Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

cesmode.4257:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

I dislike this idea. Its similar to allowing legendaries to be tradeable on the TP. People with thick wallets to turn $$ into gems into gold can purchase their way to BiS…or people with loads of time to farm materials to sell can purchase BiS.

It solves nothing, unfortunately. For me it would be more of salt in an open wound than helping alleviate the problem.

Doesn’t it allow another avenue for players to work toward the gear if they don’t enjoy crafting? Initially prices may be prohibitive but i would see them dropping.

Chris

I don’t see them dropping much unless the drop rate is very reasonable – less a lotto and more an eventual guarantee.

I also don’t think that solves the issue with ascended gear that it promotes gold grinding; I think it just cements it.

I’ve mentioned the idea of having it be more attainable through untradeable currencies. What would be your stance on adjusting the recipe to be more about bloodstone/dragonite/etc, or even karma? Karma’s a great concept; doesn’t get enough love. It’d let ascended gear flow naturally from playing the game rather than promoting certain bits of it to excess.

I will divide this subject into different paragraphs, telling the most important points in my eyes.

1. Horizontal Progression:
I really love the idea of horizontal progression. And for me this means no upgrading gear etc, progressing is getting harder content which you can achieve by becoming more skillfull. I think old Guild Wars did a good job of it, but here in GW2 Fractals were a good starting point. Fractals get harder with higher levels so people looking for a challange can have it and others you just want to have some easier fun can just do lower levels. So this concept was good, but than you add a “gear check” by adding unavoidable agony for which you need gear which just depends on luck. Sure if you do fractasl often enough there will be a time you get the materials for infused rings or directly an infused ring, but repeating the same levels over and over until you have that luck, is just annoying and not helping with progressing. So in my opinion the idea was good the implementation not so…
Another point of horizontal progression for me is rewards. These should be in my opinion skins and while some should be easier to obtain others should take a longer time (like the armor of the Fissure of Woe in GW1). Here the problem is, that all skins are very easy to obtain, since dungeon tokens are easy to come by and the only armor which took at the beginning longer was cultural because of the gold time gate (and btw I find it really offensive that an 120g armor is only rare and not exotic so everyone who wants one needs to buy transmutation stones in your gem shop – bad desicion in my opinion). And before someone says, ascended armor is taking longer… I will come to that later, but just let me say here, I am talking about just skins so not gear with higher stats you “need” to have if you want the best gear available. So for long term progression there are only legendarys, and these are again depending on luck or massive farming (grind in my opinion) to get. I don’t mind working for a skin, but just farming gold to buy precursor is annyoing (hope the treasure hunt comes soon) or for example these silver dublons for the hammer, who the heck had this idea? This is just random.
So conclusion to the first paragraph, I wish you would introduce more challanges which can be achieved by getting better ingame. And I wish there would be more skins you can achieve as long term goals (btw a wardrobe to store skins would be nice )

2. Gear progression:
So lets go to the ascended gear. I wished that there would be no gear progression in GW2 since I hated that in other MMOs and was happy that GW1 did not have it. But ok, I can accept that many people want a gear progression, so perhaps it is necassery and since the stat increase is not that huge, I can still do everything in my exotics. Of course if you added challanging progression like I talked about before, it could become a problem to not have it or it could become a different challange like playing all way to Droknar with your Ascalon Armor and only with Henchmen ;-)
But I really don’t like that this gear is time gated. Whats the use of this? Why can’t people who want it craft it in one day of they farmed all the materials? It is not like they can’t have the armor in one day at the moment, you just go buy the materials in the auction house, so why not allow crafting them in one day? Perhaps you don’t want economy flooded with the ascended materials, but honestly I don’t care, it is just annoying.

A buffed version of myself = nope.
A buffed version of myself with a tradeoff = i can live with it.

As someone else suggested before, “Prestige Classes” where you trade off something for something else could be nice. For example you get an improvement of one kind of utilities but you have to use 2 slots out of 3 for that kind of skills (mantras, glyphs) and are forbidden to choose another one (pick at least 2 mantras, can’t pick glamour).

This will help to enhance the role you want to play in a party without ruling out one specific profession (all of them have 3 families of utilities).

StriderShinryu.6923:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Absolutely. Once again, no reason at all to restrict gathering of high tier gear to any one method of acquisition. Allow all pieces to be bought and sold. Allow all pieces to be traded for using a variety of the in game currencies that are already in place (dungeon tokens, karma, laurels, glory, etc.)

You do realize that even just one of these pieces will run well over 50 gold….Im thinking closer to 100. For one piece. If people have that much gold on hand, you might as well just buy your precursor as well while youre at it.

Whats interesting to think about is that if this went live and people started buying ascended gear off the TP, these are most likely going to be the people who have their legendaries already, and probably multiple legendariesalready because they have fat wallets in the real world and able to buy gems. Its amazing… people complain about legendaries being tradeable on the TP, but this would be acceptable?

Doing this would cause greater disparity between a RL richboy vs the normal joe, and the 24×7 farmer and the normal joe.

Part 2:

And another point, why is the ascended gear account bound, so that every one has to level the crafting professions to max. There are people in my guild who hate crafting but love farming and have tons of gold. For example when I was visiting a friend he logged into the game so that I could level his cooking profession because he hated it too much. And then there are people who think that crafting is fun but are notoriously broke. If the armor was tradeable one guildmate could produce them, another would give them some gold for it and everyone would be happy.
What also falls under this category is that progessing my character by getting ascended gear feels really grindy. When I leveled my artificer, I ran out of wood planks very fast. Since I am not much of a farmer I decided to run a round (Frostgorge, Southsun, Malchors and Cursed Shore) once a day, collecting all the ancient wood and orichalcum. This let be craft one exotic weapon a day, so you can imagine how long it took me to max the profession and than of course collecting enough wood again to craft a wand. Of course I could have farmed more, but this is boring and I hate wasting my play time on boring things and honestly the materials needed for the ascended gear are just excessive. And then I realized that the wand looks awful in orange (my opinion) and that a green one would have been really cool for my necro… but no, this time consuming weapon comes with a colour depending on stats, so to have the nice one I would need to collect all materials again, build a green wand and then buy a transmutation stone from gem shop… hooray, you can image how happy I was…
In regards to the ascended materials, someone said that in WvW there should be more dragonite ore, I agree with that. But there should be also more empyrial shards in PvE since jumping puzzles yield almost no shards and farming dungons all day for 20 shards is very time consuming, also not everyone likes dungeons.
So in conclusion: Ascended gear is just grindy, needs a too excessive amount of materials, the time gating is annoying and making it account-bound as well as making skin colours of the weapons stat bound just makes me … (fill in whatever negative word you like, I don’t want to get an infraction) And all this makes it extremly unfriendly for people with many characters.

