Guild Wars 2

Shock, I think we’re better off trying to build new systems and fix existing systems that are broken rather than trying to fix a system like dungeon tokens which, in my opinion, works pretty well.

If you want to revamp dungeon rewards, how about adding more karma? There’s already pretty significant XP gold and tokens.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Yoh.8469:

A Skill Tracker
When you want to unlock a new skill, you double click it and it will be added to your skill tracker in the upper right hand corner of the screen like Dailies. (up to 3 at a time)
In order to unlock it you have to perform the list of objectives mentioned, just as you would a daily.

For example: Unlocking ‘Lightning Reflexes’ would require you to dodge attacks a certain number of times, and kill say Air Elementals some 20-30 times, and maybe even complete a jumping puzzle.

Higher tiers require more activities, and more challenging objectives.
After you unlock the skill you also get a little bit of EXP.

What great about this system is that it habituates people into doing daily and monthly activities, as well as reuses existing systems.

I really love that idea, people should be familiar with daylies so it shouldn’t be too hard to grasp.

One thing I particularly love: Skills aren’t gated by prerequisite skills or a number of skillpoints but challenges spread in the world. You might not have access (due to low level) to a specific locations, so you should probably do the easier ones first.

What a pity that we already have all our skills unlocked with a quite boring unlock-system instead of your suggestion: doing a huge variety of things in order to unlock each skill. It would have been awesome imho.

(Yes, it would be a bad system if you only play WvW, because in that szenario you want all skills from the beginning. I would have unlocked all skills for WvW (just as it works in sPvP) because you’re already scaled up to 80 also. Once you go back to PvE you’d have to continue unlocking skills via exploration & activities.)

Yeah, WvW is the only tricky part.
For normal skills it’s shouldn’t be too difficult, just have a WvW set of objectives for the skill in addition to PvE ones. Complete one or the other and you unlock the skill.

Elites is where you run into trouble. Given how bland WvW objectives are, I don’t know how you could have an interesting objective to unlock the skill beyond just kill a bunch of dudes or capture a keep. It would probably make the WvW objective overly easy to do, and path of least resistance and all.

What you ideally want from the Elite capture system is something challenging that you can work towards as you level. And WvW scaling system and lack of mobs kind of throws a wrench in that idea.

….. I got nothing.

Yoh.8469:

Yeah, WvW is the only tricky part.
For normal skills it’s shouldn’t be too difficult, just have a WvW set of objectives for the skill in addition to PvE ones. Complete one or the other and you unlock the skill.

I think this would also be a bad idea to include certain objectives to WvW to unlock skills. WvW is not about exploring but rather about coordinated teamplay with your server. You would just hurt your boys when wandering off-side and killing champs, vets etc. They could implement such challenges in the Obsidian Jumping Puzzle… but I doubt that would be too fun for everyone involved.

As I said, I think the best solution would be to unlock every skill for WvW as long as you’re in there. High level players (which are probably the most) want you to use your skills when you need them in the zerg / camps. Too many of the players are already unhappy to see upscaled players – this really hurts your and their experience imho.

This is going to be Long, apologies and as a curtousy to keep the page short.. I’ll stick it under a Spoiler.

TL;DR Version.

-Needs More-
Armor Skins
Character and Play Customization
Skill based Rewards (Not gated behind Rank or time)
Meaningful Rewards (Not gold or improved RNG chances)
Deeper Impact and Motivation to Heavily Invest into Toons.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Yoh.8469:

Yeah, WvW is the only tricky part.
For normal skills it’s shouldn’t be too difficult, just have a WvW set of objectives for the skill in addition to PvE ones. Complete one or the other and you unlock the skill.

I think this would also be a bad idea to include certain objectives to WvW to unlock skills. WvW is not about exploring but rather about coordinated teamplay with your server. You would just hurt your boys when wandering off-side and killing champs, vets etc. They could implement such challenges in the Obsidian Jumping Puzzle… but I doubt that would be too fun for everyone involved.

As I said, I think the best solution would be to unlock every skill for WvW as long as you’re in there. High level players (which are probably the most) want you to use your skills when you need them in the zerg / camps. Too many of the players are already unhappy to see upscaled players – this really hurts your and their experience imho.

You might be right about just having them temporarily unlocked during WvW, thou that just avoids the problem rather then confronting it.

And I didn’t say anything about what the objectives actually were in WvW, you just jumped to vets and champions, and yes it would be stupid if that’s what the objectives were.

They probably should be more along the lines of what you would be doing if you were playing with people, rather then take detours. Like dodge attacks, reviving allies, killing specific professions, using particular siege to kill people, etc.
It’s only limited by you imagination.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Reading through a lot of the comments on various class diversification (or just stronger trait/skill diversification) concepts, one of the things that seems to be missing is a discussion on how you’d actually earn/unlock these additional abilities to make it a progression system.

One of the goals of progression, in this case horizontal, is to create an extended sense of game play and thus = reward for playing it.

For example, we’ve added more skills to the game recently, but those simply unlock with skill points, which basically means -> play any part of the game that gives exp, or kill champs to get skill point books. That’s ok as systems of unlocking horizontal progression go for the extended class diversification, but game play wise it generally means find the easiest place to get XP/champ-loot and do it over and over again for a large % of players, since folks most often gravitate towards the path of least resistance.

What sort of systems of horizontal progression unlocking would you like to see that’d accompany a system like extended class progression?

Ways to unlock new skills.
There are quite a few to be honest.

Right now we have the very broad and easy way of just buying said skills. It alows you to choose in which order you want to unlock these in a restricted enviroment while leveling up to 80.
As it is balanced now, you gain some skillpoints with each lvl up, however you need to earn them through other ways as well —> Skillpoints in maps or items at the moment.

This of course is, as you have said, a bit boring, since depending on how you acquire the points you might not really feel like you earned said skills. It is not a reward for your skills, just something you aquire while playing the game.

So different ways are in order.
Of course we can look back to Guild Wars 1. Here we had a monetary skill advancement, which is basicaly the same as we have now, however now it is substituting skillpoints for money.

Another and still popular way was to capture skills by defeating enemies. This has been done in other games before. Usually it involves you to search a specific monster which has said skill. These are unique for this limited mob. You are basicly learning the abilities of your enemy to use them on your own.

In the same direction is the notion of learning skills from your souroundings. Using the game Wild Arms as an example, characters there learned skills as they were doing stuff in the enviroment. After experiencing a gust of wind, the swordmaster had the inspiration to use shockwave of his sworddraw for a range attack (think guardian sword 3).
The same could be implimented at hard to reach or “underused” places around the world. If your character has the right weapon equiped and the right experience (lvl) or other reccource (depending on the skill he wants to learn. this is something that can be bound to a lot of different things, beside simple skillpoints. Maybe AP, killed enemytype, etc…), at that place, he will “discover” this new skill for himself.
This of course can be a skill or trait. i do not want to restrict it here.

Another popular way is Masters.
Simply masters of certain skills are teaching you their skills if you fullfill their requirements.
This can reach from simply paying a certain amount of money or even a task to fullfill.
While we now go back to a traditional questing system, you have to keep in mind: It is your characters challange
Completing these tasks can feel very rewarding, depending on how it is designed.
In Final Fantasy XI, each class was able to find a hidden questline, which granted you the ability to raise in rank and acquire class specific equipment.
These “quests” were testing the skills of your character and were tailored around the class specific roles and abilities.
This could be applied for gaining skills.
Think about the stealth sneaking DE on the far east of the Shatterers landing zone. Have a thief do something like this to acquire a stealth skill for example (i am not that inspired for special skills atm, so bear with me)

—> Continue…

Malchior.5042:

First, my opinion is going to differ greatly from any of the previous voices concerns/suggestions.

(snip)

• I’m gonna get some serious hate, but introduce Diminishing Returns on champion loot on a per-zone basis. If a person farms Queensdale for more than an hour, no more champion bags from Queensdale for that day. If said person loves champion farming, they’ll have to go to another zone. This first step will show how repetitive play is punished. It’s still possible, but players have to explore new zones, form new champ farms, etc…

I think you can avoid the most frustrating part of Diminishing Returns, its INVISIBILITY, with something very upfront and obvious. Maybe when you open the map of a zone there’s a really blatant Champion Bag Counter just under the list of things you’ve located on that map. The counters starts at 25 and it goes down by one for each champion you kill. When it reaches zero you can’t get any more champion bags in that zone until the counter refreshes with the daily reset. You can choose which champs you go after, you can kill the same one 25 times if that’s your fancy, you can run loops a couple of times with no worries, but after 25 bags FIND A NEW ZONE.

Its a much higher cap than one per champ per day. It can be tuned after release by adjusting the number (possibly on a map-by-map basis). It allows the player to pick which champs they want to go after and doesn’t punish you because someone else killed one that might otherwise been the last one you could still farm. It doesn’t judge the details, but does judge the overall habit.

With that in place, add improved incentive for playing a variety of content. Players like maximizing time, and just about every human on earth likes to “get a good deal” or save time/money. Along with daily achievements, add hourly bonuses (not necessarily achievements) that can be messaged by the event panel/LW panel area. Only one bonus would be active at a time on all servers, and would rotate either every hour or every few hours. It might pigeonhole players, but honestly, if people are farming Queensdale, what’s the difference in just moving them around?

Something like…

• “50% bonus xp for completing events in Fireheart Rise.” – 60 min
• “50% bonus Karma from events in Mount Maelstrom.” – 60 min
• The Call to War! “50% bonus WvW experience!” – 60 min

I like that idea quite a lot .

Different types of new abilities should be unlocked in different ways.

