Guild Wars 2

If Guild Wars 2 has one glaring problem, it’s the current Itemization System. There are currently a variety of Stats which are incredibly confusing. Not only are they confusing, they are also redundant – people will select the best combination of Stats at any given moment. This means that the vast majority of Stats are irrelevant. The current Guild Wars 2 Stats system creates the following issues:

1. Players have to regear if they want to try a different build. If you have Power oriented gear, you will need to buy a whole new wardrobe if you want to try a condition oriented spec. This puts up a large wall for those who want to try new play styles. This is not fun or necessary. Having this wall adds nothing to the player experience. One of GW1’s strengths was its flexibilities. It was possible to try out any build in the game at any time (provided the skills were unlocked). There was not an itemization wall that locked certain players out of certain builds or content.

2. It is incredibly confusing for new players to the game or a given class. New players have to figure out what they mean, and what the most optimal stats will be for them. Furthermore, as they try out new weapons they will likely find that their gear does not support these weapons – so they stick with their current weapons and miss out on a lot of content.

3. It is incredibly difficult to balance. The plethora of Stats mean that the Devs must balance every stat combination to make sure that none or too powerful. This creates an unnecessary QAQC burden (which costs Anet real money…).

4. “The illusion of choice.” Players are going to go to metabattle and pick the best stats. Having a large variety for them to choose from just wastes Development Time.

There are a variety of solutions. Any of these would improve the itemization and make the game more fun to experienced players (who can more freely try out different builds) and new players (who will not feel overwhelmed or kitten).

1. Remove all “Stats” on items and have them all scale based on gear quality. This will make QAQC/balancing easier. It will also make it much easier for players to change builds to try out new things.

2. Have stats “selectable” in PVE just like they are in PVP. In a town, I should be able to select “stats” just like I would in PVP – using the same Prefixes. The game will them calculate what my actual stats are given the quality of my equipment.

ANet, I know that you guys work really hard and that you love your game. This QoL improvement would make the game a lot more enjoyable, and would not take a massive amount of programming effort. Furthermore, this will make the game much stickier and habit-forming to those of us who have been bitten by the GW2 bug.

If you implement an easier way to change builds (from power to condi, for example), you’ll get a lot less ‘hate’ from players on the Forums every time you release a balance patch. To be honest, the last balance patch almost made me quit the game. I play a Power Warrior, and I am no longer able to raid. I have no Vipers equipment, and I feel like I have been unnecessarily excluded from the Raid community through no fault of my own.

Please consider this implementation ANet. Any Development Time allocated to this will be offset by much greater player retention and spending.

Thank-you for reading.

Maybe you are partially right, but it’s been 5 years and I doubt anything can be changed right now… if you really want to try new builds you can try it in pvp, or buy some greens/ exotics in pve before you decide on crafting ascended stuff, also there are only two sets of gear you would eventually craft for each professions: berserker and viper gear… and that’s it (many players will say its ‘easy’ and ‘cheap’ but we all know it’s extremely frustrating and expensive to craft in for the first time)
Legendary armor provides option to stat swap you asked for so it can’t be simply translated to any other gear sadly, it’s the only thing that makes legendary a legendary (ofc there is also a skin)

I agree with the OP. I find myself sticking with a build since it not only means getting new gear, but also stowing away the old gear. If the stat system was simplified, or swapping stats was simplified, I would be open to experimenting. Right now it is easier to keep separate toons for each type of build. Easier stat-wise, but not easier to get them all geared and specced up.

It would be much easier to just have gear drop with random stats like they do in most games. The “predefined prefix” system does nothing but create a bunch of useless items that nobody wears and only salvages for luck and globs,

The main reason they haven’t done this is because it creates a huge market for equipment, rather than materials, and their game is built more around materials that way players dump gold into the (extremely boring and expensive) crafting system. The hundreds of gold people dump into each crafting dicipline and having to destroy and recreate any soulbound gear is far greater than the measly TP fees we’d be paying if we could just buy interesting equipment.

Try to do anything without crafting these days, you’ll be surprised just how much we’ve been forced into it, which started around the time of Mawdrey.

Completely agree with OP.

That being said, one of the main reasons to keep the current system is just that gold sink. It keeps the economy/tradepost/crafting etc going around. Also imagine how much changes must be done to the crafting and crafting receipts.

Personally been wanting an option to use PvP build system for the entire rest of the game if I wanted to for just that reason.

My own solution has been to craft Celestial stuff for most characters, and tweak out with various ascended trinkets I’ve collected, and mostly zerk weapons with a few others mixed in.

A compromise I would be able to live with:

Move all the actual stats to the trinkets. So changing trinkets changes stats. Not armor/weapons, but keep those linked to sigil/runes.

So if I have a Scepter for my guardian, I can use it for both a power and condi without having to buy another scepter with zerk/dire stats etc.

joneirikb.7506:

Completely agree with OP.
That being said, one of the main reasons to keep the current system is just that gold sink. It keeps the economy/tradepost/crafting etc going around. Also imagine how much changes must be done to the crafting and crafting receipts.

An alternative method that would would keep the economy mostly unaffected would be to require players to consume a top-level stat item (sigils, etc.) in order to permanently unlock that stat distribution for a single armor slot or weapon type. It would require some back-end work with the engine, but it would probably be doable (the game already supports items acquiring stats, it would just need to also store a list of permissions akin to the skin collections).

That way, players still need to acquire a decent amount of stat items if they want ultimate flexibility. The biggest change is just that pve players are no longer punished for experimenting.