3. What progression system did you like:
To answer the question, I was very happy with the Guild Wars 1 System. Of course by the end there were just too many skills and while it was fun to play with them, I imagine that balacing this must have been a nightmare. So I hope that you will introduce some more skills in GW2 of course slowly and not too much. Perhaps a few more utility skills, or some interchange able weapon skills (an alternative for some skills which are useless in some situations) Of course changing could only be done outside combat, perhaps also having a cooldown. Perhaps there could also be some more traits to choose from. Here I would like to mention the wish to have the ability to save builds. It could still cost some silver to load them (perhaps you could only load them when paying the skill trainer or something like that), but not being able to save builds really reduces the play variety. It would be nice to save some builds for WvW, some for PvE events, some for dungeons etc. depending on how you want to play the character at the moment.

4. Personal Progression:
This is a bit diffuse, but I would like to have some personal progression where you can see that what you did had an influence. Like killing Zhaitan and cleaning Orr. Why can’t it begin to change, for people who are new to the game this could be put into a retroperspektive, I am sure the asuras could build something and if not a well like the one in the hall of monuments in GW1 would work as well (Not going into more detail here, since this is just at the edge of progression and perhaps more about the GW 2 world).
What I would also like is to have some useful things for your home instance. Perhaps as a kind of progression you could offer personal “quests” to change it, add more things etc. (and no I don’t mean more gathering nodes, I am talking about fluff ;-) ). Give me a reason to visit my home instance because it is fun to do so.

cesmode.4257:

Im simply amazed at the amount of people that are opposed to vertical progression being confined to FoTM. If you think about it, it is the only place ascended gear is required(currently). So why does a stat increase even need to exist outside of it?

If ascended stats were confined to fractals, then the rest of us who may not want to step foot into fractals would not need to worry about power creep or a treadmill in the open world.

Im very much in favor of this and again, Im amazed that people are against it.

As a fractal player, I would NOT want to see any kind of vertical progression in fractals. I’m already dreading the day the cap gets raised, because then you’ll NEED to grind out the ascended gear to go further, which seems like the antithesis of fractals to me. Climbing to 50 is very much based on skill, not on grind, so why do we need ascended gear to go past it (when the cap is raised).

Someone suggested using stat based infusions, and I wouldn’t like to see that either, especially if it’s anything like the current implementation of agony resist infusions. Infinite vertical progression (either stats or agony resistance) is just really silly.

Part 3:

5. Achievement Progression:
I think it was very cool to add rewards to the achievement points, since these points are a kind of character progression since it shows what your characters have done / visited / accomplished. Just one small things I hope you could change. Please limit the points you can get by dailys to 5 or 10. The reason is that I know some people who have a kind of “Guild Wars 2 burn out”, since they were trying to always get all points. This leads to more and more time needed to invest into this, since you keep adding dailys (which is good, because you have more variety what to do), meaning that they are stressed all time, have no time for guild events any more and just can’t play relaxed. And this is not only people who are top of leaderboards, there a a lot of people you just want / need to complete everything, now that there are points and a reward. Of course this is probably just an issue with a small number of people, but I would really appriciate a change here.

6. … :
Hard to find a phrase to summerize this topic. When I am playing a game, I want to experience all the content and will perhaps event do it with a lot of alts. But for my progression of feelings towards the game there needs to be some new exciting things to explore or else I will get bored. Of course the living story updates are nice and they add a few hours to do something new, but in the last month I had the feeling that something is missing, and most of the time I only logg into the game because of either doing the new living story (but normally everything can be done in a few hours) or just to be online, talk to my friends and guildmates and see if we can do something together. This is seldom because someone needs something and more of a occupational therapy since we want to do something together. And while it is still fun, sometimes you wish there would be a reason to do things. (In GW1 we did Thunderhead Keep in the beginning two to three times a day, because everyone needed it and then we did it often again for the bonus. Of course it was sometimes annoying, but it was also fun, it gave us a bonding and nowadays it is just legendary)… We even talk about how it is not a good thing that you don’t have to do the story mode of dungeons with every character (I know we are a bit crazy ).
But the point is, here in GW 2 there a not many things that need to be done after completing your first character, exploring the world, fo course leveling alts, but this gets boring very fast, since the first time everything was exciting, but now you just run around alone and do all heart quests, vistas, skill points absent minded. So in my opinion this game has reached a point where it needs a big “expansion”, not necessarily a new continent (even if Cantha or Elona would be nice), but at least a big territory with several zones in it. Like the Dessert, or the Maguma Jungle or the Far Shiverpeaks. Something which has a fresh feel and is not done in a few hours (if you play exploring everything and not speeding through). Something big,
Conclusion: We need something big to come, several zones, something new.

7. Alt progression:
I love playing different characters, but honestly bringing them all to level 80 is just boring. And since you can do all content with every character and since most pug groups prefer you to be warrior or gurdian, the motivation for leveling for example my thief tends to zero. I would love to give you some creative idea how to solve this, but to be honest I can’t see one, since this is very complex. Of course you could give out more skill tomes, so that you could just click your alt to level 80 but than I would have the feeling of not being able to play it in a good way. And the problems with groups is something that probably can’t be changed. So no real ideas here, I just wanted to mention it, since it is an important part of the game.
(Btw. please make warriors harder to play so that not every “idiot” can play it. I have people in my guild saying “I will come with my warrior, then nothing can happen and I don’t need to pay attention so much, since it is so easy to play” when asked what they want to play for dungons /fractals. As a warrior loving person – I always play the combat guys with sword/axe/hammer regardless of the game – this is a tick annoying) ;-)

Ok, I think I covered the most important points, I hope this helps you devs to integrate some new and cool features into the game. Thanks for reading.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

why only some?

this does not change the obscene amount of grind needed to get to 500 or produce them in the first place.

it also undermines the meaning of “ascension”. i assume it was chosen as the tier name as a reference to ascension in gw1. however that was something personal to the character in their storyline – it was horizontal progression in its own right (at least in as much as it was storyline progression, and also allowed secondary profession switching and entry into FoW and UW).

however there is nothing special or personal about ascended gear. grind gold, craft, sorted.

there is equally nothing legendary about legendaries. grind gold, buy from tp. alternatively grind gold and dump mats into the mystic toilet.

ascended and legendary gear could easily have been horizontally progressional as well, in that they were required to be forged in particular places or needed particular tasks to be performed other than “run the dungeon of choice 50 times and then grind cofp1 until your eyes bleed”. for example, needing to use an item on the corpse of the risen wizard at the gates of arah to gain a final piece to craft your own version of his sword, eternity. oh, and not allowing them to be sold on the tp, i will never understand why they weren’t at the very least acc bound on acquire.

but no. there is nothing special about ascension and legend in gw2 gear, just stat increases. this is what makes them boring. it is the exact opposite of gw1, where ascension came after trials in the desert, legends were forged in the hall of heroes, and neither of them came with an unneeded stat increase.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

cesmode.4257:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

I dislike this idea. Its similar to allowing legendaries to be tradeable on the TP. People with thick wallets to turn $$ into gems into gold can purchase their way to BiS…or people with loads of time to farm materials to sell can purchase BiS.

