Guild Wars 2

In regards to vertical progression I feel like the ascended tier of gear is too steep for most players in term of time and money invested, specifically money invested. The cost of ascended armor through the crafting process is absolutely prohibitive to any average player, except for those who run a single character with a single gearset. I don’t personally believe that’s the norm in this game, I could be wrong but no one I know plays that way. I’m aware I’m not the norm either, but I run 8 level 80s and several of them have more than one gear setup. I don’t expect you to cater to me, but why not meet in the middle? What happens for the ‘middle’ player who has 2-3 characters they love to play, and maybe 4-6 different gear combinations they like to run?

This is my biggest issue with the direction vertical progression is going. It makes running multiple characters and/or multiple builds so expensive that it becomes illogical to even try it. It essentially punishes diversity and experimentation, and it kind of makes me dread balance patches too, personally – what happens when I dedicate 200 gold to a build idea, only to find it weakened substantially in a balance pass? I can swallow a set of exotic gear and switch out a few pieces easily enough, but if I need to re-gear for -any- reason and I’m running ascended, that becomes a massive obstacle.

Horizontal progression in terms of skins and appearance is also hurt pretty bad by this. While i don’t think the current skin selections in the game are the worst in the world, everyone in ascended is now going to look the same unless they invest in transmutation crystals. A lot of us have spent a good deal of time making a look for ourselves, and now if we want to be geared as best as we can we either have to get out the credit card, get really lucky on a map complete in Orr, or sacrifice our look. I don’t feel this is right or healthy for horizontal progression in terms of looks.

Guild Wars 2 appealed to me not just because I played 1 for so long, but because i was promised I would be rewarded for playing my way and doing what I liked to do. I feel that’s the kind of direction things need to go in again – players should be able to reach ascended level in a relatively (compared to the current ascended standard) inexpensive manner, and in a way that allows for a decent speed of progression. WvW kills and rankups, meta events, dungeons, fractals, jumping puzzles, and open world content should all be able to progress this, so players can have fun their way and still be moving forward. I have two ideas I’ll share before this gets too long.

First is the idea of a drop (only once you’re already level 80) that acts as a reverse item skin, let’s call it “ascended hardware” for fun. It combines with a current piece of gear, but that gear keeps its look and gains the new ascended stats. This would allow ascended crafted gear to retain its prestige because it would look totally unique, and players who could afford it would be able to craft it at their pace, but everyone else would be able to slowly ascend their characters as they play. Crafted gear could even get more of a makeover to make it even cooler looking, and the value of it would be reflected in the effort it takes to make it and in the looks. Nothing would end up on the trading post, so the economy would not be very affected. As long as the drop rates weren’t completely awful, it would solve a lot of problems.

Second idea would be a component drop that would combine with your armor or weapon piece, along with two other components in the mystic forge, which would instead return an ascended piece. This would have the added benefit of a cash sink (say one of the items needed was 100 ectos, just to throw a random number. A bit of a cost, but reachable for an average player with a little time played), as well as a time sink of sorts (say the other item was 50 obsidian shards, again as an example. This would mean karma would gain some more value in game, and would slow the rate of people ascending even if the base component dropped a lot). Again, it comes down to the drop rate. As long as it doesn’t drop like candy, or drop as slowly as current ascended boxes do, it could do a lot of good.

tbh i don’t care about stats getting better over time as long as it isn’t too fast and there is no STUPID TIME GATES LIKE ASCENDED

TheDaiBish.9735:

Swagger.1459:

horizontal character progression…

I’ve never played gw1, but many have consistently mentioned that it had a great amount of profession options and flexibility. this game is in desperate need of profession development, so mirroring what was offered in your original game would be a good start.

in addition to the above, gw2 could use more buttons to press on the bar. I suggest something like this…
*#1-10 would be used for individual or multiple weapon skills.
*f1-f4 mechanics bar
*f5 heal skill
*f6 aoe/team heal skill
*f7-f10 utility skills
*f11 &f12 elite skills

a 3rd weapon swap option would be great as well.

last but not least, get rid of combat movement suppression and provide an option to pan out the camera more like you do for certain encounters.

thanks and make it so!

So 22 skills available at any one time? What would it add to the game?

yes. far superior build variety and more abilities at hand to make combat more engaging.

I think it would be nice to be able to craft skins. Skins that take time to collect. Skins with mats that are only located in certain areas. For example a dredge related skin from items found only in dredge areas. This would give people reasons to go to places that currently have no reason to go to.

Swagger.1459:

horizontal character progression…

I’ve never played gw1, but many have consistently mentioned that it had a great amount of profession options and flexibility. this game is in desperate need of profession development, so mirroring what was offered in your original game would be a good start.

in addition to the above, gw2 could use more buttons to press on the bar. I suggest something like this…
*#1-10 would be used for individual or multiple weapon skills.
*f1-f4 mechanics bar
*f5 heal skill
*f6 aoe/team heal skill
*f7-f10 utility skills
*f11 &f12 elite skills

a 3rd weapon swap option would be great as well.

last but not least, get rid of combat movement suppression and provide an option to pan out the camera more like you do for certain encounters.

thanks and make it so!

So many skills on the skill bar make my head swim. GW1 only had 8 skills on it’s skill bar. It’s not the number of skills on the skill bar that make variety but how many different ways the skill bar can be loaded.

First i have to say that i had great hopes for this game. It was promised that there will be no need to grind gear to participate in content. ,,No doing boring stuff to get to fun stuff" and grind only for visuals and i was amazed by this idea. I carefully watched many reviews, Lets playes and read lot of stuff about GW2 for around 2 months to see if its really the promised game. And it looked like it is so i bought it. But it is sad that i have say that if the game would be back then like it is now, i wouldn’t buy it. I was looking for something new out of stereotype ,,Level up—-Farm——-Grind—-Gear up" and back then GW2 really was that type of game. But now mostly becouse of ascended gear it is not. With that GW2 fell to become just like every other MMO i played before. Yes GW2 has some unique features, unique content, unique playstyle. But essentially it is all the same. Just level, grind and farm….
When Ascended accessories came it was accepteable becouse it was needed only for fractals and it was gained naturaly via doing fractals. It was farming but people had to fot what they like. If player want to progress fractals he needed ascended accessories, to get ascended accessories he needed to do fractals and dailyes. It is quite annoying to farm time gated laurels but it is still bearable. Not so big deal. And after some time i started to enjoy fractals. I enjoyed challenge that hight level fractals gives.
But this ended hen ascended weapons came and now even armor.
First i need to make something clear. It is not truth that ascended gear is something that is not needed. For me as fractal player ascended weapons are requirement now and when new fractal levels will be added even armor will become requirement. New ascended infusion slots are even worse farm and gold sink then ascended crafting even if its just via fractals it is too much to get at least 10AR for one slot. I do high level fractals becouse it is fun for me, but now to get to this fun i had to and still have to get thru for me extremely boring process of grinding, farming and crafting. I dont like running in zergs and killing champions and world bosses for thousands of ore for my 3 characters. I like to do dungeons from time to time but when i want and how much i want but not every day whole for hundreds of gold to level crafting that is extreme gold sink and for thousands of fragments. I really dont like farming another hundreds of gold for materials or even digging them to get just some piece of gear that i have to have or i won’t be able to do what i like to do. I really have to do boring stuff to get to fun stuff.
Some could argue that i dont have to do that. That i can just play and i will eventualy get it. But i am no no lifer (with all respect to no lifers :-) ) With this play style it would took me half of the year to gear up at least one character. So should i wait half of the year to finally do what i want to? Crafting ascended gear takes so much time that i dont even have enough time to just enjoy game.
And all this could be much more bearable if we could at least choose how to get this gear. Why cant we have more viable sources of this gear? And zero chance for ascended drop is not viable source. Why there cant be the way how to get it via fractals just like accessories and many other possible sources depends on what people like? Where is writen that player of an MMO has to enjoy everything that this MMO offers? Nowhere becouse it is no truth. But GW2 acts like it would be so.
This game was supposed to be gear grind free but is is not. This is one of the grindiest games a ever experienced and i play mmos since 2006. I am not saing this out of passion i am saing this out of experience.
But if you really have to have gear gring in this game alt least let me choose what i want to do for it. This would make it much more fun.
At this point i have very low motivation to play this game. I know nothing will magicaly change if say something like this but i have to say it to give you view how average player like me feels now.
So my final vedict on vertical progression: It should not be in this game, at least not so huge as it is now, but if it is really necessary (and i think it is not :-) ) Please give us more choices then just crafting.

Hi Chris Thanks for taking the time. (before my post is cast aside as a ‘gripe’, skip to the third full paragraph where my true contribution comes into play).

