Guild Wars 2

Exotics aren’t hard to obtain:

As you level your character, even your first character, you can run dungeons and earn tokens which can be used to acquire level 80 exotic gear as soon as you hit 80.

Also, you can WvW at any level, although it’s harder at lower levels. But you can earn WvW badges that can be used to purchase level 80 exotic armor as soon as you hit 80.

Ascended gear though…..different story.

Before you can craft Ascended gear, you must first level the crafting professions needed for the gear. And you must be level 80 to even acquire the materials needed to get your crafting to 500. For a every class this means leveling not only the appropriate armor crafting but also any and all of the various weapon crafts. This equates to quite a lot of gold and materials just to get these various crafts to 500.

Finally, you’re ready to craft Ascended. Which requires a ridiculous amount of materials. Crafting some of the materials is time-gated. Many materials are account bound, meaning even if you are in-game rich you’ve gotta grind out gathering a lot of stuff.

The mats required are counter-productive to the whole “play as you like” motto of GW2. To acquire Emp Frags I have to do jumping puzzles (which I hate ankitten o good at) or dungeons. I have 2 of my level 80 alts parked at 2 different JP chests (which I got ported to btw) to open them daily. So that’s 2 of my characters I can’t even play properly just to farm one type of material. I do this so that I don’t have to run endless dungeons just for the chests. Dragonite requires me to kill world bosses, whether I want to or not. Bloodstone is plentiful if you’re running champ trains. For Dark Matter I have to acquire Exotic gear…and then salvage it.

Does this even sound remotely accessible to anyone playing as they want? So many hoops to jump through, so many mats needed, so much gold required. And at the end of the day, after all that, you’ve only got 1 set of Ascended armor. Who’s gonna experiment with new builds if it requires gear changes after all the work put into acquiring Ascended armor? Every profession forum has a thread discussing which 1 stat set to craft for Ascended because very very very few people will have multiple sets. It’s just too much work. Ascended gear is restricting build variety and forcing the grind.

Personally, I do not intend to get it any time soon. I’ll play as I like and if one day I amass enough materials, sure I’ll make some.

So, I guess one thing I would like to see is Legendary Armor Skins. Now, this would not add stats or anything, but rather be a cool horizontal progression. Make it an awesome design that has cool animations, modify your emotes, etc. You could even make the design of other pieces change as you acquire another Legendary piece.

Acquiring these should be extremely difficult, whether through crafting, PvP, WvW, Dungeons, World Bosses, etc. I’m not sure how it would be implemented, but I think it would be awesome to have some cool armor of “Legendary” tier to really show you had to work hard for it.

Deified.7520:

Part 1:
For starters the game is ridiculously easy to earn these currencies. They are ridiculously easy to farm to. So they dont challenge the players at all. I feel that since they are not challenging and they are earned everywhere players do not feel as satisfied when the earn them. This combined with the fact that there is no good drains except for crafting means that players can easily obtain stockpiles of them causing future content that involves them be meaningless.
On the concept of dungeon tokens, I feel one of the main reasons most of these aren’t satisfying is because theres also an exploit or a path thats insanely easy to do and people just farm that. In my years of playing MMOs I find that players feel most rewarded when they’re given something that shows they’re better or more dedicated at the game then other people. So with these dungeons if there is even one path that is “farmable” it ruins the entire dungeon sets image.
Now lets look at why current outlets of progression aren’t living up to what the game is supposed to be.
Guild Wars 2 was sold on NOT being a grind. In a dev post from a long time ago they said it themselves that Gw1 rewarded players on collection, and they didn’t want to do that. Despite this, they did. Ascended gear is a great example.

Well thought out but you make one huge mistake that everyone keeps making. I didn’t buy the game because it was sold as “no grind” in fact I never even knew that. Had I known that I may not have bought it because that translates into “no progression or end game”.

The game is way to easy and trivial plain and simple.

DiogoSilva.7089:

1. Active effects are usually more exciting than passive effects.
2. Getting both flavor and efficiency is more satisfying than sacrificing flavor for those “+10% damage” effects.

I totally agree but I think that can still be achieved with traits.