It solves nothing, unfortunately. For me it would be more of salt in an open wound than helping alleviate the problem.

Doesn’t it allow another avenue for players to work toward the gear if they don’t enjoy crafting? Initially prices may be prohibitive but i would see them dropping.

Chris

I don’t think the prices would drop at all. If anything they would rise. We are over a year into the life of the game and precursor prices continue to rise. It was thought by some that with the addition of guild missions and the possibility of legendary drops that precursors would drop in price in the TP. Instead, they rose.

It would be yet another area of the game that most people without an unlimited income could not obtain the gear.

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

cesmode.4257:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

I dislike this idea. Its similar to allowing legendaries to be tradeable on the TP. People with thick wallets to turn $$ into gems into gold can purchase their way to BiS…or people with loads of time to farm materials to sell can purchase BiS.

It solves nothing, unfortunately. For me it would be more of salt in an open wound than helping alleviate the problem.

It’d be better that way though.

One debate I’ve seen a lot over ascended armor and weapons is the restricted availability. Keep in mind, that if an individual gets ascended armor, and gear, and trinkets, and maxes their entire inventory, you run the problem of having useless drops because you’ve already fully geared up.

This is a good alleviative to that.

I think there are larger issues to think about for people that do not / cannot obtain the gear via spending loads of money or acquiring loads of resources…vs the guy that already has all ascended pieces and gets a rare ascended drop with no use for it.

I think its a bigger tragedy to push the ‘middle class’ of the game further down into the pits than worry about the surplus that a few rich or time-afforded players may run into. Its a non issue. At least in my POV.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

If you use this path, it shouldn’t just be certain. It should be all.

But even that won’t help the problem if the gear still remains ultimately unavailable, whether through prohibitive cost or prohibitive mats.

If the gear is Fractals only, so that it can’t affect the rest of the world. Fine, whatever. It can stay in Fractals and players who like vertical progression will simply have to accept the tradeoff that Fractals probably can’t be Living Story content anymore (because that would lock out a number of players who don’t play Fractals. Obviously Fractals would still receive updates, just not as Living Story content)

But if Ascended and whatever other vertical progression is going to be part of the entire game, then it has to be easily accessible. No ifs, and or buts. Because if it’s part of the world, at some point, you’ll have to design content around that gear. And that will lock people out of said worldly content when they can’t deal with the prohibitive cost, whatever that cost might be.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

My opinion as a player is that the current drop rates could be tweaked.

With all due respect, and I do apologize because I know how this is going to sound: It’s not a case of “could be tweaked”. It’s a case of “Absolutely needs tweaked.” The current form just doesn’t work if Ascended Gear is going to be gear that exists in the entirety of the game.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Brainstorm statement.

I am assuming that you wouldn’t want a progression system in which new skills and traits superseded/replaced existing skills and traits.

Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.

So therefore the idea of statistical power creep is redundant?

Chris

This would be ideal!

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Personally and note this is not the opinion of Arena but I like the idea of uniquely skinned BiS items dropping in challenging content. My opinion as a player is that the current drop rates could be tweaked.

Chris

That will not remove the RNG factor…. Look at it this way:
Say you increased the drop rate on Tequatl. That means a higher change to get a weapon. But it is still RNG.
Some people will get several drops, others will get nothing, most will get items with the wrong stat combination. Please, please, please: No more RNG!

What if you could sell them? Thus complimentary to other forms of acquisition?

Chris

I am in favor of increased drop rates as a source of these items. Everyone plays the game to kill things which drop loot. Nearly everyone. If the tables and drop rate were adjusted properly, this would benefit literally everyone.

I know everyone HATES rng and I do too, when the rate is stupidly low. And we have been burned with it within the past year for sure. But if done properly, it is an exciting element to loot acquisition and makes acquiring loot more rewarding than a boring, mundane collection of items to craft. Or acquiring enough coin to purchase off the TP. Is that more rewarding than finding it in a chest from an Ettin in Timberline Falls?

Yuri.5810:

A buffed version of myself = nope.
A buffed version of myself with a tradeoff = i can live with it.

As someone else suggested before, “Prestige Classes” where you trade off something for something else could be nice. For example you get an improvement of one kind of utilities but you have to use 2 slots out of 3 for that kind of skills (mantras, glyphs) and are forbidden to choose another one (pick at least 2 mantras, can’t pick glamour).

This will help to enhance the role you want to play in a party without ruling out one specific profession (all of them have 3 families of utilities).

Expanding on this.
You should be able to turn on/off your Prestige Class, so that when you’ll be playing with pugs you can use the vanilla version while in more organized groups (guild parties i guess) you’ll be able to split tasks.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

cesmode.4257:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

I dislike this idea. Its similar to allowing legendaries to be tradeable on the TP. People with thick wallets to turn $$ into gems into gold can purchase their way to BiS…or people with loads of time to farm materials to sell can purchase BiS.

It solves nothing, unfortunately. For me it would be more of salt in an open wound than helping alleviate the problem.

Doesn’t it allow another avenue for players to work toward the gear if they don’t enjoy crafting? Initially prices may be prohibitive but i would see them dropping.

Chris

It mainly opens it up to ppl with “fat wallets” only. Since they are not really the ones who have to worry about the grind of crafting (since they buy around it) it really doesn’t help anyone. Thus the players that dislike crafting grind are still in same predicament of having to grind for the item via gold albeit w/ or w/o the step of sitting at a crafting station.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What if you could sell them? Thus complimentary to other forms of acquisition?

Chris

I have a friend.

A month ago, he said on TeamSpeak.
I had dusk drop for me last night.
Really, you got a precursor?
Yeh, this is the first time I had one that was worth a lot dropping.
…. You mean you have had multiple precursor drops?
Yeh, but this is the best one.

A week ago, he said on TeamSpeak:
Sapling. Guess what dropped.
What?
No, no guess.
Really… you got another precursor?
Yeh, but not dusk this time.
How many precursor drops have you had in total by now.
7 no … 8.

