which is a great freedom lost from GW1 and something I believe harms to game far more than any benefits of ascended.

You introduced ascended rings as fractal exclusives. You had huge backlash over the area of acquisition (much of it was from WvW players complaining about the need to PvE but also from people who didn’t want to run FotM). You said you learned from this mistake and future roll outs would be better. Cut to today where ascended requires crafting (RNG drops don’t cut it). You had over a year to get it right and you repeated the same mistake (players who don’t like crafting have to do it to acquire ascended).

I would like ascended to be fixed. Multiple methods to acquire it similair to exotics. I would like to see something done about how negatively it impacts on build and class diversity. In all future forms of progression I would like to see you reign in the account bound character specific forms of progression. Please stop adding progression which ends up feeling like I’m locked to a specific character or build. Horizontal progression does this much better than vertical (although skills and traits were fine). I’d like to see less reliance on time gates. I believe it’s an arbitrary tool and it’s condescending to the player, if doing a one hour fractal run is worth a pristine relic once, why not twice in the same day? Or on a different character. IMO you need to fix the stuff you’ve added over the last year before it’s time to move onto new things.

Finnway.2183:

I think he meant complimentary as in “compliments your current role/build rather than obsoleting it with gear progression” as opposed to “all forms of progression are tied together.” At least that’s the way I took it.

Fair enough.

My concerns come from how what we have already seem tied together. Gear and traits from PvE apply in WvW while I can’t use the new heals in SPvP because I lack the skill points even though that isn’t an issue with other skills. How progression in one area affects another is something that’ll come up again as time passes.

My thoughts on progression

Weapon skills
- new weapons skills have been added to all weapon types expanding customization options.
- All weapons skills now have a Tiered power grade ranging from 1-5
- All skills now have a classification, minor, major, superior and master.
- Tier points are awarded to all players starting at level 11, 1 Tier point per level gained for a total of 70, spent these points on your weapon skill tiers to further customize your load out.
- All level 80 players are awarded an initial 30 Tier points, the rest is awarded as you gain skill points aka level up.

How it works
- You can equip 1 minor 2 major 1 superior and 1 master skill.
- soft CC belongs to the major category, hard CC belongs to the superior category.
GS example:
- auto attack = minor Tier it to make it hit faster or increase cleave to 5 targets
- 100 blades = master Tier it to either hit harder or hit faster
- whirlwind = major Tier it make it spin on location or hit harder
- blade trail = major Tier it to make the CC last longer or travel further
- rush = superior Tier it to increase distance or reduce CD

Defiant Boss buff
- Defiant has been replaced by Resilience.
Resilience:
- CC has been split into 2 categories
- Soft CC: cripple and chill.
- Hard CC: Blind, fear, daze, stun, knock back, knock down, blowout.
- How it works, the Boss resilience meter fills up the more CC is used on him when the resilience bar is full the boss becomes enraged and is immune to all forms of CC and is more prone to use his elite attacks more frequently, use your CC sparingly and only when necessary.
soft CC adds 1.5 points to the resilience meter, hard CC ads 3 points, the bar total is 12.
- once the resilience bar is full it will only start to decay after say 15 seconds, it decays faster the longer you abstain from using CC abilities on the Boss.

Time gating
- Time gating needs to be adjusted so that alts can be progressed on the same day as the main character, make the items account bound but at least, if I have 8 toons don’t limit my progression to just my main.
- here’s a thought, all these once per day resources could be adjusted to work for example like this: for every level 80 toon you have the time gate extends by 1 per day, this way if I have 8 maxed level toons I can gather the resource 8 times.
goes w/o saying but all of the gathered resources should be account bound even the end item itself in order to prevent economy disruption.

Hard mode dungeons
- make it crazy hard, not for the faint of heart but also rewarding.
no whites, no blues, no greens, no rares, increased chance at exotics+ by a lot.
account bound named weapons after the bosses with unique skins.
you want the skin you gotta kill that boss yourself to get it, it adds prestige.
I’d rather get no drop and just some coin rather than all the vendor trash.

elite skills
- their is a need for more weapon specific and types of elites, what I mean is:
- all weapons should have at least 2 elite skills available to them.
- from a warrior’s perspective I’d love some dragon slash elite on my sword for example.
- stances, shouts physical type elite’s that interact with your traits.

Controversial Changes
make legendary items account bound upon creation just like you did with ascended.
- this would give back the prestige legendary items should have, it adds a sense of wow you got that ! instead of the you bought it from the TP feeling.
- precursors are now account bound, drop rates have been increased meaningfully.
- rich orichalcum ore node outside of JP has been added for those that do not enjoy jumping but would like to get access to this resource, no one should be forced to jump if they do not want to.
Legendary node protector actively protects the node and cannot be lured away from node has to be killed before the node can be mined.
- TP minimum outbidding price difference of 5% has been introduced to prevent 1 copper outbids. this percentage goes up as the rarity of the item goes up.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Deified.

The Tokens idea is interesting and I am sure you are noting that with our Mega Boss update Tequatl players can earn Ascended Weapons with Unique skins (Sunless) and that we will be moving forward with that paradigm. The idea of more challenging zone meta events was raised in the Living World CDI and a good idea. More to follow on that. I also agree that there is a huge amount of awesome progression to be found in guilds. ‘It has moderate to good horizontal progression for dungeon gear looks and WvW gear looks. Now it’s time to start introducing some new ways of horizontal progression.’ I agree.

Chris

I seriously hope that doesn’t mean updating the other world bosses to Teq’s level. Obviously that would be a disaster as there are many servers who can’t even get Teq down. Even on my server JQ we only get Teq down during server prime time (and sometimes not even then). So you would have a ton of world bosses that hardly any one can complete. I think the Orr boss level is more realistic for the open world. If you want a super hard boss for organized large groups you need to go instanced, not open world. Which is why it would be nice to see an Underworld instanced type zone.

I would also like to point out the unnecessary 25 SP gate for new skills for sPvP players.

I understand the motive – to keep the initial skill pool relatively low and allow a newcomer to adjust and accustom himself with his skillset before expanding.

However, why don’t they cost 1 Skill Point, or 3, or 6? It doesn’t make sense to me that a new healing skill would cost more than double the points for some elites, and close to the full cost of others.

If sPvP progression with skills is to go down this route, I would think about reducing the costs of new skills to be consistent with the PvE unlock system that newcomers may have been using before entering the Mists. At maximum, I would say a cost of 9 for any non-elite skill. I just think the cost is too high for absolutely no reason.

Latinkuro.9420:

- here’s a thought, all these once per day resources could be adjusted to work for example like this: for every level 80 toon you have the time gate extends by 1 per day, this way if I have 8 maxed level toons I can gather the resource 8 times.
goes w/o saying but all of the gathered resources should be account bound even the end item itself in order to prevent economy disruption.

I also love this idea.

Hey folks, I’m a bit late to the party, but I would like to talk about the character progression in Golden Sun.

For those who don’t know, Golden Sun had a bit of an unusual class system. The core game revolved around four different types of elements (water, earth, fire, air). Each character starts with five “levels” in one element. Their class is derived from this element, and they can only cast spells from this element.

