Guild Wars 2

I like how ascended weapons aren’t tradeable. There is a way in GW2 to obtain huge amounts of money which isn’t fun, and and I have the feeling that a lot of players play like this: Trading Post Flipping. You sit hours in front of your open trading post window, click the same stuff repeatedly and gain a huge amount of money without any real gameplay.

Personally I’ve accumulated so much money that way that I could afford several banktabs, characterslots, bagspaces, expanders, etc. etc.

Even if I’d hurt myself with this suggestion, I’d say: rework a lot of the non-bound stuff to make it untradeable. I’d like to have fun while earning money effectively.

It’s clear to me now why Diablo 3 will remove the auction house. You don’t need to do anything in GW2 other than sitting in front of the trading post in order to get your Legendaries. I wouldn’t be proud to get one this way.

Liadri on the other hand, the mini… fantastic design.

THE GLITTERING LEGACY
“I have had a vision of times to come, when heroes will once again face horrors greater than mortals can bear… Horrors I know all too well. To them I bequeath these secrets…”
— Inscription above the entryway to the Lost Armory of Glint

The portals to the Eye of the North open for all of Tyria’s mightiest heroes! Join us as Guildwars 2 reveals Glint’s secret plan for the survival of Tyria, expanding on the Eye of the North instance with new tools to manage end-game gear in this permanent Living World release for Guildwars 2!

A World of Choices
Journey to the Eye of the North and assist teams from the Three Orders of Tyria in unlocking the Armory of Ascension. Inside the Armory a new locker will allow you to spawn additional copies of any Ascended item you have ever acquired, account-wide. No longer do your alternate characters have to dwell in the shadow of your main hero. No longer do you have to overwrite Runes, Sigils, and Infusions as you seek the perfect balance for your newest concept-build. As you acquire new Ascended gear – by any means – they are added to your Armory, ready for use.

In addition to crafting Ascended armor and weapons, vendors in the Armory offer Ascended Gear Chests to expand your armory, trading Guild Commendations, Badges of Honor, Dungeon Tokens, Fractal Relics, and most importantly Skill Points for these coveted chests. No matter how you choose to crush evil, the Armory of Ascension will reward you handsomely.

Apex Predators
With Ascended gear serving as the final plateau for stat progression, your journey into legend takes a new turn – look for new challenges to your skill, your cunning, your creativity as Guildwars 2… and the Elder Dragons… advance into 2014!

whyme.3281:

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

This would ruin the economy. People with money will get richer and richer and will dictate the prices in TP, like we have with legendaries at the moment.

I think Ascended gear wasnt needed in total. Exotics were obtained a bit too easy, but this could be compensatet by an increase of the crafting costs. Infusion slots could be simply edited by infusing them in the mystik forge if someone needs more agony resistance.
Acsended gear is too expensive and costs too much time to get, that playing an alt or even try a new build is made really hard and very expensive.

An alternative would be an Armor retrainer NPC, that can change your armor stats for 15s per armor piece and you can choose the stat of the ascended Armor afterward. This would make ascended gear a lot more buildfriendly. But you need to go to a NPC and pay him for respecing your armor.

This change would make Ascended gear a lot more interesting for all players. Yes you have to invest some time and Gold to get the gear, but after this, you have no downside if you want to test some builds. Even getting Ascended gear on Alts would be interesting.

This person is onto something here. I agree with every word.

-We’ll see the same price controlling with ascended armor that we do with legendaries. It won’t solve anything for people that cannot or won’t throw real world cash at armor, or people that dont have the time to farm endlessly.

-Ascended armor itself was a mistake. To assist with fractals, as the poster said, exotics could have been upgraded to include infusion slots.

-Armor retrainer sounds like a great idea. Do not have it cost an arm and a leg, but cost enough. Upgrade your exotic stats to ascended stats piece by piece, and have the ability to choose these stats. Have the cost be as much as 1-3 gold and 50,000 karma per piece.

This would:
-Enable people that don’t have hundreds of gold to acquire ascended pieces. 1-3 gold is relatively easy to come across even playing minimally. Karma is universal throughout the game. Anything you do, you are working toward this goal.
-Enable people with alts to acquire gear relatively easy.
-Enable people that run multiple builds to acquire multiple sets without putting a second mortgage on the house.

The gold cost is obviously the part that might need a tweak. But I think 1-3 gold, even as much as 3..or 5, would still be acceptable rather than the current system.

Fractal progression:
AR changes – horizontal progression
If you want to see how badly the changes have been recieved with the new AR infusion system – please read the threads in fractured.
I for one believe these changes were a negative step and allowed people with lots of gold to progress quickly and just became another gold sink. This has the unfortunate effect of alienating a large portion of the player base who already played at these higher levels (>30). As many posters have rightly stated more AR is required than before yet we were told by Devs that no more AR than we currently had was required. The amount of gold required to make infusions needs to be looked at urgently especially at higher levels to make this open to more players OR the infusions which are meant to be +2- and above need to start dropping (as described in the dev livestream).
This just became an event to see how much gold people had and time to get to the top of a leader board which only a few people asked for.

Level Progression Reset – loss of horizontal progression
The new mechanisms punish players with Alts as they can no I longer do many of the higher levels dodging agony. This also punishes new players at lower levels with some of these new bosses. I for one still do not support any form of progress reset (equity loss) without any compensation.
The same would be true if ascended crafting was changed – how would you refund players progress?

Rewards vs Effort
Check the fractured threads again – a RNG chance of exclusive exotics from the bosses does not warrant the time invested in this area. The best thread I have seen is on progressive RNG (in this CDI) – this needs to be implemented to make players feel like they can earn the rewards that are possible (ascended weapon drops, legendary pre-cursors). I have some serious doubts about how the current RNG has been implemented (It doesn’t feel truly random – I won’t go into more details here on how I think it’s linked to real cash gem purchases, not playing for a month and other things to encourage returning players and people to spend real money).
The fractals need to also ensure that the Tonic and fractal skin box are added as described in the Dev livestream (these are not currently available and are not considered a bug?)- the rewards described in the live-stream are not here.
Is ascended armour boxes dropping in FoTM – I doubt it also!

Other progression items:
Armor/Level Cap – please “no”: If I have to re-equip my toons with new armour again as the max level increases this will probably be the last straw. Exotic armor was easy to obtain – I believe this is no longer the case. Look at the prices now: 6g for some single pieces (30g for a full set).
For a casual player (Real-life and Job they may only get to play for about 8-10 hrs a week if lucky) with multiple toons this is extremely expensive and time consuming.
This game needs to decide who they are catering for a hardcore crowd who play lots (>30 hrs a week) or a casual crowd.
———
GW1 struck a perfect balance – allowing casuals to play with the hardcore crowd as they didn’t need excessive high priced equipment to allow them to partake at the highest levels. GW2s implementation of the DR needs to be reworked it is too easy to hit this when doing event chains in areas.
How many broken keys or porous bones can you get in an area when playing normally doing a heart or event chain? (MF:>200 = 30 on a 10 min event : Something wrong here !)
This makes players turned-off and prevents them progressing. Gw1 did not have such a DR reduction system. Now that most of the bots are gone – this needs to be looked at again.