That is RNG. That makes some people very rich.
I would prefer having several ways of working towards ascended items. Why can’t I be rewarded for doing the same things as another player? Why can’t I work towards my ascended items by killing Tequatl etc.?

Why can’t there be more reliable ways to work towards them?
Having them not account bound would be a very nice start.
Having them sold on the TP could free me from the burden of crafting.

I would still love to see more options though. I would love to be able to obtain them reliably by playing several areas of the game.
What if a certain amount of fractal relics could be used?
What if Tequatl dropped ascended tokens and when you had x amount you could buy one of his unique ascended weapons?
What if I was a WvW player? Would I ever get enough money to buy them off the TP?

I am sure there are many other and even better options, but this is what I could think of for now.

Horizontal progression:

I’d love to see some more use for skill points regarding our progression (not the current one where you add a new skill and it costs a lot for no real reason). For example you could add a new tab to the skill panel, where you can unlock your skills again (even weapon skills) but they would have different cosmetics. Like greater fireball, or bull’s charge summons a bull that runs with you towards your target, or add different colour to skills etc. These would have increased skill point costs, since they are only cosmetical, you could even tie some of them to some achievements/challenges or if you decide to use prestige classes to those as well.

Soeki.9643:

Horizontal progression:

I’d love to see some more use for skill points regarding our progression (not the current one where you add a new skill and it costs a lot for no real reason). For example you could add a new tab to the skill panel, where you can unlock your skills again (even weapon skills) but they would have different cosmetics. Like greater fireball, or bull’s charge summons a bull that runs with you towards your target, or add different colour to skills etc. These would have increased skill point costs, since they are only cosmetical, you could even tie some of them to some achievements/challenges or if you decide to use prestige classes to those as well.

Oh I LOVE this idea!!!!!

Dev post recap:

Page 1-15

Summaries (read these!):

A summary of the first 3 pages by Izzy. Big post!

General:

Izzy on fractal progression reset.

Will there be more vertical progression?

Dev questions and discussion requests:

What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others games?

The ideas of DiogoSilva. Discussion request.

Would ‘faction’ progression like in GW1 be grindy if it offered exclusive rewards?

Vertical Progression acquisition can be a pain but what if any elements do you like about Vertical Progression?

Lets keep coming up with some awesome Horizontal Progression systemic ideas and also reward ideas?

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

Brainstorm statement: The idea of a statistical power creep is redundant.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be sold on the TP?

Request to get a proposal together for stat based evolution to make room for more horizontal progression brainstorming.

Devs responding to individual posts:

We like the idea of a skin wardrobe.

Why weapons are easier than armors.

A sense of personal progression through challenge.

Catching up with individual replies to the first 3 pages. 15 posts that continue on the next page!

Chris continued with many more replies on page 13 to 15.

Future dev post recaps:

Part 2:

Page 15-30

Part 3:

Page 31-39

Yes! The idea of prestige classes would be great. Maybe not quite so… deep, but what about Grandmaster traits with a huge bonus, but also negative?

Vampire Lord
You take on the form of a vampire. While in this form your lifesteal and healing effects are amplified. Your attacks heal nearby allies. However, you take increased damage from conditions, particularly burning.

Randulf.7614:

Soeki.9643:

Horizontal progression:

I’d love to see some more use for skill points regarding our progression (not the current one where you add a new skill and it costs a lot for no real reason). For example you could add a new tab to the skill panel, where you can unlock your skills again (even weapon skills) but they would have different cosmetics. Like greater fireball, or bull’s charge summons a bull that runs with you towards your target, or add different colour to skills etc. These would have increased skill point costs, since they are only cosmetical, you could even tie some of them to some achievements/challenges or if you decide to use prestige classes to those as well.

Oh I LOVE this idea!!!!!

Its not a bad idea. I think I like it.

Wondering if it would be possible to turn off the new skill’s effects and go back to the old one..vice versa. If I got tired of that bull after bull charging so many times, could I go back?

Kiayin.3427:

2. Access to the makeover tab all the time.

The only way to preview the changes is purchasing a kit. If said preview was available for anyone to mess with, as it was in GW – people sitting on the fence could toy with it, save templates! – eventually buy a kit or create a new character/buy a character slot.

Seconded, I really like this.

Other things along the same vein: for alt-friendliness, maybe look at returning dyes to account-wide? If there’s a cash shop reason, what about some kind of upgrade (that isn’t exorbitantly expensive, please) that does this?

Horizontal progression via different builds for the same character: would be nice, I had several in GW1, but in GW2 it’s too expensive to do this. Plus the game seems to be designed so that you can just Berserker everything and it’s fine. More obvious effects from alternative builds would help with this – I realize it’s a difficult thing to balance though.

Responding to Chris’s questions more recently:

• I would actually like to be “done” with the more time-consuming parts of vertical progression (getting expensive equipment). As long as it doesn’t break the earlier parts of the game or make it unfair for others somehow, I’m not against vertical progression in other areas.
• e.g. if you raised the level cap to 100 through e.g. an expansion, the game is already set up to handle that
• Extra stuff in Fractals wouldn’t bother me either though I should note that I don’t currently play fractals.

Skill progression:

• Obsoleting skills in favor of new ones seems like a waste of the work you sunk into designing the old skills though. Would prefer that be a horizontal thing.
• “Specializing” classes like in some of those old JRPGs (anyone remember Seiken Densetsu 3?) sounds interesting though – sort of like what we do with builds currently but a more visible impact. It might lock you into those choices though, so the specializations would all need to be viable in any part of the game? Some careful thinking required there, we only have so many character slots.
• Skills that synergize with each other is probably a good way to create the same effect without locking you into stuff. Just need to be careful they don’t break balance.
  Anyone going to let me customize norn elites?

Randulf.7614:

Has the thought of dual profession ala GW1 ever been re-considered for GW2? It is likely to be a real balancing pain and require considerable coding efforts from the team, but the horizontal progression impact could be considerable.

I am surely fighting not here that hard for Sub Classes all the time, just to see then the Balancing Terror of Dual Classes from GW1 making their return into GW2!!

Hybrid Classes are a very bad concept and the results of what GW1 has become with it should be a lection for everybody who thinks, Hybrid Classes are something good, when they totally are not.
On paper maybe it sounds everything cool and awesome, but in the game then, its just unbalanceable chaos where one unpredictsable chain reaction follows after another, whenever anything gets changed within the skills.

