Guild Wars 2

1: Balancing encounters / events / everything for low population servers so that everyone can enjoy them…USING scaling better. (Teq, Kark queen, even new labyrinth all require immense amount of players to achieve….not every server has this) I hate having to guest to do open world content.
2: ALT friendliness. Why are things made so difficult to get for multiple characters. (includes Ascended gear)
3: Making Living Story actually affect the world around us. I want to see change…I want to show friends that have left over the last few months that things in GW2 are moving / changing and they should come back at least to see that.

PvE
1) Class balance (would like to see Elementalists discussed in particular)
2) Condition cap in group encounters and possible solutions
3) Skins rewarded for achievements: Why are these one-use and not incorporated into the achievement panel like the Zenith weapons and Hellfire/Radiant armour skins?

PVE:
1. Condi cap – Why you guys said working on a solution for making condi’s more powerful, (ie: stack increase) was expensive, then just throwing a new condi in anyway?
2. (in relation to Q1) The dps/dps/dps meta…This I guess can be summed up as “balance”.
3. Lack of dungeon revamps.

1. Horizontal progression. (availability/lack thereof of cosmetics, new skills, traits and weapons)

2. Class balance/build diversity. (percieved roles of professions, viability/lack thereof of desired builds/setups)

3. Living Story content. (pace, quality, player satisfaction/fulfillment)

1) Less Grind/ No Ascended or Gear grind.

2) More fun and innovative fun horizontal progression stuff.

3)More Alt Friendliness

1. Overall PVE balance, AKA the DPS race and condition cap problems
2. Class balance. A lot of skills and traits within some classes are undesirable and generally unused.
3. WTB dungeon reworks. Dungeons are far too static currently, add random events, alternate bosses, alternating trap/mob spawn locations, more interesting boss and trash abilities.
4. (Yes, I’m putting 4 down, get over it) Armor diversity. Specifically medium armor chest slot. Why the hell is everything a trench-coat? Oh yeah, and dye-able weapons.

This is probably a larger issue (i.e. system-based), but here goes:

1) Raid UI (implement - let us see more than 5 people; maybe 20?)
2) Condition Cap Issues (fix for physical objects/address better scaling in PvE)
3) Server Latency (address lag with zergs)

PVE:
1) RNG
2) Ascended items
3) Armor/build variety

PvE:
1. class-balance / class-design in general (discrimination of certain classes (“warrior or guard only”) or specific roles (support))
2. holy trinity
3. Living world being mainly a farm-feast not a real challenging change to the world

+1 for your idea btw, great direction you’re heading with this.

I would select as the most important:

1. A complete trait revamp to make items like % to damage type automatic, conditions on conditions builds only, and cooldown on weapon types merged the focus of the revamp.
2. The complete removal of DR using other methods to handle bots thru player reporting and thru the ability of tracking auto-teleports in game that happen faster than humanly possible.
3. 85% to 90% AOE resistance to all pets across the board in all combat venues to eliminate the unfair advantage and broaden the specs available.

for PvE

1. Dungeons
2. Dungeons
3. Dungeons

1. Class Balance and FUN. I want more fun/skills/variety/etc.
2. PVE : Rewards and fun group content.
3. Rewards In General. This game has the most whacked risk/reward I’ve ever seen.

1.) Lore delivery within the actual game world – most of us are starved for this!

2.) Story telling within the Living Story – the stories really need to be fleshed out a bit even if this means 3 weeks per update, instead of two. I want to feel invested in these stories! I want to feel angry with villains and I want to empathize with their targets!

3.) Accoutwide wardrobes for skins – I would even pay gems for the ability to have a wardrobe to store all of the town clothes and skins so they won’t take up valuable bank space!

PVE:

1) class balance and how it only pertains to pvp currently
2) living world.. stick a cattle prod in it already, it needs more juice, preferable of the permanent variety
3) added traits/utilities and when/how they will be implemented

Edit: and thanks for allowing us to participate in this discussion to better the game

1. New Permanent Content and Zones
2. Lore and creatures from GW1 coming into play
3. Guild Halls and Housing

1. Guilds – Kind of ironic that a game named guild wars has such little focus on guilds
2. Living story – Stop adjusting existing content such as teq. Instead create new creatures within the world.
3. Increased single player/small group content. The gauntlet was fantastic.

1. Ascended Gear, what it represents in terms of future vertical progression, and the grind thus far associated with it all.

2. Storytelling, as applied to both living and personal stories, how it affects/has affected – or doesn’t affect/hasn’t affected – character growth, and how it should or shouldn’t tie-in with/affect or not affect the continued development of the lore of Tyria.