The key idea that makes this concept work is the game’s “djinn”, which are associated with the same four elements. Each “djinn” you assign to a character raises the level of the djinn’s element by one. If I had two fire djinn and an air djinn attached to an earth guy, his elemental levels would be as follows:

5 earth
2 fire
1 air
0 water

By adding elements, you can change the class of a character substantially. For instance, say I have a bulky earth guy. By default, he has a strong attack score, a small healing ability, and mostly single-target or small AoE spells. However, if I give him a bunch of air djinn, then he keeps the same score, loses the healing spells, and gains a whole bunch of status effects (buffs and debuffs). If I combine him with fire djinn, then he attacks harder than the other two, but has worse spells overall.

There are also some very specific combinations of abilities too, such as having a mixture of fire and air djinn on the earth guy that makes you a fast single-target warrior.

The more djinn you have assigned to a character, the more powerful they will become. Their classes will improve the more elements you add. This is not to say that all assignments are equally powerful, as going for certain classes will be more powerful. The most powerful classes tend to follow specific patterns (max 1 element, equal levels in 2 elements, equal levels in 3 elements. There are not enough djinn to get equal levels in all 4).

You don’t just get djinn for free as you level, instead there’s a pokemon-esque aspect to the game where you have to track down djinn and add them to your party. The game can also throw imbalances at you even if you find all of them, such as a temporary surplus of wind djinn.

In addition, you can expend the djinn as a resource. Each djinn has a skill associated with it, which can vary from a selection of offensive, defensive, and utility abilities. Each djinn also raises certain skills of the character. When you use a djinn, it doesn’t increase your elemental level anymore, which can lead to losing your class bonuses. However, if enough djinn have been used, you can utilize them in a powerful summon attack, after which they (one-by-one) recover and contribute to your class level again.

The class system used by this game has a couple of amazing features that lead to really cool and interesting gameplay features:

1. Power is a limited resource. You can only have so many djinn at a particular point in the game, and you have to figure out how to utilize them at a given point. There is a game to figuring out how best to assign your djinn so that you get optimal classes for an entire party.

2. An increase in the vertical progression of the system corresponds with an increase in the horizontal progression. As you gain access to more and djinn, not only does this result in more powerful classes, it results in more types classes being available, and more and more configurations of an entire party.

3. Multiple uses for the power resources. I can leave the djinn alone and get a powerful class, I can sacrifice my class to use the power of the djinn, and I can use a lot of djinn to work towards a powerful summon attack. There is a balance between the three that the player can decide for themselves.

(continued in next post…)

Now, Guild Wars 2 actually has a system that shares the characteristic of increasing horizontal and vertical progression, namely, the trait system. As you gain access to more trait points, you not only gain access to more abilities, but you also gain access to more configurations.

However, there are a couple of differences in the two systems that limit the other strengths in comparison:

1. Switching trait configurations is highly cumbersome. Not only does it require paying gold to reattune, the process to retrait is a large amount of downtime for a player, especially as they cannot take back accidental point assignments. Losing your old trait configuration is just icing on the annoyance cake.

2. Retraiting doesn’t change much about your character. In guild wars 2, by selecting traits, it largely changes aspects of your skills, but they generally remain the same skill. In golden sun, you can fundamentally change what you can do by retraiting. For a less fundamental change, in Diablo 2, traits give you access to skills that you otherwise would not have available, and can get you the passive changes as well.

3. Trait configurations are very tied up in other vertical progression systems. Namely, ascended armor stat configurations. If I want to change my traits, I hypothetically could as there is horizontal progression in the system, but then for a lot of the changes I need to change out my gear, which means that I need to reset my vertical progression in terms of armor configuration. For ascended armor, this could take a month for this single horizontal change I want to make.

4. The trait system is intrinsically bound another vertical progression system (i.e., your character level). This is a highly limiting factor for the system, which limits both the vertical and horizontal progression of the system. Now, this is not inherently problematic, as many other game systems do so as well, but it is a limitation worth noting.

Overall, the most problematic aspect of this system is how many horizontal systems are tied into stats. While this is a huge problem with ascended gear, I suspect that this would have shown up as a concern even with exotics if berzerker gear wasn’t 100% sufficient to do pretty much all of the PvE content in the game. This speaks to the need of a new system outside of the stat and level-based vertical progression.

Interestingly enough, Guild Wars lore has four schools of magic that are built in, which could play well with a golden sun-esque djinn system. This may lead to too many configurations if done strictly like golden sun. A suggestion I have is to die this in to a sub-class system that people can use for a secondary class. These secondary classes could be based on configurations of magical signets that add skills that can be used for that class. For instance, Guardians could infuse themselves with Destruction and Aggression to gain abilities that allow them to be more damaging in combat, or they could infuse themselves purely in preservation and become even tankier. The configuration could be relatively shallow (such as a maximum of 4 magical infusions), and could perhaps allow more infusions as the game evolves. If people want to try out new sub-classes, they have to earn new infusions (which could be relatively hard to find), but they can always reuse previous infusions found. The idea being that there is added customization, there are added things you can do in certain configurations (but not others), and that this is a system that is outside of the current stat and level vertical progression.

I’d like to talk a bit about skins as a mean of horizontal progression in the game. Currently, when I see someone with a rare skin I think “okay he dropped 10$ in the gem store and I would look like that in 2 minutes if I did the same.” This isn’t exciting and it doesn’t feel epic. I’d like rare skins to reward players who have achieved long-term accomplishments or challenging feats. Right now, the only ones that do are the Hall of Monuments sets and the dungeon sets.

I’d like to be able to fix myself some long-term goals that will take some time and effort to accomplish and would give me a reason to log into the game more often, and a rare skin that looks awesome is something I would definitely see myself going after. And if there ever is a skin collection then I’ll probably try to collect others after I get my favorite, just to fill my collection. Power creep (as in vertical progression) gets boring after a while but new art never gets old, at least if the styles are varied.

I understand that armor is the most expensive kind of gear to make, but it’s also the most powerful mean of changing a character’s appearance so it’s important.

I’d like to see Guild Wars 1 gear philosophy go make a comeback: quick to get the maximum stats, hard to get the skin you want! Altholics also win with that since they only need the stats. I agree that exotics were a tad too easy to get, but currently, getting ascended gear is way too time consuming.

P.S.: Nice to see that the game director likes the same classics as I do. (Final Fantasy Tactics) :P

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Brainstorm statement.

I am assuming that you wouldn’t want a progression system in which new skills and traits superseded/replaced existing skills and traits.

Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.

So therefore the idea of statistical power creep is redundant?

Chris

Hi Chris, personally I like stat progression, but I would like to see it available other than by gear (though i think you could improve infusions as the last gear related stat increase).

My concern with your complimentary progression system is: will it actually feel like progression? If everything is no better than what we have already, where is the progression? The new heal skills are a good example of this. They are no better than my current heals (for necro and thief), so they don’t feel like progression at all to me. People hold up the GW1 skill system as a model, but it sounds like the new skills were often better than the old ones, so there was a power-progression there. The old GW1 skill system actually sounds pretty good, esp with way the skills were acquired.