If ANet improves the Classes, they should stick to Sub Classes, they are alot easier ti implement anyways and its the absolute clear superior system, when it comes down to balancing the skills, traits ect., because Sub Classes are as already said alot easier to overview.
They can’t produce with a skill change directly douzens of unpredicted chain reactions, because everythign stays within the Basic Classes and no cross class mixing being possible, so if ever somethign unpredicted should have, the thread of the unbalanced skilsl stays within a quickly graspable range of how far that unpredicted effect could have influence in the game, because you have then basically olnly to overlook 1 single basic class and its like 3 sub classes and not instantly like 8×8 = 64 different hybrid combinations due to such a silly concept of dual classes with cross class mixing…

Get it please out of your heads, its the most worst balancing nightmare ever, especially when Anet begins now to increase the amount of skills in the game.

cesmode.4257:

Randulf.7614:

Soeki.9643:

Horizontal progression:

I’d love to see some more use for skill points regarding our progression (not the current one where you add a new skill and it costs a lot for no real reason). For example you could add a new tab to the skill panel, where you can unlock your skills again (even weapon skills) but they would have different cosmetics. Like greater fireball, or bull’s charge summons a bull that runs with you towards your target, or add different colour to skills etc. These would have increased skill point costs, since they are only cosmetical, you could even tie some of them to some achievements/challenges or if you decide to use prestige classes to those as well.

Oh I LOVE this idea!!!!!

Its not a bad idea. I think I like it.

Wondering if it would be possible to turn off the new skill’s effects and go back to the old one..vice versa. If I got tired of that bull after bull charging so many times, could I go back?

Ah yes I read it as opening up a choice of which you would use rather than being stuck with the one you unlocked most recently. You could almost tier the skills with blue/green/rare/exotic/asc/legendary for their effects and you chose which you wanted. That may be over complicating the idea mind you…….!

Draehl.2681:

Yes! The idea of prestige classes would be great. Maybe not quite so… deep, but what about Grandmaster traits with a huge bonus, but also negative?

Vampire Lord
You take on the form of a vampire. While in this form your lifesteal and healing effects are amplified. Your attacks heal nearby allies. However, you take increased damage from conditions, particularly burning.

I like this +1

Glyphs in WoW have had a weird history, but the aspect of them I like best is how they can change the behaviour of your spells, even to the point of giving you trade-offs that specialize their function.

Of course that’s basically what the trait system does already. What if we could have another tier of traits entirely to work on at max level? It wouldn’t even have to function like the other tiers or be as large. But a bit of work to unlock each trait in the super-grand-master tier, then we get to pick one or two of them to use at any time..

Chris Whiteside.6102:

DiogoSilva.7089:

Solutions

• Separate the concept of (ascended) gear crafting from the concept of equipment stat customisation. Make it easy or easier to change stats, or at the very least, to craft new copies of the same gear with different stats.
• Add an universal build template system, and allows us to change traits on the fly (while not in battle, dungeons, etc). Creating and saving builds should be free. Loading/ changing them could still require a small money sink, if Anet feels it needs to be there.

There are some good ideas here which I would like to see us discussing as a group.

What do you all think about these ideas?

Chris

These two are something I’ve wanted to see in a game for so long. How legendaries work I think is amazing. Choosing the stats is fantastic. I wish exotics/ascended worked this way, except make it an unlocking system. Say you bought a berserker set from one of the dungeon vendors. If you buy then soldiers from another vendor, you could then select from either stats. I would like to see this extrapolated to skins as well.

Essentially what I envision is an unlocking system of skins and stats, where once you acquire a skin/stat for a armor piece, you can switch it (out of combat, maybe have a few min CD or something, idk probably needs a minor limiting factor but maybe not) to whatever you have unlocked. This is also going to open up huge potential for people to keep playing. A lot of people are 100% completionists and it’s going to take quite some time and effort to get everything. You could tie achievements into it as well. It adds a lot of horizontal progression for a character by expanding what variety they have, and it’s also a quality of life update. Saves space in inventory. I also have a lot of different armor sets that I like but I don’t want to get 4 different armor sets when I only use 1 stat, so I feel a bit pigeonholed into always wearing the same armor. I know this is a self-inflicted limit, but I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I do understand however that this is a complete reworking of the system. But with the legendaries you’ve shown that at least stat wise some of the functionality is already there. Skins would be a whole other issue to tackle though.

Personally something that I would like to see as a possible form of horizontal progression is the ability to cycle between different runesets on the same armor set without losing either the runes or the armor.

Similar to the way in which legendary weapons can have their stats changed outside of combat, the system could allow the player to double-click their armor and select the rune from any of the runes which have been previously applied to that piece of armor.

This could be implemented through the use of a consumable item (acquired from fractals/wvw/balance appropriate whatever), which can be used on a piece of lvl 80 armor to unlock an ‘extra rune slot’. This would essentially leave the item showing with an unused upgrade slot into which a new rune/upgrade component could be applied, and the item could then be double-clicked out of combat to select which rune is currently applied.

This could be balanced by making it one consumable item per armor piece per ‘extra’ rune slot, and adjusting the drop rates/circumstance of the item accordingly: this would prevent players from immediately having access to all runes on all pieces of armor, as they would need one ‘bonus rune slot’ item per piece of armor per extra rune, as well as the new rune itself.

This would give an alternative to those players who wish to use different rune sets on their character but keep the same armor (i.e. not have to buy a new set of cultural armor or perpetually replace runes on top of other runes).

A PvE Locker is the answer to the Skin part, they just need to upgrade the already existing achievements-tied panel to a full PvE Locker.

Lheimroo.2947:

Glyphs in WoW have had a weird history, but the aspect of them I like best is how they can change the behaviour of your spells, even to the point of giving you trade-offs that specialize their function.

Of course that’s basically what the trait system does already. What if we could have another tier of traits entirely to work on at max level? It wouldn’t even have to function like the other tiers or be as large. But a bit of work to unlock each trait in the super-grand-master tier, then we get to pick one or two of them to use at any time..

I agree. Maybe a separate trait window for traits that have penalties. You could slot any number of these you like because the balance will come with the associated penalty.

Yuri.5810:

A PvE Locker is the answer to the Skin part, they just need to upgrade the already existing achievements-tied panel to a full PvE Locker.

Oh yes I didn’t even think about that. It’d be nice if the functionality worked so you didn’t have to unequip armor —> use skin --> drag current armor piece —> say yes --> put back on, but I would 100000% take it over nothing.

Edit: And a template system would be awesome like in GW1, except it’d save stats/skin/(ideally traits if were entertaining the idea of having more easily resetable traits)/skills/dyes/weapons. But this is asking for quite a lot haha.

My issue with ascended gear is how limiting it is.
- swapping roles becomes less desirable. (lame).
- Can’t exchange old armor to alts. (lame).
- Transmuting for looks effectively deletes an entire set (lame).