Interaction with playerbase
Unfortunately when a patch is announced most things are already set in stone – this prevents you from changing things based on player feedback, I would like to see things that have major repercussions in the world like (Ascended items,Teq, Fractured) properly discussed before implementation and the release “held” until you have a chance to implement player feedback. Right now you are developing in a vacuum and hoping that the release wIll go down OK with the player base.

I for one have pretty much given up on the whole ascended tiers (my toons do not have full exotics).
I have never had a precursor drop whilst others have had many – implement progressive RNG please (>2000 hrs here – no precursor yet).

I thought the whole reason Ascended was introduced was because it was too easy to get exotics e.g. via the trading post? Although easier/more accessible/varied ways of acquiring Ascended are pretty much a necessity at this point, I think I’d be more irritated than anything if Ascended gear became tradable because it would just be a whole lot of extra effort to get us back where we started in the first year of release, into a situation that was honestly fine to begin with, but that someone in the powers that be of GW2 decided was bad for the game.

We have a tonne of barely-utilised currencies that you get for playing the game your way – karma being the main one for PvE at least. Why not make use of it?

Imho one of the best progression systems I’ve seen in any game is the HoM-achievement progression system for GW2 by playing specific parts of the game in GW1.

You could see your progression physically in the Hall of Monuments. You could see all the things you had collected. You could get awesome skins by unlocking specific milestones.

I love it.

I think it’s not important to create a whole set of weapons of the same theme. The HoM rewards are no sets either, but I love each of those weapons/skins. I don’t need a fiery staff or greatsword, the fiery sword has more character to me than any of the (fantastic) Jade weapon skins. (it has it’s own lore and connections (NPCs who wield it))

Karma: this needs to become easier to acquire ?
1M karma is required for a legendary (250 obs shards) and the lucky clovers.

This affects progression.
Many players pre-karma nerf who played many hours had in excess of 4M karma which kept things like cooking flowing in the market. Now that karma has become more difficult to obtain this is slowing down (and increasing prices) of items across the board.
This is another example of progress reset (negative progression) which affects the casual player base more than the hardcore crowd making it even more difficult for them to obtain the necessary karma to craft ascended or legendary items – if they are lucky enough to get a pre-cursor drop.

TPMN.1483:

Karma: this needs to become easier to acquire ?
1M karma is required for a legendary (250 obs shards).

This affects progression.
Many players pre-karma nerf who played many hours had in excess of 4M karma which kept things like cooking flowing in the market. Now that karma has become more difficult to obtain this is slowing down (and increasing prices) of items across the board.
This is another example of progress reset (negative progression) which affects the casual player base more than the hardcore crowd making it even more difficult for them to obtain the necessary karma to craft ascended or legendary items – if they are lucky enough to get a pre-cursor drop.

You still gain karma quite readily by playing – any event will give it to you.

If you think this is a “progress reset”, we have very different understandings of the term…

here some ideas people come up on reddit for new reward types

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1qdrv2/lets_create_new_rewardtypes_for_gw2_one_idea_per/

some examples from this thread:

Utility Minis
Minis which collect your loot. And a mini-slot in your hero-window.

Cosmetic rewards for achievements.

Example: slayer achievements. Complete animal slayer to gain a dolyak head to decorate your home instance. Complete krait slayer for a decorative krait trident to hang on the wall. Etc…

PS: what makes this idea so great is that player housing is a prerequisite.

BL-Scraps drops
Not my favourite idea in the world, but if Black Lion scraps would (even rarely) drop in game, more people would buy chest keys as you would still have to top them up to 10.

*You have 0 scraps = “why even bother?”
*You have 1 scrap = “where do I get nine more?”
*You have 9 scraps = “Now that I’m waiting for one to drop it will take foreveeeeeer and I’ve spent the last week checking out the weapon skins in anticipation, I’l just have to buy a few keys because NOW I CAN’T WAIT”

Card game
They should introduce a “simple” card game akin to… FF8’s Triple Triad, for example. Nice for collectors, a new pastime while you wait for Tequatl to spawn and the cards are relatively easy to create—they just need an artwork for the card and they’re good to go.

Hell, they could go as far as make every enemy drop a card by a low chance like in Ragnarok Online. I’m not sure if their art department has enough manpower to create that much new art, though. It’d surprise me if they had concept art for every encounter.

Vanquisher – GW2 version zone progression

a strategist NPC sells you a map for a huge amount of karma. It’s a vanquish-mission for you.
this map is segmented into quadrants
do any event in a quadrant turns that quadrant green
your goal is to turn 15 of the 20 quadrants green
each green quadrant adds +10% magic find to that zone

—> you can sell your map at any time. The more green quadrants, the more money you get.

—> a complete map (15 green quadrants) can be turned in for a special reward (zone specific skin, big bags,…)

Alts attraction is greatly reduced recently with the addition of endless mining picks/axes/sickles, endless personal merchant/TP, ascended gear. I’d like to see endless items unlocked like achievement skins, so player can get them for all characters at the same time (or mailed to every character). Endless merchant/TP could be unlocked as account skills (like Mistfire Wolf).

I think that farming ascended gear during 1 month for first character is good, but after that it should be much quicker and cheaper for alts.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Would ‘faction’ progression like in GW1 be grindy if it offered exclusive rewards?

Content itself can be grindy, not its sphere. Faction progress can be stupid dailies to kill 50 mobs (grindy), or can be like personal story (not grindy).

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be sold on the TP?

Anyway ppl will need to level up craft to make another parts. Time-gates resources are already sold on TP, so, I think, that’s not needed.

idea for a karma-sink in order to give us more new skins to spend our karma on:

for 500.000 (change to other number) Karma you can buy one of the existing waypoints. The catch: you don’t know which one. This is a permanent purchase, so you will never have to pay to port to that waypoint ever again.

It’s like a gamble-minigame where the lucky ones get waypoints they desire and the less-lucky ones get waypoints in a Skritt-cave.

It’s a horizontal progression in the sense of making you more mobile travelling the world. Having this accountwide would also make new alts mobile.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

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

I am trying to see if we can just remove conversation around any form of statistical evolution in the CDI?

Chris

I would like to see more skills for the weapons we use. Like i posted before, i think there could be a way to unlock new moves in each key for each weapon. After all, after we unlock the attacks at the start of the game, there is no more progression there, and i think that if one use a weapon for long time we should be able to develop new moves to create a more personal fight style.