As an example of non-gear based stat progression, I like LOTRO’s virtue system. This gave you stat bonuses from doing certain achievement type tasks. There were lots of stat bonus types, but you could only slot 5 at a time. For exampe, if you killed 1000 centaurs you could get a +5% damage bonus to centaurs, which would compete against other benefit type for your 5 slots. You could give other types of benefit too, like +20% duration on control effects.

This system would allow a lot of options for build customisation and specialisation. It also encourages players to do a wide variety of content, so they could have a range of possible bonus types to slot in the appropriate circumstances.

Another option to consider is “status progression”. Status is a very powerful motivator. If horizontal progression was tied in with the idea of status, I think it could be very attractive to players. This is where unique new skins are tied in with skill achievements. There is some of this in the game already, like the arah dungeon set and fractal weapons. It is not that well developed however. Fractals in particular would be a good avenue for this, but you would need to start adding some titles etc. Maybe some fractal armour too.

I greatly prefer horizontal to vertical progression. However, I’d like to ask that you keep in mind that it’s very easy to make a horizontal system too complicated, especially with regards to skills. I started playing Guild Wars 1 about 5 years after it came out. Bought the combo pack that had all the expansions at once. There were WAY too many skills. I never got to the point where I could create my own build without consulting a guide website.

I don’t think GW2 is too complicated on the skill front right now. Having skills tied to weapons helps with that and greatly simplifies that aspect of things. The part of GW2 that mirrors the complexity of GW1’s skill system is the trait system. I can set up a trait build on my own at this point, but if you add many more it will become very difficult, especially for new players.

I do think there are things you can add to mitigate that. Highlight or otherwise ‘suggest’ traits that help weapons or utilities a character has equipped. Once a trait is selected, highlight other traits that synergize with that trait. This can be as simple as showing highlighted traits in a different color on the dropdown box and putting a colored border around their trait slot hexagon to indicate that’s there, or as complicated as adding a line to the tooltip that says ‘this trait synergizes with x that you currently have equipped/active’.

Just to repeat, I greatly prefer horizontal progression in whatever form, and I would prefer a complicated skill system to a vertical progression system of any form. But I’ve seen adding horizontal skills mentioned a few times and wanted to toss my two cents in. Personally I’m very motivated by minis (thrilled with my yak from wvw season 1), and while I like skins I would much prefer more skins like the zenith ones, where I can use as many copies of them as I want. As it stands I have most of my LS skins stashed in my bank because I don’t know for absolute certain which character I want them on…so for fear of having them on the wrong character they sit in my bank.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here is a crazy brainstorm idea, not in anyway indicative of our direction.

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

I am asking this because it is going to generate some left field conversation not because I think it is or isn’t a good idea.

Chris

That would be ok in my book. Because I do not care about fractals and do not do them. So I would not feel forced to grind fractals for this gear since it doesn’t affect WvW or regular PVE.

Gear Progression:

As a player who loves to change builds, I really wish that we were able to quickly change stats on gear. With the current system, the cost specifically, I feel as though experimenting with builds and trying new things is not encouraged. There have been many occasions that I would love to try something out but give up on it because of the cost of setting the build up. This is also because of the lack of build templates and there being a lack of diversity in builds … but that’s for another day =p

One idea I had for ascended armor was that it had the ability to have multiple stats. Much like legendary weapons do now. Therefore I thought of an expansion of ascended armor. This could be done through a crafting expansion or new recipes. These recipes could be something like (Ascended armor piece + X,Y, Z). The resulting armor piece would have the exact same stats as ascended … no bonus what-so-ever! Although they would be able to change the stats of the armor. Although I feel that having access to all stats would be amazing, I think perhaps it would be a bit too much awesomeness.

Therefore I figure we should be able to have access to different categories of armor stats. The creation of which could be based upon the recipes. These could be some examples …

Brawler (offensive stats): Beserkers, Assassins, Rampagers.
Paragon (Defensive): Soldier’s, Knight’s, Sentinel’s, Dire.
Monk (Heal stats): Cleric’s, Magi, Apothecary’s, Shaman’s.

The idea then is to “upgrade” your ascended armor to be able to swap stats. So if you made a set of Brawler ascended armor, you would then be able to swap stats between the stats in that category. This system … i feel … could open up players ability to swap builds, but at the same time keep the need for multiple armor sets.

That’s about it, I hope even if its too crazy it gives someone else an idea. =)

All right, finally getting in on this discussion.

My issues are with ascended gear.

Basically: it has turned the game from what was a relatively flat horizontal progression – kitting out multiple characters and/or multiple builds in exotic gear for different situations – to an excess of vertical progression: taking no less than two months to kit out a single character with a single build in full ascended.

I think this is far too restrictive and goes against what I believed to be the core philosophies of this game. It’s massively expensive and time consuming to kit out a character in just one set, let alone a legion of alts with several builds.

Why not just go with exotics? Well, when something better is available, even if it’s only better by a small amount, I think it’s unfair that players who put in the time to grind for their materials and/or cash to make it have higher stats than the players who do not. Everybody should be able to access their best-in-slot stats (and change them when they want) with relative ease – that is one of the biggest core philosophies I believed Guild Wars 2 was going to follow.

After doing some math on the materials needed for a full ascended set, I’ve come to a set of numbers – for most ascended gear, it’s about 100+ world bosses. 100+ dungeons/towers/jumping puzzles. 100+ gold. And at least 1-2 months (laurels).

Doing that once is not fun. Doing that two or more times per character just to have build diversity? That’s a grind – and that’s what this game was supposed to avoid. I want to be having fun. Instead I’m just thinking about my vertical progression whenever I play, and how is what I’m doing right now going to help me progress efficiently?

I have one big suggestion, a sweeping change that would fix ascended gear and turn it into not only a worthwhile grind but a horizontal one too: equalize stats between exotic and ascended gear, and then give ascended gear stat-swapping. (Or allow ascended gear to cannibalize exotic gear in order to swap to those stats – so if a Zojja’s Greatsword ate an exotic Knight’s Greatsword, the Zojja greatsword could swap between Berserker and Knight’s stats freely from then on. This would keep legendaries special and also make exotics worthwhile again, because now exotics are almost totally worthless except for salvaging for Dark Matter.)

With this change, players who grind would not have a numbers advantage over players who don’t. They would have greater utility – easier build variety, less bag space taken up by gear. And we could get back to having fun, instead of working to have fun. Having higher stats behind a time-gated and massively expensive wall is not fun, it’s not fair, and it’s not what Guild Wars 2 or ArenaNet should stand for. At least, that is what I was led to believe in my time playing since 2006.

P.S.: please provide easier access to +5stat (not AR) infusions. The laurel ones are only +4, so any player with common sense is going to ignore the +5 Mystic Forge ones and just go buy them from WvW. Either make the laurel ones +5 or add +5 ones to the Guild Commendation vendor.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Personally and note this is not the opinion of Arena but I like the idea of uniquely skinned BiS items dropping in challenging content. My opinion as a player is that the current drop rates could be tweaked.