So I am one of the people thats slowly coming to terms with ascended gear’s existence in GW2 even though I strongly oppose it. I am crafting a few weapons and plan to stop there.

In terms of gear progression, I sincerely hope it ends with Ascended armor. I hope we do not see ascended sigils and runes, let alone ascended sigils and runes that can only be placed on ascended armor. This would put many people at a disadvantage that chose not to craft ascended armor.

With that said, my contribution to this topic would be to end GEAR progression here with ascended armor, and work more toward CHARACTER progression. What do you think about adopting a pioneering idea from SoE(developers of Everquest Next) where you can find classes(in our case, skills and abilities) in the world.

Example: Max level character, level 80 is participating in an event in Timberline Falls. He/she successfully completes the event(solo or not) and is rewarded the normal experience, karma, and silver, but also a bonus box which contains a Skill/ability that can be learned for his/her class. This skill/ability can be in the form of a recipe or consumable that the player double clicks and automatically has that skill unlocked to he/she. The player can now ‘drag’ that ability onto the hotbar and start using it.

The point is, you want to reward players for playing the game, in any way they want to. Whether its completing an event in the Living Story, or completing a dynamic event in Orr or some mid-level zone, taking a keep in WvW, or completing a dungeon. Whatever the case may be, you want to reward them. What better way to do this than character progression. But this character progression is not tied the massive requirement of gold or mass accumulation of materials to craft an piece of gear. It is simply playing the game however you see fit and getting a truly kitten reward for it.

tldr; Reward us for playing any part of the game. Since this topic is about progression, verticle or horizontal, have these rewards be discovered and found(and not at some obscenely low RNG rate), rather than ‘crafted’.

The traditional model of gear acquisition, or in this example’s case would be skill acquisition, is what many people are accustomed to, rather than having loads of resources to craft things like ascended armor. People are used to gear drops in Raids, in dungeons, in the open world. Why not take that a step further?

Swagger.1459:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Swagger.1459:

horizontal character progression…

I’ve never played gw1, but many have consistently mentioned that it had a great amount of profession options and flexibility. this game is in desperate need of profession development, so mirroring what was offered in your original game would be a good start.

in addition to the above, gw2 could use more buttons to press on the bar. I suggest something like this…
*#1-10 would be used for individual or multiple weapon skills.
*f1-f4 mechanics bar
*f5 heal skill
*f6 aoe/team heal skill
*f7-f10 utility skills
*f11 &f12 elite skills

a 3rd weapon swap option would be great as well.

last but not least, get rid of combat movement suppression and provide an option to pan out the camera more like you do for certain encounters.

thanks and make it so!

So 22 skills available at any one time? What would it add to the game?

yes. far superior build variety and more abilities at hand to make combat more engaging.

If you increased the amount of skills, you’d also have to increase the amount of skills you can slot. Build variation also depends totally on how you balance them skills, thus more skills can easily run into the same issues as we have now with build variation.

As for engaging, it depends on whether the encounters would require all of them skills to be used, as well as the skill design.

You could easily add more variation and engagement by adding more skills, as well as revamping the skill design so that there’s less reliance on traits for certain effects – i.e. extra damage and such – to the current system that we have.

Personally I’ve played other games where I’ve had 30+ skills to manage, and I’ve never been as engaged as I have with GW1, where I only had 8 skills.

(part 1/2)

Character Progression vs Account Progression

At present, Guild Wars 2 is pretty schizophrenic about when you’re progressing your character vs your account.

Example: Your character completes an event, and earns character experience, account gold, and account karma. That event happened to count towards a account daily achievement, which when completed will award the character experience and items, and the account a laurel, which can be used to progress gear for the character.
Notice how that everyday scenario went: character → account → character → account → character

This leads to games of “Legolas can’t go slay the beast in the woods this evening, because Aragorn hunted rabbits there this morning”. It’s almost as if my characters are griefing each other far harder than any other player could.
This is a major factor in people complaining GW2 is Alt un-friendly, and has personally led me to enjoying fewer characters than I’d prefer. (I have 8 L80’s, but can only really further progress 2-3 of them.)

Most of these all tie into the various “once per day per account” mechanics in the game (dungeon rewards/dailies/ascended crafting).

Suggested Remedy: Make most most of the “once per day per account” mechanics be “once per day per character”. Yes, this would mean that someone with 12 characters could run CoF1 12 times a day for max rewards. But so what? There should be some benefit to having progressed 12 characters to the point they can go dungeon running. Any yes, I’m talking about being able to do dailies on multiple characters a day, and getting multiple laurels from it. (though I’d limit you to getting the AP just once)

Content Doesn’t Progress

Apart from Fractals, the vertical progression of a character is not met with vertical challenge in content in GW2. Take a dungeon run, for instance. A player going in full Ascended gear has about 50% more effectiveness than one going in wearing full Rare gear. And thus, will have a /much/ easier and faster time of it.
This can be upsetting for both players. The player in Rare, who likely is still trying to figure out the dungeon at all, gets discouraged at how hard things are to do, all while hearing from his Ascended buddy “how easy it is.” Meanwhile the Ascended player, with both the better gear and the experience of having done the content over an over again

Suggested Remedy: Exotic gear is in a decent cost/benefit place for the majority of players. Limit the effectiveness of higher tier gear to exotics, but give other benefits to Ascended gear and above. For instance, the ability to change stats on gear at will out of combat. (perhaps limit to in town/mists/spawn area of WvW to limit abuses.) Legendaries would still be special with the uber-skins.

What do you Balance Against?
How on earth do you balance the effectiveness of slot skills vs weapon skills, when the latter is subject to such wide variance in power? (18.5% between rare and ascended) This becomes particularly acute in cases where slot skills replace weapon skills (eng kits, ele conjures, etc). This is also acute when game modes share skills, but not access to gear (No Ascended in PvP)

Suggested Remedy: It appears that Exotics were meant to be the standard to balance against. Leave it that way, and again, lower higher tiers to be on par with Exotics in effectiveness.

(part 2/2)

Vertical Gear Progression leads to Build Lock-In
Aragorn has spent months (quite literally) getting geared up in all Ascended Soldier’s gear. And he’s a beast! He can smash dungeons hard! However, he keeps hearing about people smashing dungeons harder with Berserker gear, and he wants to check that out. Resetting his traits doesn’t bother him. He spends more getting to the dungeon than what it costs to reset traits. His gear, however… he would have to start completely over with his gear, and spend the next several months regearing, just to find out if he likes that play style. So he doesn’t bother. Later, a skill patch comes out, and again, there’s a different play style it opens up which might be interesting, but again, he’s looking at months of hard adventuring to try it out. Thus, he forever sticks with the choices he made early on, and doesn’t explore the various options other builds could bring him.
He considers buying a cheap set of lower tier gear, to test it out. However, he then sees that a full set of Rare Berserker gear has about the same Power as his Ascended Soldier gear… and considerably less precision. This will not give close to the same experience.

This example was Soldier’s vs Berserker, but it also extends to such things as “Conditions vs Power” and “Support vs DPS” and other major shifts in build style, which benefit greatly from the stats on gear.
At the Exotic level, it takes about a week to earn a full set of gear. However, then, you have to store all that gear somewhere…. 6 armor, 6 trinkets, several weapons, different food… it’s a full 20slot or bank tab.
Bearable in small amounts, but quickly becomes obnoxious.

Suggested Remedy: Be able to earn a method of divorcing gear tier from stats. At first glance, I see a couple different ways to do this.

All Ascended Gear Can Swap Stats Like Legendaries: This would give a very tangible value for someone to go through the effort of acquiring ascended gear. Once you’ve bought your warrior an ascended helmet, you’ll never have to buy her another. Legendaries would still hold value as having the Uber-skins (people were crafting legendaries before Ascended tier came out… for exactly just the skin). Spending a month earning a character the last set of armor they’ll ever need is worth it. Similar effort for something that devalues with shifts to the meta… not so much. For crafting, you could make people include like 25 of each T6 Rare material or something like that.
— or —
Follow the PvP model, where gear doesn’t have stats: For this, your gear would offer up “points” to a general pool, with more points per tier. Then you’d have a set of predetermined ways of spending those points. Berserker’s would say “38% power, 31% precision, 31% crit damage”. Changing your stat distribution could be done at the profession trainer, for a few silver. Thus you’re locked into your build for an adventure, but it’s trivial to reset in town. Add trainers to the WvW spawn camps so it’s available there to.

Playstyle Lock-in
To craft ascended gear these days, you need equal parts Bloodstone Dust, Dragonite Ore, and Empyreal Fragments. However, each of these are acquired through different styles of play in the game, and thus forces players into content they may not enjoy. This can also lead to scenarios where people have disproportionate amounts of one material over another… with no use.
Suggested Remedy: Add Mystic Forge recipes to convert Ascended Materials from one type to another. I could easily see a template of “1x{Material converting to} 250x{Material crafting from} 1xMystic Coin 10xPhilosopher’s Stone ==> 50 {Material converting to}” being something that would get used heavily.

