Guild Wars 2

As you know, Guild Wars 2, unlike many other MMOs, does not have a holy trinity. I do not think that inherently makes the PvE “worse” in any way; however, I do think there are ways ANet can improve PvE mechanics to make them feel less like DPS races and more like encounters.

For one, incorporating more factors into encounters can greatly improve PvE experiences. In Ascalonian Catacombs, The Lovers was by far the hardest part of the dungeon, and in my opinion, the most fun. The reason for the difficulty was the fact that if the two bosses were together, they would be stronger. Factors like these, instead of artificial factors like increased health and damage, make encounters more fun, challenging, and overall satisfying. Take for example Sindragosa in the Ice Crown Citadel raid in World of Warcraft. Hiding behind ice blocks, switching off tanking roles, freeing friends from ice tombs, managing debuffs — all of these were aspects to the encounter as well as the actual battle. Granted tanking in GW2 may not be possible for extended periods of time, perhaps forcing players to switch aggro more often will make for a better PvE experience.

Another idea I have is having higher difficulty settings, similar to Fractals. Instead of having an artificial difficulty like Agony, however, bosses would have more skills and abilities available to them at higher difficulty settings. The health and damage would remain the same, but there would be more attacks and more things to watch out for.

Overall, I think ANet is doing a good job. Fractals was a huge improvement to PvE in my point of view. However, I believe there is still much room for improvement.

How about you? What are your opinions?

First of all, they need to make Stories concurrent and not sequential. What does this overly complicated sentence mean? It means implementing full character storyline, full race storyline and add more Faction storylines(as a Norn you could join three usual ones+Spirit of the Wild lodges(NEW!). Character storyline would be impacted by ingame and character Creation decisions, racial storyline would be impacted by ingame decisions and your race choice(Norns fight Jormag, Humans fight centaurs and enemies within,…) and Faction storyline would be determined by ingame choices. CS and RS would go from 1 till max while FS would go from 30(perhaps 20) till the max.

Second allowing us to slot weapon skills by giving as a choice on each weapon skill slot would be rad(you could have skill 2a, skill 2b and skill 2c-all follow the theme of the weapon currently equiped). It would make whole game better.

Finally add a henchmen in. If you ever bring Heroes back, you’ll have to do mini storyline(perhaps even few) with them-Mass Effect style. The gist is, most of this Game’s combat system promises lie in the Combo skill-which is barely noticable unless in Dungeon or sPvP. Henchies would Mend that(at least I think so).

I totally agree with you. The game relies on the high hp high attack paradigm way to much. Another couple of bosses that display good mechanics are in Sorrows Embrace. 3rd boss Kudu and his golems is pretty good. The last boss is excellent tbh.

Fixing this would allow for 10 / 20 man raids to be added to the game should the devs ever decide to add them.

Well, Lovers is all about exploiting AI and doors. Meh =\

While I agree with you points, OP, I have doubts about the Anet’s ability to make exploit-proof content. And even if they will do it, it will be mostly ignored. Cause you know, cof speedruns.