Chris

That will not remove the RNG factor…. Look at it this way:
Say you increased the drop rate on Tequatl. That means a higher chance to get a weapon. But it is still RNG.
Some people will get several drops, others will get nothing, most will get items with the wrong stat combination. Please, please, please: No more RNG!

What if you could sell them? Thus complimentary to other forms of acquisition?

Chris

I believe this is the wrong way to go about obtaining this gear, and very much tantamount to selling of precursors and legendaries on the TP.

Just because the option is there doesn’t mean it’s a good decision to do so, and most certainly doesn’t make it right.

No, I believe the way to go is to fix acquisition of this gear outside of sales on the TP. My suggestion, as others have also alluded to, is to make it a reward for content completion, perhaps included as a part of every 2.5k AP chest after 10k AP or something.

You choose the piece. You choose the stats. Similar to how Zenith skins are currently acquired.

Please do all the things that Bearhugger suggested!

Character Progression in GW2 is something rather puzzling in my opinion because I feel like it was one of the things that GW1 did so well. When I played the game in GW1, I didn’t have to be bent over the numbers so much. If I wanted to run a build with one of my characters, I had to assign points to some of my 9ish stats, but that’s all I had to worry about. The numbers on my skills would increase accordingly. Inscriptions and Sigils on weapons were simple and concrete – an x% increase in damage if this happened, condition Y lasts z% shorter, etc.

But with GW1 – MOST of the difference in your character were the skills you chose, and the way you looked.

The skills you choose are still here to an extent. You choose your weapons and your utilities. Big difference here is – while in GW1 the numbers on those skills could be chosen and changed on a whim, changing from a Zerker to a Condition build in GW2 takes a ton of time and effort to grind the gold to have another Weapon/Armor set to give you MOST of the numbers needed to change around.

Which ties into your gear now. The Gear in GW1 (from what I can remember) started the same for each profession. Armor of the Gladiator’s type and of the Knight’s type had the same stats. You could then customize the armor by adding runes on it – similar to this system in GW2, except in GW2 you have the Basic/Fine/Masterwork/Rare/Exotic/Ascended framework AND the Berserker/Cleric/Carrion/etc framework, resulting in hundreds of combinations of the same armor set. Having these baked in means that the player has to spend less time enjoying the intrinsic beauty of the game and more time grinding to get gold to get decent gear for the one build you were currently playing.

In the end, this takes a toll with immersion. I know that I spend most of my time in GW2 working to get my character fully started with the best armor so I can deal more damage in my dungeon group. In GW1, I could stat up and forget about it fairly quickly and then go in and do things without having to worry about whether or not that 15 platinum I spent on armor was spent on the right stat set. And if something didn’t work the way I wanted to, I could add a little here and subtract a little there until my build was tweaked the way I like it. GW2 locks you into a greater state of permanence.

Also, in GW2, I’m constantly reminded of how much money I’m spending. Every time I travel, I’m reminded that I’m paying 3 silver. Every time I repair, I’m reminded that I’m spending (in my habits) usually around 11 silver. I’m constantly reminded that my money is being drained and that I need to step aside and grind a little to replenish my money. I find that I’m doing things solely for the monitory gain — I no longer do dungeons for the fun and adventure, but rather for the average 1g that I get at the end. In GW1, I could grind DoA or UW or FoW as the Elite Dungeons of sorts to get the money – and I often did. But even then, sometimes I went in for the pure, unrewarded spectacle of discovering that door where Dhuum hid behind.

To make a long story short, to me, GW1 was more about Character progression, GW2 is more about Number progression. But then again, maybe that’s just nostalgia.

Most MMOS if not all focus their progression in 2 ways: increasing the level cap or adding more better gears. Both mechanics imply they need to add more High level content while the low level content is ignored.

My idea – which is not new to some MMOs – is to add levels to the skills which in GW2 style they don’t mean to be more powerful due to the scaling down system, but they need to have better visuals.

I will give different examples:
A lvl 1 “barrage” will have visually less arrows then a lvl 3 “barrage”
A lvl 1 “stomp” will make visually less dust then a lvl 3 “stomp”
A lvl 1 “minion” will be visually smaller then a lvl 3 “minion”
etc.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

DiogoSilva.7089:

HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION
The flaws with its execution in GW2

Skill/ Build Progression
What is skill/ build progression? It’s about getting new tools to improve or customize our builds.

• It is crippled by some of the systems set in place for vertical progression, like stats being tied to gear, which in turn is tied to huge money and time sinks.
• It is further restricted by how trait allocation works, and the lack of build templates.
• Non-profession skills are very underwhelming. Although this is done on purpose for the sake of balance, when they aren’t worth using, they do not serve their purpose to enhance world immersion, as they are left unused, nor do they add any form of horizontal progression, because no build will be created around them.
• Skill hunting is generic and lacks the charm GW1’s elite skill hunting had.
• The skill system is generally very restrictive, with few weapons per profession, very few utility slots tied to high cooldowns, and an elite skill system that isn’t acchieving the epic feel it was meant to acchieve.

Solutions

• Separate the concept of (ascended) gear crafting from the concept of equipment stat customisation. Make it easy or easier to change stats, or at the very least, to craft new copies of the same gear with different stats.
• Add an universal build template system, and allows us to change traits on the fly (while not in battle, dungeons, etc). Creating and saving builds should be free. Loading/ changing them could still require a small money sink, if Anet feels it needs to be there.
• Revise how non-profession skills should be balanced. Instead of making them bad on purpose, make them decent but only fill a certain niche/ tied heavily to a specific area or situation. In theory, the new spray skill does that, but it’s a poor skill even for its intended purpose.
• It’s probably too late for a better skill hunting system, but perhaps that can still exist for something other than skill collection. More on that later.
• Anet is already adding new skills to professions, so this area is already covered.

I’ll talk about skins next.

There are some good ideas here which I would like to see us discussing as a group.

What do you all think about these ideas?

Chris

I’d have to agree that the Racial Skills have to be some of the most disappointing skills this game has to offer. It’s often to the point where racial skills feel more like a hindrance to unlock than actually fun and interesting. I know you guys do this for the sake of balance, but to me these skills don’t serve any sort of purpose at the moment. I’m not anywhere as skilled at balancing skills, but I know that you guy don’w want metas to be formed around Race/Profession combos, but it really would serve a greater purpose if you guys revisited racial skills and gave them some kind of an upgrade.

As to skill hunting. I miss it, but not a whole lot. I do want skill hunting to be in the game the same way it was in Guild Wars, but at the same time I like the convenience of being able to unlock my skills as I play, without having the need to travel to X location for Y skill. I have to say that I liked how you guys introduced the Toxic Cleanser skill during the Tower of Nightmare story. It gave players two options, though I feel the options were reversed. To me, if your going to introduce a skill in-game that doesn’t cost skill points, you guys needed to have made it cheaper in comparison to the skill points. I feel that unlocking the skill through spores should have been the better alternative, and it would have given players a cheaper option to unlock the skill on a character. Sadly, with how easy it currently is to gain Skill Points, and the rather outrageous price you gave the skill for gold and spore, you didn’t give the skill a better option for unlocking. I hope in the future we do get multiple options for unlocking skills, but have the cheaper of the two be the method that doesn’t involve Skill Points.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here is a crazy brainstorm idea, not in anyway indicative of our direction.