This moves shouldnt be more powerful but different than the basic ones. For example, a warrior using a 1h sword have bleed and torment conditions in their attacks, and new moves could change bleed for venom, for example. Or a Greatsword could change 100 blades for a faster attack with less hits, or change Bladetrail for a block skill like Riposte (1h sword).

The idea would be to be able to have at least 2-3 options (including the basic ones) in each slot (keys 1 to 5) and maybe a 4th for legendary weapons. I repeat, those attacks shouldnt be more powerful, just different.

My idea about how to unlock this is that could be done with the Weapon Master achievements (creating a special one for the legendary weapons) but could be done in another way to make it less grindy.

For the other skills, i always like to see more, if arnt more poweful than the ones we have. Sadly i think that people always find a “perfect” build and everyone end having the same, but that shouldnt be a reason to dont add more skills.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Barsimoprimo.2759:

The idea of having inter profession specializations is pretty intriguing and could really work. It’s also an excellent way to introduce new weapons and skills. It should require some sort of effort( not too much) to specialize and should happen at level 80.

I always loved hybrid class design in AD&D.

Chris

I like that idea, but is hard to make it balanced. If that can be done, then it would be ok. I remember some games in which one could use the armor of the lightest class. In this game one should be able to use the sum of all the weapons of both classes, and if there are repeated weapons, the attacks should be added to the attack options suggested above. About the skills from 6 to 0, maybe pick a main class which can use all the skills and a secondary one that can use only some of them (which class is main and which secondary could be changed at any times with the npc that reset the traits).

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I think it would be cool if we can get a proposal together for treatment of stat based evolution as it currently stands in the game and then concentrate on Horizontal progression ideation.

Chris

Awesome inspiring ideas from everyone. And while it would be great to have the best of everything, I feel that we have to be practical about this. So far the overall thoughts in the thread lean towards more horizontal progression and more accessible vertical progression. So while I really like some of the more elaborate plans to make stats less gear bound or introducing new gear systems… I tried to think up a proposal with the following in mind:

The fewer resources it takes to make vertical progression manageable, the more resources we have available for horizontal progression.

So without further ado:

Proposal for the treatment of stat based evolution.

In chronological order:

• (Early 2014) Announce a large increase of ascended gear sources.

• (Early 2014) Announce the end of stat based gear tiers. (Even if just for the forseeable future, 2 years?)

• (All over 2014) Use the time bought by vertical progression to come up with horizontal alternatives.

• (Mid-late 2014) Increase the amount of ascended gear sources dramatically. Everyone who plays about 8 unfocused hours a week will have multiple characters in ascended gear at the end of 2014.

• (2015) Final destination: ascended gear is just about two/three times as hard to get as exotic gear currently is, so we can afford to make different sets for different builds. By then there should be enough horizontal progression in place to keep us busy.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression/page/14#post3374568

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression/page/11#post3373373

I like the idea of have quests given by each Order, like at the start of the game. Maybe having special rewards, etc. Orders sending players to puzzles, towns and other places to complete tasks would give the game more deepness and the players would go to more places than just megabosses and champion routes.

Sinope.5630:

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: …???

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.

I just want to correct you … its MY suggestion, Morrigan only quoted a Text Passage from me what I have suggested a long time ago.
——-

With that being cleared, here the next 3 examples of what would make the Sub Classes special with the Guardian Sub Classes:

Crusader – specialized in Weapon + Shield Combat, Great Swords, has improved Virtues and Symbols
Speciality: Crusaders have with their improved virtues some special “Auras” with that they can support better than before on longer range their allies.

Augmentor – specialized in Scepter/Staff Combat, Consecrations, Augmentations and Spirit Weapons.
Speciality: Virtues get exchanged with Augmentations, special Support Skills that can either have influences on the environment, or allies. They can create Barriers for example and Force Fields

Patron – specialized in Meditations, Healing Support, Boon Control and Condition Control
Speciality Patron Spirit Form is the special ability of the Patron, which can based on the chosen Virtue transform into various Patron Spirits.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I think it would be cool if we can get a proposal together for treatment of stat based evolution as it currently stands in the game and then concentrate on Horizontal progression ideation.

Chris

Awesome inspiring ideas from everyone. And while it would be great to have the best of everything, I feel that we have to be practical about this. So far the overall thoughts in the thread lean towards more horizontal progression and more accessible vertical progression. So while I really like some of the more elaborate plans to make stats less gear bound or introducing new gear systems… I tried to think up a proposal with the following in mind:

The fewer resources it takes to make vertical progression manageable, the more resources we have available for horizontal progression.

So without further ado:

Proposal for the treatment of stat based evolution.

In chronological order:

• (Early 2014) Announce a large increase of ascended gear sources.

• (Early 2014) Announce the end of stat based gear tiers. (Even if just for the forseeable future, 2 years?)

• (All over 2014) Use the time bought by vertical progression to come up with horizontal alternatives.

• (Mid-late 2014) Increase the amount of ascended gear sources dramatically. Everyone who plays about 8 unfocused hours a week will have multiple characters in ascended gear at the end of 2014.

• (2015) Final destination: ascended gear is just about two/three times as hard to get as exotic gear currently is, so we can afford to make different sets for different builds. By then there should be enough horizontal progression in place to keep us busy.

That is a horrible roadmap. Exotics are worth almost nothing, so 3x exotic is still almost nothing. Ascended is fine as it is.

Orpheal.8263:

…here the next 3 examples of what would make the Sub Classes special with the Guardian Sub Classes:

Crusader – specialized in Weapon + Shield Combat, Great Swords, has improved Virtues and Symbols
Speciality: Crusaders have with their improved virtues some special “Auras” with that they can support better than before on longer range their allies.

Augmentor – specialized in Scepter/Staff Combat, Consecrations, Augmentations and Spirit Weapons.
Speciality: Virtues get exchanged with Augmentations, special Support Skills that can either have influences on the environment, or allies. They can create Barriers for example and Force Fields

Patron – specialized in Meditations, Healing Support, Boon Control and Condition Control
Speciality Patron Spirit Form is the special ability of the Patron, which can based on the chosen Virtue transform into various Patron Spirits.

What do you see as being gained by formalized subclasses over just adding those abilities as new traits/utility skills/weapons?

All I’m seeing is arbitrary gating of pieces of the toolbox forcing them to conform to specific visions even more so than the 5 trait lines do now.

Why make things less flexible and bet that one singular vision of the class will be more interesting that what emerges from tens of thousands of players tinkering with the same options presented as a spread within the existing framework?

Incidentally I think the idea of giving ascended gear stat-switching ability gives us a kind of metric for determining how difficult it ought to be to acquire.

Say, (for example), ascended can go with 12 stat combinations. Functionally the same thing can be achieved by multiple exotic sets, but that’d be far less convenient.

Add in a bit of a premium for that convenience and in principle ascended gear perhaps ought to be priced around 15-20 times the ‘effort’ required to get exotic gear.