3. The astonishing lack of bats as either ranger pets or a playable race. Previously I would have wanted to discuss Cantha and/or Elona but I have decided they are fine where they are, and I’d rather not see them get ‘GW2ed’ until or unless my first and second topics are resolved. So for now, bring on them bats!

PVE.
1. Gear system, Ascended gear, gear treadmill in relation to how convinient it is play for players and especially players who play multiple toons. Details: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Play-GW2-the-way-you-want-to/first#post3033770
2. FotM account bound levels.
3. New skills for weapons, make it possible to choose skills for weapons from a list of skills.

PS. Thanks a lot for making such topic.

PvE

AI

• Is there any way you could improve AI so that mobs act more like players and mobs work together? (Possible suggestion: Give mobs the exact same tools players have (utilities, traits, combo fields and finishers ect)

Open World Fights

• Improving the scaling? (Suggestion: would it be possible to tie the scaling to the mechanics for each of these fights, instead of just damage and health? For example, with 18 players, Shatterer has 6 healing Crystals, with 24 he’ll have 9 crystals. I feel this could allow revamped fights like Tequatl to not require as many players, but still become challenging when there are more players)
• More revamps like Tequatl? (I may be in the minority with this, but these types of fights that require some form of organisation and communication are good for the community)

Instanced content

• Possible to make instanced content less linear and predictable? (patrolling mobs and bosses, a more open layout [something akin to a mini open-world map] end goals other than beat the big baddy, puzzle solving ect)

New skills and traits

• How will these be unlocked? (Hunting them out vs just gaining skill points and unlocking them)

Community

Player Generated Content

• Player competitions a la GW1? (Armour, Weapons ect)
• Map building tools (for WvW, mini-dungeons ect)

Polish and Friendly UX

• More comprehensive search function in the TP? (Armour type, for example)
• Adjustable UI?
• Dual Trait setups, savable templates ect

1) Positive benefits for Grouping with other players. (To encourage more group activities)
2) Ascended Gear Grind
3) Living Story (Community driven narrative)

1- Guild Cohesion and Management — This could also include the Guild Mission and Multi-Guild Membership systems. Guild Missions could only go so far.

2- Revisiting “Temporary” Events — For those who have missed out due to real life or other things beyond their control, or those who happen to be new to the game.

3- Dungeons — Maybe it’s me, but it feels like the recent dungeon content has gotten better, especially with the new Aether path in TA. However, I do wonder what else is in store for the other dungeons. I suppose the concept of large-scale “Raids” could also be lumped into this subject.

PvE:

1: Loot RNG and DR.
2: Class Balance (focus on Rangers and Pets)
3: Rewards (For anything in the game.)
And please fix the tearing on my Ranger—-(or all characters that has it) right leg comes right through the coat.

PvE

1) Event scaling or lack thereof – You have made too many activities hinge on “did a big enough zerg show?” (and if it did, the event is trivial) and not enough on “is this challenging and reasonably possible to complete for the number of people who did attend?” Significant regions of the later zones are deathtraps for the solo player, while the big events dissolve under the pressure of the number of players showing up. This is my number one concern with the playability and fun of the game. It’s reflected in the collapse of the Scarlett Invasion event, its there in the collapse of the tequatl event.

2) Alt unfriendliness – Too many cosmetic rewards are once per account. Ascended gear grind is multiplied by a factor of 10 for a player like me. Too many activities are curtailed at once per day per account rather than once per day per character.

3) Living Story pacing – While new releases every two weeks has been an amazing undertaking, having it produce so much short term access content is extremely frustrating. It seems like there is nothing I can tell my friends (your potential customer expansion) other than “well if you had been here 2 months ago, you’d have seen something great.” Its simply not building a library of activities. This often compounds the sense of Alt Unfriendliness (i.e. only a handful of my characters ever had the chance to see the inside of the Molten facility, and now the opportunity to try it out with other classes is gone).

General development philosophy

•The perceived lack of development time and effort given to less popular races and classes, and Arena Net’s confirmed focus on “wider reaching” issues (IE, warrior) to the apparent detriment of those lesser played options.

•The perceived lack of development time and effort given to less popular races and classes, and Arena Net’s confirmed focus on “wider reaching” issues (IE, warrior) to the apparent detriment of those lesser played options.

•The perceived lack of development time and effort given to less popular races and classes, and Arena Net’s confirmed focus on “wider reaching” issues (IE, warrior) to the apparent detriment of those lesser played options.

1. Story/lore
2. delivery system
3. limits of the Event system (how big/complex can they be? Could an event take weeks to do?)