• Elite skills
  • Merge skill challenges and GW1 skill capping. Talk to a hard-to-reach NPC for a difficult fight where you and they both have this skill; the rest of your skill bar stays as you had it built; win to permanently learn the skill.
• Utility skills
  • Training point. An NPC is trying to defend a point, and their new utility skill is the best way to do it. Talk to them to have your skill bar replaced with an environmental weapon and this skill. Defend the area against x waves of enemies to learn the skill.
• Healing skills
  • Gauntlet challenges. Talk to an NPC who empties your skill bar and boons, giving you nothing but the new healing skill. Step into a gauntlet area full of unkillable enemies or other sources of damage. Between movement and the healing skill, survive a set amount of time to learn the skill.
• Weapon types
  • Talk to a profession trainer to get a training version of the weapon, usable anywhere. It has relatively poor stats, and cannot be upgraded. While equipped, you have no healing, utility, or elite skills. Weapon skills themselves are learned the same way they are now: by using the weapon. Weapon swapping during combat is temporarily disabled. Experience earned through combat while wielding the training weapon fills a mastery gauge. Gain full access to the weapon type when the gauge is full. The experience required assumes a high level character; learning at a low level is technically possible, but would take forever.
• Traits
  • Let me get back to you on this one…

I think we should all take a moment to thank Chris Whiteside. Whether or not our ideas or suggestions see the light of day, hes been on these forums almost every day during the holiday/vacation. Its good to see that type of dedication with an employee of any company.

So thank you Chris for your hard work during this CDI!

DiogoSilva.7089:

Let’s keep things simple

Subclass Traiting System

• Expand the number of traitlines available to each profession.
• Make most of the traitlines (and each of their respective tiers) collectible through levels, quests, tome collection and boss hunting.
• Give an unique subclass flavor to each traitline (already happens to a certain extent). This also implies a redesign of the current traitlines and different trait allocation.
• Have each traitline offer traits that more deeply affect weapon’s skills, core profession mechanic skills and the profession as a whole.

This would basically be an expansion of the current trait system, with a stronger subclass flavor.

Opportunities for more Horizontal Progression with this system

• Enhanced world exploration (new quests, boss hunting, tome collecting).
• New acchievements tied to new subclass-driven content.
• More variations of pre-defined skill sets (more weapon traits, more core mechanic traits).
• Higher stat customisation, because traitlines would eventually start offering stats other traitlines already do.

Other advantages

• Journey to lv.80 will be more exciting/ diversified.
• Character customisation will continue beyond max level.
• Character customisation will not be as underwhelming after the first few levels.
• Easier to expand the system by adding more trait lines over the time (each new traitline addition would mean three new collectible tiers to be found around the world).
• Enhanced world immersion.
• Stronger build flavor for two reasons: subclasses would have more evocative names, and the pre-defined flavor for each traitline would not clash directly with efficiency. Players would be able to choose the best traits for each traitline without sacrificing flavor, because flavor is already pre-defined. The current trait system can already do this, but due to the geometrical and rigid 5 traitline setup, it is both too restrictive and too broad.
• Subclass flavor can work as a source of inspiration for Anet’s designers to create new effects, without being “stuck” to the current, rigid traitline structure.

If anyone believes my proposal would be worse than the current system we have in place, please, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

+1 This is good.

Personally I would like to see ten trait lines as opposed to five, one attribute dedicated to a trait mastery instead of two attributes that don’t necessarily match sandwiched into one trait mastery, and twice the amount of trait points to spend so you can cover the attributes you want.

For example, as a Thief, I might want to make an acrobat build focusing on power/toughness/vitality, but I have absolutely no use for venom or stealth related traits. I might want to make a pure damage build that revolves around steal and steal augmenting traits, but all of those traits are in the stealth/condition lines of Deadly Arts, Trickery and Shadow Arts. I would love to make a non-stealth, non-teleport, non-venom thief to focus on abilities like Withdraw, Roll for Initiative and Melee, but it’s just not possible with the current mechanics.

Another example could be as a Ranger, I want to make a pure melee/berserker build with Greatsword and Sword/Warhorn I have absolutely no use for condition duration, spirits, pets or condition related traits or attributes whatsoever, the Greatsword/sword skills are in the Woodland Survival line.

—> Continue from last post.

I allready hinted on in with learning from enviroment, however new skills and traits could be unlocked with Archievments
We allready have categories like: Killed 100-1000 Dredge.
This could be used for specific classes to unlock Skills based on these enemy types or traits which are inspired by these.
For example an engineur could aquire a sonic based attack, basicly retrofitting his goonie inspired toolbelt to use a sonic shockwave to stun his enemies (if something like this allready exist in his skillset i am sorry, it is just an example)

However this could also be applied to traits. An ranger who has killed a lot of Drakes for example might get a trait which changes the effect (visually and statwise) of his greatsword attack. Instead of a Bear a giant lizard is attacking for a bit less damage, but a poison suffix.
Or a warrior gains a “brute force” trait, after he fought a lot of abomination or enemies with a charge skill, which will change the feel strenght and animation of similiar skills.
Having experienced the “natural” forces so much, he is now able to replicate it himself. Leaving trail of crumbled earth in his wake as he runs towards the enemy for example (exagarated example: Dawn of War 2: Retribution. The Comander there has such a charge. Normaly it would stun and push back an enemy. Upgraded he just ran through enemies like a knief through butter and earthspikes came up behind him. Looked quiete awesome)

Furthermore this kind of unlock could be even tied to a direct change of weapon skills
With these “inspired” skills, like many martial arts, attacks and use of wepons could be exchanged for “wild skills”.
Again with the Dredge, a Warrior could learn how to use a soundwave attack with his warhorn, replacing one of his allready existing skills.

Learning based on archievments sounds nice, but has one downside. It is too much in your face. Like with skillpoints, you might see it too much as a grind or a checklist, instead of something you archieve.

To counter that, i would advice to use a synergy method. Combine different tasks to do for new skills, before you are able to unlock them. However for the beginning (this is the internet, after a while everything will be known anyway) keep them obscure.

let it be different “ressources” your character has to “gather”, task to fullfill. Basicly give us the feeling that the things our character did are the reason we got this new shiny skill and not some bar we have filled (which it is in the end, but we do not have to feel it.)

Example
Going from my proposal of learning from the enviroment:

Your character is a mesmer. He fought in Orr, killed at least ten Eyes of Zaithan (killcounter enemytype) in his travels.
He is proficient with his wand (killcounter wand), learned all his attack moves (Skillcheck) and skills and arrived at lvl 80 (lvlcheck). He also traveled the world to see other “beammagic” (killcounter enemy) and learn about them from an scholar (master).
After ariving at a certain location (locationcheck) with a powerfull version of a Eye of Zaithan and you are able to defeat it, you might find his corpse still around. Examining it might trigger an idea, which results in a new attackskill for your Wand:
Charging up some magical orbs to deliver multiple beams of energy to the enemy, inspired by the attackpatern of this enemy.

In the end. There are several ways for a character to “unlock” skills. The thing is to make them feel like we earned them and not just simply “bought” them.

While the current system definetly works for the casual player, since it offers an easy way to obtain this skills over time, they definetly do not feel “special”.
It is just a timegate (excluding the limitation of skills you can aquire due to lvling up).

Something like a “story” or a challenge sourounding these “skills” we are out to acquire has definetly a more impactfull feeling in the long run in my opinion.

My Top One:

New weapons, and more skills for existing weapons and unique ways to acquire them. I want this because the build and creative side of what Guild Wars is to me is very stale right now.

How to acquire: Skill Challenges. Instead of collecting points, fight a veteran that is using the skill that you want on you. Additionally, I would scale the player down in these encounters green level stats at the MOST.

Additionally, make some of these skill points champions which use the skill that you are wanting to acquire. Additionally, for each profession that is represented, have it use that Professions skill in its rotation. Have it require people to recruit help from a guild or from the zone.

Additionally, you could have new Elites acquired by running dungeons in green level gear scale (ie, auto-scale the gear of the group down to that level). Make you and the team do more with less to earn an elite of choice.

Have some movement related skills, weapon or utility, be tied to completing jumping puzzles and even vistas (not all of them have to be “hard”).

Lastly, I’d like to see some skills acquired in chests at the end of a ‘cave’ crawl. Not an instanced dungeon, mind you, but an open world cave system with a chest at the end.

I’m sure there are others, but this would make the skill stagnation change for me, would open up more pve builds, and would give me incentive to get out into the world to explore unique corners and enemies to be uniquely rewarded with skills that build my character.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Yoh.8469:

Yeah, WvW is the only tricky part.
For normal skills it’s shouldn’t be too difficult, just have a WvW set of objectives for the skill in addition to PvE ones. Complete one or the other and you unlock the skill.

I think this would also be a bad idea to include certain objectives to WvW to unlock skills. WvW is not about exploring but rather about coordinated teamplay with your server. You would just hurt your boys when wandering off-side and killing champs, vets etc. They could implement such challenges in the Obsidian Jumping Puzzle… but I doubt that would be too fun for everyone involved.

As I said, I think the best solution would be to unlock every skill for WvW as long as you’re in there. High level players (which are probably the most) want you to use your skills when you need them in the zerg / camps. Too many of the players are already unhappy to see upscaled players – this really hurts your and their experience imho.

I listed essentially the same idea earlier in the thread.

For Elites or WvW, I assume the requirements to unlock would be friendly for all game modes (notably, they’d still be locked in PvP, but you could easily enough complete the skill requirements just by playing PvP). Jumping Puzzles or “mob bounties” (killing specific kinds of mobs, not guild bounty) could be a nice idea, but like has been mentioned, its not completely friendly to different game modes.

Elite Skills, might just have more involved requirements (like combining ~15 interrupts, ~30seconds total chilled duration, and ~15 blast finishers or more). Anyone can interrupt, add chill, or blast finishers in PvE, WvW, or PvP. (I also feel these skills should be locked in PvP.

The Personal Story aspect of unlocking might not be necessary for WvW or PvP, but using skills to “learn” your new skills seems to be a very interesting aspect that I think PvPers could take part in).