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

I am asking this because it is going to generate some left field conversation not because I think it is or isn’t a good idea.

Chris

This would be amazing and it will also make people like me who fear that PvE difficulty will have to increase more and more to make up for bigger stats, feel a lot better.

My greatest fear is that eventually my skill will not be enough and i will be locked out of content simply because I do not have the gear.
As someone with 4 80’s and more coming this would break my heart

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Brainstorm statement.

I am assuming that you wouldn’t want a progression system in which new skills and traits superseded/replaced existing skills and traits.

Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.

So therefore the idea of statistical power creep is redundant?

Chris

Absolutely

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Savoy.6824:

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

You may recall that in the first Guild Wars there were two factions. I believe they were called the Luxons and the Kurzacks. In that game it was possible to compete quest for a particular faction. Doing so resulted in rewards such as special armor and weapons. I would like to see the orders work in a similar fashion (or if no one likes the orders, then create some new factions for us to be a part of. I just pick the orders because there already in the game and I like that incorporates the personal story back into the game)

Also, I believe it would be great if completing quest didnt stop at skin and title rewards. If npc’s in the world could react to you based on which order you joined that would be cool as well. Have npc’s sell you cheaper food based on the order your in. For example, the vigil could sell you cheaper food that has power at its base, where the order of whispers could sell you items that deal with vigor or stealth. Discount food has already been done in game. The dragon bash festival introduced food that could be bought with candy (which is basically another currency when you get down to it) The food had buffs similar to that of food that was already in the game it just didnt last as long. Please dont stop at just food, Im just using this as an example.

Maybe put some animosity between some of the orders and provide us with some conflict we can participate in. Thats all Ive come up with for now. Anyone else have any ideas?

Would this kind of ‘Faction’ progression outside of how NPC’s perceive you in the world allow you access to exclusive Faction based rewards? Would this be grindy?

I like the base idea a lot and obviously it is something we could build in and thus am keen to hear the thoughts of everyone in regard to this?

Chris

It depends on how players would go about obtaining favor for these Factions.
Personally, I feel that it was mistake on the Writing Teams part for having players join an Order. I feel that players could have affiliated themselves with them on an individual basis. Similarly to how Trahearne was associated with all the Orders, but wasn’t a member of any of them. This would have allowed players to get on multiple Order’s good sides, and removed the limitations that came from joining a single order. Rewards being one of them.
In a perfect world, I would have loved to have the ability of obtaining a sort of affiliation with an Order, similarly to how we did during the Cutthroat Politics story. Once within their good graces, players could do things for them, such as doing events, killing enemies of a certain Order, aiding an Order’s NPCs in obtaining items, which would give a player points for that Order. Like in Factions, if a player had more points for that Order, then the other orders would shy away from you until you affiliate with one of them more. Alternatively, players could then hand in some of their “Affiliation Points,” to their respective Order for cosmetic rewards, consumables, etc., which would then lower those points. That would have been an interesting way of allowing players to interact with the Orders of Tyria, while still giving them the freedom of not having had picked an Order, and feel trapped within them.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Morrigan.2809:

I came about this post of a several month s ago and what I really liked about it was the fact that it expanded on the current professions but added horizontal progression-without the idea of balancing classes nightmare please consider something like this:

I will just quote:
Warriors > Berserker —- Legionnaire —- Duellist
Guardians > Crusader —- Augmentor —- Patron
Necromancer > Occultist —- Visionary —- Witcher
Rangers > Hunter —- Strider —- Mystic
Thiefs > Rogue —- Infiltrator —- Saboteur
Engineers > Alchemist —- Artificer —- Pioneer
Mesmers > Chronomancer —- Fencer —- Bard
Elementalists > Runologist —- Sorcerer —- Arcanist
—-NEW CLASS – 3rd Soldier—-
Lancers > Dragoon —- Templar —- Partizan >
That way players can:
progress with their characters
individualize themself better and make them more unique
unlock alot of new skills, traits, weapons ect. just through progressing with their class specific Talents that define, into which direction you specialize your character

Yep we chat about this a lot (-: It get’s me excited as a player to.

Chris

I’ll have to throw my support behind the idea of an Advanced Class System for Guild Wars 2! Personally, I find that it would be one of the best ways for players to progress their characters while not affecting gear progression in the slightest! Please continue to talk about this often! I would love to see how you guys would implement such a system into the game!

Edit: Throwing in my response to this post here since they go hand in hand.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Brainstorm statement.

I am assuming that you wouldn’t want a progression system in which new skills and traits superseded/replaced existing skills and traits.

Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.

So therefore the idea of statistical power creep is redundant?

Chris

Yes, I wouldn’t want to see older skills and traits be replaced with new ones out of fear of losing the builds I worked hard to craft on my own. I’d love to see the addition of new skills and traits that gave my characters newer roles, but could also greater define their current ones. I think something like an Advance Class System could work well with this because it fleshes out the roles that the current professions have, while also opening up some avenues to new play-styles that could have only been made when greater emphasis is placed on existing ones.

An example for the Guardian being the inclusion of a Zealot Advanced Class. The zealot could be a guardian that took his role as a defender to a whole level. They don’t want to defend the weak through defense, but with a greater emphasis towards their offense. They want to be able to defeat, and not stop, the enemy before they get the chance to attack. As such, they place emphasis on the guardian’s abilities at playing offensively. Maybe the could get access to conditions that currently the guardian can’t get access to because their flavor wouldn’t allow it to, or if it could it would be stretching things at best. What if a zealot can gain access to Bleeding and Cripple and even Torment? It would make sense for a Zealot because that would be a means for one to defeat their enemies before they get the chance to strike an ally. Their defense has become their offense.

I’d love to see profession evolution take part in Guild Wars 2. It could greater add to a player’s kitten nal without touching their equipment in the same sense that gear-based progression does. Which is something that is clear a lot of players don’t like.

Just a random thought here…..
The precursors that we get from those long-awaited scavenger hunts…….they better be account bound…..

Morrigan.2809:

I came about this post of a several month s ago and what I really liked about it was the fact that it expanded on the current professions but added horizontal progression-without the idea of balancing classes nightmare please consider something like this:

I will just quote:
Warriors > Berserker —- Legionnaire —- Duellist
Guardians > Crusader —- Augmentor —- Patron
Necromancer > Occultist —- Visionary —- Witcher
Rangers > Hunter —- Strider —- Mystic
Thiefs > Rogue —- Infiltrator —- Saboteur
Engineers > Alchemist —- Artificer —- Pioneer
Mesmers > Chronomancer —- Fencer —- Bard
Elementalists > Runologist —- Sorcerer —- Arcanist
—-NEW CLASS – 3rd Soldier—-
Lancers > Dragoon —- Templar —- Partizan >
That way players can:
progress with their characters
individualize themself better and make them more unique
unlock alot of new skills, traits, weapons ect. just through progressing with their class specific Talents that define, into which direction you specialize your character

And how many new “profession specific armor looks” can this create/
Awesome
Ah… and these profession branching can be added as an Order’s Choise.
At the end, when you have “saved the world” from the dragon and you are like a friend to all of the orders, you can have a choice of what you like to become next and that will be offered by a specific order

I don’t know as for others but for me vertical progression has one plus – the feeling of power! To see your character trounces the challenges, how one fart sets half the map flying, muahahahah!
It does however have nasty sideeffects of anything that is not endgame (gear, maps, skills) becoming “very temporary” until the end game part which becomes game itself.