I’m not talking about gold price on the TP; exotic gear value has taken a dive due to it being much less desirable now, and so freely available. I’m talking effort in terms of playtime to get the karma/dungeon/celestial/cultural sets.

I’m completely on the fence about making ascended sellable via TP. If the acquisition is tuned too high the prices will be astronomical and we grind gold while watching inflation push it continually out of our reach. If it’s too easy, ascended becomes a redundant brand of exotic. There is a certain convenience factor to that and it is seductive.. but darn it, I like the idea of gear attainable through gameplay only. And gameplay challenges more than through repetitive gameplay, but.. well, not everybody could beat Liadri even if you did put an ascended weapon on her.

Though if ascended remains a source of ‘vertical’ progression and not optional, all that goes out the window: it has to be easy.

I know that’d still devalue what people’ve already put into gearing up their characters, but I can’t think of a good solution that honors that effort while putting ascended in reach of the average 1-2 hour/day guy with multiple alts. That’s the reason why I think communication on the subject from Arenanet can’t come soon enough.

Yes, I know you’re communicating! I’m grateful. But getting a ‘game plan’ out to players is crucial, whatever ends up decided.

Another thing we lack is ‘skill specialisation’: why can’t we combine elements from several professions, why can’t we create a ‘subclass’ after our general playing. If they started subclass building from level 30 and onward I’d be a lot more interested in level 30+ content, which is atm for me mostly filler (I’m bored from 30-80).

Orr Temples.

How about revamping the rewards here. At the moment the armour stats are all scattered, why not have the same pattern as the trinkets:

Balthazar – Cavalier
Lyssa – Magi (this is an useless stat set to be honest, it can never be the main focus of a armour set, instead Pow/Vit/Heal?)
Dwayna – Rabid (don’t know how Dwayna ended up with Rabid, it doesn’t fit her theme)
Melandru – Dire (there should really be both dire trinkets and armour here)
Grenth – Soldiers
Arah – Assassins (or a new stat set based on Pow/Pre/Vit)

Each rune could be purchaseable separately for karma.
Add each corresponding insignia so it is easier to get these to craft the ascended armour, purchaseable with karma.

Dragonite ore could be purchasable too for karma.

Or add ascended armour with corresponding stats for a large karma cost and/or dragonite ore cost. So players can buy just by farming both currencies instead of having to craft the armour.

I think it would be a good idea to let ascended crafting raw materials to be used as a currency if a player has no interest in crafting. e.g. buying Sunless weapons for dragonite ingots (7-10) as the the only required currency, using the mystic forge to allow conversion of ore into ingots.

Allowing raw materials to be converted one to the other would be something to consider, besides rebalancing their acquistion from different areas of the game. Turning 10 bloodstone bricks into 3 – 6 of the other ascended materials for example.

Malediktus.9250:

The Lost Witch.7601:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I think it would be cool if we can get a proposal together for treatment of stat based evolution as it currently stands in the game and then concentrate on Horizontal progression ideation.

Chris

Awesome inspiring ideas from everyone. And while it would be great to have the best of everything, I feel that we have to be practical about this. So far the overall thoughts in the thread lean towards more horizontal progression and more accessible vertical progression. So while I really like some of the more elaborate plans to make stats less gear bound or introducing new gear systems… I tried to think up a proposal with the following in mind:

The fewer resources it takes to make vertical progression manageable, the more resources we have available for horizontal progression.

So without further ado:

Proposal for the treatment of stat based evolution.

In chronological order:

• (Early 2014) Announce a large increase of ascended gear sources.

• (Early 2014) Announce the end of stat based gear tiers. (Even if just for the forseeable future, 2 years?)

• (All over 2014) Use the time bought by vertical progression to come up with horizontal alternatives.

• (Mid-late 2014) Increase the amount of ascended gear sources dramatically. Everyone who plays about 8 unfocused hours a week will have multiple characters in ascended gear at the end of 2014.

• (2015) Final destination: ascended gear is just about two/three times as hard to get as exotic gear currently is, so we can afford to make different sets for different builds. By then there should be enough horizontal progression in place to keep us busy.

That is a horrible roadmap. Exotics are worth almost nothing, so 3x exotic is still almost nothing. Ascended is fine as it is.

Exotics are worth nothing partly because they are tradeable.

If ascended gear is meant to be BiS. And it cannot be traded, then it will always retain value as being BiS.

Adding different ways to obtain ascended gear will indeed lower the ‘value’ (which is defined how?) of ascended gear. But if more meaningful horizontal progression systems are in place, we don’t have to rely on the absurd steep road of vertical gear progresssion that we currently have to keep players busy anymore.

One thing clearly shines through this thread (and many many more before it) though, regardless of the accuracy of my personal vision: Ascended definitely isn’t fine as it is.

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

From a new player — even old ones — perspective, ascended acquisition is a bit asymmetrical and convoluted, so if you’re gonna let people sell ascended on the TP, you should let em sell all pieces. So in short, I don’t think it’s a good idea at all. Still, full set on TP could be a good thing, if the time gating factor doesn’t keep prices prohibitively high and only accessible to TP players and farmers.

What I do see as gain by adding Sub Classes over just adding the Stuff directly?

• The feeling of real character progression, that you can directly see, that your Character visually changes also over time, uses completely new mechanics, that are integrated in the class.
  You can’t simply exchange complete class specific mechanics by only exchanging 1 single Utility Skill or 1 single Trait.
  These changes are way too fundamental to be changed just by a Utility KSill or Trait only.

• Breaking down the Specializations to a more overviewable amount of 3.
  If you would base them on the Trait Lines, we would basically end up with 5 Sub Classes per Class and that is in my humble opinion too much . 3 is just perfect.

• Sub Class Mechanics can be used to make out of them a similar system of the GW1 Dual Class System, but just without the horrible Cross Class Mixing, thus it can create alot more build diversity, than you can get with just only Utility Skills and Traits alone.

• Sub Classes can be uses as mechanic to unlock new equipable Weapons for the Character, something that can’t be done with only Utility Skills or Traits in the same way and for what Utilities and Traits shouldn’t be responsible for at all.

• Can be used to combine with them special Sub Class linked Armor Sets to give our characters a more unique look to increaase that way the individualization opions for your characters. Currently all classes of the same category can share exactly all the same armors with each other.. theres no individualization within that system!!

• It can be used as a good Gold Sink/Skill Point Sink, so simple.

• They can be used to implement new class specific mechanics to be able to create that what new Utility Skills and new Sub Class Based Elite Skills, which can be used only by the specific Sub Class. Something that doesn#t work with simply Utility Skills and Elite Skils alone, as again, theres 0 individualization currently in the system, every class shares exactly the same skills and that makes the classes somehow also boring, when every say Warrior for example is exactly the same skill wise.