1. Conditions in PvE, specifically condition caps when it relates to boss battles, dungeons and other organized group content, when it’s entirely possible for a single player to reach them on its own.
2. RNG in general, specially when it comes to the acquisition of skins with time-limited availability.
3. Reward quality when related to difficulty. Personally I feel that some hard content (for example, Tequatl) still isn’t rewarding enough, at least when compared to others much easier contents (like champion farming)

PvE:

1) Class balance
2) Ascended gears
3) Reward vs. Effort

1. unique rewards for hard Content
2. hard Content
3. Gambits for dungeons!

1: Return of the lore and content that got put aside (aka cantha/elona)
2: More build variety/more skills
3: DR and how it affects the life of a gw2 player

Thanks Chris for putting this this in to action. I’m looking forward to additional communication on what the playerbase would like to see. Lots of offshoots of topics but I tried to lump them into 3 buckets:

1. Progression – horizontal vs vertical, gear vs skill, time vs effort, rewards, wecome and unwelcome RNG, crafting, grinding, alt friendly

2. Zerg combat – making all zones worth visiting, creating a reason to do DE’s, removing stationary #1 spamming, depth of combat and mob interaction

3. Game direction – Living Story cadence, old lore vs new lore, additions to world & races & professions & skills, future of dungeons, FoV & Camera options

Edit: Sorry Mark, typed this out before I saw your concise comment.

1. Elite dungeons/new dungeons
2. PvE class balance
3. Dungeon rewards

1) Mini games and playing with your friends/party.
2) Armor skins
3) New skills, weapons and traits for classes.

Please, support subject one people, mini games would be so much better if you could play with your buddies and I’d like to know this has become such a low priority.

PVE:
1. Living Story
2. Personal Story
3. Home Instanced items

1.) Polish and QoL (The little hills that add up into mountains)

2.) Split class balance (WvW/PvE/sPvP) All of the mechanics are different for all of these formats. Skills working identical to each other in each place make little sense.

3.) RNG/DR/Skill Based Rewards. I don’t have answers, but I know it’s not fun the way it is set up. Sorry I couldn’t be of more help here.

PvE:

1. Condition damage
2. Gear dependence and the OP state of zerker gear
3. Living world pace/story

number 2: also encompasses ascended gear in general since some gear sets (conditions) gain almost no tangible benefit from the upgraded gear, while other gear sets (zerker) gain a 4x stacking bonus that gives significant gains.

whyme.3281:

PvE:

• Condition damage Cap (making condition builds viable in parties)
• Class balance ( balance between access to boons, defense and overall damage)
• RNG (loot luck of some people is to good to be true, compared to others)

Nothing to add here.

1) Doungens – add hard Mode or somthing with better risk / reward
2) PvE balance skilsl and classes
2) more hard to obtaind and unique skins for weapons and armor

1) new weapons on classes, added diversity

2) revamp poor traits on all classes

3) making other aspects of the game more appealing to players, IE, getting pvers to wvw and wvw players to pve, etc.

1.) Dungeons
2.) Class balance
3.) Dungeon Rewards

RNG: Why so much of GW2 content has to be shut behind stupid high RNG factors
Diminishing Returns
Fractals: why is the reward still lower than anywhere else and RNG skins

PvE:

1)Loot/RNG (Let’s be real here, it’s terrible, I feel like every time I get something I’ve just commented out code. Get it? Because they’re green?? Oh man. I’m hilarious.)
2)Unique armor skins (Wheeeeeere are they???), for that matter, variety of rewards in general.
3)Lore, something I think we need to see more of imo. I know more of the lore from my GW1 time than anything from GW2.

But I think this collaborative development idea is genius. If it works out!

1. PVE Class Balance
2. World and group event scaling (specifically on lower population servers)
3. New Guild Mission Types

PvE:
1: New weapon and Armour skins. ESPECIALLY medium coats!

2: Dungeon/World Boss reward improvements.

3: Working towards an open world, or at the very least significant reductions in loading times between zones.

Reasons:
1- The selection is limited. Best way to look good is mixing currently. I’d like some new skins, preferably not gemstore, maybe crafting, that look as good as the majority on GW1 did.
2- Currently, as stated before, they’re not very good.
3- Do I even need to explain?

1. Some form of “Skin Bank” would make me extremely happy. My mesmer currently has 3 different exotic berserker sets because I like to change her appearance frequently. Thus, I’m also worried about ascended armor.

2. I’m excited to visit other areas of the game, especially those from GW1. Maguuma and Crystal Desert areas would be nice to see.