HP summary page 23 to 28 Part 1
Ok next summary update, this is a long multi post again. Again thanks Guhracie, for any that missed it check out Guhracie’s summary here.

For anyone looking for up-to-date topic information and a complete index of all summaries over the Character Progression CDI The Lost Witch has created CDI – Character Progression – Summaries. Again if I’ve missed anything lets me know.

Top Three Tally Guhracie Updated as of page 28 (Guhracie first tally with descriptions also check out AlanaTheStrange’s Tally list)

1. Cosmetic customisation tools (75)
2. Skills, traits and weapons (73)
3. Quests, challenge missions and order progression (61)
4. Housing, guild halls and customisation of the home instance (54)
5. More new skins (27)
6. Build diversity (26)
7. Expansion of the personality system (22)
8. Zone progression (17)
9. More titles (13)
10. Hard mode (10)
11. More character customisation (9) and Lore as a reward (9)
12. Game world to actively respond to the choices we make (8) and Total guild system expansion or overhaul (8)
13. Expansion and secondary crafting skills (6)
14. Visible rewards for completing heroic feats (5), Expansion of the emote and verbal call-out system (5), Improvement or overhaul of the personal story (5)
15. Improvement to the interface for minis (4) and Skins that show progress via cosmetics (4)
16. Mounts and mounted combat (3) and Arena-style combat (3)
17. More activities (polymock in particular) (2)
18. Again a handful of other ideas with only one mention.

• Levionan writes about the overall theme of progression, HP & VP.
• TheLostWitch looks at how we go about acquiring all our things (ranks, items, skills etc..)

HP summary page 23 to 28 Part 2
Again if I’ve missed anything lets me know.

Character Progression
Build content expansion

• Yumeijin talks about skill diversification looking at traits, runes & sigils with less focus on purely passive additions like “+10% modifiers” and more active skill transformers / changers like “on heal, allies gain swiftness” & changing symbol fields into fire/ice/water.
  New Skills:
• BlackThornArrow looks for the addition of more skills (weapon skill, weapons, utility skills) and also brings up the idea of skill hunting again.
• Delvoire brings up synergy which would add another reason for forming parties and profession skill challenges an idea Arena Net presented prior to release. Orpheal expands on Delvoire synergy and references Tales of Xillia. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
  Marcus Greythorne turns synergy’s into elite skills
• Chrispy highlights that many idea’s on new weapons skills & skill expansion are looking at some type of in game skill hunting / collection other then just UI unlocking. This would also return players to existing zone. Although only most likely until all skills are collected.
  Sub-classes
• Orpheal returns to the sub-class discussion with(Part 1) and looks at how the trait and sub-class system can enhance each other in Part 2. Orpheal’sPart3 talks about the trait system as a customisation system looking to avoid any unlocking (Eg. New weapons unlocked behind a grandmaster trait). Part 4 and Part 5 expands Orpheal’s talents.
• DiogoSilva present Subclass and Trait System Revised
• Ghotistyx looks at using sub-classes as a way to introduce more specific traits and skills.

The other side

• Shriketalon looks at expanding the existing system instead of adding sub-classes. Part 1, Part 2
• TheLostWitch asks some interesting questions and looks at the reason for sub-classes.
• Kulcar questions the need for sub-classes.
  Draxynnic compares sub-classes & the existing GW2 classes to editions of D&D.
• Yoh joins in the sub-class discussion. Part 1, Part 2.

HP summary page 23 to 28 Part 3
Again if I’ve missed anything lets me know.

Cosmetics expansion

• TheDaiBish addition of cosmetic templates expands the idea of the skin locker. Marcus Greythorne looks at adding milestones the skin collection and how Arena Net could use the gem store with cosmetic templates
• For everyone talking about the skin locker I recommend Chrispy’s post about some of the negative impacts such a system could have on the economy. These are actually quite large impacts on the economy which I missed when looking at the skin locker idea.
• Yuri present a solution and videoboy discusses the issues and offer a alternate solution to #4.
• A few players have brought up the idea of profession being able to wear any of the armour class. Mix & match the different types of armour types to achieve the cosmetic look your after. Isaiah Cartwright posted in the VP thread that there are technical issues that make this mixing & matching of armour classes impractical.
• Redstar touches on cosmetic expansion through crafting feeling so much more could be achieved.

Other Content

• Orpheal discusses the idea of hired heroes were you could create your own little personal Destiny’s Edge similar to the hero system from GW1.
• TheLostWitch present a different take on the hired heroes idea.
• Caveth looks at achievement progression. Focusing on expanding option to acquire achievement points.
• Radiantglyh talks about HP expansion in regards to mini-pets, looking to expand there function from just a collection.

Home instance, Player housing

• Marcus Greythorne discusses the issues with Chrispy about displaying player housings to other players and brings up the idea from LotRO of housing districts.
• Marcus also adds another housing idea withhome mini-dungeon instance.
• Morrigan looks at player housing neighbourhoods as away to expand non combat gameplay.
• Conski Deshan ties player housing to all aspects of the game in this post

Zone Exploration / Progression

• Marcus Greythorne presents another idea on the expansion, removal & addition of new DE’s in zones.

Order /Faction Expansion

• AikunFelcis joins the discussion with a great multi post talk about expanding order’s character impact and content. Part 1, Part 2.
• Marcus Greythorne present another idea for order progression.

I have seen that people have been talking in here about skills and how to unlock them.

My suggestion to this is to let those skills be rewards from Racial Titles . When character have achieved some specific Racial Title, it will give skills as reward. They are somehow related to the title, or to what requirements you have to do to get the title.

Benjamin made that racial title table, and I modified it bit in here adding more detailed information to connect the title to unlocking skill mechanism:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/page/41#post3459941

Lets take the requirements from that table and see what kind of skills you could open by achieving these titles.

1. Complete all jumping puzzles with specific race / Racial mini title 1
- Reward from this title are leaping skills, long range skills, and long range evade skills.

2. Use any Racial skills 1000 times (cumulative) with specific race / Racial mini title 2
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives condition damage to a single foe and support to nearby allies

3. Complete Personal Story with a specific race / Racial mini title 3
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives DPS and AoE damage to foes

4. Defeat 1000 players being other race than you in PvP / Racial mini title 4
- Reward from this title are single damage skills with high DPS

5. Complete 1000 successfull events in WvW with a specific race / Racial mini title 5
- Reward from this title are skills with single condition damage skills with high DPS

6. Complete all Dungeons with a Specific Race / Racial mini title 6
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills and AoE healing skills and Single high DPS skills

7. Obtain max Fractail level with a specific race / Racial mini title 7
- Reward form this title are single target supporting skills and single target healing skills, AoE high DPS and Condition damage Skills

8. Complete 3000 successfull Group Events in PvE with a specific race / Racial mini title 8
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills, AoE Healing skills and AoE Condition damage skills.

9. Complete All World Boss Events Successfull 20 times with a specific race / Racial mini title 9
- Reward from this title are Long Range High DPS skills and AoE supporting skills

10. Complete ”Been There Done That” with a specific Race
- Reward from this title are long term Running skills

11. Obtain all racial Master Titles / GRAND TITLE
Reward from this are Elite skill High AoE support, High AoE Condition damage, High AoE DPS and High AoE Healing skills same time.

Of course, this can be included into a vertical progression too, but it brings a different way into the unlocking skills system which would diversify the skill acquisition making it a horizontal progression valid option. Titles are optional.

The Racial Titles as Nike said, they are long term goals due to their nature, so adding skill unlocks to various tiers in a specific title for each title will make it really interesting goal for many players expanding the pool of skills.

My personal top 3:
1) More unique armor (and weapon) skins!
2) More skills
3) More dungeons and epic fights like Tequatl (better if instanced)

Immanuel.1560:

I have seen that people have been talking in here about skills and how to unlock them.

My suggestion to this is to let those skills be rewards from Racial Titles . When character have achieved some specific Racial Title, it will give skills as reward. They are somehow related to the title, or to what requirements you have to do to get the title.

Benjamin made that racial title table, and I modified it bit in here adding more detailed information to connect the title to unlocking skill mechanism:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/page/41#post3459941

Lets take the requirements from that table and see what kind of skills you could open by achieving these titles.

1. Complete all jumping puzzles with specific race / Racial mini title 1
- Reward from this title are leaping skills, long range skills, and long range evade skills.

2. Use any Racial skills 1000 times (cumulative) with specific race / Racial mini title 2
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives condition damage to a single foe and support to nearby allies

3. Complete Personal Story with a specific race / Racial mini title 3
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives DPS and AoE damage to foes

4. Defeat 1000 players being other race than you in PvP / Racial mini title 4
- Reward from this title are single damage skills with high DPS

5. Complete 1000 successfull events in WvW with a specific race / Racial mini title 5
- Reward from this title are skills with single condition damage skills with high DPS

6. Complete all Dungeons with a Specific Race / Racial mini title 6
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills and AoE healing skills and Single high DPS skills

7. Obtain max Fractail level with a specific race / Racial mini title 7
- Reward form this title are single target supporting skills and single target healing skills, AoE high DPS and Condition damage Skills

8. Complete 3000 successfull Group Events in PvE with a specific race / Racial mini title 8
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills, AoE Healing skills and AoE Condition damage skills.

9. Complete All World Boss Events Successfull 20 times with a specific race / Racial mini title 9
- Reward from this title are Long Range High DPS skills and AoE supporting skills

10. Complete ”Been There Done That” with a specific Race
- Reward from this title are long term Running skills

11. Obtain all racial Master Titles / GRAND TITLE
Reward from this are Elite skill High AoE support, High AoE Condition damage, High AoE DPS and High AoE Healing skills same time.

Of course, this can be included into a vertical progression too, but it brings a different way into the unlocking skills system which would diversify the skill acquisition making it a horizontal progression valid option. Titles are optional.