Here are my thoughts:

Living Story Meta Rewards Become Account Bound Unlimited Use Skins like Achievement Weapons / Armor
I believe in the terms of Horizontal you can allow players to be rewarded with their unique skins they have earned from past living story releases. You were able to do this with the Super Adventure Box and allow players to earn a new meta reward for completing the old release. All of the achievements are being tracked and most of them already had a meta so it would just require an adjustment to allow meta rewards in the unlimited skin box.

Living Story Rewards in Home Instance
An alternative to this would be to put the meta rewards in the home instance for us to grab like a PvE locker.

Certain achievements you have completed in the main story add certain characters to your home instance. Why not implement that with certain achievements in all of the releases?

• We have this already with the Obelisk Shard, Quartz, and Candy Corn node
• Have a building with armor displays or pictures of previous events where we can interact with the armor set and pick up previous Living Story skins such as the Karka Back, the Injector, the Slickpack, etc.
  • This building could also be incorporated to implement a way of replaying previous living story releases or cinematics like the scrying pool / Hall of Monuments

Variety to Getting Ascended
Ascended should just be like any other tier of gear in my opinion. There should be multiple ways to obtain it, take a bit longer to get than exotic, but not as long as a legendary like you have stated before. That means:

• Fractals should have a guaranteed method of obtaining ALL Ascended items (Explained down below)
• Remove Account Bound limit
• Allow us to salvage Ascended Gear (Rings we no longer need or get from Fractals that we don’t want for Ascended materials)
  • Introduce an Ascended Salvage Kit?
• Remove Time Gating as it serves no real purpose (Also explained down below)
• Jewelers should be able to craft Ascended Amulets, Rings, and Accessories

Everything in this game has multiple ways of being obtained. Why should Ascended be any different?

Guaranteed Methods of Ascended in Fractals
Fractals in my opinion should have guaranteed methods to obtain Ascended items just like you can get the rings. Not only does that increase the desire to do fractals, but if you split up the rewards, you have other ways to get Ascended items other than crafting.

• Add more rewards in the fractal difficulties, but allow purchases of Ascended Accessories, Amulets, Weapons, and Armor using Pristine Fractal Relics. Give people even more incentive to go up to higher difficulties.
  • Level 1 – 10: Chance of Rings
  • Level 11 – 15: Chance of Infused Rings
  • Level 16 – 20: Chance of Amulets and Accessories
  • Level 21 – 25: Chance of Weapons
  • Level 26 – 30: Chance of Armor
  • Level 30+: Chance of Infused Backs
• Add a gift to dungeons that allows players to mystic forge exotic dungeon purchases into Ascended dungeon armor / weapons
  • Possibly add the gift of ascension to dungeon gear and mystic forge it

Remove Time Gating for Ascended Weapons / Gear
I really do not think ascended weapons / gear time gating is needed. The ecto refinements, although a small part of the crafting process, just delays the process in making ascended tier for no real reason. For people that have the money, they can easily buy all of their materials to bypass this system while the people that have all of the materials and not so much money are stuck

You can craft from 1 – 400 without any delays so why does 400 – 500 have limits? Ascended is suppose to be the missing link between Exotic and Legendary, but Legendary weapons do not have a time gate on them.

Keep Legendaries as Stat Switching Only
Having the Legendary gear be the only gear that allows stat switching is a big incentive for people to make Legendaries with the exception of it being best in slot. Making Ascended stat switch will kill the interest in people making anything Legendary

TheDaiBish.9735:

Guhracie.3419:

Here’s what I don’t understand about gear progression: It’s so weird. It’s totally unfinished; there’s no method of acquisition for higher end underwater gear, for example. Then there’s this whole system of insertables, which is really not intuitive. Runes, sigils, marks, gems, 2 infusion types, doubloons…. It feels messy. I also have no idea why some items have a collectible spot and others do not. There are plenty of cooking items that only work as ingredients, but they don’t deposit, for example. It is punitive to switch to new gear and costly in terms of gold and space to keep gear for different builds/situations.

Horizontal progression is just so difficult to even manage. Even on the same class of armor, dyes vary wildly in coloration. There’s not enough space to hold all the gear/skins we have been getting, and the cost of switching looks is prohibitive. There has been a distinct lack of full armor sets being added to the game- I don’t think it needs to be an equal ratio with the gemstore sets, but maybe 3:1 isn’t a terrible idea? Of course, I’m all for postponing if it means less clipping issues with non-human races.

Implementing the zenith/radiant/hellfire pieces the way you did shows that you have the capability to unlock and store skins in a much more permanent and efficient way, and I think people are really wondering when you are going to utilize that to its full potential.

Also, I don’t think it’s off-topic to discuss progression resets. There’s precedent for it, now, with the fractal level resets.

Will there be another stat increase in gear? Will cooking get bumped up to 500? Will crafting be expanded again?

Mmmmm…..Ascended doughnuts.

In all seriousness, I wouldn’t consider skins and how you dye something as ‘progression’, or at the very least, the progression is very personal to the individual. Who’s to say someone who likes the Karma weapons in a level 2 area hasn’t progressed?

Rather, it’s more along the lines of cosmetic customization, much like the character creator, unless the look of the gear was tied to challenges you went through to get it (Fractal Capacitor comes to mind).

As for storage, yes, they could do with a wardrobe. Even if they gave you 3 slots which you could store a set, as well as the template for that build, and you could buy additional slots at your pleasure.

Maybe I wasn’t clear, because when I talk about cosmetic customization, I’m talking about horizontal progression.

I actually think there are some hidden gems in the low level karma vendors. I still think that all cosmetic customization plays into horizontal progression, and that includes the way dyes work. It’s irritating to have a dye look perfect on one piece and then clash on another piece.

I think dyes are the way to go with increasing the cooking cap to 500, by the way. A recipe for straight unidentified dyes, dyes that give minor glow-type effects (which can be combined with one regular dye, rather than being used on its own), dyes with patterns… there’s a lot of potential with them being rewards for progression- I’d love to see a set of 3 dyes as a meta reward, rather than in the gemstore. There is plenty more they could do, rather than minis and backpieces, and other random skins.

I think ease of use is something they really need to consider, at this point, for horizontal progression.

And ascended doughnuts. Take note, anet!

To save space I’ve just gone and put a +1 next to the comments that closely reflect my view.

In all honesty, I would have played this game if there were no attributes on gear at all and if the level cap was 30 when you first unlock the Elite slot. Endgame should have been Horizontal progression in the form of achievements and bragging rights, enhanced skins acquired from said achievements (not gem store), skills acquired from said achievements (not a slapped on 25 skill points).

The WvW rank progression is relatively good for vertical progression with the exception of Guard Leech and Applied Fortitude, the mastery lines offer variety without making an individual overly powerful against someone without mastery. The same could be done for PvE, with Fractals for example, you could have Fractal ranks with mastery’s in a variety of specializations such as Agony Resist and Self or group Boons that trigger on Agony damage for example.

From what I am reading in this thread, the general consensus with the exception of a few seems to point toward a distaste of gear/power creep and in favour of a more horizontal form of progression. You could also look outside of the GW2 spectrum and see that the majority of crowd funded projects are also showing a trend of horizontal progression over vertical, the reason these projects are getting crowd funded is because the demand is there and people are tired of power creeping vertical progression.

Deadcell.9052:

When I first played Gw2 on that last beta weekend prior to launch I was on the fence about buying and getting into yet another standard MMO, so I did some research and once I saw the Dev comment “Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game. We want everyone on an equal power base. The rare stuff becomes the really awesome looking armours. It’s all about collecting the unique looking stuff and collecting all the other rare collectable items in the game: armour pieces, potentially different potions…” I was sold, I was so tired of stat progression type games that I have been playing for 10+yrs. So I started playing and I was hooked instantly, I loved being able to try new builds and earn gear sets quickly on all my characters without the worry of being behind statistically, sure many of my sets were ugly looking at first but it would just lead me to the gem store to buy transmutation stones and skins.

Once Ascended gear was announced I felt like I was kicked in the ding dong

I personally don’t feel we’ve ever had a good explanation for this change and would like to take this opportunity to ask for one.

Oh, almost forgot… more home instance customization! To start, give us a way to travel directly to our home instance at no cost (like the HoM teleportation stone). Retroactively award us trophies or decorations or town clothes based on our personal story choices – eg for human, street rat/commoner/wealthy, or for choosing which race to help, etc. Give us a vendor from our order so we can buy order armour and discounted food related to the order (ie Vigil sells Power-base food). Give us trophies for significant story and world boss kills – Zhaitan, Shatterer, etc. Let us build crafting stations and bank access and decorations and trophies.