When you compare one warrior with another, they should have different fighting skills, unless they have learned both the same way of fighting from the same person.
Sub Classes would improve that with the help of specializations.
They are different decissions, that should have influence on the way how a character fights, looks, moves and so on and thats simply said too much for just only Utilities and traits to handle.

Character progression (time) isn’t that bad, just the way you have to get it is a bit off. Grinding dungeons with random people, who sometimes don’t even say a word for whatever – gold, tokens or rare drops aren’t my ting.

I have 4 80 lvl characters (needed more variety in combat) and never did the 100% map discovery. The quests are nice, but mostly nothing special, something that you would like to do/see again in all those maps.

Now I’m on a break from GW2, my friends got the Ascended/Legendary or just Exotics, then they left for other games and I lost one of the most important things that were holding me in world of Tyria. I love all those random events, which bring some action in, but thats it…

Games that I enjoyed most had always some type of “regular reward system”. Not always something planned – surprises are always good.
There was a main goal, far away, but on the way I could find some smaller goals that made that long way friendlier, you could call it some “rewarded sandbox aspect” I guess…

I probably wend off topic, but I just had to let it out…
Before the release I was so happy about GW2, but then I found out that a lot of things I loved about the main idea behind it or from other games, will never be there…

I have a question. Why are there no quests for ascended, precursors, and legendaries?

The personal story consists of Trahearne questing with you to earn a legendary greatsword. This bears repeating. Trehearne quests to earn a legendary greatsword. Why can’t that be us?

Also, huge fan of FFT here. I would also agree that FF 7’s materia system was a decent progression system, but was overly complicated for what it did. Namely because better weapons and armor were almost always better in stats and slots.

Orpheal.8263:

Sinope.5630:

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: …???

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.

I just want to correct you … its MY suggestion, Morrigan only quoted a Text Passage from me what I have suggested a long time ago.
——-

With that being cleared, here the next 3 examples of what would make the Sub Classes special with the Guardian Sub Classes:

Crusader – specialized in Weapon + Shield Combat, Great Swords, has improved Virtues and Symbols
Speciality: Crusaders have with their improved virtues some special “Auras” with that they can support better than before on longer range their allies.

Augmentor – specialized in Scepter/Staff Combat, Consecrations, Augmentations and Spirit Weapons.
Speciality: Virtues get exchanged with Augmentations, special Support Skills that can either have influences on the environment, or allies. They can create Barriers for example and Force Fields

Patron – specialized in Meditations, Healing Support, Boon Control and Condition Control
Speciality Patron Spirit Form is the special ability of the Patron, which can based on the chosen Virtue transform into various Patron Spirits.

This is correct- the list of class breakdowns is a quote from one of Orpheal.8263 old posts- I thought I made that clear and if I didn’t I apologize.

The reason I posted it here was because I really like the idea of progression within the classes we already have.
That particular list was the most concise version of the idea I have seen in various threads here on the forums.

Not sure if we see specialization in quite same way however- since I was thinking much more in the sense of true sub-classes, each with unique skills and abilities that unlock if you choose to specialize once you hit lvl 80 and have all the trait points.

I am totally against raising the level- cap and was thinking that once you unlock a certain specialization- say via a guest to do so from you Order or whatever- you gain a second trait tab- where you can spend x amount of trait points that you would gain the same way you do now.

Edit: I mean the specialization would come on top of you regular build- and not in place of it if that makes sense- That is why I suggest that you only specialize once you have a final build at 80

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

What’s the point of having an unique skin drop from a challenging encounter if you can just buy it on TP? Isn’t the point of the skin showing you beat the challenge? If a unique gear is gonna drop from a challenging encounter, it should be guaranteed and account bound, and the encounter really tough.

cesmode.4257:

Randulf.7614:

Soeki.9643:

Horizontal progression:

I’d love to see some more use for skill points regarding our progression (not the current one where you add a new skill and it costs a lot for no real reason). For example you could add a new tab to the skill panel, where you can unlock your skills again (even weapon skills) but they would have different cosmetics. Like greater fireball, or bull’s charge summons a bull that runs with you towards your target, or add different colour to skills etc. These would have increased skill point costs, since they are only cosmetical, you could even tie some of them to some achievements/challenges or if you decide to use prestige classes to those as well.

Oh I LOVE this idea!!!!!

Its not a bad idea. I think I like it.

Wondering if it would be possible to turn off the new skill’s effects and go back to the old one..vice versa. If I got tired of that bull after bull charging so many times, could I go back?

This is a great idea. Alternative looks for abilities you can switch. Would encourage people to keep leveling up their chars just so their abilities look awesome or add variety to their looks, change colors etc.

The more I think about Profession sub-types, the more interesting they seem to be to me.

PROFESSION SUBTYPES

• They could ease this game’s balancing, unlike a cross-class system.
  What is the biggest problem with a D/D elementalist? Survivability. Give them a Battlemage subtype that would use heavy armor and melee weapons, and D/D elementalists would be at a slightly better position without affecting non-melee weapons.
• They could offer more visual diversity to players.
  Using the above example, professions wouldn’t be stuck to a single armor type, and maybe, who knows, some subtypes could even have hybrid armor type combos, for never-before-seen equipment combinations. Like, for example, heavy body and leggings armor, but scholar head, shoulders, gloves and boots, for a Battlemage type of character.
• They would offer a lot of room to be expanded upon, horizontally and vertically.
  Anet could add more subtypes with time, and even a system to upgrade subtypes through tiers. This could then be used for gated content or gated equipment. A Guardian “Paladin” could have access to hammer and mace, and a player could later down the road, through gated content and story-driven content, upgrade that subtype to “Crusader”, unlocking new skills (yes!), unlocking access to new equipment tiers (“Paladin” could only equip “rare” equipment, “Crusader” exotic, the next tier could go for ascended), unlocking new story-driven quests with unique guardian-esque or paladin-esque skins as rewards, and even unlock or expand core mechanics per tier (“Crusader” could unlock a F4 virtue skill, for example).
• They could have a direct influence on core profession mechanics.
  For the players that love pets, they would choose the “Beast Tamer” subtype for Ranger, and later upgrade it to “Beastmaster”, for a deeper pet control system. The lower tiers would offer simpler systems for the sake of the learning curve. But what if a player wants to be a ranger, but not be stuck to pets? Then they could choose to go for the “Hunter” and then “Sniper” subtypes, with less pet control and new sniping/ hunting mechanics. Meanwhile, higher tiers of Warriors would add “stances” with drawbacks into their F skills, much like how GW1’s warriors played, which would add to the profession much needed complexity, without affecting lower subtype tiers, and thus without overwhelming newer players.
• It would give to Anet greater control to design an ideal learning curve
  Without sacrificing end-game complexity.