The Racial Titles as Nike said, they are long term goals due to their nature, so adding skill unlocks to various tiers in a specific title for each title will make it really interesting goal for many players expanding the pool of skills.

How would you address the fact that many people do not play PvP in any way, and thus are locked out of skills under the system you proposed?

Edit : And there are Some people who only play WvW, should they be forced to play PvE content and do Jumping puzzles in order to unlock new skills as well?

I’d prefer something as important as skills to be rewarded independent of which race I play. I only play humans for various reasons, mostly related to character aesthetics.

Titles are not very rewarding by themselves and offer no extra game play. I can’t even see my own titles except in the achievement panel. As a little bonus reward sure, like Dungeon Master for example.

Just playing off of the title —> skill acquisition idea, a title should instead be rewarded for collecting all the various skills and not the other way around.

ColinJohanson.2394:

VOLKON.1290:

Well, new personal story arcs could send you off on paths that lead to unlocking something specific from the Order you chose at the beginning of the game (which would add more substance to the Order you choose mattering)…

Also just want to quickly add, I think this would be really cool and is an example of an approachable system for all players that’s relatively easy to message, understand, and could be available to everyone.

Yes, finally a someone started talking about this! I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. So I noticed that the current skillpoint system wasn’t going to last in the long run mid summer and the recent skills kind of helped enforce this. A majority of the people and guilds I interacted with didn’t do anything different. They unlocked it, either said it was bad or interesting, then went on doing what they’ve been doing.

So I notice a trend that you guys should watch out for. Discussions. A very certain kind of discussion with a certain format. You need to look for instances where players from all walks of life are communicating with one another on HOW to do something. Many discussions we see now a days on the forums are complaints, people talking about how to improve something, about what to add, things like that. Every so often (not often so far) you’ll see a bunch of players talking about how to do something and helping each other. I’ve been taking note of these things for the past year and here is what i’ve seen it happen

1. Initial release (happens every game as everyone figures things out).
2. How to farm something (CoE, Champion paths, etc. Not my favorite of the bunch)
3. Final Rest, Reaper of Souls, Darkmoon Shield PvE search effort.
4. Queens Gauntlet
5. Tequatl (after patch)

These are your keys. These are what you guys need to take special note of on the forums. When players act like the way they did with these 5 things, it means you’ve done something that is good for horizontal progression. The rest falls on reward and keeping the player interest with those things. Lets dissect 2-5.

2. Economy based. Improves players horizontal progression in the economy/token sector. We have plenty of this if you ask me.

3. Look based/Armors

4. Player Challenge, Player skill heavy

5. Large group Challenge, group skill heavy

Now I’d like to focus on one thing for skills. #3. The search for final rest and the other lost artifacts. Tons of threads with player theories, people translating things, people trying to look for patterns. It was glorious. It was the most fun I ever had in this game and with the community was looking for final rest. Now when you revealed that final rest dropped from SB, the 2 other lost artifacts were given up on and the community around it disbanded (many were disappointed).

So lets take this interest and put it to something skill based. Send the players on an adventure that doesn’t necessary tell you what to do right away but gives you hints and pretty much sends you on an epic quest.

Now lets take a look at things you need to take advantage of to make this thing work. It wont be as simple as saying hey, read that orange text and follow what it says.

1. Orders/Personal Story Factions.
2. Mini dungeons
3. In game languages/translation.
4. Puzzles (Tears of itocotol was a very fun mini dungeon imho)
5. Named Champions/Enemies
6. World Bosses
7. Secret Passages/Bases
8. Doors. So many people are not acustomed to doors actually being able to be opened. When I show them the secret whipser base in Ebonhawke, it always amazes them. The one in lornars pass always is cause for awe too.
9. Allied Towns/Friendly NPC towns.

So we have the nine building blocks of setting up a good quest for players to embark on. I’m going to throw in a quick example of getting a skill. If you do like 3-4 of these every month or 2 months it would do a lot for the game, especially endgame players.

Step One. Requirements
Level Requirement (optional if you see it fit)
Be in an Order on the character you want the skill on(make personal story more meaningful)

Step Two: Contact
Notify the players of a new skill. Avoid Mail. Mail is boring and allows players to continue to sit in LA. Put Order bases in each of the capital cities. At these bases will be “Couriers” or “Messengers”. Players talk to them and if you added a new skill there will be a chat option for it. These Couriers will acknowledge the player as a part of their faction and if the player has done the Personal story last mission they will have a special dialog greeting for them.

Please look at my next reply for the rest of the example below

Step Three: Order Contacts
Depending on the order of the contact will depend where the player goes to start the quest to get the skill. Each of the contacts will be in the Orders main base. They will have a unique name and a title (like players) pertaining to a lore friendly name. Example
Asuran Priory Contact- Vred Bruffuz. Title: Priory Lead Researcher
Charr Vigil Contact- Kofarm Gutblade. Title: Senior Forward Scout
Slyvari Whispers Contact- Evyn Bluetree. Title: Master Lightbringer

These characters will be outlined in a faint blue/light blue (same color as the skill points to be easily identifiable by new players) when they have a skill for a new skill. You want to tie things into the living story so you can move tehse guys with forward camps for each order for the living story and tie it into the LS. This example I wont. I will be using Priory in this example.

Step 4: The Quest

A. Player must talk to Vred. He goes through well written dialog about why he is sending the player on his way. “We recently killed a Risen and found a wear glowing flame inside of its body, similar to the Foefire. This is troubling news for our effort in Orr. I need you to go to the ruins of the Ascalonian Abby and look through their records for anything that may give us a clue on where and how these risen have this”.
B. Players go there and you can do a couple things here. Have players do a quick puzzle, solve a quick riddle, or do a mini dungeon (or just do all three). At the end of the dungeon/after they have done the required event is what they need
-Ideas for puzzles. Something to do with translation of some old text. Solving a riddle. Placing objects in correct placement. Emotes. Things like that.
C. At the end they interact with the object and “take notes” on it ( you can do some good immersion and put a different way each order collects the information). You take it back to Vred. He looks at the ancient text, talks about it some, ask the player for his opinion. Theres only one right answer and no matter what he chooses he will get to the same conclusion, it just promotes a different response from Vred and helps with immersion.
D. He discovers an old text of an ancient structure in Orr that they used to craft the sword. He writes down a special saying on the text and tells you to use this at the entrance, it says in the text only royalty who knew that text were able to get to the structure.
E. Players go there and interact with the door and are able to enter it. Players who haven’t started this chain can’t enter the door because they don’t know the saying. This works similar to the order of whispers base in Lornars Pass.
F. Players go in. They do a quick boss fight. Maybe do another puzzle. They find the structure and its ancient power source. They interact with something to send a signal to the order members near by that they’ve secured it and they can come in to secure the area. This completes the “quest”. Players can now “commune” (similar to the way the skill point acquisition in the open world worked) with the power source. It unlocks the ability to use skillpoints (don’t want to make these useless) on a new skill. They can reenter the area whenever they want, help otherplayers, etc.

Side Notes: I think you should hint at some of the quest objectives and not straight out tell them like I did. An example for the Abby would be they found some kind of riddle or ancient asconlonian text and ask you to go to Plains of Ashford and ask around the Charr encampents to see if any of the commanding people at the camps know anything. They players can go around and just do guess and check till they find the right one, or they can look at the text and try to solve it for themselves. Eventually they can either go straight to the abby or talk to the charr commander who directs them to the abby.

I also advise making these fights challenging. Remember, a ton of HP isn’t necessarily hard or challenging for the players. A great boss fight I think you guys should work off of is Temple of Dwayna. The final boss is amazing. Very obvious but not screen cluttering animations. Punishing but easy to counter. Not spammed. Boss didn’t have a ton of HP. Its an amazing boss fight.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Reading through a lot of the comments on various class diversification (or just stronger trait/skill diversification) concepts, one of the things that seems to be missing is a discussion on how you’d actually earn/unlock these additional abilities to make it a progression system.

One of the goals of progression, in this case horizontal, is to create an extended sense of game play and thus = reward for playing it.

For example, we’ve added more skills to the game recently, but those simply unlock with skill points, which basically means -> play any part of the game that gives exp, or kill champs to get skill point books. That’s ok as systems of unlocking horizontal progression go for the extended class diversification, but game play wise it generally means find the easiest place to get XP/champ-loot and do it over and over again for a large % of players, since folks most often gravitate towards the path of least resistance.

What sort of systems of horizontal progression unlocking would you like to see that’d accompany a system like extended class progression?

This is a very tricky question. On one side it is important to have things easily accessible for people who have trouble dealing with hard content and on the other side if its easy to get its hard to value it properly. Personally I would mix ways to earn the skill up a bit kinda how we could get the Antitoxin Spray. Either using gold+250 spores or skill points.

What I am thinking is say we get a new utility that says grants you swiftness. There might be various ways to unlock it. Either straight out spend 25 skill points. Pay an NPC to teach it you for say 5g or spend some laurels say 5 of them or do a skill challenge to unlock it by say complete a particular hard jumping puzzle in a specific time frame etc..

The idea here is people can either choose skill or time to acquire the new skill. I would assume most people will go for the skill challenge but those who find it hard to overcome can trade in some time to skip the skill check so they’re not completely cut out.

I would like to have players ability to obtain via achievement challenges these::

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/NPC_rank

They would be also need to measure some of the skills you got and also to reflect the general experience you have, but the reward would be along the lines of champion icon around your face for others and perhaps something that a player can see from somewhere too.

I thought that veteran one could be challenging to get and would measure some set of challenges and of course general achievements to measure that you are indeed experienced(as in veteran) in game.

Silvers would need more work and would need dungeon experience taken in to account too, and also needs more achievements made to measure that experience, Champion should be really hard to obtain and the Legendary and possibly Epic status should be also obtainable but with lot of hard work. and incredibly hard challenges should be included to obtaining those.

