Guild Wars 2

Dear devs and GW2 community,

Since the last couple of years, GW2 has gained a lot of skill-dependent late game PvE content. Which I absolutely love. I stopped playing for a while, but I am hooked once more. But. Because of this new content, I feel a specific change in the way stats are determined would do a lot of good for the game.

*What I propose is this: Armor pieces/Weapons/Trinkets yield stat point instead of prefixed stats. For example: A body piece might give you 300 stat points, which the player can then attribute to stats like vitality or precision… Higher tier gear yields more stat point of course, so people still want that ascended stuff This proposed system resembles the PvP stat system somewhat(where all stat are on your amulet I believe?), but it ensures the relevance of each piece of gear you can equip.

This way, GW2 becomes a lot more flexible when it comes to changing builds. Especially with raids/fractals on my mind: It suddenly becomes a lot easier and more fun to organize an efficient team. Also, I believe this was(and is) one of GW1’s strongest points. In GW1 messing around with different skills and builds was amazing. If this is ever implemented, loading/saving build templates like in GW1 would also be a logical step.

Furthermore I believe it fits with the GW2 design philosophy, which is all about flexibility within the individual classes. I think a change like this will reinvigorate existing content, because a lot of people haven’t really tried being efficient with different builds(mostly berserker builds it seems). I understand that legendary armor already has an option to change the stats on the fly, but I think this is not enough for the majority of players.

This is my first post and I am curious what you guys think. Are there flaws in my proposal? Does it have potential?

Thanks for reading!

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

This is my first post and I am curious what you guys think. Are there flaws in my proposal? Does it have potential?

WoW tried this with reforging of gear to move stats around. Ultimately, it turns out that even with a non-trivial penalty to stat amount for doing so, this becomes a game of:

• gear drops

• put in bags

• visit a spreadsheet or website to calculate optimal stat allocations for all gear

• reforge all gear to match

The optimal values for stat allocation were pretty much uniformly copied from websites, where they were recorded based on simulation and real world testing, in the same way that the current GW2 meta builds and so forth are.

So, the end result was that reforging was what could best be described as a “don’t suck” button that you pushed between “get gear” and “equip gear”. It added no complexity, no build diversity, no real choice between gearing, just a push-button-get-stats metagame in between the two.

If you want to know about the details and experiments they undertook, you can probably find the history over at the mmo-champions forums.

Thanks for your reply SlippyCheeze.

You make an interesting point. One I did not think through enough.

However, is it really a given that players will calculate optimal builds? Isn’t GW2 flexible enough with its skills to avoid this? For example: dmg of a certain skill ramps up so gradually, that one or two points of power don’t make that much of a difference, right?

I definitely see the problem though, as others aspects of skills might encourage player to calculate optimal stats for everything, such as manipulating stats to turn a 2 second daze into a 3 second daze…

Maybe if somehow everything related to skills would increase gradually and proportionally with these custom stats this can be avoided? It would make for an incredibly difficult update though…

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

Thanks for your reply SlippyCheeze.

You make an interesting point. One I did not think through enough.

However, is it really a given that players will calculate optimal builds? Isn’t GW2 flexible enough with its skills to avoid this?

How much use do you think do the hybrid builds get outside of pvp?
People that are good enough to know how to allocate the points (instead of assigning them randomly or leaving them at a default value) are also good enough to either find out what the best solution is, or, at least, search the internet to see the answer to this question.
And there would be an answer, because not every point allocation would be worth the same. There would be optimal choices.

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

For example: dmg of a certain skill ramps up so gradually, that one or two points of power don’t make that much of a difference, right?

Current meta build calculations are so precise to tell you the breakdown for stat infusions that would be best for the build. Each infusion is just +5 stats.

These things can be calculated.

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

However, is it really a given that players will calculate optimal builds? Isn’t GW2 flexible enough with its skills to avoid this? For example: dmg of a certain skill ramps up so gradually, that one or two points of power don’t make that much of a difference, right?

Experience from WoW says: people will still do it, anyway, despite it not being of any real world value. Alternately, you could do what they did with the random “third tier” attributes, which is devalue them to the point they are ignored, since they are otherwise just another bit of grist for the mill.

(Plus … once you have the ability to manipulate anything, there will be a theoretically optimal value calculable, at which point it becomes the “necessary” thing. See also the berserker/viper meta in PvE, and the “X is dead in raids” when they can be cleared with pretty much any composition of competent players…)

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

Maybe if somehow everything related to skills would increase gradually and proportionally with these custom stats this can be avoided? It would make for an incredibly difficult update though…

Neither of these are bad ideas. They are so good, in fact, one of the best funded and most dedicated MMO companies in the world tried them!

Sadly, that tells us that they don’t result in the gameplay you would hope, in non-trivial part because this is really a people problem — in the sense that it doesn’t matter if the difference is mathematically invisible because it is smaller than the margin of error due to human reaction time variance, people will still believe it matters.

…and the sad truth is, you can’t solve people problems with technology.

Thanks very much for these great answers.

I suppose some sort of dilemma in which players seek optimal builds through either calculations or on the internet is unavoidable.

I will say this though: GW1 did it. It was a different game altogether, but for me it wasn’t a game of downloading build templates. It was a game of trying new stuff to see what works and what doesn’t. A factor that probably contributed to this is the relatively simple stat system, where numbers were a lot lower. This way calculating was kind of obsolete, but trying things was still useful.

However I am not that nostalgic and do enjoy GW2 ofcourse ;-) It has its own merits.

Been wanting for a while that they remove the stats from weapons and armor, and focus them entirely on the trinkets. And have each of the 6 trinkets give +500 to a single stat, max +1000.

That way players could setup their own stats as they wished, in decent shaped blocks, and make it easier/cheaper to change around stats as needed. Without invalidating armors and weapons every single time etc, keep those for Runes/Sigils and skins.

It would remove some of the current fine tuning of the stats, and I know the WvW crowd is waiting for me around the corner with baseball bats for even daring to mention this. I just find the current stat system needlessly complex for the sake of complexity, which actively discourage most people from experimenting with stats and builds, simply because it isn’t fun or practical to change around everything you got.