The problem with vertical progression as it exists in the game now is that rich players already have their Ascended Armor. The only people that were time gated were the majority of the population. I can’t stand vertical progression in any form, but the way it is implemented in the game now is possibly the worst form of it. You have segregated your player base economically and made your “Top Tier” gear as easy to acquire as exotic for rich players.

When you tell your players that exotic grade equipment was just too easy to acquire and then you make ascended just as easy for rich players to acquire it comes off as being implemented as an arbitrary money sink. Does that make sense? Why did you not gate the rich players as well if that wasn’t the case? If true, this is why a lot of players hate this type of vertical progression.

TL;DR Time gated vertical progression that doesn’t have a solid and engaging game mechanic based in entertainment is the problem. Economic time gating is the worst.

Stop suggesting stat switching for ascended. It should stay a legendary only perk. Most legendaries look terrible enough so there is no other reason to build them.

As a suggestion of a nice way to get ascended armor. Issue a token for each complete set of dungeons done. I.e the reward for dungeon master is a token, subsequent completing of all paths in all dungeons are rewarded with a token.

1 token=1 ascended weapon/armor piece.

Jandopo.2107:

I know I’m late, but I’d like to express my idea about the acquisition of Ascended gear.

Personally, I think this tier of equipment should be obtainable through different ways, not only crafting (and I see lot of players agree with me).

My idea is very simple: through Badges of Honor, Glory and Guild Commendations, because each of these tokens represent a different part of GW2. Players would be able to obtain Ascended gear by playing the part they enjoy the most.

ex: Random Ascended Sword:

• 200 Badges of Honor + 5 gold
• 20000 Glory + 5 gold
• 10 Guild Commendations + 5 gold

Now, why is “random” important?
Because crafting gives the opportunity to choose the type of set the player wants (Zojja, Tonn, etc.), but it’s a long method and way more expansive than the “token + gold” method I listed above.
There is a total of 18 Ascended Sword, so it’s very unlikely that the player get the exact sword with just one try. But, at the same time, he get the opportunity to equip all the alts he has.
ex: I want a Zojja’s Greatsword for my warrior -> I spend 20000 Glory + 5 gold to buy “Random Ascended Greatsword” -> I get Tonn’s Greatsword instead… too bad, BUT I could give this weapon to my guardian! (of course these weapons should be Account Bound ).

Sooo… what do you think?

I’ll give my opinion about Horizontal Progression when Mr. Chris gives the green.

Thank you for reading!

I don’t like this idea at all. It’s more RNG-fest which is the last thing we need. Plus it will be wasteful because we can’t even salvage this gear. So here is my ranger and I’m trying for a berzerker bow and keep getting one with crappy stats that none of my other characters can use. That’s a huge waste of the time I put to get my badges or commendations. I want to know that my 10 commendations or honor badges are going toward the weapon I actually want.

John.5732:

I have a question. Why are there no quests for ascended, precursors, and legendaries?

The personal story consists of Trahearne questing with you to earn a legendary greatsword. This bears repeating. Trehearne quests to earn a legendary greatsword. Why can’t that be us?

I think mechanics like the Black Moa Chick quest would be awesome for acquiring BiS or rarer equipment, or even components of that equipment. The BMC quest in GW1 was basically the following:

• A journal dropped from an NPC you fought if you beat her. The journal contained information about her journey to obtain the elusive black moa.
• By following the clues in the journal, you too could obtain a black moa egg and hatch it into a rare minipet.
• The activities you had to perform weren’t simply go here and collect X or hand in Y to NPC Z, but typically more involved than that. For example:
  • You had to actually find a standard moa egg first and then do special things to it in order to hatch a black moa chick from it – like visit a particular waterfall out in the world to harden it.
  • You had to build an incubator kit with materials from the open world, from collector NPCs and other various means.
  • Some of the materials were ‘fragile’, which meant you couldn’t trade or bank them or they would be ruined.
  • Some parts of the quest had you visiting isolated parts of the world, and others meant you had to go into particular combat zones and fight specific bosses (e.g. you had to get hit by a specific boss in the elite area Sorrow’s Furnace to actually hatch the moa chick).

It was a really diverse quest that would be the perfect kind of content for obtaining rare components/gear.

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

The best ideas I’ve read in here. I think DiogoSilva and cesmode usually make good points and have good reasoning when it comes to progression.

This particular idea of being able to switch stats on ascended has been given by many people over and over on many threads and it is AN ABSOLUTE MUST. I’ll keep saying as long as you intend to (hopefully) listen: Variety is THE thing about long-term games and you have a clear chance to add a lot of variety to players and actually turn this mess into something awesome.

As far as I’m concerned, it would give purpose to the tier, turning it from a major senseless pain in the kitten gear made to theoretically keep people playing into something actually highly desirable. Remove the grind and the gates and make it alt-friendly and it would change it from a symbol of boring grindy vertical progression into “that awesome flexible set that you can switch stats on the fly and have FUN with”. there you have it: vertical and horizontal progression together.

Couple that with a quick on-the-fly build saving system and you have tons of FUN again in the game. Moreover, class rebalances won’t totally screw you over after you invested so much in a set.

These ideas have to happen to foster varied gameplay, if you can’t have varied gameplay, things get boring and you stop playing. I suppose I speak for a great deal of people in this game: I don’t want more stuff to get, I want more and varied stuff to do.

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

If faction rewards are to be introduced

• They need to be horizontal/cosmetic
• People need a chance to switch factions, so they’re not stuck in one they don’t want rewards from

And it’s only gonna be as grindy as you wanna make it. If you want to turn it into a series of mystic toilet 250-stack convoluted and never-ending recipes as you usually do, then it WILL be grindy. If you’re gonna add content, like well-written storylines or fun dynamic events associated to getting this stuff, it’s not going to be grindy at all, just tons of fun.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

[…] There is a way in GW2 to obtain huge amounts of money which isn’t fun, and and I have the feeling that a lot of players play like this: Trading Post Flipping. You sit hours in front of your open trading post window, click the same stuff repeatedly and gain a huge amount of money without any real gameplay.
[…]
Even if I’d hurt myself with this suggestion, I’d say: rework a lot of the non-bound stuff to make it untradeable. I’d like to have fun while earning money effectively.
[…]

So much this. TP stuff should have been account bound on acquire since day 1.

Pros:
1) No more flippers.
2) Prices reflect real demand and supply
3) Developers monitoring the tp can understand if an item is too easy/hard do obtain and if the community as a whole like/dislike said item.
4) Traders can still do money by selling items that are high on demand (but this time they have to actually work to get them like anybody else)

As the TP works right now putting in Ascended Armors will help rich ppl to work around the time gated content while the poor will be left even more behind.

I’ve noticed several posts about “Factions.” All I know is I hate rep grinds in other games. They are mind numbing. So I’m not sure how you do this thing with Factions in a way that’s not a horrible grind. At the very least if you add rep don’t go with time gated nonsense like dailies. WoW’s MoP expansion was a horror full of rep grind dailies and I don’t want a repeat of that abomination.

edit: and oh yes, any rewards from Factions must be horizontal rewards. No gaining more power/stats.