Sure, this would probably decrease the day-to-day population of Lion’s Arch, but let’s be honest – the primary reason that LA is the main hub is because we can get there for free via the PvP lobby. It’ll still be packed full during festivals, and people will still stop by on their way out of PvP and WvW or into Fractals.

What’s the point of this thread if you didn’t implement any feedback from the previous ones?

I don’t think you can improve character progression in any way with your current monetization scheme.

You’re not being honest about what that scheme is: the reason gears stats (vertical progression) are tied to gear looks (cosmetic progression) is to create a market for transmutation service.

The transmutation system kills the idea of endgame relying on cosmetic progression: permanent replacement is the very opposite of progression.

As players have no incentive to chase new cosmetic rewards to add to their collection – as they currently do with skills, dyes or crafting materials – the end-game is reduced to simply the end of the game as people are left with no attractive goals to work towards to. Furthermore, the number of these goals would be small anyway, as the number of weapon/gear skins in the game for any one character is very shallow (as consequence of using light/medium/heavy armor and other such restrictions)and often prohibitively expensive.

Without cosmetic progression, the only available progression is the same vertical grind that most other MMOs are rightfully hated for – and that’s exactly what you’ve been implementing with Ascended gear and Agony in particular.

Your monetization model contradicts the core ideas of your game and promises you’ve made prior to launch in your released videos, interviews, and blog posts. Without abandoning or reworking it, there can be no talk of progression that does not rely on a stat-based gear treadmill.

For example, you could change transmutation stone function to work the same as dye system: gear looks (or stat combos) could be permanently unlocked for later use with roughly the same amount of money-to-time-spent as a monthly subscription in another MMO.

This would still go against the players’ expectations of a subscription-free game, however. It would be, as it is now, a free-to-play model.

Another idea regarding horizontal vs vertical progression could be something as simple as a “Legendary class” like for instance you could do a series of quests (as well as craft certain items “gifts”, in the mystic forge) which would culminate in something truly heroic and the reward would be an entirely new class. This would be an easy way to introduce new class’s into the game “prestige classes” for people to work towards. This class would be balanced with the other classes, but yet would still be “hard to get” and as such be something for people to work towards if they wanted to play it. (it could be a “cool” class like a dragon lord, or vampire, or Quaggan-tamer.

This method could also be used to unlock additional races to play….do a series of Tengu quests to eventually unlock the Tengu race to create a character as.

Again, so many methods of horizontal progression.

Ascended armor is a sticky issue for me for a couple of reasons. The fact that that the only way you can get it is through crafting, is disappointing. I know you can supposedly get some pieces in a drop, but if the chances are as low as getting an ascended weapon/precursor, then that will be exceedingly rare and I hold no hope for that. Not to mention the stat options are going to be random, and not necessarily what you need anyway.

Proposed solution: Give us more ways to acquire ascended armor. In addition to just straight up crafting, why not gate the ascended armor behind dungeon tokens? Each dungeon has different stats, so gate the different pieces that way. If the issue is time gating it, why not just make each piece some astronomical amount of tokens? Or introduce a new form of token that either drops in addition to the normal tokens, or can be created by combining them (e.g; Combine 100 Knowledge Crystals to make 1 Wisdom Cube. Each ascended armor piece costs 10 Wisdom Cubes)

In line with this, I would love to see more permanent content in the way of new dungeons outside of Fractals. I do love Fractals, but my word, they take so long now at the higher levels that it’s hardly worth the negligible benefit; Getting ascended weapons/armor chests is unlikely. There’s no armor to work for, and now I can craft ascended backpieces without needing to run fractals. What reason do i have to do fractals anymore? TA Aether path is a great start, I’d love to see more new paths that are a greater challenge in all of the existing dungeons.

Another point that may not be directly related to horizontal or vertical progression, why are there no new armor sets (other then ascended)? The point of the endgame in GW2 is more about visual appearance then stats, correct? Then if that’s the case, I would love it if we could see a solid armor set update. Yes, there have been quite a few armor sets that have come out through the Gem Store, but is that the only way we’ll ever get good looking armor?

Proposed solution: World boss themed exotic armor. Give me a reason to fight The Shatterer for the billionth time! Why not have each world boss drop their own currency or crafting material that I could then use to create/buy my own world boss armor. Shatterer armor! Jormag armor! Shadow Beast armor! I can imagine so really amazing looking armor sets!

Anyway, those are my thoughts thus far. Gotta get back to work now.

On the topic of skill progression, I think an issue with the system is the fixed weapon skills. IMHO you either should have a larger pool of skills for each weapon for each class and give players a choice like with utilities, or you need to expand the number of weapons each class uses.

I’ve always been the type to collect things to feel a sense of (horizontal) progression— minis and armors in GW1, mounts in other games. But minis have very little functionality (they don’t ‘stick’ through zones, most of them don’t swim despite many of their models having swim animations). And we have no mounts, which makes me sad. I’d probably spend another year just collecting all these things.

I know armors take a lot of resources to build, but GW has always been about displaying your prowess through your armor skins. Please let us earn more of them. <3

To me, character progression can usually be measured in 4 primary ways:
1) Character is stronger (by inherent stats)
2) Character has access to better gear
3) Character is able to access higher level content
4) Character can obtain a distinguished appearance or title

With respect to GW2, these seem to be met (or not met) in the following ways:
1) Reaching level 80 is relatively easy and fast. At this level, all characters are essentially equal. Thus, once a character reaches level 80, there isn’t much or any advancement left. This could change if the level cap was raised or some other form of advancement were added.

In WvW ranks, provide a different form of character advancement. Could something similar to this be added in PvE? For example, what if the slayer titles were modified to provide small damage/defense bonuses at progressively higher levels against those types of foes? This might help give players another reason to frequent different maps to engage specific foes, and give them something else to work toward.

2) Ascended & Legendary gear provides the best overall stats. However, they are not that much different (~5%) than very cheap & easily obtained exotics. As a result, the the incentive for obtaining these does not appear to be that high from a raw stats point of view. These are even less attractive when the costs to obtain them are so extreme. Many players seem to give up on ever obtaining a legendary, and many seem to be forgoing ascended weapons and armor due to the prohibitive costs.

Grinding gold, farming materials, or gambling away items into the mystic forge all seem counter-productive to having fun. There should be a better and more enjoyable way for players to work toward obtaining these items.

3) After mapping the world, the primary area limits seem to be Fractal levels. Although even lower (fractal) level players can still enter higher levels, success will be gated by agony resistance which in turn will be somewhat limited by fractal rewards.

I don’t play fractals often, but I think this kind of progression is ok. However, I would really like to see more new areas added to the world, possibly ones that require previous achievements to reach. For example, what about a new dungeon mode that could become available after defeating each dungeon path a certain number of times. It could use the entire dungeon map and be more like an explorable area, possibly filled with random mobs and interesting loot.

4) The game features many titles, some of which can be difficult to earn. However, there are only a few equipment items that evoke much awe from players. Legendary weapons are about the only unique items the game has in this regard. Not only are they hard to obtain, but they have special effects that clearly distinguish them. What seems to be lacking is a distinguished set of armors that really exude a feeling of pride and accomplishment for players. Although this is somewhat subjective, the new ascended armors don’t really provide this at all. Nor do the ascended weapons for many.

In the case of legendary weapons, there are only a few types in the game (only one choice for most weapons), and it seems too hard for many players to obtain them. In the case of armors, there do not seem to be any compelling options in the game right now. Thus, it seems like the game is missing the mark on its distinguished items – they are either too limited, too hard to obtain, or they just don’t exist.

morrolan.9608:

Deadcell.9052:

When I first played Gw2 on that last beta weekend prior to launch I was on the fence about buying and getting into yet another standard MMO, so I did some research and once I saw the Dev comment “Everyone, including casual gamers, by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game. We want everyone on an equal power base. The rare stuff becomes the really awesome looking armours. It’s all about collecting the unique looking stuff and collecting all the other rare collectable items in the game: armour pieces, potentially different potions…” I was sold, I was so tired of stat progression type games that I have been playing for 10+yrs. So I started playing and I was hooked instantly, I loved being able to try new builds and earn gear sets quickly on all my characters without the worry of being behind statistically, sure many of my sets were ugly looking at first but it would just lead me to the gem store to buy transmutation stones and skins.

Once Ascended gear was announced I felt like I was kicked in the ding dong

I personally don’t feel we’ve ever had a good explanation for this change and would like to take this opportunity to ask for one.

