Guild Wars 2

Good evening!

I’m here to start a discussion about what we can do to expand the game without trying to change it (or not too much), by using the current mechanism with imagination.

Please remember an important thing : it’s about diversification, not replacement or full change of what’ll come in the futur to fit a unique fighting paradigm. It’s more about making flavorful fight. If they became the usual fight, it would be a failure.

I’ll open with some ideas

Survival

Currently, surviving is something we do aside of beating our opponents.
What matter is dealing damages without dying in the process, because the only thing granting us victory is to kill before it kill us.
Then, monsters are designed to be slaughters before they kill us if we manage well enough our spells and dodge.
Damage is the first concern to end a fight, and the more damage are done, the faster the fight end. With conditions too easily reaching their cap, we got the “berzerker only” trend we all know.
Of course, a dead player will not damage at all, and surviving is not completely useless.

Now, imagine a foe/boss you can damage, but eventually reduced or at key moments only, its life is depleting anyway, automatically or if the correct action is done.
Then, what matter the most is surviving it while damaging it is just a bonus.

A declination would be that it’s not as vulnerable as when we complete a specific task.
Being able to complete the task is now as much important as damaging, pushing survival interest up. Then you can go full focus on damage, but for those who want to play otherwise, they would have something they can try to do their part without the need to conform to the “berzerk trend”.

And bam! We’re exactly on the original statement of Arena.net “play how you want”.
Damage would still be a core mechanism, but it could be given alternatives.

Sneakiness

We have rogues and mesmers with invisibility, teleporting skills, and not a single encounter provide emphasis on sneakiness. Being able to trick some trash mob guard to knock him from behind and avoiding the fight if successful.
Or at least, disabling him momentarily to gently slaughter his friend nearby before taking care of him too.

Jumping

Jumping puzzle dispersed in the whole world, and I can’t remember any encounter where people have to reach places to fight or evade deadly strikes. Could provide some interesting alternatives to “dodge it or die”, an other way to dodge things. Could unlock specific buff or help.

In a boss fight, someone could choose to go jumping over the fight to provide help from above by activating help or deactivating traps. Aiming a cannon at the boss to explode it’s shield, removing boss AoE faster (extinguisher for fire AoE), spraying power buff… Or making a mistake and poping adds :°

Run Forest

Cripple, Chilled, Swiftness, teleporting skills, but for when a fight where someone can kite some mobs or must run with an object to prevent the boss to reach it?
The mobs can be linked to the surviving part, their life depleting automatically, making them not worth damaging them.
The object could be pass from player to player like barrel/crab mini-games if a player feel that he will not be able to flee the boss any longer.

It’s now midnight for me, I’ll end here for now
What do you thing of these ideas? Do you have others to share? Improvement to these ideas are good to share too!

Thanks for reading!

We have rogues in gw2?

Oh, and there is no “berserk trend” outside of speed clearing dungeons so your whole survival section can be removed.

Looks like you’ve never played fractals?

“Play how you want” does not mean what you want it to mean.

The original context it was used in referred to players being able to play whatever type of content or activity they want and still be rewarded for it.

Then it’s “play at what you want”

And sorry for rogues, I mean thieves.
But there’s a berserk trend. Killing faster and no condition caping is appealing even outside dungeons. But as I said, it’s a trend, not an universal rule and requirement. Even if Berserker was not a trend, the “survival” part could diversificate the possibilities.

I’ve done all fractals (at low level), but there’s other dungeons, world bosses, dynamic events, and a whole incoming expansion.

That’s how they said it first. And that’s how they meant it.

Berserker is a trend because every content boils down to “finish it as fast as possible to get your reward as fast as possible”. This mentality is not something you can change.

Kulvar.1239:

snip

None of your suggestions would in any way change how the game got played. There is nothing besides throwing more unmitigatable damage at people than they can evade that would make tank stats importent.

And even with that change all that would happen is:
-> required group setup. any class not useful will get ommited (already happening to a big extent in high level fractals)
-> tank stats would only be needed after all the evasion/immunity skills have been used. failing with only 1 evasion skill means death. I’m sure a lot of eltist would love that. We get constant yells for harder content. Casuals, yeah they are going to stay VERY far away from this

Jumping puzzles are great, for every one who likes jumping. See how many people come crying here when they are not optional any more. Hint: it will be a lot.

Stealth already gets used to bypass a lot of content. Having stealth in boss fights or dungeon mechanics would mean at least 1 slot in the group has to go to mesmer ot thief. Very resrictiv game design. Not supported.

Was already mentioned. The play how you want was refering to allowing people to play any content they want and still progress their character (unlike having to run dungeon xyz for item abc). Has nothing to do with stats on gear.

Fractals use almost all that you mentioned

Pass the Hammer! (Cliffside)
Go up on the ledge and use the trap! (Dredge, AC, CoE)
Go up the ledges JP style (Raving Asura)
Survive the <mechanic>! (Mai Trin, Snowblind, Grawl, etc.)
Stealth though the <thing>! (every dungeon ever)

Could some of these mechanics be used more often? sure… some of them are even in the personal story I think (been a while since I did them).
Could there be a larger variety of “special” things like this? yeah there could! But it’s likely we’ll see more mini-events like SW with a few open world bosses with unique mechanics which at least is nicer than face tank ground pound!