Guild Wars 2

I wanted to talk about ideas for content in GW2 that is challenging and friendly for solo play.

Before we get into this, let’s try to avoid responses like "MMO = ‘multiplayer’. I play plenty of WvW and PvP, and some group PvE. I am not advocating that all content be soloable just as I would not advocate that all content require cooperation from other players. At this time, I would argue that most of the soloable content is relatively simple and easy, like map completion and gathering. Some dungeons and Fractals can be soloed, but they are not designed for this, and consequently I would argue they are not typically rewarding or very fun to solo. GW2 would benefit from more challenging content which is amenable to solo play. So I want to ask: are others interested in challenging solo content? And if so, what form do you think it should take? I want to present this discussion now since, with an expansion in the works, such content could be added if it is sufficiently appealing to players.

I will present two ideas of mine briefly:

1) Fractals scale with the size of the party – all the way from 1 to 5 players. This means any fractal should be made solo-able, duo-able, etc. I have played GW2 since launch but didn’t try my first Fractal until a few days ago. I did the scale 1 Urban Battleground solo, and it was awesome. The final battle against Captain Ashym was an epic duel that just became a 5v1 gang beatdown when I did the Fractal later in a party. Of course, even high scale Fractals can be solo’ed, but they generally aren’t designed to be. Scaling the Fractal to the party size may mean for example, that Fractals would either have to adjust mechanics if the number of players change in the middle of the Fractal, or NPC support (e.g. GW1 henchmen) can be hired on-the-fly- to replace players that leave group.

2) Personal Story challenges – there are some personal story and instanced living story quests which have difficult achievements and even challenge motes to increase the difficulty of the quest. However, few quests have these challenge motes, and often the achievement rewards are lackluster This system could be extended to make all relevant instanced quests optionally challenging (e.g. Challenge Motes on all quests), with the potential for increased rewards.

But what does everyone else think? Do you want more challenging content? Do you want challenging content that must be played with 5 players? 10? A zerg? Solo? All of the above?

Just make raids soloable and I will be happy. BANG problem solved. :P

You are not really asking for solo content, you are asking for more rewards for doing content solo. There is no solo content that can be made that won’t simply be trivialized by repetition. You should try solo roaming in wvw if you want repeatable solo content that will challenge you by ever changing encounters.

The problem with challenging solo content is that you either can or can’t. That’s why group content is always the “challenging” content, because it’s not balanced to challenge each individual, it’s balanced for the group as a whole, allowing for others to pick up the slack and making it easier to tune. So what you end up with is a hybrid of solo content that allows groups, however doing so essentially allows groups to trivialize the content, much like the living world achievements. Including the group size in the achievement would fix that however.

All content should scale, or at the very least, the rewards should. The problem with doing that however is the risk that good players will choose to scale down, while the bad players are stuck together. Although soloing would be more challenging, a group needs to be more rewarding as an incentive.

I’d definitely like more challenging solo content, just not in the way OP proposed.

The BEST part of GW2 ever was SAB tribulation mode and Queen’s gauntlet. Of course they were broken in the sense that you could cheeze Liadri with lifesteal and join someone just before finishing trib mode run, but if these worked as intended, it would have been amazing.
I’d like more content where others physically can’t help you and you have to carry your weight. Maybe something that will finally be working and will actually show your personal skill.

Nearly all dungeons can be done solo, with some notable exceptions. Similarly, most fractals can be soloed. Most people can’t solo champs, but some people can…and the game has a lot of champs. And, as others have noted, I’ve seen some exceptional players soloing against groups of 3-5 or more in WvW.

From my point of view, therefore, the game already has tons of solo-worthy challenges.

Regardless, as the OP notes, GW2 is an MMO and because it’s an MMO, I prefer that the developers spend most of their time developing challenging group content, whether it’s for small, medium, or large groups. For the most challenging solo content, there are plenty of single-player games.

Thanks for your responses everyone.

Justine.6351:

You are not really asking for solo content, you are asking for more rewards for doing content solo. There is no solo content that can be made that won’t simply be trivialized by repetition. You should try solo roaming in wvw if you want repeatable solo content that will challenge you by ever changing encounters.

Not quite…while I do think that content should be appropriately rewarding, I was trying to state that solo challenges don’t really exist in this game. Yes, we can solo dungeons or Fractals or champs, but since they aren’t really designed for it. This often means, for example, that a monster has HP scaled for 5 attackers and takes a long time to kill for a single player. While this certainly is challenging, it’s not necessarily fun.

I do participate in WvW frequently, and especially roaming, and I agree that it is challenging and enjoyable. I am simply proposing that that similar challenges be developed for PvE against AI opponents.

Healix.5819:

The problem with challenging solo content is that you either can or can’t. That’s why group content is always the “challenging” content, because it’s not balanced to challenge each individual, it’s balanced for the group as a whole, allowing for others to pick up the slack and making it easier to tune. So what you end up with is a hybrid of solo content that allows groups, however doing so essentially allows groups to trivialize the content, much like the living world achievements. Including the group size in the achievement would fix that however.

All content should scale, or at the very least, the rewards should. The problem with doing that however is the risk that good players will choose to scale down, while the bad players are stuck together. Although soloing would be more challenging, a group needs to be more rewarding as an incentive.

These are all fair points, and I do agree with them, though I don’t think these points are mutually exclusive with challenging solo content. As example ideas, I chose to propose content that could be done either solo or as a group (not forcing you to play it solo). E.g. challenge modes to personal story which are harder than normal, however the full story can still be completed as normal. And, of course, you can still do personal story in a party. Or Fractals which scale with the number of players so they could be solo’ed. So even if a player can’t finish the Fractal alone, they can still do the content in a group (or in a team of two if that’s how they like it, for example).

I do also agree that most content should be more rewarding in a group, though I think the difference should be fairly small.

What you are not getting is that challenging solo content would only be challenging 1-3 times and by then it would become trivial if the encounter never changes and you are only going to get better at it. If group content got scaled down to solo, people would just be getting more rewards compared to group play. That’s what happened for like 95% of gw1 when heros and hard mode were introduced, it was far easier to use heros because their builds and ai were set where as pugs had such a random menagerie of skills and experience lvl of people playing them that it made moderate content challenging.