I agree completely with both of you. It is sad by i felt quite cheated when ascended weapons came :-/

• I do not like working hard to reach a gear level cap, being told there would not be another one and then having another introduced.
• I do not like the fact that the new gear level cap revolves around one single feature/location of the game thus pulling players from all other areas and features
• I do not like the fact that I have to grind dailies or Fractals to move towards a new gear level cap.
• I do not like the fact that tier 6 items are not common in level 80 areas
• I do not like the absorbent amount of materials necessary to craft Legendary or Ascended weapons
• I do not like that RNG or absorbent amounts of gold are necessary for Legendary Weapons
• I do not like direct time gating in crafting (I already put in the time collecting and finding the items why do I now only get to craft certain items once a day)
• I do not like reaching a crafting cap only to be told to grind more/spend more gold again.
• I do not like account bound materials
• I do not like account bound Ascended items (its literally telling the community you do NOT eventually want all players to be on the same playing field)
• I do like being properly rewarded for accomplishing challenging content.
• I do like being properly rewarded for accomplishing a series of challenging content
• I do like new skills.
• I do like working for/training new skills like we all had to when we first started playing
• I do like traits and fine tuning them to my play style
• I do like expressing myself with my characters outward appearance
• I do like my engineer
• I would like new weapon choices

There. No anger or emotion.

Personally, I feel that both horizontal and vertical progression are fine as long as two tenets are obeyed.

First, vertical progression can not become a funnel through which players have to progress in order to experience content. In other words, all of the content in the game should be designed with no gear checks. If it’s hard content, it’s hard. If it’s easy, it’s easy. But it should never ever be a question of “you can’t do X because you don’t have Y gear” (unless you’re talking about a specific graduating game mode like the Fractals). Right now, this is largely the case and should remain this way.

Second, acquisition must be open to everyone, regardless of their play style. Once again, this doesn’t require things to be fast or easy, it just needs to be doable as a reasonable goal for every player. Right now, this is not the case. There are a few ways to gather ascended gear, but they are almost all exclusive. There is absolutely no reason for some gear to be locked to laurels, some to crafting, some to fractals, etc. All of the ways of acquisition existing are good, and they cover almost all bases, but there’s no reason why a player shouldn’t be allowed to, say, purchase an ascended helmet with laurels or craft an ascended ring or earn ascended leggings purely by PvPing. At the end of the day, some methods are going to be longer/shorter/easier/harder than others. That’s going to be pretty much impossible to completely balance. All methods, however, need to be viable for all pieces of equipment.

Draco.2806:

What’s the point of this thread if you didn’t implement any feedback from the previous ones?

I honestly do not feel there is any way to quantify whether or not feedback from these things is ever used, since we’re being encouraged to provide philosophical feedback more than anything else. I suspect that has to do with legal issues of intellectual property, etc. That being said, it’s far too early for them to have implemented any of the feedback, even if they were going to do that directly.

Vertical progression
Another old gw1 player here, and I’ll throw my hat into the dislike of vertical progression, but to be fair I didn’t even really notice it until weapons came out.

You can make the argument that you don’t need stronger gear unless there is some harder content that requires it. Personally, I don’t ever want a level cap increase or another tier. I play this game for fun, and I love the fact that anyone can do anything even if they take month long breaks.

Vertical progression is also bad for any new players.

For a fresh new player to get fully ascended gear:
30 (Amulet) + 70 (rings) + 80 (Accessories) + 5 (weapon) + 30 (armor) = 215 laurels
If you get rings from fractals and use badges of honor (which a new player wouldn’t have access to in large supply) this drops to 135 laurels.

Over 3 months to just gear one character seems way too excessive. And not to mention the extreme cost it takes to get to 500 crafting. I have maybe 1.5k hours of casual play, I’m not rich, but I can afford these massive gold sinks, but why are they here. Going from 400 to 500 in crafting should cost maybe 25% more than it costs to go from 300 to 400.

If I recall a dev (maybe Colin?) said that the players got exotic gear way too fast for your liking. My question is, why is that a bad thing? In gw1 you could reach level cap and get the best gear in under a week.

Also exotic gear was obtainable through: Crafting, Drops, Mystic Forge, Dungeon Tokens, trading post.

Ascended gear can only be reliably gained from time gated materials (laurels) and crafting (which is also time gated).

To me vertical progression isn’t fun, it’s a grind. And in this case it is very expensive in both time and gold.

Hi!

I have a suggestion. I understand that Ascended armor is a fact and will not change, but you guys must consider something else. ALTS and possible revenue lost.

Why? because GW was (and hopefully will remain) a “go for the cool looks” game. You guys make money form selling us skins and fine stones, weapons skins, etc.

Why would I buy a skin and put it on an alt with useless* exotic armor? (*some exaggeration may have been used here )

So here is my suggestion. Add “proficiency” to the crafting, keep the crafting as hard and as timed gated as it is now for the first set BUT the next time I go to craft a piece (no matter which stats) the requirements are easier! (in terms of t1 – t6 mats & gold at least, don’t mind the grind for dragonite, bloodstone and fragments or some time gating) The idea is that they become as accessible or “just 5% more” expensive as exotic armor in terms of gold needed to craft. This will help us gear our alts and/or make secondary sets for other builds without taking away the “vertical progression” needed to craft the first set.

What we, the customers, gain? We have “hope” that we can gear our alts. Understand that many of us despair not because we have to craft 1 set… its because we are looking at crafting at least 8 sets (and level 3 crafting prof to 500…) and some of us even more (wvw set vs pve set). Make us work hard to unlock the first set, but then rewards us with the same level of accessibility that we had with exotics for the rest.

What, Anet gains? Money!. People with alts are people that spend money on them. If I quit my Alts I would not spend money to buy weapon skins, armor skins, bag slots, etc. As soon as my main has the look I want it stops. I can grind the new armor tier and the looks will most likely remain the same. Kasmeer’s staff? too bad my main is a warrior, now if I only I had a mesmer/ele alt geared….

Oh, one more thing before I forget. Skills! I know this is a tricky subject to go into as there are balance issues that come into play, but I would love for some more variety in terms of skills.

Wishlist in terms of Skills:
- All classes can use all weapon types.
- New utilities that offer a broader range of builds
- New Elites that a genuine game changers
- Elite Skills that you have to hunt down (a la GW1) instead of spending skill points in
- Better underwater skills/more interesting combat *

• I know this is a weird one, but I love the idea of underwater combat, but as it currently stands it’s incredibly dull.

I just posted a suggestion about a possible method of character progression. I feel this is a good supplement to the overall idea of progression. I’ll now post my thoughts on traditional vertical vs horizontal progression.

Vertical progression:
Every game has done this. There are many MMOs out there that play to the carrot on a stick crowd and some deviate from the formula of VP slightly, but none come close to the king of VP (WoW). GW2, I hope, isn’t aspiring to be climbing that mountain, but VP is in GW2 regardless even if it is ~5 or so.

I cannot persuade you to remove ascended weapons, ascended armor, or ascended trinkets. I truly hope that it ends here. I hope that we do not see ascended runes and sigils, especially ones that can only be placed on ascended armor. This will increase the gap between exotic and ascended. Would ascended still be required in the game? Probably not. Thats not the point. Many people bought GW2 with the hopes that they would be able to obtain a BiS gear set and then simply enjoy playing your game. They now stare at the face of a mountain of ascended requirements and they tremble. For many, including myself, its not possible to do. I cannot obtain BiS gear in this game without 1.) more than 2 hours a night to play 2.) a fat wallet.

So, to close out my thoughts on Verticle progression as it exists in GW2: Please end it with ascended armor. No ascended sigils or runes. And please, please keep agony contained to fractals ONLY. I can stomach the existence of ascended armor and weapons, but adding to it with sigils and runes will be too much for me to stay and support your game with gem purchases.

Horizontal progression:
I prefer this over vertical progression and I bought GW2 on the belief that once I acquire a BiS slot(which at the time was dubbed exotic gear as per many interviews, blogs, etc etc) I work on a aesthetic look afterward.

My thief has the two chaos pistols, Lyss and Iyla. This is the type of horizontal progression I was looking for. These guys were not cheap, yet not wildly out of reach. I love the look and I am proud to equip them. While using the mystic forge to do create them, the forge should not be the only place. Gem store should have gem store exclusive skins. Random drops in the world(and not a ~1% drop rate). Random drops from certain dungeons. How cool would it be to have a pistol that is engulfed in flames drop from a boss in a CoF run? Or a pistol skin made out of pure electricity drop from a CoE run?

Comparing the two progression systems, I think in GW2, horizontal would have been the way to go. It would have been less of a headache for you(Im sure you have jokes in the office about our ascended gear rants), and I truly think you would have a more positive player base. You may have the few people that gripe about lack of VP, but these peopel did not do their research on the game before buying and should play a game like WoW.

I think GW2 is more about the adventure, more about discovery and exploration, about discovery of items, skills, lore… Sadly it has become more about the collection of materials…which is not fun.