I was thinking this could be made to achievement line, some sort of meta if you will. Something like those long quest lines other games had but still different.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Yoh.8469:

Yeah, WvW is the only tricky part.
For normal skills it’s shouldn’t be too difficult, just have a WvW set of objectives for the skill in addition to PvE ones. Complete one or the other and you unlock the skill.

I think this would also be a bad idea to include certain objectives to WvW to unlock skills. WvW is not about exploring but rather about coordinated teamplay with your server. You would just hurt your boys when wandering off-side and killing champs, vets etc. They could implement such challenges in the Obsidian Jumping Puzzle… but I doubt that would be too fun for everyone involved.

As I said, I think the best solution would be to unlock every skill for WvW as long as you’re in there. High level players (which are probably the most) want you to use your skills when you need them in the zerg / camps. Too many of the players are already unhappy to see upscaled players – this really hurts your and their experience imho.

I listed essentially the same idea earlier in the thread.

For Elites or WvW, I assume the requirements to unlock would be friendly for all game modes (notably, they’d still be locked in PvP, but you could easily enough complete the skill requirements just by playing PvP). Jumping Puzzles or “mob bounties” (killing specific kinds of mobs, not guild bounty) could be a nice idea, but like has been mentioned, its not completely friendly to different game modes.

Elite Skills, might just have more involved requirements (like combining ~15 interrupts, ~30seconds total chilled duration, and ~15 blast finishers or more). Anyone can interrupt, add chill, or blast finishers in PvE, WvW, or PvP. (I also feel these skills should be locked in PvP.

The Personal Story aspect of unlocking might not be necessary for WvW or PvP, but using skills to “learn” your new skills seems to be a very interesting aspect that I think PvPers could take part in).

Mmmm, your idea is similar, but it’s not the same. I’ve cut out the middle man and the extraneous extras. My idea was more as just a straight up replacement to skill points, and a expansion of and return to form for elites.

But the core concept is the same. Using the daily/achievement tracker with individualized tasks for each skill you want to unlock. Much more engaging then a simple skill point dump.

However it is worth noting that your suggestion about control/support revamp is while necessary, wouldn’t be as easy to fix as your might imagine.
It’s a very complex problem, one which would probably require entirely new attributes/stats and likely a new trait line to accompany it.
Not sure if this is the thread to discuss such a complex issue thou. We’d probably require a CDI on the topic.

Hold the gates! I’ve been working on suggestions for housing, hard mode, rewards, story and how it all ties together. I’m done with the post content, but I’m not done editing it.

It’s bedtime though, I should be able to get it up in about half a day.

I’d like to see easy access to different sets of armour, aiming to encourage to own different full sets and to quickly change from one to another once the sets are done by any of the current ways. For example with a personal wardrobe for every character with spaces to be used only for sets of armour.

That could be located in a personal housing instance in the racial city and/or Lion’s Arch, allowing the armours to be displayed (so, instead of being only additional bank spaces, this wardrobe could be a fashion display). Additional uses could be to transform soulbind pieces to account bind, allowing to share some armours with other characters for example.

For characters customization, I’m not quite found on the trait system. Being not-reset-free it doesn’t encourage too much to play with it and explore options in play instead of calculating it or going to forums to search for pre-builds.

A way to add diversity could be to allow three sets (for example) of traits, with custom names. You could change from one set to other by free, either in a selected location (trainers) or while not in combat, as weapons do. So you could develop totally different lines of traits for the same character.

Companions, as GW1 Heroes, is something I’d like to see with a “GW2 light”. For example, instead of full-growth big kitten heroes, those companions could be novices, low level characters with limited set of skills, and a lot of visual customization. You could craft weapons and armour for them, script some actions and develop their behaviour (attack, protect, etc…). An example of limited customization would be to make them with limited slots (for example, 4), labelled as “healing skill, attack skill, protect skill, support skill”, and some easy scripting made in sentences, like "when an enemy attacks me, you should [choose: attack the enemy, heal me, protect me, support me] and so with 5 or 6 sentences and some default sets. It should be a low level set of skills without a lot of impact.

I’d put those companions in the personal story, after finish the current one, in a new set of personal history made to learn this system. After that, the companion could become available for PvE, not sure if it should be allowed in WvW.

MEGABONUS is you could also define appearance, gender, personal story, etc of those companions.

I’d like also to see more explorable areas, there is plenty of areas in the map to open and explore, and it feels weird that after this time none of those areas are likely to be opened at any time during 2014. More permanent zones could increase the interest in the PvE part and the use of characters in the non-competitive modes of play. New areas could provide with new armours and weapons, skins available for karma, etc

ColinJohanson.2394:

Reading through a lot of the comments on various class diversification (or just stronger trait/skill diversification) concepts, one of the things that seems to be missing is a discussion on how you’d actually earn/unlock these additional abilities to make it a progression system.

One of the goals of progression, in this case horizontal, is to create an extended sense of game play and thus = reward for playing it.

For example, we’ve added more skills to the game recently, but those simply unlock with skill points, which basically means -> play any part of the game that gives exp, or kill champs to get skill point books. That’s ok as systems of unlocking horizontal progression go for the extended class diversification, but game play wise it generally means find the easiest place to get XP/champ-loot and do it over and over again for a large % of players, since folks most often gravitate towards the path of least resistance.

What sort of systems of horizontal progression unlocking would you like to see that’d accompany a system like extended class progression?

Personally I would prefer a system like we have currently in place for acquiring skill points. Make a spot on the map where teachers are, masters that can learn us a specific skill and let them challenge us in some way. More challenging than skill point acquisition. Make us solve puzzles, do some mini mini dungeon, fight the mentor with special mechanics that are related to the used skill.

Getting people out in the world:
Click black boxes to extend the text

Deified.7520:

Step Two: Contact
Notify the players of a new skill. Avoid Mail. Mail is boring and allows players to continue to sit in LA. Put Order bases in each of the capital cities. At these bases will be “Couriers” or “Messengers”. Players talk to them and if you added a new skill there will be a chat option for it. These Couriers will acknowledge the player as a part of their faction and if the player has done the Personal story last mission they will have a special dialog greeting for them.

The various Orders actually have bases in the capital cities, or at least the Vigil and Priory do. The Whispers’ ones tend to be a bit more hidden, which would actually be nice to keep that way. Perhaps they could have a Mysterious Contact in a city instead, who then gives you a hint of a nearby base.

In addition to the multi-racial Orders, it would be nice to see race-specific factions to do missions and tasks for. One of my favourite bits of living story was the part where you went into the Toxic Alliance infested Kessex Hills with a group of Seraph. My favourite bits of personal story were also those that focused on my chosen race, with the struggle between the Seraph and Ministry Guard, the corrupt minister and the bandits with connections to a hidden White Mantle cult.

While faction could take many shapes or forms, I would think it best to focus on racial factions first and ‘exotic’ factions (such as Hylek, Ogres) later – mostly because I think those would feel more ‘personal’ to the players’ characters. For example, I would love to see more things explored by aiding factions such as the Seraph and possibly unlocking rewards or titles, that indicate your time of service with them. Perhaps skills that you could only buy after attaining a sufficient standing with them. It would be awesome if every race had several iconic factions to support, to further involve the players in the lore of the world.

Then if you want to gain standing with the factions of other races, you have to give a little extra effort. If racial factions offered different racial themed skills to unlock at the highest standing, it would make it more special and rewarding to unlock those from other races.

Possible factions could include:
The Seraph, the Ministry Guard, the different Charr Legions, the different Spirits of the Wild, the Wolfborn, the Ebonhawke Fallen Angels, the Asuran Colleges, the Soundless, the different sylvari Cycles, the (what’s the name again) Circus .. So many possibilities to explore!^^

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

timmyf.1490:

As a counter-point, I’ve been crafting Damask and selling it at a substantial profit. This is the first time crafting has been profitable for me, so I’m happy.

People who play the tradingpost (flipping) will have access to much more mats —> the rich guys get even richer while the poor ones find no place where to farm cloth-mats effeciently.

I don’t know, maybe it’s a very bad idea, but what if mats could be purchaseable through karma also? So that people who play the game a lot have a chance to follow up to the guys who buy gems —> money / flip trading post (aka no gameplay involved)?

So, I realize I’m a couple days late responding to this, but been sort of busy with the snow here.

Anyway, my husband and I were just talking about the bolded section of Marcus’ post. There is a discrepency in the game in the options of acquisition between wood, ore, cloth, and leather. For all 4 we can get them from bags and from salvaging; however, ore and wood can also be gathered directly. Honestly, to be consistent, cloth and leather should also have these options.

For cloth:

Jute – Is made from a vegetable fiber. Add some plant nodes to the world, which can be harvested with the existing scythes, which give us jute scraps when harvested.

Wool – Comes from various animals. Technically ‘wool’ is from sheep, but goats and rabbits would suffice too. This might require an additional harvesting tool (sheers), although the scythe might work, but sheep and rabbits exist in the game already. Maybe make some of them into harvest-able ‘nodes’ and let us sheer some wool scraps from them.

Cotton – Also a plant. Would work similarly to jute.

Linen – Again, also a plant. Comes from the flax plant, so again could work like jute.

Silk – Comes from insect cocoons, typically the best known comes from a moth, but fro game purposes there are any number of furflies, and such which could potentially offer ‘cocoons’ for collecting.

Gossamer – The definition of this is ‘a spider’s web’ or ‘a very light, delicate material,’ so let us harvest it from certain spider’s webs.

I’m not sure which gathering tool would work best for silk and gossamer, but other than that and wool, everything else would work with existing game tools. This would help increase the quantities of cloth in the game, and give us a guaranteed means of acquisition.