• For example a Necromancer grandmaster trait explosive conditions: any condi’s applied above the condi cap to detonate dealing some percentage of the condi’s full duration damage to the target.
• Warrior grandmaster trait mighty roar: shouts require/drain adrenaline grant might and knock down your target.
• Ranger trait druid’s force: you and your pet’s attack damage is reduced but you both gain effects for every spirit you have out beyond the current effects.
• Thief spectral smoke. Whenever a skill summons smoke spawn a smoke elemental that absorbs projectiles moves to your target and detonates for x damage scaled with your highest attribute.

All of these actively change skills and can be placed in trait lines. By removing the x% based traits and adding skill modifier traits it will allow players to achieve more customization.

Part 2.

Nike asked, "whats with “Archer” …
I can speak now only for myself based on my suggested Sub Classes, but within Berserker, Legionaire and Dualist, your question would be answered with Legionnaire.

Sub Classes are all just a matter of how Anet would implement them, the problem with suggested Sub Class Names is only, as long as nobody comes up with a fully fledged out concept, people will permanently ask such things like ..

And whats with ?, and wheres this and wheres that ect. because of people being unable to just imagine into just a class name, what the suggestor is intending with the Sub Class at all. But making out of the system now directly Sub Classes for everything is just nonsense.

Everybody expects something different about Sub Classes and the real fact, that everybody has to keep in mind is, that if ANet implements Sub Classes, that regardless of what they do, it will be from begin on a clear fact, that they can’t make with them everybody happy. There will be definetely something among them what you personally won’t like. There will always something, that splits the community, as like Engineers split the communit,y because alot of people think they don#t fit at all into the game, while others think they do fit…
I count myself into too, because I personally am very extreme nitpicky, when it comes down to class names. They must fit perfectly to me, or I don’t like them.
—-

You want a Gunslinger as an Engineer, I say, go with the Pioneer and you’ll find what you want within my system. I just didn’t think its good, to make Sub Classes for basicalyl everything, because its simply too much effort to implement it and keep it balanced too in the end. its much easier to focus a Sub Class System on a low number of specializations and design those specializations around that decision.

Sure, alot of people will be as said then disappointed, because such a Sub Class System based on only 3 chooseable Subs wouldn’t give them much likely their personal dream class to play, but its not important for the game to give everybody their dream class.
WHats important is that a Sub Class System adds more diversity, character customization opitions and by that allows us for coming up with better character individualization, visually (skill skins, character looks based of sub class specific gears/weapons) as like also game mechanically based on skills, traits ect. pp

You want a Master of Bones? Take the Occultist, he’s the real master of all Necromancy, able to summon Undeads, Ghosts and Demons, all kinds of unholy and undead creatures using various kinds of necromancy rituals based on blood rituals, pact rituals, offerings. Necromancy is more than just summon undead creatures and an Occultist would be just the specialist, when it comes to all kinds of occult rituals for summoning creatures!!
—-

What do you think what Sub Classes are Nike ? You speak about “new tools”.
A Sub Class System is a new tool . Its a tool for Anet to implement new class mechanics of all varioos kinds to the classes and that not just based only on implementing only new skills/traits.

Skills/Traits can’t work like class specific features that unlock new mechanisms permanently for a class. Thats why the current Trait System is junk, because all what it does is crippling us onto specific trait line,s if we want to have specific Stats for our builds. it cripples us onto specific trait lines, if we want to have certain skill effects for specific chosen weapons like that we have to spec into traitline X, because only traitline X allows it for us to have 20% quicker cooldown tims with weapon Y or to deal 10% more damage with weapon Y or have additional effects with skilsl from weapon Y

Thats where splitting up the trait system is needed to be able to have independent abilities that could alterate our skill effects, without being tied with having to put trait points into a specific trait line. Only if traits get splitted up, will we have real character individuality based on independant ways to change our character builds without beign forced to put points into certain trait lines just to get the stats and skill effects that we want to have or to be the most effective with weapon X

Seras.5702:

Who’s gonna experiment with new builds if it requires gear changes after all the work put into acquiring Ascended armor? Every profession forum has a thread discussing which 1 stat set to craft for Ascended because very very very few people will have multiple sets. It’s just too much work. Ascended gear is restricting build variety and forcing the grind.