Genius asura level idea:
Give the feeling of power to skilled players! But not with flat stats, but battle mechanic and animations!

• breakdown for veterans/elites - if they can’t land enough damage on a player or group of players during a certain time they start to panic taking more damage, or maybe even self-fearing and trying to make a break for it!

• more brutal animations - animations add a lot to the feeling of power. Now take warrior’s 2h hammer for example. When you see him use it it’s BRUTAL! When i see my guardian use it it’s like…oh..he did a swing..wow… Especially “banish” skill should have far more vigorous, fast, PAINFUL swing animation!

I fully understand the great benefits of skill and not stat based combat – all maps useful, no player shunned cause he doesn’t have that latest patch sword etc. But i still wanna know that when i willl enter orr with my necro and i will play it right, i will feel like death incarnate and those sorry risen will know the business end of that feeling!

What I would like to see:

Exotics brought up to Ascended power level OR Ascended nerfed to exotic power level
Ascended gear allows you to change your stats on the fly, similar to a system legendries use. Ascended also keeps all infusion slots. Ascended trinkets lose some stats but allow you to slot jewels again to allow players more customization.

I think it would be a fair trade, make ascended gear desirable as a method to save inventory space.

I would like to see ascended gear tradable as well, so I throw my support behind that notion.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Oh god I would love that. At least then if I wanted to at least partially gear up all 8 of my characters I would be able to get the money playing my way, go in and buy it without any time gate

Chris Whiteside.6102:

cesmode.4257:

StriderShinryu.6923:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Absolutely. Once again, no reason at all to restrict gathering of high tier gear to any one method of acquisition. Allow all pieces to be bought and sold. Allow all pieces to be traded for using a variety of the in game currencies that are already in place (dungeon tokens, karma, laurels, glory, etc.)

You do realize that even just one of these pieces will run well over 50 gold….Im thinking closer to 100. For one piece. If people have that much gold on hand, you might as well just buy your precursor as well while youre at it.

Whats interesting to think about is that if this went live and people started buying ascended gear off the TP, these are most likely going to be the people who have their legendaries already, and probably multiple legendariesalready because they have fat wallets in the real world and able to buy gems. Its amazing… people complain about legendaries being tradeable on the TP, but this would be acceptable?

Doing this would cause greater disparity between a RL richboy vs the normal joe, and the 24×7 farmer and the normal joe.

Yep this is definitely a valid concern. If the drop rate was higher though and it wasn’t just crafted then supply could be more deterministic in terms of demand.

Chris

My personal concern with being able to purchase Ascended gear on the Trading Post mirrors cesmode’s. Though there’s more; Wouldn’t adding this option essential turn Ascended level gear into a more annoying to obtain Exotic? It takes a lot more effort to craft a single piece of Ascended leveled gear than it does a whole set of exotic armor. This is somewhat proven by those that were able to craft their way from level 400 to 500 in the currently available crafting disciplines.
Not to mention that the fact that it’s incredibly rare to get an Exotic from a drop mean that Ascended will always have to be more rare of a drop. You could lower Exotic chances for the sake of lowering Ascended, but that would push Exotic onto the brink of becoming the new Rare-tier. Useless because then players would only get up to rare value, maybe get a few exotic pieces if they can, but just buy all the Ascended gear they’d need off the Trading Post. Of course the prices would more than likely mirror cesmode’s predictions, but with your thoughts on increasing their drop rates in the open world, I fear you could run the risk of diminishing the worth of Exotic tier gear to the same effect that Rare currently has in the game.
Please stick to the idea of expanding the avenues of obtaining Ascended gear outside of the Trading Post, as that, to me, is a sure way of pleasing players who don’t want to craft them.

Mikuchan.7261:

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.

I really, really like this idea.

In all of these discussions and development to get better looking armor like ascended or Legendary have been lost the main issue of the game. How to make this game more interesting for all of us, for new comers and old ones.

There is always someone who will get new armor in a day and they get bored again. So how does it make game more interesting for them. Not in any ways.

There is already so much currencies in this game that there should not be more of them anymore. And new currency for some new armor, that’s something what does not make game more interesting.

So making game more interesting is more important than just making character’s armors looks “better” way.

So how to make this game more interesting. Is make character’s progression different way, like Morrigan.2809 have suggested:

Morrigan.2809:

I came about this post several months ago and what I really liked about it was the fact that it expanded on the current professions but added horizontal progression-without the idea of balancing classes nightmare
Please consider something like this:

I will just quote:
Warriors > Berserker —- Legionnaire —- Duellist
Guardians > Crusader —- Augmentor —- Patron
Necromancer > Occultist —- Visionary —- Witcher
Rangers > Hunter —- Strider —- Mystic
Thiefs > Rogue —- Infiltrator —- Saboteur
Engineers > Alchemist —- Artificer —- Pioneer
Mesmers > Chronomancer —- Fencer —- Bard
Elementalists > Runologist —- Sorcerer —- Arcanist
—-NEW CLASS – 3rd Soldier—-
Lancers > Dragoon —- Templar —- Partizan >
That way players can:
progress with their characters
individualize themself better and make them more unique
unlock alot of new skills, traits, weapons ect. just through progressing with their class specific Talents that define, into which direction you specialize your character

And this way, there should be come different access to new DE’s in all maps, depending what progression we have been choose. For example. There are NPC’s wandering all around, and if you are specific progression in your profession, you can see new events (stars) above of NPC’s head. When you start that DE others can join you with these DE’s and get normal reward, but you will get also special reward for your progression (weapon, armor piece, item, skill, trade point or something). Also those who have choose same progression as you have, will have that special reward too.

So game would evolve different way, what ever you have choose before. In another words, game is changing around of you, what choises you have made. So your character’s progression is affecting the whole world around of you.

So please, no more looks, instead give players really something to do.

BEHOLD, ARENANET!
~ The Folk Spoke ~

Now you see what we expected from the game.
It is time to put that effort on game contents you’ve promised.
Most of all, in grade of Next-Gen.

I’ve said What & How to do these LONG AGO and OUTWORKED.
You’ve saw all of my topics, and made only the little fixes.
In year of 2014, play Big. Follow the instructions We’ve given.
( So all who spoke on this topic over 16 pages and counting… will enjoy the game as intented to. )

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here is a crazy brainstorm idea, not in anyway indicative of our direction.

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

I am asking this because it is going to generate some left field conversation not because I think it is or isn’t a good idea.

Chris

If outside of Fractals it was the same as Exotic level stats, this would be a massive improvement and would stay more true to what I understood the original intent of Ascended gear was.