Leather would probably require more work, as well as the addition of a ‘skinning’ means of gathering. I don’t want to see skinning implemented in the same way as WoW though. My thought was of using a nomadic herder npc, which we help him ‘skin’ animals that he’s already working on, rather than killing and skinning them ourselves (could get kind of gory). Since I don’t know precisely how Anet’s system is set up, I’m not sure what their capabilities are, which makes it a little more difficult to brainstorm this idea more fully.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Which current system do you think works great specifically? In theory, we have a lot of systems already

[snip]

- Collect skins: Purchase them for currencies (which becomes play the fastest way to earn currency X), get them as rare drops (play fastest way to kill mob/content type X), or purchase them off the trading post. (Play the fastest way to earn gold)

- Legendary: This one doesn’t really have a totally clear path to acquisition other than earn crazy amounts of gold, which goes back to play the fastest way to earn gold. (note legendary is only horizontal if you already have ascended)

- PvP Skin Locker & PvP Ranks: Play PvP. (This is basically just play PvP since the latest release.)

Not everyone plays the way I described above, but many of the systems above encourage you to want to play the fastest way possible to earn the rewards, sometimes at the cost of not playing the way you’d find the most fun. The upside of Gw2 is you can play the things you enjoy most and still be rewarded for them in most cases, even if it’s not at the fastest rate. The downside is because almost everything can earn you most of the same rewards, this becomes a matter of choosing to do the things you enjoy the most, but getting rewarded slower because of it.

Potential different systems would create more diverse game play, but the challenge is making it not overly complex, and running the risk of driving players to force one specific type of game play they may not enjoy since they can’t earn it other ways. These are some of the challenges we face we looking at any form of horizontal progression, and some of the discussions that come up when looking at new potential systems as well.

Yes, sadly people will try to get rich as fast and easy as possible as it is their nature to do so. As long as everyone can do the same thing it is however fair (barring scams and such). I remember one of the developers saying he would like more skill based content (correct me if i’m wrong) and thats something I think would be great for the game. More challenging content should automatically give higher rewards which I think is currently lacking. Across the game players get mostly rewarded for their time investment not because they know that part of the game very well. When you let more champions/bosses give special rewards, like with tequatl, players would have more incentive to seek these champions off the beaten path. I think this would then be more fun and rewarding towards players that actually play the game instead of the trading post. In effect, it should be easier for players that are good at the game to gather gold and start collecting other things.

In line with the more unique rewards you could couple skills for skill hunting to make it feel even more different then other bosses. I would say that adding a npc to lions arch that can give players directions towards the different skills would be understandable enough.

ColinJohanson.2394:

What sort of systems of horizontal progression unlocking would you like to see that’d accompany a system like extended class progression?

Skill quests for utility skills.

Maybe some skill ‘discovery’ via some general world exploration. IE, you pick up an environment weapon to use, and you ‘discover’ a skill that is now permanently added to your available skills.

Signet of capture for elites (might need to stick a skill name “being used” under the boss’s hp bar so we know he has it)

Npc ‘trainers’ with various tasks, quests, instanced missions to earn new weapon skill ‘sets’ IE, a norn trainer would require you to perform various feats of strength and skill, in addition to actually beating him before he would agree to train you in the new skill set. After the ‘initial’ stage, there would be training tasks and quests to earn the skill permanently as well as to learn how to use it. Edit: I should also add that these npcs would be in the world all the time, but not necessarily stationary. You could learn about them from talking to your trainer (when you buy books to unlock traits), from listening to snippets of conversation the npc’s have, or from talking to npcs in general, as these ‘trainers’ should be somewhat noteworthy – great warriors or some such. They should have a reasonable back story to support why you would want to seek them out to train with them.

Orpheal.8263:

Sorry, but if you are so silly to take yourself away all the fun of what the game provides you by going onto sites, like dulfy, then this is just your own fault.
The main point of my posting was also to show you, that the game can easily be alot more, than just only unlockign skilsl with skill points only.
There are as you can see lots of different ways how palyers could receive for their characters new skills, than only by the total boring way of farming skill points only.

If a player wants to take his/herself away all the fun of the game by looking into solution sites in the internet, like dulfy, only to be done with everythign as quick and efficiently as possible, then this is the clear decision by that player to do so, but if a player does this, this player in my opinion clearly has no right to complain about it, that the game hasn’t anything to do anymore to “quickly” and that the game got boring so fast.

Because if you simply take out everywhere dulfy out of your posting, you will see, that alot of those methods would add alot of fun for the game, which could feel for every class different.

Each class having to hunt down different elite/champion/legendary foes for their skills
Each class having to find and read different books
Each class having to receive different inspirations to learn new skills.
Each Class havign to talk with different NPCs…
Each Class havign to do completely different Tasks for their Masters/Grandmasters/Sages
Each Cllass having to go into their own Schools

Also there are options for Anet to randomize those methods a bit, like changing daily the positions of NPCs/books ect. that have to be found, so that people simply can’t just go onto the site of dulfy and look where somethign can be found, when the location of what you seek will be every day somewhere else.

This concept is already basically used with guild mission npcs, that move around, ANet just has to expand on this, that the world and especially NPC#s become more “living persons”, that actually follow their own life and move around, never to be found at any given time always at the same spot, based also on daytime ect. and what dynamically happens around them (letting them for example flee to an other map, when Scarlets invasion occurs for example on their current map)

I love this idea of class specific challenges and tasks. The problem is that A.Net stated that they didn’t want that. This is because they encourage all people to work together. If you create class specific content, this means that your friends from other classes won’t be able to help you complete it.
But I have a solution for that problem. The personal story. I’ve heard from many people that they feel that the personal story has too many blanks in the middle. If there were some class specific stories within those blanks (that also filled the blanks). It could be a way to give classes a feel and it could be an interesting way to learn skills.
More into the classes. I’d like to say that I’m missing a warrior’s academy, a guardian’s sanctuary, an elementalist’s school, a thieves’ guild and so. It’s not that it needs to be much story there. But I’d like to have a place(or places) in the world that explain lorewise why there are 8 classes and why there are this 8.

Yeah, it would be awesome if skill trainers or champions to capture them from would be wandering the world (or zone). That would encourage people to adventure and going out to search for them. Or perhaps some of them could turn up only when specific events are completed successfully, preferably the more obscure and hidden ones. Maybe require people to talk to specific NPC’s or scouts, to get hints about their location.

Gaebriel.3754:

Yeah, it would be awesome if skill trainers or champions to capture them from would be wandering the world (or zone). That would encourage people to adventure and going out to search for them. Or perhaps some of them could turn up only when specific events are completed successfully, preferably the more obscure and hidden ones. Maybe require people to talk to specific NPC’s or scouts, to get hints about their location.

Yes, that’s the kind of progression that I’d like to see. The current way to learn skills feels flat to me. I know A.Net tried to make the skill acquisition equal for every class. But I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. Even if that was in the right direction due to their philosophy.

Maybe we should take a page from GW1 and apply something like the Ascension quests here.
As others have said, skill trainers teaching us the basics on how to apply skills would help people unlearn some habits.
At some point we should have a showdown with a doppleganger, maybe a Mesmer construct, where it uses certain things against us and we defend ourselves.

If you win, a skill or something of important value is awarded.
If you fail, you try again the next day.

I’m not sure if anyone else has put this down in their posts, I skimmed, but I did like the idea of a skill trainer helping out.

This way we could utilize this test for future skills or special rewards down the road.

Unlocking skills:
Click black boxes to extend text

Contains references to the Repeatable Heart Quest, Personal Quest Arc and Factions system described a few posts up in this thread.

But do not litter the game with skills, like GW1. GW2 has quite few, but GW1 for sure had way too many in my opinion.

Ludovicus.7980:

Gaebriel.3754:

Yeah, it would be awesome if skill trainers or champions to capture them from would be wandering the world (or zone). That would encourage people to adventure and going out to search for them. Or perhaps some of them could turn up only when specific events are completed successfully, preferably the more obscure and hidden ones. Maybe require people to talk to specific NPC’s or scouts, to get hints about their location.

Yes, that’s the kind of progression that I’d like to see. The current way to learn skills feels flat to me. I know A.Net tried to make the skill acquisition equal for every class. But I don’t know if that was the right thing to do. Even if that was in the right direction due to their philosophy.

I think the current skill acquisition system is interesting and fairly varied, but only at the earlier levels. At a certain point the skills just stop and the points don’t. Having an excessive amount of them at higher levels is what makes them less interesting, since there’s never again the feeling of ‘awesome, if I find those last two points on the map I could finally get skill X’. You just allocate some points from your pool and that’s it.

Chrispy.5641:

How would you address the fact that many people do not play PvP in any way, and thus are locked out of skills under the system you proposed?

Edit : And there are Some people who only play WvW, should they be forced to play PvE content and do Jumping puzzles in order to unlock new skills as well?

Being a master of your race implies to be good in all aspects of the game PvE, PvP and WvW.

Obtaining this title is purely optional like all the achievements are. So, no one is forcing you to play anything. You play it if you want.

Personally I don’t play JP’s, PvP or WvW, but this doesn’t make me think only about myself when I put a suggestion, but I think about community as a whole and also, I think about “What” makes a character be the best which doesn’t imply that I personally can get it.

ColinJohanson.2394:

VOLKON.1290:

You could even throw out in the PvE world random Champions that enter the world from one side, simply walk across and out the other if they’re not defeated. It would be up to the players to recognize, band together and defeat this champion to get an unlock that way. Don’t announce it, just have it happen.

So an open question: If you don’t announce it, how do players who want to progress their character down these new paths of exciting character progression know what to do it, or how to progress? We’ve seen if the path of progression isn’t relatively clear, most our every-day casual players won’t bother doing it, which isn’t a system that buys us much game play over-all.

And if the champion isn’t available, how do we message to players that the system of progression to advance their character isn’t available at this time? I think you can get away with no real messaging around something like a rare skin, but if it’s a system that expands your characters profession diversity it needs much clearer communication.