Personally, I do not intend to get it any time soon. I’ll play as I like and if one day I amass enough materials, sure I’ll make some.

I was with you up until this statement. Experiment with BiS gear rofl. You don’t experiment with ascended you experiment with exos then salvage them.

Whew, what a thread. I’m just reading through all of this now and let me say, it’s a journey.

I love this type of involvement by the community as well as the developers. I would also like to comment that I loved how Colin said he was a fan of FFT as in my personal opinion, think it may be the best RPG/Strategy game ever.

So there has been a few things that have caught my eye in this thread that I’d like to comment on and throw my support behind.

A ways back, E.V. mentioned an idea for Horizontal progression in the form of a profession based challenge that would reward with particle effects or just a small tweak to a profession based skill. I think this idea is pretty amazing. You would be able to show your fellow players that not only are you skilled with your profession, but you also have this nice reward for doing so. If this could happen, my support would be behind it.

Also pages back, there was mention of Player and Environmental synergy. Basically these are party features that let you play off your fellow party members. I love this idea. Not only was the skills mentioned in that post very neat ideas, but this would create some amazing opportunities for teamwork. This could potentially give the developers new avenues to challenge the players and their party make-ups.

This thread is great and it’s a very good read.

Wulfhearth.7962:

A Mechanik that lets you add different functionality to skills
, giving you the possibility to add effects or slightly changing what they do but still keeping the essence of the skill intact. Examples for such a system could be the runes in Diabolo3 or the glyphs in World of Warcraft.
As an example lets take the “Cleansing Flame” of the Guardians torch. In the Weapon Skills section of your hero panel you could choose to upgrade this skill, adding different effects to it.
For example the skill could: -Cleanse conditions on you as well
-Remove boons from the ennemy
-Convert the cleansed conditions to boons
-Do more damage/always crit/set the ennemy on fire
-…

I believe that the better traits already do these types of things.

Some examples:

• Mesmer focus skills cause reflection
• Guardian symbols cause healing
• Engineer elixirs remove conditions
• Elementalist auras are shared with nearby allies
• Thief attacks always crit when coming out of stealth

Really, there is a lot of interesting stuff that can be done with traits. But as others have mentioned: a lot of balancing still needs to be done (on the skills & traits but also when it comes to encounter design), to make more of these options ‘valid’.

Oh and I would love to see more of those interesting traits someday ofcourse!

Unrelated to your post:

On subclasses

Ideas about subclasses seem to be rather vague so far. Perhaps it would be useful to make an example of a subclass and what functions it would have? I find it very hard to give a good comment on something that I probably don’t envision the way you do.

I might suggest that our discussion would be considerably more focused if we kept in mind the development effort of some of these suggestions. Entirely re-working the profession system to include subclasses is a HUGE undertaking.

Smaller, easier-to-implement ideas have a much higher likelihood of being adopted.

Not that it’s unhelpful to have these conversations, of course. Just remember that development resources are limited.

Astralporing.1957:

Nike.2631:

Making with the Sharp Knives

And now a word about sub-classes. They’ve been trotted out a few times with people often saying “Wow, that would add so much diversity!”

No, it won’t.

It annihilates diversity.

I was meaning to address the point of subclasses, but i see you did it far better already.

I dislike the cost of ascended armor, because it prevents me from changing builds and tries to lock me to on option. But at least ascended armor can be changed, even if getting a second set would cost me an arm and a leg. Subclassing on the other hand would be far more limiting (unless it could be easily changed, but then why would it even exist?). There’s absolutely nothing positive subclassing could do to the game that adding new weapons, traits, skills and aestethics (by way of new armor designs) couldn’t do better.

Exactly, we need to expand, refine, and rebalance existing systems, not bolt on a new system on top of the old ones and end up with the problems of both.

