Me and my guildies thought it would be an interesting idea to implement something called the “Z” Table. We had played a previous MMO and in dungeons much like the ones in GW2, we would press Z and it would show us a summary of each and every party member, showing total damage dealt, total damage taken, kills, deaths, healing amount, etc.
Since a lot of us like to brag about how much damage we do, or how much support/healing we give within the guild.
We thought that it would be interesting and add another dimension to PvE if GW2 implemented something similar to that.
It would show:
- Total Damage Dealt
- Total Damage Taken
- Healing (including healing on yourself, teammates and regeneration you apply)
- Amount of times in downed/death state
- Amount of revives
- Highest Single Hit
These would probably be the very basic stats that this table would show, of course you could add some more quirky stats just for fun such as amount of times evaded, amount of total hits, total amount of conditions removed etc. Maybe even split up the total damage dealt to condition damage dealt and burst damage dealt.
To make things more interesting, there should be extra monetary rewards for scoring the highest in some of these statistics (something small like 5 silver and maybe like 3 silver for second and 1 silver for 3rd place).
However, an inevitable concern would be that people would play these dungeons just to get first in all of these categories, and potentially upset team synergy, thus making the run longer. Or potentially alot of griefing over being kicked out of a party because their DPS is too low (although one who is hindering the party because of bringing a very compromising and sub-optimal build is a bit selfish and they should be kicked).
Two ways to prevent this is to have the summary table pop-up only at the end of the run. This prevents people from totally derailing a dungeon in favour of winning all of the said categories. A second way is also to introduce party rewards for faster clear times in dungeons.
The second way is also segue into another idea, which is to have a database which records the top 20 fastest clears of all dungeons. And rewards can be allocated based on whoever party has the top 5 fastest clears.
I think this is a good way to make PvE more interesting, adding a competitive feeling that WvW and PvP have, rewarding people for being team-oriented and bringing good PvE builds to dungeons besides bringing bad builds that end up bringing the team down.
I will admit though, the inherent issue with this is that PvE still isn’t balanced between classes. This could further bring about class segregation. Certain classes will excel and tend to reap rewards better if this type of system is implemented moreso than others. You may potentially see more Warriors, Guardians, Eles, etc rather than Thieves, Rangers, Necros, etc, although stats like condition damage dealt or amount of conditions applied can help bring diversity into the berserker meta as little help that may be.
But still, I would like an idea similar to this to be implemented. Me and my guildies like to compete with each other so this would be interesting.
This can also be helpful to developers looking to achieve balance in PvE. By looking at these tables, you can see perfectly who is doing the most DPS, most healing, most condition damage, etc. This could potentially give better insight. Also it may clear up some misconceptions about who is the best at DPS, etc.