These are the kind of questions I ask the designers coming up with the systems we’ll use in the future, so it’s a fun opportunity for you guys as well

I honestly believe that the answer to this and another question that consisted of Dynamic Events with special rewards (Skritt King in Brisban) is a fairly simple one.

In Game Mail.

Brisban is a lvl 15 – 25? map. When you reach lvl 15 or if you are already past it, you get a in game mail from your respective race correspondent (Logan – Humans, Rytlock – Charr and so on).

Something to the effect that they hear your earning your way through Tyria but they’ve been made aware of some special events across the world that may reward you with surprising and powerful rewards.

This would honestly draw the masses to these areas fairly easily.

Chrispy.5641:

Immanuel.1560:

I have seen that people have been talking in here about skills and how to unlock them.

My suggestion to this is to let those skills be rewards from Racial Titles . When character have achieved some specific Racial Title, it will give skills as reward. They are somehow related to the title, or to what requirements you have to do to get the title.

Benjamin made that racial title table, and I modified it bit in here adding more detailed information to connect the title to unlocking skill mechanism:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/page/41#post3459941

Lets take the requirements from that table and see what kind of skills you could open by achieving these titles.

1. Complete all jumping puzzles with specific race / Racial mini title 1
- Reward from this title are leaping skills, long range skills, and long range evade skills.

2. Use any Racial skills 1000 times (cumulative) with specific race / Racial mini title 2
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives condition damage to a single foe and support to nearby allies

3. Complete Personal Story with a specific race / Racial mini title 3
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives DPS and AoE damage to foes

4. Defeat 1000 players being other race than you in PvP / Racial mini title 4
- Reward from this title are single damage skills with high DPS

5. Complete 1000 successfull events in WvW with a specific race / Racial mini title 5
- Reward from this title are skills with single condition damage skills with high DPS

6. Complete all Dungeons with a Specific Race / Racial mini title 6
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills and AoE healing skills and Single high DPS skills

7. Obtain max Fractail level with a specific race / Racial mini title 7
- Reward form this title are single target supporting skills and single target healing skills, AoE high DPS and Condition damage Skills

8. Complete 3000 successfull Group Events in PvE with a specific race / Racial mini title 8
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills, AoE Healing skills and AoE Condition damage skills.

9. Complete All World Boss Events Successfull 20 times with a specific race / Racial mini title 9
- Reward from this title are Long Range High DPS skills and AoE supporting skills

10. Complete ”Been There Done That” with a specific Race
- Reward from this title are long term Running skills

11. Obtain all racial Master Titles / GRAND TITLE
Reward from this are Elite skill High AoE support, High AoE Condition damage, High AoE DPS and High AoE Healing skills same time.

Of course, this can be included into a vertical progression too, but it brings a different way into the unlocking skills system which would diversify the skill acquisition making it a horizontal progression valid option. Titles are optional.

The Racial Titles as Nike said, they are long term goals due to their nature, so adding skill unlocks to various tiers in a specific title for each title will make it really interesting goal for many players expanding the pool of skills.

How would you address the fact that many people do not play PvP in any way, and thus are locked out of skills under the system you proposed?

Edit : And there are Some people who only play WvW, should they be forced to play PvE content and do Jumping puzzles in order to unlock new skills as well?

I like this idea, if people have that major a concern about not being able to unlock the new skills you could make it that each of the mini-titles unlock one skill for your account (non specifically). So that you’d only have to do it all if you want everything. Having the Grandmaster title awarding a unique skill and maybe other rewards too would be nice.

Wvw,Pve and Pvp are each an aspect of gameplay mastery should require you to display skills in all three areas. Plus it adds a unique reward for genuine skill that can’t be bought.

I’d consider tweaking the group events one, I believe I’ve just barely completed over 3000 events total group events accounting for maybe 500 of them in the year and a half the games been out., so 300 might be a better target.

As for fractals, as the level will go up it wouldn’t be a concrete goal so I’d specify a specific level, say 40? or the current max of 50?

Bezagron.7352:

HP summary page 23 to 28 Part 3
~

• Radiantglyh talks about HP expansion in regards to mini-pets, looking to expand there function from just a collection.

Home instance, Player housing

• Marcus Greythorne discusses the issues with Chrispy about displaying player housings to other players and brings up the idea from LotRO of housing districts.
• Marcus also adds another housing idea withhome mini-dungeon instance.
• Morrigan looks at player housing neighbourhoods as away to expand non combat gameplay.
• Conski Deshan ties player housing to all aspects of the game in this post

Zone Exploration / Progression

• Marcus Greythorne presents another idea on the expansion, removal & addition of new DE’s in zones.

Order /Faction Expansion

• AikunFelcis joins the discussion with a great multi post talk about expanding order’s character impact and content. Part 1, Part 2.
• Marcus Greythorne present another idea for order progression.

I think that the whole element of collection is also not as it should be. You talk about the mini’s being more then collections but collecting them is not fun at this moment. It’s all a grind for money or against time (ls).

Collecting mini’s and other sorts of side progression is also a part of fun character progression. So make sure that is in the game, not behind a living story grind or gold-grind because it’s gem-store related. (same for mounts when they ever get implemented or ranger pets.. now getting a pet is not really a game-element. It’s not dynamic enough for that)

Another way of horizontal progression is implementing fun crafts where it’s not so that you do the crafting so you can get to the max level so you can finally make that cool item but where there is always this next nice / cool / funny item to work towards.
(I said this in an other post here).

Adding XP to a mini to give it more then a collection is nice but first make the collecting itself fun. I do understand why they now do it this way as it’s more likely to sell gems but them maybe they should rethink that and get money from expansions so they are not forced to have those elements all locked behind a boring grind. It’s that grind that many people complain about and it’s part of the horizontal progress of your character. When that is not fun because of a grind then there is your core problem.

ColinJohanson.2394:
What sort of systems of horizontal progression unlocking would you like to see that’d accompany a system like extended class progression?

Iiii’m not sure about PVP or WvW, but for PVE I had an idea.
Tho it may require a Skill-quest tab like the personal story one.

How about linking the acquisition of new skills to exploration and vet-hunts? Like, giving the POIs some significance? (Not all ofc, only some of them.) As we know Points of Interests now, they’re merely hints to GW1 lore or specific unusual locations one needs to visit for map completion.

A scavenger-quest starting at a POI where a new interactable object or NPC may be (which newer members would come across while exploring the map anyway and not be highlighted on the map itself as this would ruin the immersion). This NPC or object explains a bit of juicy lore we don’t know yet related to the POI or a story that recently occurred there and mention a monster or whatever that used a skill never seen before or a person using a long forgotten technique, creative liberty here .

The “skill never seen before” could be written in red to highlight it is something important and new, so newbies get the hint. (if that doesn’t suffice, cue hint-window about new skills being unlockable through exploration)
Also, stories and lore-bits tied to it would definitely be interesting to discover as well, since GW2 got a hell lot of mysterious places.

An example for a quest-chain: To find the Elite/Veteran, one has to acquire an item first and the clue to the location of this item is provided by the NPC/object in form of a riddle, puzzle or just a description of the possible location depending on the individual quest.

What we search for doesn’t necessarily have to lay around overworld guarded by tons of regular mobs and a vet in a cave. It could be in the hands of a NPC now. Or a mob if you can make it interesting enough, like with the Skillpoint challenge of the evil Raven Shaman in the Snowden Drifts! And the searched for NPC shouldn’t be highlighted for convenience either, that’s what the hints by the quest-giver object/NPC are for. It can be in possession of one of the many NPCs in a city, at an outpost or even at the orders, depending on the zone the initial POI was at (so that a lvl-10 chara doesn’t need to break their head about how to visit the Whispers HQ as example). Key-word exploration!

Now after acquiring the item, it reveals a bit more info on what or who we’re hunting, but we find out it’s unfortunately incomplete. If it’s notes, pages could be missing that need to be found. If it’s another…thing, we might need to gather materials to fix it depending on where the quest started (10 Iron Ore and 10 Soft Wood for a lvl 20 zone as example). Or we might need to interact with different overworld objects or more NPCs, like recovering data crystals from an inquest hideout. Basically everything overworld, giving players still the chance to help each other without it turning into a zerg-fest.

More steps can go in here depending on how long it’s supposed to be and yanno. Pretty sho from here on the devs could think of what they can do with their tools.

At the end of this part the gained items would be transformed into something akin to the capture signet of GW1, specifically for that one quest/mob. Except it’s a soulbound trophy item instead.

But what about the Veteran/Elite? Well, the person at this quest-step simply interacts with something at the POI or other place, wherever the quest leads and the Veteran spawns! However, only people who have the capture-item can spawn the Veteran/Elite/whatever scales with people around it.

The spawned Veteran would be an open world event, but only the people with the item from the quests before get the skill. Other people who contribute get normal DE-awards. Afterwards the item disappears and you got the new skill! Woo! (The cooldown to spawn it can be like 2 minutes. Since it’s only an Elite/a Vet, no worries about people camping and farming it either.)

I know not everyone would be too fond of this kind of quests, but some may like it.

However, I’m surprised because Anet already had an open world event that tied to a “quest” before. PS Spoiler. The personal story quest "Fixing the Blame" ends with us finding Syska's body in the overworld. When the player with the quest interacts with her corpse, it triggers an open world event. After the mesmer minions are defeated, the character with the personal story quest moves on to the next story quest. Meanwhile for anyone else it's just a normal DE.
Also this whole personal story-quest was stretching across all of Tyria instead of being restricted to a single zone, which actually makes a good base-template for other scavenger-like and hunting-quests.

ElysianEternity.6215:

ColinJohanson.2394:
What sort of systems of horizontal progression unlocking would you like to see that’d accompany a system like extended class progression?

Iiii’m not sure about PVP or WvW, but for PVE I had an idea.
Tho it may require a Skill-quest tab like the personal story one.