In terms of gear progression, I believe the current system works but could be greatly improved upon. I like the fact that in crafting ascended and legendary gear, you have to go around collecting rare, exotic materials to forge a powerful weapon.

The problem is that to craft gifts, bloodstone bricks, empyreal stars and etc, you’re merely grinding out the required component materials for these primary ingredients. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, because you have to time-gate the acquisition of top-level gear somehow, so that acquiring these items feels like an achievement. Its also a good thing that many of these things can and sometimes need to be acquired through playing different portions of the game; dungeons, WvW, skill point accumulation, etc.

However, I think that ascended and legendary acquisition and that form of progression could be so much more engaging by revisiting the ways that players get these items.

Think about some of the endgame items you can get in the Zelda games. Biggoron’s sword and the Fierce Deity Mask, for instance. Those were really, really fun pieces of gear to obtain! It was awesome how those quest chains were set up, sending you back out throughout Hyrule and revisiting characters, helping them in unique ways to get yourself closer to that end item. All of these items take a long time to obtain, but it doesn’t feel like it at all since you’re doing so many unique tasks to obtain them, rather than obtaining thousands of rupees, rerunning the Forest Temple a ton of times, stockpiling Deku sticks or killing hundreds of Stalfos for a rare drop.

I think that type of of quest chain could easily be integrated into GW2 to keep the time and effort required for item acquisition similar but reduce the amount of grind. Send players back out into the world, doing new tasks for completed reknown heart NPCs, put a forge at the end of a dynamic chain, make the individual legendaries only craftable at specific hard to reach locations, collect and trade items in a personal story quest chain to get a gift-like ingredient, even integrate spin-off rewards in the process of crafting these items.

Even randomly dropped ascended items could be a bit more interesting to obtain. Instead of dropping the ascended chest, drop a key to unlock an instanced jumping puzzle or special activity that the player would need to complete to obtain the items. Here’s an idea: you get an ascended key drop in a Fractal. You use that key to transport you to a solo jumping puzzle Fractal, that has multiple routes that take you to different areas, each of which houses a different ascended stat set with a theme corresponding to that stat set’s name.

EDIT: Now with a picture of what a Biggoron’s sword might look like!

Regarding Horizontal Progression…

Personally, Im finished with it. The only form of horizontal progression I really experience in this game is weapon/armor skins. And I have those already. I find the dozen or so other armor sets available to my character to be aesthetically inferior. The gem store options aren’t doing much for me either. Thankfully, they’re all relatively easy to aquire… which is a good but hamstrung by the fact there’s so few of them. (the dye system had some potential there, but the Radiant skins I’m using lock me out of ever dying my armor anything but grey)

Weapon skins have a different problem. There’s lots of them, but many of the interesting ones (in my opinion) are locked behind a prohibitive grind, the gemstore, or only available for a small window of time. And that’s excluding the legendaries. Ever seen anyone with an Infinite Light? It requires around 300 Charged Lodestones to craft. Mojinir is in this category. The Foefire Hammer and Greatsword. The Lidless Eye. The Ascended skins. The SAB weapon skins. LS NPC weapons. Every Halloween weapon skin. The Flame and Frost and Dragon Bash skins.

I honestly regret grinding out Foefire’s Power for my guardian. It kitten near killed the game for me and wasn’t worth the time and gold I spent not having fun to get it. (It was just so thematically perfect though) I love the new Dwayna backpiece, but I will not subject myself to another 500 Craft level grind for it… because I want to enjoy my game time.

So my look is essentially finalized, and…. I don’t have much else to progress towards.

I’d like to teach my guy new skills. Maybe get proficient in a new weapon. Go out and hunt some beasts for some trophies in my home instance. (love the nodes you’ve done so far) Befriend one of those lesser races (personality system!) and get some little bonus for that.

Guhracie.3419:

Draco.2806:

What’s the point of this thread if you didn’t implement any feedback from the previous ones?

I honestly do not feel there is any way to quantify whether or not feedback from these things is ever used…

I don’t believe there were any differences between the December 10th changelog posted in the CDI announcement thread and the actual changelog on release date, and certainly nothing that could be linked to feedback thread. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Seemingly none of the more popular themes that pervade these forums have even been acknowledged, less of all addressed. The outpouring of hate towards Ascended gear, Scarlet, progress reset in Fractals, extremely low droprates or performance issues being some of the more obvious. Granted the dire situation with condition damage cap was addressed, but never resolved.

What’s the point in asking for feedback if you’re not going to change anything anyway?

EverythingXen.1835:

So my look is essentially finalized, and…. I don’t have much else to progress towards.

Exactly.

Making the gear looks work more like unlockable dyes would solve that. Tired of old looks? Well, you can search the world for new ones, add them to your collection, then swap them whenever you feel like looking a bit different. That way there’s still some tangible goal in the distance.

But, of course, this goes against the current way to monetize the game: transmutation stones. That’s really the core of the problem there. ANet wants to sell the feature that’s supposed to be at the very core of the endgame.

Here is a quick summary of what the posters are asking for:

- Give us progression through new skills (earned by doing long quest chains and events and story in the game, also dont forget wvw. Skills can be focused on specific encounters in the environment like anti toxin was, so it wont throw off balance in pvp)

- Give us progression through factions (skins, discounts on items, special items)

- Give us progression through our actions (have our choices be reflected in the world ie: npc interactions, a personality system)

- Give us progression through mini pets (let us race them, fight them against each other, minigames)

- Give us a skin locker to help manage all the skins

- Give us more ways to aquire ascended armor and weapons (let us use other currencies already in game like laurals and wvw badges and guild commendations)

- It would be nice if the ascended items could become stat swapable (maybe add an additional step through the mystic forge to make it swapable)

- Give us guild halls to add personal touches too (let us add things like tapestries and furniture)

- Give us housing to again add personal items too

- Give us home instance customazition (this is kind of inline with player housing, but may be easier to develope than player housing. Basically its an acceptable comprimise)

- Give us more titles

- Give us ways to upgrade existing skins (Like the fractal capacitor)

- No more verticle progression

Let me know if i left anything out and Ill add it to the list.

Wallace MacBix.2089:

If I recall a dev (maybe Colin?) said that the players got exotic gear way too fast for your liking. My question is, why is that a bad thing? In gw1 you could reach level cap and get the best gear in under a week.

It’s bad thing for the reasons that I posted in previous post, but make “short” summary:
1. There is no other progression, beyond stats and skins. Skins didn’t worked, so they tried increasing stats. We all know how it went.

2. There is no skill collecting/hunting. You can get all skills extremely quick. It’s not bad thing on it’s own, if not for the fact there are very few skills to play with in the first place.

3. There not much to play with in terms of customizing your character. I’m not talking about looks, I’m talking about gameplay. Very simple itemization combined with very few skills, and tiered traits, prove to not be enough in that terms, and people got bored quickly. Those limited options can get you only this far in terms of experimentation.

4. Add on top of that that items lock you in single build, and customization is even more severely limited. I personally could get over it, if the items were not boring in the first place.

Oh, heck yes. The home instance – this isn’t my idea, I’m delivering this on behalf of a friend. But seriously, in terms of horizontal progression.. what if we could earn like flocks of sheep or mines or something for it? There’s a nice start already with the skill point and the quartz crystal etc; I just wish they weren’t legacy and were attainable NOW. Improvements to the home instance, or cosmetic customizations of it, could be a major focus.

And if we had flocks and mines (and NPCs that harvest a bit daily/weekly), we’d at least have some non-farm way of getting the mats for this vertical progression if it’s gotta be here.

Probably covered in other peoples’ posts already, but here I go.

Horizontal Progression:

• Gear- When I first started the game, one of the major things that attracted me was the no grinding for better gear, just for different and unique looking gear. I set out on my quest to get my arah light armor for my necro, after weeks of running paths with both successful and unsuccessful pug groups I finally got the armor pieces I wanted. It was the best feeling to see my character in the outfit I envisioned for him.

While this still exists it would be great to expand and encourage this even more. You have heard it before and I’ll say it again… PvE lockers.

A place where you can store skins for future use; not necessarily to skip grinding for gear, but to retain gear that you may not need right now or want to utilize later. The best example would be (exclusive) backpack skins.

“Wow I got X skin, and its soulbound on acquire for some reason, man this would look great on my other character, too bad its stuck on this guy, if only there was a locker to save my skin in.” OR “Awesome a new back pack skin, now I can farm a whole new ascended back piece or lose my current exclusive skin to a transmutation, if only there was a PvE locker”

• Character story- While every main story mission from here out will be at level 80 already, the next set of main story missions should be encompassing, not only of your previous exploits with traehearn, but also include aspects of the living story you have gone through.