3. Better rewards for fractals. They take longer than most dungeons and frequently reward less.

1: Living story / temporary content
2: New zones
3: Alt friendliness

1.) Horizontal Progression, skills, skins, etc…
2.) Availability of Living Story content/grindy game mechanics/unrealistic player expectations based on “average play hours” of the community.
3.) Artificial scarcity of digital resources/ridiculous means of item acquisition giving a feeling of necessitating cash payment to facilitate any “high level” play on a casual time budget.
4.) Closed communications on game mechanics (players will do the math to figure it out anyway, why hide it from everyone? Why not let people develop tools to play the game how they want?)
5.) RNG, what type of RNG is being used, is it pseudo RNG, what changes are being done besides “woo, more magic find.” to fix the seemingly broken system that has gotten complaints since launch.

Thanks for working with the players in this way, it means a great deal to many of us.

My personal list is this:

1: Guild Raid content

Reason: I’ve seen many guilds are currently struggling to keep players interested in running together. As is, guild missions is just about the only thing guilds can run together (excluding maybe a server than can actually participate in WvW) and while it was a step in the right direction it was only difficult and thus engaging for the first few weeks after each mission type was unlocked, the guild had to work together to figure things out and then do it. Now guilds who have been working them since release have become so familiar with the content it’s less engaging as most of them are very easy and require little communication.

2: Harder content

Reason: The majority of the updates have appealed to the more casual players which by itself isn’t an issue what-so-ever. From what I can tell the majority of the player base would consider themselves close or not far from being casual. The issue in my eyes comes from a lack of harder content being released over the past year. When I think about it I can only come up with two significant updates with content that would appeal to the more hardcore community. Fractals and the Queens Gauntlet, one of which was temporary content. I feel like the Aetherpath for Twilight Arbor was trying to fill that gap with some of it’s harder mechanics which is good but it brings me to my next point.

3: Risk Vs Reward

There nearly isn’t any system of risk vs reward currently in the game and it seems to be killing it in areas. The areas there is an issue currently in my own opinion is the champion farming trains. They have essentially no risk involved but the greatest reward in the game (in terms of gold). I don’t think the drops need to be nerfed necessarily as simply killing a champion alone feels worth it now but their ability to be farmed is concerning. Where Risk Vs Reward is NOT so much of an issue is in fractals as there are unique skins that appeal to most people where there is actually a risk involved. What I really appreciate about the reward system in fractals is that even though it’s RNG based, the greater the risk the better chance at the great reward. BUT this does not limit getting the skins to only high risk scenarios. By allowing the skins to drop around level 20, those who do not have the skill level to do 40+ are still given a chance at the skins but at a lower drop-rate. It gives them a reason to want to progress for a better chance at the reward but if for whatever reason they cannot, they’re not completely shutout of the opportunity.

These are my big 3 things. Honestly, I don’t believe I hold a majority’s opinion on this but I do believe that those who have put a lot of time into the game will agree with these points.

1) Organizing large scale play in WvW

For the majority of players (as I see it and in my opinion), WvW has been a completely unfulfilling game mode since almost immediately after launch, when it became obvious that no amount of strategy beats mindless zerging. The mode needs mechanics which punish disorganized play and reward organized play, no matter the group size. Better controls for commanders, stacking and clipping penalities, a higher AoE Limit, and kill credit for preventing damage, healing, providing support, CCing and anything that contribute to or prevents a kill or point gain.

2) Class mechanics

The Warrior and Guardian’s class mechanics are just lame, they need a buff to the ‘fun’ attribute.
Elementalist needs its traits carved more fittingly around it’s class mechanic, which is really less a class mechanic and more an entirely unique method of play. They are never going to have builds with attunement recharge stuffed in to one tree.
The Engineer needs kits to either be a part of its class mechanic, or to stop receiving a drawback as if they are.
The thief and mesmer needs their class mechanic to be more broadly applicable
The Necro’s is probably the most perfect one you have.

3) The Event System

The event system is amazing, I don’t know a single player that doesn’t have multiple areas of the game they would like to receive more events or have their existing event chains improved upon. Do NOT let your horrible of an implementation of the last round of events (the Modus Celeris) prevent you from adding any new events in the future.

EDIT: Whoopsy, didn’t see the red-post above about PvP and WvW, that should probably be placed in the opening post…

The following topics I would like to discuss:

1) Core character/equipment stats and mods – in my opinion, the base stats power toughness, precission, vitality are boring and should be done away with, equipment should have much more specific bonusses like 20% enchantment length etc

2) The trait/skill system – I don’t feel I can customize my character at all, I want to choose from a selection of weapons kills for each weapon, I want cooldowns greatly reduced, 15 sec max cooldown on a skill, rework elites to actually fit into a character build, remove the dedicated slots (if I want to fit 8 healing skills on my bar, let me!)

3) Progression and itemization – in my opinion, remove exotics and above rarity alltogether and completely remove character levels. Horizontal progression and better aesthetics ONLY!