Part 3:

If Anet would follow your way of thinking here, we would just land in a few years again there, where Anet has stopped with GW1 – we would land in a total balancing nightmare. Thats the reason why ANet has started the game with only very few skills and made the weapon based skills.
They don’t want to make out of GW2 a copy of GW1 , where each Class has like multiple hundreds of different skills and could get mixed with all other classes together to come up with ypour like 100000s of combinations, when from those 100000s of combinations are only like a hand full of them effective, that the major part of the whole community plays them only, your so called min/maxers that play only with their personal most perfect “Meta Builds”…

That brought down to Sub Classes just means, its senseless to make a game, where each class has like tons of Sub Classes, when just a small amount of them would be way then more of enough!
QUALITY over QUANTITY!!

You can make basically everything important of the classes with just only 3, maximum say 4 Sub Classes.

A Swashbuckler basically is nothing else, than a Rogue in Pirate Clothes…
You know, Class Names can be so very versatile. It all comes down only about what you interprete into a specific class name, what you expect from a class, what the class should be able to do, when you hear the class name and what it makes you remember about.
A Swachbuckler would be just a Thief, that is specialized in Sword Combat and Dual Weapon Combat, thats nothing that you wouldn’t be able to expect also from a Rogue dressed in Pirate Clothes for example and et voila, there you have your Swashbuckler.
But just putting some new Traits into your Traitlines won’t make out of a Thief a Swashbuckler directly. Its more than just only Skills and Traits, that define a Class.
Traits have ZERO influence on how a class looks, traits can’t unlock complete new class specific mechanics that can be then again used for complete new utility skills or complete new usable weapon types like Whips/Chain Sickles for example.

You can just make the game make you only able to equip these kind of weapons, if you use Trait X, that would be a horrible terrible way of implementing new weapons, if you’d link their usage with silly traits!!
it have to be passive unlockable mechanics, that just unlock you more class specific mechanics by rasing in your characters personal career through specializing into a Sub Class.
We develop us all furether in real life. Nobody stays a pupil forever, we learn more over time, we rise up in our careers of our jobs.
So should our characters do also too in the form of Sub Classes, which then again could maybe come up with tiers to take the basic suggestion a step further.

Sub Classes are an easy way to improve horizontal progression just by adding more visual options of character progression in regard of equipment, skill skins and new skills.
New skills make a character not vertically more powerful, like better weapons or better armors and accessoires of new higher tiers would do. They just increase the build versatility of our characters and increase the maximum fun of that we can have with out classes by specializing the classes gamepaly mechanics more into the ways of how we like to play with our characters.

You like for example to be a very stealthy thief, you love that gameplay to be at one moment here and at the next moment surprisingly fast there and nobody has seen what you do? You think the Thief could improve this basic gameplay of the class?
Then the Sub Class of becoming an Infiltrator would be exactly the right thing.

Sure people could say now, Anet could do this just with Skilsl/Traits by traiting everything into Shadow Arts ect. but then we are limited and crippled again instantly to that 1 trait line and its stats.
The current system just leads to thousands of same thiefs with all the same meta builds being used, the same skills ,the same traits …

But I say you, a very stealthy Infiltrator would completely be played differently, than a very stealthy Rogue or stealthy Saboteur, because every sub class could provide you completely different weapon based skills, new sub class specific utilities, healing and elite skills, new sub class specific traits and so on.

All stuff, that just can’t be done with only adding permanently new skills/traits alone.

Got to this thread late and I tried and failed to read everything so forgive me if these aren’t new ideas.
1. Art progression – please give us new animations for skills that we have traited. For example if a thief picks up the Mug trait his steal shadow step should be red instead of black. Simple things like that..

2. Skill progression – Tie some skills to stats. For example if a warrior gets to 1800 non buffed power they get access to a new cool utility skill that is a blast finisher. Or if he gets an equally high toughness stat she might get a skill that ignores all non critical damage for a while. I don’t know the number but I do know there are sweet spots where trades offs start to happen. That’s the target stat area. Hopefully this is clear enough to understand what I’m proposing.

3. Character progression – A. please do more with the priory/whispers/ etc. It felt like a big decision when you made it but it seems like there should be more content related to it. B. we need more irrevocable choices. Currently we have race/gender/class/faction everything else in this game can be taken back. I submit that for a decision to matter it has to be permanent. If you do subclasses or specialties make them matter.