Characters who remember you (problems with this during QJ when rox and Braham did not remember you), and who share in your story both in the living world and personal. Progression vertically with the story is a must, new things should definitely happen, but horizontal progression should also be a major part.

Expand on previous relations from the personal, revisit your old allies from the starting of your story, and from your order. Basically, enrich what is already there. I kind of want to hear this, “Hey there! I have not seen you since (insert location/mission), what have you been doing all this time?”… “Lets see… killed Zhaitan, defeated the mad king and his son, halted an invasion of karka and got revenge, took down all of Scarlet’s armies, saved a few hundred thousand lives. So you know, not too much.”

Vertical Progression-
THIS IS WHAT I WOULD LIKE ANSWERED OR EXPANDED ON MORE THAN ANYTHING, THANK YOU

• Underwater content/gear- Both vertical and horizontal is needed here.
  Underwater was so promising and one of my absolute favorite things when I started this game, however due to a lack of development in that area it fell short. The areas are some of the most beautiful in game, but there is a lot to be desired.
• More breather skins (gas mask would look amazing as a breather skin)
• Traits that aid both underwater and land combat (staff/trident skills recharge 20% faster, for example)
• additional/reskinned elites for underwater- some classes only have 1 option available for underwater elites.
• Breathers of a higher quality than green- currently the only ones that are yellow are extremely hard to obtain, this should not be the case. In addition most people who are at level 80 still have their original rebreather equipped from the start of the game, due to these armor pieces being so difficult to obtain.
• Craftable breathers
• Underwater World bosses- you don’t need many, just one to start. This one can be somewhat easy to kill in order to reintroduce people to fighting underwater. If the boss is too hard to kill, it will put many people off and they will ignore it entirely. Make it in an open underwater area with a low populace of other mobs. Think shadow behemoth’s area, but underwater… OH, and be creative, not just “look a krait witch :/” or a “giant jellyfish :/”. I believe in you.
• another underwater mini dungeon, much like the one in Diessa Plateau

*Any thoughts on this from you would be much appreciated, even a quick we’re working on it would make me happy as a clam. Of course, any details you can give or counterpoints to my underwater suggestions would be more than welcome as well.

• Thoughts on Ascended
  I like that it is in no way required, 5% stat increase is nice, while not game breaking. The main thing I am looking forward to doing is obtaining those few additional AR slots that I need. Well done, could have been introduced at launch so it didn’t get as huge of a backlash, but hey… lesson learned.

It is also a fantastic money sink, however for those who have issues making gold it seems daunting.

That is it for now, thanks for doing this and I hope this gets read.

Ok ANET here is your problem in a nutshell:
You made and marketed a game with no real grind for max stat gear to please a subset of players.
You then added the grind to please a different subset of players.
And now you want to please the first players again by making it less of a grind?

Before you lies the impossible task of trying to please everyone.

You had the throne as the no grind MMO all you had to do was get us REAL content. Instead the last year could be summed up as: GW2 2013 – Scarlet and the grind for ascended gear.

So what is the big problem with ascended? Well in case you didnt read any of the numerous posts in the last 13 months:
-it devalues peoples efforts that have previously had BIS gear
-it creates more inequality in WvW
-it destroys balance
-it promotes elitism
-it necessitates the need for harder content
-it necessitates the use of transmutation stones
-it makes the game revolve around it and makes it seem the focal point of everything you do in the game

So what doesnt do the above?
Well there s a certain almost 8 year old game that has the answer:
horizontal – variety/skin progression and/or vertical progression that only affects certain areas in PVE (ie: lightbringer, GW2 agony)

But wait… i thought you already knew this?
http://web.archive.org/web/20130201042944/http://www.arena.net/blog/is-it-fun-colin-johanson-on-how-arenanet-measures-success

Horizontal progression

This is where gw2 can really shine and stand out as a game.

I still believe some things need to be addressed in terms of balance (direct damage builds versus condition builds), but I don’t believe this is the place for that discussion.

I am very happy that we did receive a new healing skill per profession. (I really was hoping for more, but it’s a start). I understand how hard it is to add new skills that both have meaning (not redundant and possibly unique) and are balanced. The same goes for traits.

I know you guys are working hard to give support roles more options, I say keep going. I really dislike the somewhat prevalent mentality in PvE of “go zerk, or go home”.

Honestly, the biggest suggestion I can make towards horizontal progression is:

Swappable weapon skills.

The two ways to implement this is to
1) give each 2-5 number, 2-3 different selectable skills (much easier to balance)

2) let us select 2-5 skills from a pool of skills. (2-3 from the main hand, 4-5 from a different pool based on the off hand, or all 2-5 for a 2h weapon). Much harder to balance, but I think would a lot more build versatility and could give some great options for further development.

Weapon skills could have a subtype, which would allow new traits to affect those subtypes (instead of taking the “sword” trait, you could take the “snare” trait)

Possible synergy between the skills: I’m mostly drawing from the Assassin from gw1 here, where 1 skill would be an “initializer” another a “combo” skill and then a “finisher”.

Or innate balance “synergy”: if you take 3 burst skills, you could have a cool down increase +% on all skills.

cesmode.4257:

Comparing the two progression systems, I think in GW2, horizontal would have been the way to go. It would have been less of a headache for you(Im sure you have jokes in the office about our ascended gear rants), and I truly think you would have a more positive player base. You may have the few people that gripe about lack of VP, but these peopel did not do their research on the game before buying and should play a game like WoW.

I think GW2 is more about the adventure, more about discovery and exploration, about discovery of items, skills, lore… Sadly it has become more about the collection of materials…which is not fun.

Agree whole-heartedly. We need more of the adventure, discovery and exploration…less of the grind / champ farming to get our ascended / legendary….there is no sense of AWE in getting a legendary right now…it is farm farm farm farm farm farm farm farm farm farm farm farm farm….whoo hoo! finally got it. Give me a massive quest / story / month-long journey any-day! Ascended is even worse…it is a grind of farming and you don’t even have the cool looks or changeable stats of the legendary…you finally get it just in time for the latest balance patch to come out and completely nerf your build with your character so that you need to use a different one anyways with potentially different armor / weapons! Or you want to enjoy WvW this weekend instead of PVE….oh crap…I still only have exotic for that…oh well…grind grind grind grind some more for my second set of armor / weapon.

iniside.4736:

It’s bad thing for the reasons that I posted in previous post, but make “short” summary:
1. There is no other progression, beyond stats and skins. Skins didn’t worked, so they tried increasing stats. We all know how it went.

2. There is no skill collecting/hunting. You can get all skills extremely quick. It’s not bad thing on it’s own, if not for the fact there are very few skills to play with in the first place.

3. There not much to play with in terms of customizing your character. I’m not talking about looks, I’m talking about gameplay. Very simple itemization combined with very few skills, and tiered traits, prove to not be enough in that terms, and people got bored quickly. Those limited options can get you only this far in terms of experimentation.

4. Add on top of that that items lock you in single build, and customization is even more severely limited. I personally could get over it, if the items were not boring in the first place.

1. Stats went the way they went we can both see that, as for skins I think the issue is less “no interest” and more “not enough diversity”. Key example, medium trenchcoats, not much point going after skins when they are all similar.

2. I agree that the game could use more skills, HOWEVER they shouldn’t be grindy to acquire.

3. It’s funny because I think there’s plenty of customization here, it’s jsut people are adverse to playing around with it due to the cost of getting multiple sets of armor, storage, and re-traiting.

4. See 3 Honestly, I’d love if they jsut scrapped stats one gear altogether and made traits THE customization for a build but that’s unlikely.

HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION

Skin Locket

• Make skins “unlockable” (and account-bound) and not consumable. More on that bellow;
• Make some skins not tradeable to incentivate players to explore the world;
• Expand the crafting system, so whenever we craft a new item, we can choose a skin for it based on what the list of skins we have unlocked. This doesn’t needs to come for free. It would cost either a transmutation item, materials, or a combination of both.
• This system would make crafting a lot funnier, and greatly improve horizontal skin progression. So please, don’t lock it to players who don’t have in-game transmutation stones. A solution to that is that players with transmutation stones could craft items with skins of their choice without a time-gate, or with less materials involved, or with more crafting experience gained, so that there’s some sort of benefit to still having transmutation stones around, without locking this exciting new feature from other players.
• Make it so that each new item crafted with a new skin counts as a “discovery”. This way, players have more options to level their crafting other than creating unneeded stuff, furthening making crafting funnier.
• This system can make world exploration funnier and more rewarding (unlocking, collecting, hunting for skins).
• This system works well with the online shop system. Not only because skins can already be purchased with gems, but because if more players want to fill in their skin locket, more players will want to purchase gems to get more skins. Keep in mind that, in my suggestion, skins should be a one-time-only account unlockables, but not freely duplicated. They would still require crafting or transmutation stones to be used.
• Several acchievements can be tied to this system, which is another plus.
• Dungeon tokens can be removed, and have dungeons unlock skins after being completed several times, to simplicy the number of currencies in this game.
• If popular enough as a long-term goal (horizontal progression/ collecting), as a material/ money sink, and as a reliable way to make cash through gems, it’ll create more incentives for Anet to work on more skins, which is what the playerbase wants.