I personally don’t like that Vertical Progression does limit my Horizontal Progression.
Say I have only one character and I love to play around with different builds. In gw2 this seems not really ‘possible’. Sure I could buy four or more Exotic Equipment Sets and keep them all in my Inventory, then when I want to switch my build, I go to LA and pay to reset my traits…
But you know? To me it costs a lot of effort to switch between builds. Not only do I have to keep track of my build setups i already have acquired, it is also costly, it consumes a lot of inventory space, it downgrades my characters appearance, and so on.

So in the long run, switching builds seems, well, like the game actually doesn’t want me to do it too often. It already is an annoying and costly process. Now with ascended gear, things become worse. Do I really want to get ascended gear for every one of my builds? Or do I prefer to just stick to exotics?

What I want is to ‘collect’ my ‘build parts’ and then be able to easy switch between builds i have already created. What I prefer is better Horizontal Progression.

For example: I find clerics exotic heavy boots and i right-click > ad to my collection. Then I have a ‘Edit my Build’ option in my character screen where i can choose from a dropdown which already unlocked stats i want to have on my boots. I then click ‘Save to a new Build’ and afterwards have the option to easily equip this build setup (with traits, equip and all)

And armor looks could work in a similar way! i would love guild wars to be about collecting stuff. like dyes, unlock and keep! and have easy access to it.

Horizontal Progression Idea for PvE using cultural factions.

What if there was a progression system similar to the WvW ranks but it was gained by improving ones influence with certain factions?

For example, when gaining influence with the Seraph your ranks would give you options against the Centaur and Outlaws, with every 5 ranks invested you could get a skill or effect when fighting those NPCs.

Each of the factions may have two or more enemies, some factions may share a common enemy but have different ways of dealing with them.
Seraph – Centaur, Outlaws and Krait.
Sylvari – Nightmare Court, Hylek and Krait.
Norn – Jotun, Sons of Svanir and Dredge.
Charr – Ghosts, Flame Legion and Dredge.
Asura – Inquest, Hylek and Outlaws.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here is a crazy brainstorm idea, not in anyway indicative of our direction.

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

I am asking this because it is going to generate some left field conversation not because I think it is or isn’t a good idea.

Chris

This would be perfect for me. As a non Fractal player I find it irritating that a minuscule portion of the game spilled over to other areas destroying balance and forcing me to get BiS – again – something I have stopped doing alltogther since getting handed a recipe, a shopping list and a daily to-do list is not my idea of fun.

I am mostly sticking to sPvP nowadays since it is the only portion of the game that still sticks to the original idea. Which is sad since I enjoyed to WvW a lot.

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.

I like that FFT system too -

About collecting skills in GW1 i do not understand why you guys did not keep it in GW2 and launched the game with this… would not be late to change it now?

I do not want to collect skills just for collect… how to collect it is important and in GW2 we learn skills through the interface which makes “collect” a little boring.
I miss the Signet of Capture, not the skill itself, but the fact that I have to kill a X boss to learn a elite Y.
The fact that the boss uses the elite against me is cool, play PVE in GW1 is like playing “PVP against bots” because the NPCs have the same cap of skills which players can have… I imagined that GW2 would be like that, but only the NPCs of the Heart of the Mist are like a “bot version of players”. Ok I think I was a bit off topic now ^^

Returning to skills progression, when you started talking about skill challenge before the release I imagined it would be challenges to learn the skills itself and not skill points… I think it would be great for PVE but it would be a problem for people who only play WvW :s

And to finalize! Skills unlocked at GW1 PVP are accbound, why not do the same in GW2? I agree with the fact that having many skills at the beginning can complicate things for new players, but once they’ve unlocked we can consider that they learned more about the profession and do not need to unlock skills again for that profession. I think it would be fair… you’ll have to play with the profession, you cant unlock skills to another profession as in GW1.

I honestly don’t think there is anything wrong with progression in this game, I think the problem rests solely with what many people call “end-game” or basically the game after you achieve the max level. I think it was a fantastic approach to make leveling very fast paced basically like a tutorial of sorts for how to play the game at 80, and then making the core of the features available for level 80 characters, I think this system functions fine.

I think the real problem lies with the fundamental philosophy with item progression. It’s something that will eventually drive the downfall of the game if its not corrected. WoW is a perfect example of how properly implemented item progression works, you have a system that provides a large variety of items (in the order of thousands) which can be obtained through many different aspects of the game (besides just grinding). GW2 doesnt have this, it has crafting as the sole focus of the game, which I think for some is fantastic, because alot of people appreciate that “grind free” system. But it doesn’t offer any sort of “progression” after hitting 80.

What in reality happens after you hit 80 is that everything is available in the game to you with very little work involved, and you turn the game into what is perceivable work, towards a crafting process that is painstaking to level and not very rewarding in the long run. (even from a cosmetic standpoint).

What needs to be done to cure this and appease both sides? Well first as foremost, this game needs more variety, in particular, tiered armor, which will give the core focus of the game actual progression. The variety of items needs to increase, and there needs to be more ways to get items besides JUST CRAFTING. (speaking of weapons and armor specifically) So that the actual things that make the game relevant at 80, such as world bosses, jumping puzzles, dungeons, etc, actually wind up having some sort of purpose (reward) when you complete them.

I think that anet see’s the skinning/cosmetic focus of the item system as a problem solving solution to the lack of a monthly fee, but its not. There are plenty of ways to find balance between rewarding players with good items through actual gameplay, and convincing them to purchase skins as well as other features available on the gem store. And like i have said in the past, this is a creativity problem on the part of the dev team, because I have heard no less then 2 dozen fantastic ideas to implement in this game that would make it AMAZING and I would never want to go to another MMO ever again, but they are always overlooked for things like wvw and pvp or cheap knock off skins in the gem store.

Not to mention the fact that I think people would actually like to see their magic find ability’s be used for something.

Just give a meaning to “ferocity”, “charm” and “dignity” which is a feature completely ignored since the first beta test.

Think like it as a easy mode – charm, normal mode – dignity and hard mode – ferocity
In easy mode, the foes have a less sensitivity sensor while in hard mode even the white and yellow foes will start attacking you.
These personality bars will always vary depending on your actions not only on your talking to NPCs
The more finisher moves you use, the more the ferocity grows up. The more you are healing and reviving others, your charm will go up and the more insignificant (less aggressive meaning, sneaky) you are your dignity will go up

Killing foes with weapon skills counts for dignity, Killing foes with elite skills counts for ferocity, while killing foes with conditions counts for charm

There are all sorts of ways to make these personality feature work and it will be constantly progessing. Giving the donation to the Dolyaks in the LA now as Wintersday events will count for charm while hitting the skirts with snowballs counts for dignity and kicking them counts for ferocity

Note*
The personality bars will not be limited, they will be infinite, so for someone who is really ferocious by his actions, he will need a lot of work to get his charm bar up.
think of the magic find bar with infinite levels.
Level 56 ferocity, level 28 charm and level 40 dignity. Getting charm up will need a lot of reviving and healing

I speak for only for myself.

I bought this game because it was advertised, or shall I say deceptively implied as a no gear grind game and to experience the highly recommended pvp because of GW1.

I supported the game through the cash shop, found the crafting somewhat interesting, and loved exploring.