My issue with armor in general is that all these stat combinations are getting a bit much and I’m sure you’ll add more. Ascended armor should have increased stats and let you choose what kind of stats you want to have on it (just like Legendaries), but require an unlock for each stat combo.

So I go craft a set of ascended armor. By default there’s nothing on it. I buy the plan and say I want zerker stats. I apply it to the armor, now the drop-down list says I can choose zerker stats. I want to have soldier too? Easy, just buy the item, apply, now I have two options!

This would:
- make it easier to pick the stats you want
- keep the stat selection from being super cluttered if you only need 2 sets of stats
- still require significant time/money investment for each character to have a set
- still require gold sink for unlocking stats

Art Progression:
Create an area where you can show some concept art and players can vote. You say you are building the game for us as a community, so let the community get involved. It would also reduce risk for you as a company since you can see the popular choices.

DCUO works like that, Stats and Skins are splitted and you can change looks whenever you want once you’ve unlocked the skin (by equipping the item once).

Also, I think agony resistance should go away. Just make agony a hard-hitting skill that people need to learn to avoid. That would play into skill more than agony resist anyway.

Quick Brainstorming on what every Sub Class could make “special”, like it has been mentioned on the last thread page: Examples for the Warrior.

Warrior
- Berserker – specialized on twohanded melee weapons, like Greatswords, Great Axes, Hammers as also offensive Shouts and Physical Attacks
Speciality: The Bloodrush Mode, a 4th bar of Adrenaline, that can be reached now to activate the Bloodrush Mode, in which the Berserker receives temporarely special Berserking Skills that are empowered versions of the current equipped weapon with bloody slice effects to make their attacks look more brutal.
Bloodrush Mode increases the Attack Speed and Max Health of Berserkers, but they will also lose a significant amount of Toughness meanwhile and receive Stability, while the mode is active. Bloodrush Mode, once activated will work then like the Life Force Bar of the Necromancer, slowly decreasing anc once it runs out, Bloodrush Mode ends and the Berserker returns to normal state with 0 Adrenaline.

- Legionnaire – specialized in Weapon and Shield Combat, defensiove Shouts, Banners and ranged Combat with Longbow/Rifle
Speciality: Can summon and command Legions, Lost Souls that are filled with Emotions. Those Legions will have an offensive and an defensive move and always stay near the Legionnaire like Body Shields.
The adrenaline Gameplay gets enchanged with a Command Bar for the Legions switching out the several Legion Types and changing between offensive and defensive formations. Very inspired by the Game Chaos Legion by the way and is imo the best way for a “dark soldier” sub class, without lettign the result look too much of a Necromancer, because the behavier of Legions is very different to that of Mininos, as also the way of commanding them

- Duellist -specialized in Dual Weapon Combat, Stances, Fast paced combat ideal for Counter Attacks, so specialized in Blocking, Parading and Evasion also.
Speciality: Battle Styles that define more the Weapon Skills into various different working skills, in regard of which style youve chosen currently to fight with.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

cesmode.4257:

StriderShinryu.6923:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Absolutely. Once again, no reason at all to restrict gathering of high tier gear to any one method of acquisition. Allow all pieces to be bought and sold. Allow all pieces to be traded for using a variety of the in game currencies that are already in place (dungeon tokens, karma, laurels, glory, etc.)

You do realize that even just one of these pieces will run well over 50 gold….Im thinking closer to 100. For one piece. If people have that much gold on hand, you might as well just buy your precursor as well while youre at it.

Whats interesting to think about is that if this went live and people started buying ascended gear off the TP, these are most likely going to be the people who have their legendaries already, and probably multiple legendariesalready because they have fat wallets in the real world and able to buy gems. Its amazing… people complain about legendaries being tradeable on the TP, but this would be acceptable?

Doing this would cause greater disparity between a RL richboy vs the normal joe, and the 24×7 farmer and the normal joe.

Yep this is definitely a valid concern. If the drop rate was higher though and it wasn’t just crafted then supply could be more deterministic in terms of demand.

Chris

But, of course, you run the risk of having supply be too high such that everyone gets it soon enough and starts looking for whatever is next. I think, personally, keeping them as they are as a primary progression time sink is the way to go. Now, perhaps the materials could be crafted on a 12hr cooldown as opposed to a 24hr one, I don’t know… you just need to be careful, I think, to not make it too fast or easy to get, otherwise you’ll start hearing the “now what” complaints. Then the temptation to go another level will creep in and you begin to slide down the slippery slope of a god-forsaken treadmill. The stat advantage with ascended isn’t so great that there’s a massive need to have it now or you can’t keep up, so I think there are advantages to keeping it time consuming. (This is from a guy that doesn’t even have his first ascended weapon yet, but I’m working towards it.)

I think the character is not the only thing that can progress in the game, why can not progress the home instance for example?
as in Assassins Creed 2 and 3, you have a town that you can progress, by reforming houses, reopening the stores, buying more vendors to town, doing this you gets discounts on armor and weapons, receives more funds and money .
in GW2 we could do that in the home instances

give us more things to make progress, such as housing, skins, skills, guild hall,
ships? (why not? XD)
we have endless things to make progress but please no progression of gear

Shriketalon.1937:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Lets keep coming up with some awesome Horizontal Progression systemic ideas and also reward ideas?

Hmm……how about a Reputation System?

You keep trying to balance drop rates individually, but that results in people farming whatever turns out to be the best possible route to wealth. Meanwhile, adding block buffs doesn’t do anything for the out-of-the-way zones since people congregate in the optimal areas. But you could design a system where rewards were done from a top-down method and scattered across the world to encourage mobility. Like so…

Remove the champion reward boxes (don’t panic!), remove the world boss bonus chests (stay with me!), and remove the PvE Monthly Reward (hold on, don’t go anywhere!). In its place, add Reputation.

Reputation is a series of monthly meta achievements corresponding to the different factions. Each meta achievement has 100 tiers with a chest of goodies per tier, and is fed by a series of different activities for that zone. The individual achievements are logarithmic, becoming less rewarding over time. Reputation resets every month, though there is a permanent achievement reward for maxing it out. For example…

Seraph Reputation
-Slay Bandit champions.
-Slay Centaur champions.
-Slay Ettin champions.
-Slay Underworld and Demon champions.
-Complete unique events in Queensdale, Kessex, Gendarran, and Harathi Hinterlands.
-Complete unique group events in human territory.
-Defeat miscellaneous champion threats (anything not considered a racial foe) in human territory.
-Defeat the Shadow Behemoth.
-Defeat Ulgoth, champion of the Modniir.
-Explore unique jumping puzzles in human territory.