How about linking the acquisition of new skills to exploration and vet-hunts? Like, giving the POIs some significance? (Not all ofc, only some of them.) As we know Points of Interests now, they’re merely hints to GW1 lore or specific unusual locations one needs to visit for map completion.

There is actually already an event like this in the game although it doesn’t give anything particular at the end.

Then there was the stuff for getting the 2012 Halloween back piece.

What about a skill unlock system that is based on actually using skills or performing actions in combat? For example, you could unlock an evasive defense skill after performing so many successful dodges or a condition damage skill after inflicting a certain amount of conditions.

Obviously you would need to balance it and maybe time gate it a little to stop people simply spamming dodge or condi skills just to unlock it. But if balanced right and timed to a nice pace, people could unlock new skills just be playing the game, regardless of what areas they play in. Not only that but they will unlock skills that hopefully suit the build they are playing. Then if they want to change builds they can start unlocking new skills that suit it by using existing skills/actions of the same type.

I had an idea about class progression unlocking based off of something from GW1. You had something in Factions called the Insignia quest (http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Insignia_quest). It was a meta quest with a series of sub quests with challanges that tailored towards the new skills. A similair but more robust thing could be done in GW2.

Zaishen Dojos
The Zephyrites have returned and brought with them (racially diverse?) members of the Zaishen Order to construct training dojos designed to challenge Tyria’s heroes and maybe teach them a thing or two.

The dojo itself has an instanced staging area (similar to SAB) but there would also be a variety (say five per dojo?) of instanced challenges designed to favour certain strategies and skills and promote different kinds of gameplay.

• Defend an NPC with several choke points leading to it that enemies travel through. NPC allies damage mobs as they pass through the chokes. Favours control skills.
• Race through an obstacle course. Favours swiftness, stability, stun breakers and condition removal.
• Defeat opponents with powerful charge/telegraphed attacks. Favours disruption or blocks.
• Reach the end of a combat scenario using the new skill bar, fighting opponents that use builds and techniques designed to test it.
• Dual an NPC hero. This would be similair to the Queen’s Gauntlet except only one hero is present at the dojo and the hero can rotate out weekly to showcase different characters from across Tyria (similair to Magni Bison’s arena in EotN).
• Escort a group of blast finisher spamming Zaishen through a scenario. Combo fields recommended. Escort a group of combo field spamming Zaishen. Finishers recommended.
• Throw in something similair to fractal instabilities that mimic the situations skills are designed to counter.
  * If you complete the skill’s requirement a certain number of times in that challenge with the new skill(break a stun, evade an attack, cure a condition, heal an ally, grant a boon to an ally, interrupt an attack etc), you can purchase that skill from the trainer for a certain amount of skill points.
• A primary goal of dojo challenges should be to have diverse types of content so that one single build or strategy doesn’t suit every encounter and the experience is fresh with something for everyone.

The dojo is a lot of content to simply accommodate new skills, so replay ability and other forms of class specific progression could be added to them:

• The first pass through the challenges would give players a set bar with new skills to use and unlock (for example, the new skill might be Spirit of Water and thus the player would temporarily use a spirit build), this ensures players are learning how to use the new skills as they acquire them.
• After completing the challenges, a harder, scaling (for party members) version of the challenges becomes available. Players can use any build to attempt to complete the new difficulties allowing for experimentation (similair to Candidate Trials).
• You could introduce gambits similar to the Queen’s Gauntlet or just have a set number of levels similar to Candidate Trials.
• Different challenges can be exclusively: solo (duels), with a party or scale for both.
• Titles can be awarded for players completing all the challenges to a certain standard on a specific profession(similair to sPvP achievement tracks). This would be a way of recognising a player’s mastery over their profession (so if the content is easier on a mesmer than it is a thief, the thief has unique recognition).
• Scroll’s of Knowledge are awarded for completing challenges to help players purchase the skills. Completing a set of unique challenges will complete a repeatable achievement (similair to the mini game ones tied to festivals) that awards a rare scroll of knowledge.

To counter the influx of skill points, scrolls of knowledge (or just skill points?) are used as currency. Class specific vendors only sell to players that have unlocked appropriate achievement titles on their respective classes:

• Unlocked all skills and completed easy version of challenges – a back banner with class insignia on it. Five scrolls of knowledge.
• Completed level two of all challenges on a specific class – class specific item (ranger quiver, elementalist back book, thief hood etc). 100 scrolls of knowledge.
• Completed level three of all challenges on a specific class – forgeable ascension item to ascend the class specific item (adds green glow and falling leaves to ranger quiver, rotating particle effects for each element on the elementalist book, shadowy particle effects on the thief hood etc). 20 rare scrolls of knowledge.
• Maybe a weapon set or other items (like recipes, consumables, mini pets) can be purchased with skill points from the vendors.

I can think of a bunch of problems with this proposal but I only have so much body length for this post.

Conski Deshan.2057:

Chrispy.5641:

Immanuel.1560:

I have seen that people have been talking in here about skills and how to unlock them.

My suggestion to this is to let those skills be rewards from Racial Titles . When character have achieved some specific Racial Title, it will give skills as reward. They are somehow related to the title, or to what requirements you have to do to get the title.

Benjamin made that racial title table, and I modified it bit in here adding more detailed information to connect the title to unlocking skill mechanism:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/page/41#post3459941

Lets take the requirements from that table and see what kind of skills you could open by achieving these titles.

1. Complete all jumping puzzles with specific race / Racial mini title 1
- Reward from this title are leaping skills, long range skills, and long range evade skills.

2. Use any Racial skills 1000 times (cumulative) with specific race / Racial mini title 2
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives condition damage to a single foe and support to nearby allies

3. Complete Personal Story with a specific race / Racial mini title 3
- Reward from this title are Racial elite skills which gives DPS and AoE damage to foes

4. Defeat 1000 players being other race than you in PvP / Racial mini title 4
- Reward from this title are single damage skills with high DPS

5. Complete 1000 successfull events in WvW with a specific race / Racial mini title 5
- Reward from this title are skills with single condition damage skills with high DPS

6. Complete all Dungeons with a Specific Race / Racial mini title 6
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills and AoE healing skills and Single high DPS skills

7. Obtain max Fractail level with a specific race / Racial mini title 7
- Reward form this title are single target supporting skills and single target healing skills, AoE high DPS and Condition damage Skills

8. Complete 3000 successfull Group Events in PvE with a specific race / Racial mini title 8
- Reward from this title are AoE supporting skills, AoE Healing skills and AoE Condition damage skills.

9. Complete All World Boss Events Successfull 20 times with a specific race / Racial mini title 9
- Reward from this title are Long Range High DPS skills and AoE supporting skills

10. Complete ”Been There Done That” with a specific Race
- Reward from this title are long term Running skills

11. Obtain all racial Master Titles / GRAND TITLE
Reward from this are Elite skill High AoE support, High AoE Condition damage, High AoE DPS and High AoE Healing skills same time.

Of course, this can be included into a vertical progression too, but it brings a different way into the unlocking skills system which would diversify the skill acquisition making it a horizontal progression valid option. Titles are optional.

The Racial Titles as Nike said, they are long term goals due to their nature, so adding skill unlocks to various tiers in a specific title for each title will make it really interesting goal for many players expanding the pool of skills.

How would you address the fact that many people do not play PvP in any way, and thus are locked out of skills under the system you proposed?

Edit : And there are Some people who only play WvW, should they be forced to play PvE content and do Jumping puzzles in order to unlock new skills as well?

I like this idea, if people have that major a concern about not being able to unlock the new skills you could make it that each of the mini-titles unlock one skill for your account (non specifically). So that you’d only have to do it all if you want everything. Having the Grandmaster title awarding a unique skill and maybe other rewards too would be nice.

Wvw,Pve and Pvp are each an aspect of gameplay mastery should require you to display skills in all three areas. Plus it adds a unique reward for genuine skill that can’t be bought.

I’d consider tweaking the group events one, I believe I’ve just barely completed over 3000 events total group events accounting for maybe 500 of them in the year and a half the games been out., so 300 might be a better target.

As for fractals, as the level will go up it wouldn’t be a concrete goal so I’d specify a specific level, say 40? or the current max of 50?

+1 Conski Deshan for this
you could make it that each of the mini-titles unlock one skill for your account
Plus it adds a unique reward for genuine skill that can’t be bought

Hello community

I’ve been a player of Gw2 since the fisrt day and a player of GW1 for six years, in my overall expirience i could say i like very much the guild wars franchise but dissapointingly i prefer guild wars 1 and i will tell you why. I think a lot of improvements in guild wars 2 about the community and the fast pace of gameplay (dinamic events) but as a gamer hungry for new expirience and a veteran of viedogames i feel gw2 have a serious problem of lack of challenging cooperative content yes i mean the evil world: raids. I know that you could think about a type of raid that dont have vertical progresion and not be unfriendly to the player but in high.end game we have little things to do other than grinding dungeons or play wvw (IMO boring). In GW1 we had a lot to do, so much titles to acomplish a good ,COOPERATIVE and rewarding expierience four more than 5 players (dungeons in GW1 by far more challenging than gw2, vanquish, HM , cooperative advetures) since i became level 20 in gw i had a lot of things to do and in gw2 dont,

Do you want a good game progresion, make things harder, challenging (not frustating) and bring rewards (like hall of monuments) to the player, dont become casual and bring back the goosd stuf and ideas of arena.net.

Btw, i’ve seen a lot of comments is this trhead a i tell you again the system of progresion in gw1 was great, make the titles give you skins and abilities and make more bigger challenges.

Cheers

Elthurien has a good system there. Add a new tier for utilities but give new elites (and maybe healing skills) a quest or an objective to complete. Force players to cover various aspects of the game. It’s an elite skill after all.
Even though I was saving skill points to buy my bloodstone shard, the last item I needed for my Flameseeker Prophecies, I still bought the new heal skill. I think that shows how much new skills can influence players, at least for me.