Guild Wars 2

Delaying giving new players downed state will just increase their confusion – that is how it seems to me. I will explain why below. I also want to say that we should have an option to opt out of this, if nothing else – otherwise, you are artificially limiting our capability when making alts, not unlike the trait changes.

Why the delay will be confusing:
In most MMOs that I’ve played, when you die, you die. There is no downed state. There is no chance to recover. You are dead and you have to go through whatever “respawn” process the game gives you.

The first time I got downed in GW2, I knew immediately that this game was different in that regard. I knew exactly what to expect, “When I die, I can potentially recover from it.” Had my first downed been before level 5 with this upcoming change, I would have thought that this is another game where you die and then you respawn and it’s over.

Then I would have been confused to see that I magically get the opportunity to experience an entirely different death system at level 5. The reason being that the expectations are already set after that first “downed/dead” experience.

If you want the system to be more clear:
Change the UI, honestly. The downed skills are all red skills with nothing particularly discernible about them, other than reading the entire tooltip as your health drains away.

You could do this by changing the ability pictures themselves – for example, a healing symbol for the 4th skill. You could change the colors (e.g. healing is green, auto attack is red, utility is yellow). The possibilities are extensive and I’m probably scratching the surface on how you could do it.

In summary:
I know you want people to understand how the downed state works, but there are ways to do it that won’t put veterans through unnecessary pain and/or potentially cause further confusion and mangled expectations among new players.

Please learn from what happened with the trait system. You can do better than this.