Every time you complete one of the minor achievements, you receive a tic on the Reputation track and a choice between several different bonus chests (for basic crafting components, rare components, ascended components, random valuables, etc). The requirements themselves go up over time. Initially you must defeat one champion for a single tic, but soon it becomes two, then three, etc. Likewise, the same event cannot be farmed over and over again since it demands unique events, and the world bosses stop providing the reward after a few tics.

Other Reputation tracks include the Sentinels, Wolfborn, Peacemakers, Wardens, Lionguard, and the Pact (unlocked through the personal story to make people stop skipping it), thus covering 100% of Tyria and the various Flame Legion/Branded/Inquest/Nightmare Court/Krait/Icebrood/Destroyer/Sons of Svanir/Risen threats encountered across the world.

With this system, the key to getting excellent rewards is to do things you haven’t done yet. It favors diversity rather than repetition, providing benefits for people who go off the beaten path. It also allows people to approach rewards at their own pace. You can spend an afternoon slaughtering champions and be well rewarded for your efforts, but you can’t farm champions for several hours every day the entire month and expect a consistent reward stream. The Wolfborn stop being impressed when you bring in the 274th Icebrood Quaggan head. On the other hand, you can just wander around and explore while still being rewarded for completing the new activities and new events you find through random wandering. Likewise, you can max out different Reputation tracks throughout the month in different ways, so you never feel too burdened by tedium.

Play Your Way suddenly becomes absolutely true and forms the backbone for rewards.

This looks so much like the WoW thing… and how’s it working there? Not too good… the complaints about having to grind one faction or the other for a desirable this or that…

THE PROBLEMS WITH ASCENDED AND LEGENDARY GEAR
One major problem with Legendary gear vs Ascended gear atm is that Legendary weapons have the ability to swap stats at will, making Legendary weapons the BiS weapons available atm. To illustrate why this is important take this example: Ascended armor and weapons have been added to the game, so a player(we’ll call him John) learns about this gear and (for some reason or another) decides to go make him self a set, two to three months later (depending on how many weapons he crafted) John has his full set and being a bit of a power gamer he has made a special build that he built the gear for, then a couple weeks later a skill balance patch comes out, invalidating his build and his armor by extension. Now all his hard work go’s down the drain and John must choose whether start all over again or to just give up on ascended gear and stick to exotics.
This is a even worse problem when you have multiple toons and want to give them all Ascended gear as decking out a full account could take upwards of two years or more (this is going off the numbers A-net gave us). Now if your going to invest that much time in to your account then you would (quite reasonably) want to know that your investment was secure and that it wouldn’t be lost the next time a skill balance came out.
When Ascended crafting first came out A-net changed Legendarys to have ascended level stats so they would keep there equal to BiS status, but they made one other change, and that was the ability to swap stats any time you where out of combat, which took Legendarys from being equal to BiS to being BiS. Now I’m not saying that this should be taken away form Legendarys simply that this ability should be given to Ascended gear as well, that way you don’t lose months worth of work to a skill patch, and Legendarys are back to being the “Shiniest Shiny” only. As far as I can tell this would be the quickest and easiest solution to please as many people as possible.
Thank you for reading and have a good day(or night).

cesmode.4257:

StriderShinryu.6923:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Absolutely. Once again, no reason at all to restrict gathering of high tier gear to any one method of acquisition. Allow all pieces to be bought and sold. Allow all pieces to be traded for using a variety of the in game currencies that are already in place (dungeon tokens, karma, laurels, glory, etc.)

You do realize that even just one of these pieces will run well over 50 gold….Im thinking closer to 100. For one piece. If people have that much gold on hand, you might as well just buy your precursor as well while youre at it.

Whats interesting to think about is that if this went live and people started buying ascended gear off the TP, these are most likely going to be the people who have their legendaries already, and probably multiple legendariesalready because they have fat wallets in the real world and able to buy gems. Its amazing… people complain about legendaries being tradeable on the TP, but this would be acceptable?

Doing this would cause greater disparity between a RL richboy vs the normal joe, and the 24×7 farmer and the normal joe.

That’s under the assumption that purchasing on the TP would be the only other way to acquire the gear. If you could get it in a variety of other ways (say with those Guild Commendations sitting in your bank, or with that pile of Karma you’ve been accumulating since launch) then the demand would not be there to support extremely high prices on the TP. Or, even if the prices remained high, there would be other ways to get the gear without paying through the nose for it.

Sure you could say TP acquisiton would still be something that supports Richie Rich and the Wallet Warriors, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but as long as that’s not the only way to reach that destination I don’t see it as that big of an issue. If someone wants to spend hundreds of dollars on something I can just buy with karma, laurels and dungeon tokens, then I’ll be laughing instead of angry.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Here is a crazy brainstorm idea, not in anyway indicative of our direction.

What if there was vertical progression in the Fractals with gear that increased in stats but when outside of the fractals defaulted back to BiS numbers?

I am asking this because it is going to generate some left field conversation not because I think it is or isn’t a good idea.

Chris

If you do this you Need to give a fix Bonus for each instability done ( So People don’t skip and do only easy instabilities).
The Creatures Need to get harder.( It shoul still be getting harder not beeing the same with the new stats)
Rethink Agony ( This is the biggest Problem atm People can’t get the AR needed with just playing fractals )

So another idea for you: What if you add some accountbound agony: You get for each instability completed firsttime a certain ammount of AR. This ammount of AR would make sure that you can Progress without having to buy additional gear and stuff.

This would provide: Altfriendlyness ( since you can swap to alts main issue here atm you can swap to alts but you Play with 0 ar no Problem but still sometimes annoying;))

No geartrademill: What I really loved when I leveled to 81 at first was the fact that People stopped at around 30 cause they said it’s too hard dmg from agony .. and we could advance cause we had a nice teamplay with reflects absorbs shadowrefuges rezes ect when sombody gots hit by agony.. this really felt like beeing able to aquire somthing threw skill not just because I have the right gear.. Atm I feel like I getting worse at playing cause I don’t care anymore about agony attacks.

Short Version:
-Add accoundbound agony resist for the firsttime completition of each instability
- If you make statsgain make sure it’s not statsgame for leveling up but for completing each instability so People don’t skip the kittenes ( and only do 30’40’50 with proper ar)

I think it isn’t a too bad idea and while still waiting on an answer about the reset I really appretiate the step to talk about ideas about fractals with your playerbase:)

StriderShinryu.6923:

cesmode.4257:

StriderShinryu.6923:

Reesha.7901:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Ok another brainstorm idea.

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

Chris

Yes please, or even better:
All pieces could be crafted and sold on the TP.
All pieces could change stats.
All pieces could be obtained outside crafting without relying on RNG.