Faowri.4159:

I think mechanics like the Black Moa Chick quest would be awesome for acquiring BiS or rarer equipment, or even components of that equipment. The BMC quest in GW1 was basically the following:

• A journal dropped from an NPC you fought if you beat her. The journal contained information about her journey to obtain the elusive black moa.
• By following the clues in the journal, you too could obtain a black moa egg and hatch it into a rare minipet.
• The activities you had to perform weren’t simply go here and collect X or hand in Y to NPC Z, but typically more involved than that. For example:
  • You had to actually find a standard moa egg first and then do special things to it in order to hatch a black moa chick from it – like visit a particular waterfall out in the world to harden it.
  • You had to build an incubator kit with materials from the open world, from collector NPCs and other various means.
  • Some of the materials were ‘fragile’, which meant you couldn’t trade or bank them or they would be ruined.
  • Some parts of the quest had you visiting isolated parts of the world, and others meant you had to go into particular combat zones and fight specific bosses (e.g. you had to get hit by a specific boss in the elite area Sorrow’s Furnace to actually hatch the moa chick).

It was a really diverse quest that would be the perfect kind of content for obtaining rare components/gear.

This is a pretty nice idea.

Malediktus.9250:

Stop suggesting stat switching for ascended. It should stay a legendary only perk. Most legendaries look terrible enough so there is no other reason to build them.

People made tons of legendaries when they were only cosmetically superior.

If you don’t want stat-switching on ascended, then can you offer an alternative solution that would turn ascended gear from a kitten-kitten ed obligation of a grind into a rewarding option?

Malediktus.9250:

Stop suggesting stat switching for ascended. It should stay a legendary only perk. Most legendaries look terrible enough so there is no other reason to build them.

This makes no sense. Legendaries had the same stats as exotic before. The only reason to get them is their look. That’s the point of them. So you are saying people in fact did not make them for their looks but because of their ability to switch stats? Excuse me if I’m super skeptical of such a claim. Considering how easy exotics are to get it seems like an awful huge grind just to get stat swapping. The stat swapping is a perk for Legendaries now that Ascended has been introduced. But that’s not the reason why many people went out and made Legendaries. Most people made them long before the introduction of Ascended.

Ascended gear needs stat swapping. Period.

Here is one suggestion for how a quest for a legendary weapon would work. Of course, the tropes for these are fairly common, and I don’t mind copying well-worn tropes if it’s made well. My idea would use great quests. Great quests would look like LW updates in your right-hand tracker and would appear in your AP tracker menu. They would show you where you are along this long quest chain that would lead to a goal (like a legendary or ascended weapon or rare skin). It would update as you go and give you AP for completing legs of the quest. It would also have a timer for how long you had to wait for the next part, if it was time-gated.

1) Greatsword You get a great quest from an NPC in LA about the legendary greatsword. He tells you a story about who created it and how. He tells you that the last the greatsword was seen was before Orr fell. This starts the Great Quest to seek out info in Orr. After a few temple events, an NPC there would tell you that her history research shows that the GS wkittentered when fighting the rise of Zhaitan and fell into the sea. Using her notes, you are able to locate two places in Orr. You must recover the hilt and the blade. Each of those are instances, like personal story.

Next, you must find someone who can reforge the blade. This leads you back to LA, where you show the initial guy the sword pieces and he tells you of the living descendants of the original blacksmith. The great great granddaughter of the blacksmith carries on the family business and she lives up in the Iron Marches. She is impressed you found the blade that he father had told her about. She always thought it a family tall tale. She agrees to attempt to reforge it. She sends you on a quest to find the hottest flame, which would be a special event in the CoF dungeon. Taking the flame and money to her for supplies, she begins work on the GS. She needs a week to experiment and forge. When the week is up, she tells you that she was unable to reforge the blade because she does not have strong enough metals. She tells you of an experimental metal the Dredge are creating that sounds ideal. This leads you to Dredgehaunt Cliffs and another personal story instance. Taking back the experimental metal, she asks for more money and time to complete the weapon. A week later, you have your legendary GS.

Harbard.5738:

This particular idea of being able to switch stats on ascended has been given by many people over and over on many threads and it is AN ABSOLUTE MUST. I’ll keep saying as long as you intend to (hopefully) listen: Variety is THE thing about long-term games and you have a clear chance to add a lot of variety to players and actually turn this mess into something awesome.

As far as I’m concerned, it would give purpose to the tier, turning it from a major senseless pain in the kitten gear made to theoretically keep people playing into something actually highly desirable. Remove the grind and the gates and make it alt-friendly and it would change it from a symbol of boring grindy vertical progression into “that awesome flexible set that you can switch stats on the fly and have FUN with”. there you have it: vertical and horizontal progression together.

Couple that with a quick on-the-fly build saving system and you have tons of FUN again in the game. Moreover, class rebalances won’t totally screw you over after you invested so much in a set.

I completely agree with build variety being essential to the longevity of the game, but the interchangeable stats-mechanic does come with some heavy downsides:

• One set to rule them all. Once we have one set of gear, why bother getting any new ones? If we are getting new sets of gear for different builds, then we will probably go on a quest to search for fitting skins. Maybe some new weapons to match our armor aswell… This too is a large source of fun for many people. But they may not feel encouraged to discover new sets if they can manage with the same set throughout the entire game.

• It completely devalues all the non-interchangeable weapons that drop for you afterwards. No reason to keep that new rampagers gearpiece for a condition build, you just salvage it because you can change your gear on the fly anyways.

• It removes an opportunity for unique items. As it is, they can add stat-specific ascended items to a loot table or vendor. (Like the rabid Tequatl weapons) With interchangeable stats, all ascended gear will be the same. I personally really like the idea of getting specific stats from specific sources. They make getting my gear more like a quest. (Though the Tequatl loot table is way off)

I think that making ascended gear way more accessible will lead to a similar situation in the end. (Multiple sets that we can swap around.) But without these downsides.

Simple ideas (hopefully fun) for CRAFTING PROGRESSION concerning ascended

Thinking of ascended as a goal here, since its the only real benefit from crafting atm.

Since crafting is utterly irrelevant (meaning it’s stupid to craft for yourself or to sell your products) from 1-400 and a meaningful and well-executed crafting revamp would take a lot more resources, why not make refining materials give cXP all the way up to 500? (ascended bricks and all that stuff could give cXP only from 400-500). What if gave more crafting XP as well?

