Guild Wars 2

Copying my reddit topic here.

tl;dr: Add an option to reduce own personal reward while increasing own personal strength.

Most of you have probably checked lfg for dungeons and seen numerous requirements about experience and gear. Sure, you can make or join a group for new guys but that’s a recipe for a bad dungeon experience since everyone is clueless. Ironically getting to decent groups would be a good way to gain experience and gear.

What I propose is an anti-gambit system. At start of every dungeon there would be a powerful skritt magician who would offer you various buffs in exchange for shinies. Each buff would increase strength of your character but in return reduce your end reward.

For example you could reduce damage taken by 50% or increase damage dealt by 100%, each reducing reward by 50%. If you take both, your end rewards get reduced by 75%. There could also be stuff like permanent stability, condition immunity, etc.
These buffs could be activated at any time so if Lupicus wipes your group too many times you can come back with increased strength. Naturally activating any of these prevents you getting any achievements.

What this system achieves to do:

• Allows anyone to experience dungeon story / encounters regardless of their skill level
• Prevents weak groups getting stuck and having to forfeit whole dungeon
• Encourages experienced groups to take newer / weakly geared players
• Allows developers to increase dungeon difficulty

It’s an interesting idea, but might produce some dangerous results.

For example, players could use the buffs for an easier/faster solo, which would reduce their own individual rewards, and then sell the path. Since buyers would obviously not get the buffs, the biggest part of the final reward would remain untouched.

Yes, it needs a proper implementation so it’s always bit risky. In that case I would add that if any bosses are killed with buffs on, those buffs became default for new players.

mmh. I don’t know how to feel about that. THe idea is nice, but imagine how toxic the phiw will become when they will be able to do arah. “pve so easy lol i phiw duck you cause my killtime is the same”. I don’t think it would work in the current state of the game ( especially since devs always do things wrong).

Sorry but I dont get it. People that want to be carried wont reduce their reward… Anf more importantly, this system will encourage not learning the fights.

Ultimatly if you want more challenging content, why not to add a system like fractals where you can increse the difficulty levels?

By the way. Whats the reasoning for capping the fractals max level?

You had me at “Skritt Magician.” <3

Ryn.6459:

Sorry but I dont get it. People that want to be carried wont reduce their reward… Anf more importantly, this system will encourage not learning the fights.

Ultimatly if you want more challenging content, why not to add a system like fractals where you can increse the difficulty levels?

By the way. Whats the reasoning for capping the fractals max level?

It’s for new player experience. Ok, actually the goal is to get dungeons popular so maybe devs start caring about them. And what’s more popular than a casual content? Ultra-casual content!

Why wouldn’t reduced rewards encourage learning the fights? Of course penalties have to be harsh enough.

I like it, could even have it increase stats or something, give perma protection, perma vuln stacks on enemies, a sort of tutorial to the dungeon path while you see mechanics and whatnot, learn boss encoutners, then go to the real thing in hardcore mode!

I think it’s a good idea, would help new players to get into dungeons and slowly work themselves to play without any buffs.

This way the Devs could even make really (really) difficult dungeons for the hardcore players who would receive a really huge reward for playing without buffs and the average players could receive some decent one. I think it’s wrong that some person who dedicates a huge amount of effort atm to solo/play with less players (without exploits, note that) to go through a path but get the same reward kitten players would (unless he sells which is totally ruining the game and he is evil and should be permabanned like forever and stuff)

Personally I would also fix selling and kicking by making a system which would track which players did which events/bosses. When dungeon gets completed all participating players would require their rightful rewards.

So if for example you solo a dungeon you get 500% reward or if you get kicked at end you would still get ~80% reward while the new guy would get ~20%.

And then replace static reward system with dynamical system which would track runs globally and personally. Rewards would get balanced based on global runs. Personal tracking would be used to prevent farming (like current daily reward). Playing too much same path would reduce rewards for days or even a week but it would gradually return back to normal.

That sounds really awesome! The current Living Story system already tracks all your achievements in the instance, should not be that hard to implement in dungeons – if it would be too time consuming they could just make each boss/challenge trigger their own chest with x-amount of gold/bags inside – would not need to wait for the end to receive 1 chest/award for 100% of your reward, instead you could get like 20% for each boss/challenge. That way the disconnects and getting kicked would feel less punishing since you would get at least something (the greens in a champ bag you get don’t comfort you so much after being kicked at last boss)

Is it feasible coding-wise? Will people be able to glitch with the buff like in the case of Brie’s invuln buff few months ago? Another example, if I get the buff in one character, before the end reward, I swap to another alt, will the buff persist? And what if it never expires and affect my magic find/drops/etc?

Make these buffs/reward nerfs apply party-wide and voted on instead of just on individually and I think it would be viable

I do agree this would help bring in more players to our circle that would ‘maybe’ get Anet to pay more attention to us. This in effect creates the opposite of HM, so if development continues with this idea in mind.. win-win.

Right now dungeons are like the Eugene of the game. Locked in the attic and ignored

Given your background, I see that your real intention is to get a raise in dungeon difficulty, and the noobs can use your magician to get a buff to overcome.

Having said that, the general idea is very good. In fact, I would used it in the first year of GW2 very much, if it existed. I never understood why there is only one difficulty level for the dungeons where GW1 already provided 2, and why fresh people with lower levels than 80 are invited by the game to all these dungeons – only to fail miserably. I bet many players gave up GW2 frustrated in the first months of GW2 because of that, and there are still plenty of active veteran players who set foot in a dungeon once shortly after release and never returned since due to the then-ridiculous difficulty.

I don’t know if giving a buff is acceptable from a balancing point of view, but it is probably much easier to implement than designing different difficulty levels. If it is possible to lower the difficulty for new players by giving out a buff without spending developers time by designing different difficulty levels, go for it.

However, I doubt that dungeons will ever be redesigned for higher difficulty or for a more polished or simply different experience. They lay in waste for more than a year already. A few encounters have only been made easier in this time, for example AC path 2. Or Arah story mode, which is trivial now even for the most casual player. If Arenanet really wanted to do a major rework of the dungeons, they would have done it by now.