Story-driven and World-driven horizontal progression

• Personal Story Instance: Make it customizable and as a long-term goal. Unlock more shops for convenience or for unique items, influence which NPCs go or stay there and their respective dialogue, have the NPCs offer “personal quests”, allow us to invest on buildings, etc. Acchievements tied to that. Unique rewards tied to that.
• Datalog UI: Allow us to collect (unlock) books and unlock piece of information from exploring the world, fighting unique bosses and talking to key NPCs. All this information tell us more about the world of Tyria, and is all gathered in the Hero menu page. This adds even more incentives for world exploration, improves world immersion, and again, it’s yet another amazing opportunity to expand the acchievement system and tie unique rewards to that.

TL;DR: A world of Tyria where you can gather and collect LORE and SKIN PIECES, working for long-term ACCHIEVEMENTS tied that, influence your PERSONAL HOME INSTANCE and customize your own BUILDS, makes for a better world of Tyria.

I dont think we need 8+ pages telling them that ascended gear was a bad idea. If we can lets focus on ideas to make obtaining it easier and other ideas for progression other than vertical.

Savoy.6824:

I dont think we need 8+ pages telling them that ascended gear was a bad idea. If we can lets focus on ideas to make obtaining it easier and other ideas for progression other than vertical.

I’ve written a few walls of text already where I analyzed the current situation and made serious suggestions to improve upon it.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Savoy.6824:

I dont think we need 8+ pages telling them that ascended gear was a bad idea. If we can lets focus on ideas to make obtaining it easier and other ideas for progression other than vertical.

I’ve written a few walls of text already where I analyzed the current situation and made serious suggestions to improve upon it.

Me too :-D Simple short suggestion but i did :-D

Evee.2714:

iniside.4736:

It’s bad thing for the reasons that I posted in previous post, but make “short” summary:
1. There is no other progression, beyond stats and skins. Skins didn’t worked, so they tried increasing stats. We all know how it went.

2. There is no skill collecting/hunting. You can get all skills extremely quick. It’s not bad thing on it’s own, if not for the fact there are very few skills to play with in the first place.

3. There not much to play with in terms of customizing your character. I’m not talking about looks, I’m talking about gameplay. Very simple itemization combined with very few skills, and tiered traits, prove to not be enough in that terms, and people got bored quickly. Those limited options can get you only this far in terms of experimentation.

4. Add on top of that that items lock you in single build, and customization is even more severely limited. I personally could get over it, if the items were not boring in the first place.

1. Stats went the way they went we can both see that, as for skins I think the issue is less “no interest” and more “not enough diversity”. Key example, medium trenchcoats, not much point going after skins when they are all similar.

2. I agree that the game could use more skills, HOWEVER they shouldn’t be grindy to acquire.

3. It’s funny because I think there’s plenty of customization here, it’s jsut people are adverse to playing around with it due to the cost of getting multiple sets of armor, storage, and re-traiting.

4. See 3 Honestly, I’d love if they jsut scrapped stats one gear altogether and made traits THE customization for a build but that’s unlikely.

3. I disagree. There is not enough customization. Mainly because stats are boring. Most of them are composed of +some number. And it is just flat number. It’s not interesting.
I want back item that were consturcted in that manner:

1. If <condition> Then <something happen>
2. While <conditon> do <something>
3. For Each <collection> do <something>
That was incredibly simple idea, and yet it had immense customization power for characters and itemization. It boggles my mind that none had thought about it before GW1 and noone seems to be using it after. Everyone is using flat stats. Borinnngggg.

4. I agree. But i think that stats and traits should be separate things. I don’t want to increase stats, just to get certain traits.

Savoy.6824:

I dont think we need 8+ pages telling them that ascended gear was a bad idea. If we can lets focus on ideas to make obtaining it easier and other ideas for progression other than vertical.

there are plenty of suggestions for it, they’re jsut getting a bit drowned out at this point but hopefully Anet can pick them out.

With that said I agree. As I said in my own initial post, Ascended gear is in the game and we need to look forward as to how to implelment it in a way that is more constructive than it’s current implementation

One more thought as far as ascended goes. There needs to be a way to get infusions out of ascended equipment. To put a single Agony+stat infusion into an infusion slot it takes 100 T6 mats + 250 passion fruit or Karka shells + 20 mystic coins + 50 philosophers stones…now what happens if I want to change the stats on my weapon, if I transmute this weapon, I LOSE THE INFUSION, same goes if I change my Beta fractal capacitor into a Fractal capacitor…oh, I want to infuse my ring to add the additional new slot….again, you LOSE the infusion.

This is another loss of vertical progression….working your butt off to earn either the gold or farm the materials for one of those infusions is REALLY difficult with current drop rates….and now you completely lose these if you do anything with the item…and this goes for all ascended items. There needs to be a way to remove infusions from ascended items…I would gladly pay for a gem-store item that would allow this…this is yet another thing that makes me dread ever having to change stats with an ascended anything.

iniside.4736:

Wallace MacBix.2089:

If I recall a dev (maybe Colin?) said that the players got exotic gear way too fast for your liking. My question is, why is that a bad thing? In gw1 you could reach level cap and get the best gear in under a week.

It’s bad thing for the reasons that I posted in previous post, but make “short” summary:
1. There is no other progression, beyond stats and skins. Skins didn’t worked, so they tried increasing stats. We all know how it went.

2. There is no skill collecting/hunting. You can get all skills extremely quick. It’s not bad thing on it’s own, if not for the fact there are very few skills to play with in the first place.

3. There not much to play with in terms of customizing your character. I’m not talking about looks, I’m talking about gameplay. Very simple itemization combined with very few skills, and tiered traits, prove to not be enough in that terms, and people got bored quickly. Those limited options can get you only this far in terms of experimentation.

4. Add on top of that that items lock you in single build, and customization is even more severely limited. I personally could get over it, if the items were not boring in the first place.

Thanks for summarizing, with how fast these CDI threads expand I doubt I have the time to read everything.

1) I guess that’s my point. I can enjoy this game as is, I don’t need “progression” (outside of trying new content every so often). I hit lvl 80 in less than a month, and I actually really like the craftable heavy armor, so I’ve been using that for over a year now (and ~1.5k hours of him). I much prefer having to “grind” for a skin than stats.

2) I agree that there are not many skills in total. And even less for a particular playstyle, and again even less that are viable. I posted above how I think skills/combat can get more interesting.

3) While I can see your point, wouldn’t horizontal progression (ie, more skills and traits) help solve this problem? Also I don’t see how the trait system can be reworked. At most, you can maybe give players access to 10 more trait points (or maybe just the traits and not the stats associated with that line).

4) I’m confused about this part. While exotics aren’t free, they also are much cheaper than ascended. I’d say the vertical nature of ascended gear is what locks you into a build more so adding new stat combs, etc. I agree with others above that for the amount of time/mats required to get ascended gear they should have changeable stats.

@DiogoSilva and @Evee.2714 that sounds great guys. Can you repost the suggestions and the suggestions only here in a bulleted list format. It might be easier to read than a wall of text and require less research (post spread out all over the forums even when you link to them are hard to find). Thanks for all you do.

@Lheimroo.2947 suggest -add a qualitative bonus to ascended gear rather than a quantitative one (can you elaborate on this more?)

DiogoSilva.7089:

Savoy.6824:

I dont think we need 8+ pages telling them that ascended gear was a bad idea. If we can lets focus on ideas to make obtaining it easier and other ideas for progression other than vertical.

I’ve written a few walls of text already where I analyzed the current situation and made serious suggestions to improve upon it.

So have I... I’m trying hard to be polite and focus on suggestions that would feel good for the majority of players.

Ascended gear is a bit of a pandora’s box, and it can’t be gotten rid of. To do so now would be to devalue a lot of people’s very hard work, and that would be far more serious than slightly resetting any fractal progression level. Making it extremely cheaper also faces the same problem, somewhat.. which is why my suggestion is to add a qualitative bonus to ascended gear rather than a quantitative one. I think it would feel better for people who’ve already put in the work.

I’ve also mentioned how I feel gold is a bad currency to set ascended gear acquisition by.

In any case.. Colin, if you’re reading, if you guys come up with any big intentions for ascended gear, I think the key for public relations is to tell us. Even if it’s only vague, tell people who are working on the gear asap.