Alternatively
A total alternative to speed up crafting would be making all those fangs, scales etc account bound and only sold to npc merchants and make them drop frequently. That could turn leveling crafting into a matter of actually playing the game and not buying tons of crap at the tp with tons of gold and processing it all in one day with craft boosters just to get that freaking ascended piece. But of course, farmers are gonna complain, but crafters will get an actual “do it yourself” experience and play the game, which is what most people like about making their own stuff, in the first place. Go, gather, craft. Not go, sit at tp for hours, craft.

John.5732:

/snip

1) Greatsword You get a great quest from an NPC in LA about the legendary greatsword. He tells you a story about who created it and how. He tells you that the last the greatsword was seen was before Orr fell. This starts the Great Quest to seek out info in Orr. After a few temple events, an NPC there would tell you that her history research shows that the GS wkittentered when fighting the rise of Zhaitan and fell into the sea. Using her notes, you are able to locate two places in Orr. You must recover the hilt and the blade. Each of those are instances, like personal story.

Next, you must find someone who can reforge the blade. This leads you back to LA, where you show the initial guy the sword pieces and he tells you of the living descendants of the original blacksmith. The great great granddaughter of the blacksmith carries on the family business and she lives up in the Iron Marches. She is impressed you found the blade that he father had told her about. She always thought it a family tall tale. She agrees to attempt to reforge it. She sends you on a quest to find the hottest flame, which would be a special event in the CoF dungeon. Taking the flame and money to her for supplies, she begins work on the GS. She needs a week to experiment and forge. When the week is up, she tells you that she was unable to reforge the blade because she does not have strong enough metals. She tells you of an experimental metal the Dredge are creating that sounds ideal. This leads you to Dredgehaunt Cliffs and another personal story instance. Taking back the experimental metal, she asks for more money and time to complete the weapon. A week later, you have your legendary GS.

I rather like the idea, but a couple of “tweaks” that could be made are:

1. Keep it out of the dungeons/instance trap. Keep it in the open world. An instanced story would be ok, but not part of the PS. Also, many people will not do dungeons as a matter of preference, just as many will not PvE or PvP. WvW can have relatively the same quest, but placed in the WvW “world.”

2. Try to keep money out of it. It would be better if everything you need is in the world somewhere. Paying for it only “cheapens” the experience.

3. Make it difficult. It should be a “badge of honor” to obtain, so that not every generic player can get it.

4. Definitely make it not tradeable! no TP sales!!!

Harbard.5738:

but crafters will get an actual “do it yourself” experience and play the game, which is what most people like about making their own stuff, in the first place. Go, gather, craft. Not go, sit at tp for hours, craft.

I agree.

Imho the trading post, as it currently works, is poison for a lot of ideas in this game.

The Lost Witch.7601:

Harbard.5738:

This particular idea of being able to switch stats on ascended has been given by many people over and over on many threads and it is AN ABSOLUTE MUST. I’ll keep saying as long as you intend to (hopefully) listen: Variety is THE thing about long-term games and you have a clear chance to add a lot of variety to players and actually turn this mess into something awesome.

As far as I’m concerned, it would give purpose to the tier, turning it from a major senseless pain in the kitten gear made to theoretically keep people playing into something actually highly desirable. Remove the grind and the gates and make it alt-friendly and it would change it from a symbol of boring grindy vertical progression into “that awesome flexible set that you can switch stats on the fly and have FUN with”. there you have it: vertical and horizontal progression together.

Couple that with a quick on-the-fly build saving system and you have tons of FUN again in the game. Moreover, class rebalances won’t totally screw you over after you invested so much in a set.

I completely agree with build variety being essential to the longevity of the game, but the interchangeable stats-mechanic does come with some heavy downsides:

• One set to rule them all. Once we have one set of gear, why bother getting any new ones? If we are getting new sets of gear for different builds, then we will probably go on a quest to search for fitting skins. Maybe some new weapons to match our armor aswell… This too is a large source of fun for many people. But they may not feel encouraged to discover new sets if they can manage with the same set throughout the entire game.

• It completely devalues all the non-interchangeable weapons that drop for you afterwards. No reason to keep that new rampagers gearpiece for a condition build, you just salvage it because you can change your gear on the fly anyways.

• It removes an opportunity for unique items. As it is, they can add stat-specific ascended items to a loot table or vendor. (Like the rabid Tequatl weapons) With interchangeable stats, all ascended gear will be the same. I personally really like the idea of getting specific stats from specific sources. They make getting my gear more like a quest. (Though the Tequatl loot table is way off)

I think that making ascended gear way more accessible will lead to a similar situation in the end. (Multiple sets that we can swap around.) But without these downsides.

1) Once we have one set of gear, why bother getting any new ones and find new skins

With the current prices on ascended gear you’re lucky if you ever complete ONE set of armor and weapons at all in the coming year. Assuming you’re the average player. If we have a skin wardrobe, the quest for skins is still on.

2) it devalues non interchangeable stat gear

Devaluing previous tiers is how vertical progression that don’t use upgrades goes. I don’t like it, but that’s how they chose to make it. Not my fault. Your exotic is still worse than ascended, flex stats or not. The only difference is that an ascended set would be worth the time investment.

3) it removes the opportunity for unique stat combos

No, it doesn’t. Just add that unique stat combo to the pool of combos you can pick. Now is unique stat combo from Tequatl for instance a good idea? I don’t think so.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Imho the trading post, as it currently works, is poison for a lot of ideas in this game.

I think this is a bit harsh. But one big problem, is that the game is so focused on gear, yet switching out statistics is made very hard, and moving statistics to new equipment REQUIRES that you buy Transmutation Crystals from the Gem store. The fact that transmutation stones only work up to level 79, seems like a very poorly disguised trick to get people to spend money on the tier 80 crystal variant.

Ashabhi.1365:

John.5732:

/snip

My idea about how to acquire legendary GS

I rather like the idea, but a couple of “tweaks” that could be made are:

1. Keep it out of the dungeons/instance trap. Keep it in the open world. An instanced story would be ok, but not part of the PS. Also, many people will not do dungeons as a matter of preference, just as many will not PvE or PvP. WvW can have relatively the same quest, but placed in the WvW “world.”

2. Try to keep money out of it. It would be better if everything you need is in the world somewhere. Paying for it only “cheapens” the experience.

3. Make it difficult. It should be a “badge of honor” to obtain, so that not every generic player can get it.

4. Definitely make it not tradeable! no TP sales!!!

Trust me, that was a rough sketch. Of course you can tweak the length, money (or other currencies) involved, difficulty, time-gating, or legs to complete it. You can add more fetch quests, make people grind something, or make people turn in mats with the sword. I was just trying to get the discussion started about what would make a good quest for legendary and ascended items in game.

A few clarifications: I think it’s important that these quests include more than one type of game mode. Just like map completion currently requires wvw, I feel that requiring temple events and dungeon runs and personal instances broadens a player and shows devotion and efficacy in-game. I realize that not everyone likes each of these things. But, getting a legendary should be difficult and push you as a player to extremes.