Absolutely. Once again, no reason at all to restrict gathering of high tier gear to any one method of acquisition. Allow all pieces to be bought and sold. Allow all pieces to be traded for using a variety of the in game currencies that are already in place (dungeon tokens, karma, laurels, glory, etc.)

You do realize that even just one of these pieces will run well over 50 gold….Im thinking closer to 100. For one piece. If people have that much gold on hand, you might as well just buy your precursor as well while youre at it.

Whats interesting to think about is that if this went live and people started buying ascended gear off the TP, these are most likely going to be the people who have their legendaries already, and probably multiple legendariesalready because they have fat wallets in the real world and able to buy gems. Its amazing… people complain about legendaries being tradeable on the TP, but this would be acceptable?

Doing this would cause greater disparity between a RL richboy vs the normal joe, and the 24×7 farmer and the normal joe.

That’s under the assumption that purchasing on the TP would be the only other way to acquire the gear. If you could get it in a variety of other ways (say with those Guild Commendations sitting in your bank, or with that pile of Karma you’ve been accumulating since launch) then the demand would not be there to support extremely high prices on the TP. Or, even if the prices remained high, there would be other ways to get the gear without paying through the nose for it.

Sure you could say TP acquisiton would still be something that supports Richie Rich and the Wallet Warriors, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but as long as that’s not the only way to reach that destination I don’t see it as that big of an issue. If someone wants to spend hundreds of dollars on something I can just buy with karma, laurels and dungeon tokens, then I’ll be laughing instead of angry.

Well, this goes without saying. However, Chris only mentioned the TP being the other addditional source aside from crafting. Had he said crafting, meta chests, dungeon chests(even though they are there but increase the drop rate), guild commendations etc…thats a different story.

But if youre still forced to choose between crafting or purchasing off the TP, it doesn’t solve anything. Its just another avenue for the rich to get a step ahead.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I think it would be cool if we can get a proposal together for treatment of stat based evolution as it currently stands in the game

I’m just tossing this out there to spawn thought, not sure I like it in the form I’m writing it, but I like the general direction.

There’s seems to be a lot of consensus that divorcing stat combos from gear is welcome.
So let’s take all the stat bonuses from gear, and toss it into a giant pool.

Then we allow people to pick how they split their stats up into Power/Precision/Toughness/etc. (oh, and have Critical Damage work like Precision where X many pts nets another 1%) However, we don’t want everyone roaming around with 100% of their points in Power, so we’ll borrow from GW1 Attribute Points , and how the points where split up there, and have a cap on each, and at the same have it where the higher you go, the less benefit you get from each additional point. (I leave the task of balancing the progression curves as an exercise for the developer.)

For the new player, this could be… overwhelming. So have pre-bundled distributions available to them, with familar names. “Berserker’s” would mean “40% Power, 30% Precision, 30% Critical Damage”, “Celestial” would mean “14% in everything”

How to Interface it? Well, go a step further, and separate the attr pts from traitlines, and toss them into the pool. (Every skilled player out there I know picks traits based on the traits, not the stats). Then have a couple different of the +/- sliders on the screen. One for traits, and one for attribute pts.
Wanna try a new build? Go to your local profession trainer, and pay your 3s50c.

However, we got a lot of gear out there, with stats already on them. We also don’t want to totally hose over the crafting system, where having the different stat splits are essential. So let’s have it where gear can have “pre-allocated” attribute points and “unallocated” attribute points. The ratio of pre-allocated to unallocated points would vary with item tier. Basic/Fine: 100% pre-allocated. Masterwork: 80%, Fine: 60%, Exotic: 40%, Ascended: 20%, Legendary: 0%. (Note: even in 100% Fine gear, a player would be able to learn the mechanics of the system since they’d have the attr pts from the traitlines to play with)
Example:
Zojja’s Reaver (Ascended Axe) would have 40/30/30pts allocated to Pwr/Prec/Crit and 400pts unallocated.
An Exotic Berserker’s Axe would have 80/60/60 allocated, 300 unallocated.

Thus, as a character progresses into rarer gear, they are less “locked into” a stat combo, but also assume more responsibility for their own fate. It’s also more of an incentive for people to acquire the gear.

As horizontal progression, I’d love to be able yo switch the stats of my armor just like the legendary weapons. Also the same mechanism for the sigils and runes, where you can switch them again and again instead of those inventory slots used for alternate weapons with only a different sigil, or those piles of sub par rare sigils.

cesmode.4257:

Im simply amazed at the amount of people that are opposed to vertical progression being confined to FoTM. If you think about it, it is the only place ascended gear is required(currently). So why does a stat increase even need to exist outside of it?

If ascended stats were confined to fractals, then the rest of us who may not want to step foot into fractals would not need to worry about power creep or a treadmill in the open world.

Im very much in favor of this and again, Im amazed that people are against it.

Well in that case I would like to know what happens to all the gold that has become wasted.

The problem with that sort of change is that we are having this conversation after the fact. Trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle isn’t going to work very well. It will simply breed more distrust for any changes the developers make in the future. Personally I find the level of distrust high enough as it is.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

So therefore the idea of statistical power creep is redundant?

I think “harmful” is a better word here than “redundant.” You can see this now in gw2 where Lv80 blue and green gear will provide less than npc prices on the trading post. It’s like that because it’s those items were made useless via exotic, ascended and legendary gear. With skills especially, it’s worse because those skills take more effort to make than an item with the same appearance as an item from lv10.

Thus all progression must be complimentary, enhancing your current roles, perhaps creating new ones rather than just making you more powerful.

This feels wrong to me. I think it’s “complimentary.” I don’t care that wvw progression doesn’t help me kill a world boss. Having different progessions that don’t stack with each other isn’t a bad thing.

For me, I want a system where I decide what style of play and focus the class towards it (within reason). I started playing an ele because I liked dagger/dagger’s battle mage style since it had both fire, melee, and reacting with 4 elements/conjures. The system should let me develop that without being forced into ~10 step rotations to pull off a single attack or to help others. But the current setup leads to a lot of dead ends instead.

Note that I’ve experienced similar issues with Necros (trying to mix wells + daggers). This is not just an ele thing.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

What if certain pieces of ascended gear could be crafted and sold on the TP such as gloves and boots?

I think there would be considerable confusion as to why only some items could be sold and not others. This feels like an all or nothing trait on thought as there’s no reason to single out certain items, especially when it comes to weapons.

That last bit sounds quite useful. A lot of the time you can get by on a handful of pre-allocated stats so it means less worry for re-traiting even before acquiring optimal equipment.