Then you added fractals. I was ready to pack up and leave at that point, but decided to give pvp a chance first. What I experienced was a huge let down. Huge burst, a broken stealth mechanic, and anemic healing in WVW.

I’m going to tell you the truth, I won’t be purchasing any of your products in the future. I can’t trust you anymore. Regardless, good luck in the future.

Mungrul.9358:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here is a crazy brainstorm idea, not in anyway indicative of our direction.

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

I am asking this because it is going to generate some left field conversation not because I think it is or isn’t a good idea.

Chris

If outside of Fractals it was the same as Exotic level stats, this would be a massive improvement and would stay more true to what I understood the original intent of Ascended gear was.

The question here really is: To what end?

Why would I want to have a fractal-only carrot which I don’t even get a benefit from whenever I am not inside those fractals with my 4 guys (since most people would probably stick to a tightly-knit group rather than PUGs if any difficulty is involved).

Why wouldn’t people enjoy wailing through those fractals (which aren’t badly designed, just horrendously unrewarding in the status quo), if they got unique skins from higher level challenges that would at least hand them ‘bragging rights’ whenever they are doing anything other than fractals?

Let them drop through RNG for all I care, but PLEASE – for people like myself who have abysmal luck in the game – also provide a way to counter-act RNG when it’s just messing with people. Put in a similar system to the fractal rings, give them a way to acquire that new unique reward through say ascended materials thrown into the forge with one of the components only dropping in the higher echelons of fractals where the unique skin would drop – so that they can build their skin through a recipe if they’re continuously haunted by tough luck.

To me, someone who deems himself rather progress orientated, it’d feel like busy work if I don’t get anything out of fractals but higher stats to beat higher fractals while I still look at 9 Greens and 6 Blues at the end.

The issue with fractals is not that they are too difficult in their current incarnation, they are just not worth the time to do it. As with many other areas there are simply no incentives to compete in them and the up-coming leaderboard will be nothing short of a farce and everyone seems to be aware of that, but ANet themselves.

As someone else said, make Fractals challenging again – not through higher Agony ticks but through additional game mechanics (you did this in a way with the Instability, but adding new layers of difficulty to existing bosses through mechanics would go a longer way, imho.)

To answer the question about whether Asceded Armor or a portion of it, should be sellable via the Trading Post:

I honestly don’t think so, because it would add nothing to the enjoyment of people, they should have means to earn their ascended gear through challenging content, not yet again be offered another investment. Those who really WANT to do that, can do that already – I don’t think there’s anything people either can’t buy or don’t have in abundance that keeps them from acquiring ascended armors but maybe for Dragonite Ingots, which for no apparent reason gets artificially reduced drop rates on various ends if compared to the other two ascended materials despite being the one people have the least of, unless they camp those temple and dragon sites day in day out.

On that note: Is there a reason why Giant Gifts i.e. seem to yield Dragonite Ore at 1/4th of the chance they yield the other stuff people are swimming in? Wouldn’t that have been a chance to at least even that out a little with the ascended armor being introduced, fully knowing that Dragonite would be in high demand again?

I just had a cool idea of introducing dungeons to gear you might want (not gear you buy to salvage for money (assuming you have exotic gear already)).

1. Fix all the paths nobody wants to play. Take a look at length, rewards, difficulty, amount of silver mobs between bosses and make them about 20 min long (could go for every path in the game).

2. Add vanquishing to dungeons. A longer version of the path (provided you’ve made them about 20 minutes now!) where you kill everything for a better reward. Ascended possible reward, new cool vanquishing only items (fractals has its weapons).

It would potentially open up dungeons for everybody, newbies and non-80s (I hate seeing 80 as a requirement on LFG for lower dungeons), while still having that extra challenge for people who mainly do dungeons.

I think you also should get rid of the difference between lower dungeons and 70+, where people buy those 30 token rares and salvage. You could either add some kind of universal token (play any dungeon, progress towards ascended or new vanquishing gear) in exchange for a dungeon’s token for those that don’t want the exotic armor, and if you don’t need or want those kinds of weapons or armors there should be a viable cashing out option (2 <class> gear boxes), or maybe some minis, dyes, maybe even black lion keys?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Brainstorm statement.

I am assuming that you wouldn’t want a progression system in which new skills and traits superseded/replaced existing skills and traits.

Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.

So therefore the idea of statistical power creep is redundant?

Unfortunately, at this point you’re really asking the question “how comfortable are we at overthrowing the efforts of player who have already committed massive time, resources, and gold?” Early adopters have been taking a beating recently, from Fractal-Delvers to folks that bought the Flame-kissed armor.

Ironically, I find the new system to be extremely punishing on a front I haven’t seen mentioned yet. I like crafting. Specifically I like building/collecting complete recipe books. I suffered the double-whammy of having my old collections of Exotic recipes wiped AND the introduction of a new tier that ignores the idea of ‘discovering recipes’. Instead of a sense of discovery, you have to buy every possible slot/stat combination.

It now takes 306 laurels to fully train a single armor-making crafter (along with 510 gold and 357,000 karma). Was it really the intent that master crafters sink the larger part of a year’s worth of Laurels into nothing else?

I’d really like to see the emphasis within crafting go back to the joys of discovery and collection and away from the buying-your-way-to-completion…

…As long as the mountain of ascended recipes I’ve already bought are FULLY refunded .

Progressive RNG and you

Progressive RNG can be infinitely better than a flat 0.00000000000001% drop rate.
here’s why,

What is progressive RNG?
- Progressive RNG is in it’s simplest terms an RNG system in which your chances to get a specific item you’re after increases by every fail attempt made at that specific item.

Why use progressive RNG?
- Very simple, it allows someone to acquire an RNG based item even if he has the worst luck ever, by simply putting in the effort.
- Think about it as working towards rather than a gambler’s once in a million lucky strike.

Let’s use an example.

- You’re trying to get OP sword of awesomeness
which drops from a specific Boss monster and has a drop rate of 1%
- The progressive RNG variable for this drop is say +0.3% per failed attempt.
- This means that if you’re unlucky enough to not get it in 332 attempts which is highly unlikely seeing as the drop rate after that many attempt would already be beyond 95%
The 333rd attempt using the progressive RNG formula guarantees the item will drop.

The main benefit of progressive RNG is that it is not just based on luck, it also rewards your hard work by adding your progression towards that item to the equation.

I think the difficulty of obtaining ascended gear is correct.

The problem comes when we need new gear, if it comes because we get bored of our current build, or it becomes useless with some update. Getting all that gear can go to waste because we don’t know what’s coming in the future.

There should be a way to be able to change the stats on ascended gear, not on a whim like legendaries, but for a cost.

Ex. If i have Soldiers ascended staff, I can toss that in the Mystic forge with 15 icy runestones, a lesser vision crystal and 10 globs of dark matter and you recieve a Ascended Staff Chest, which lets you pick your new ascended staff.

Some form of insurance so that all that time/money is guaranteed to not go to waste for some reason.

Same can be done with all types of ascended gear.
Ascended Offensive Ring Chest
Ascended Amulet Chest
Ascended Light Armor Helm Chest

etc.