Guild Wars 2

TL;DR Give players the option to under-level their character in exchange for an experience bonus, to have more challenging and engaging combat.

I would love to see the devs add some form of effective difficulty modifier for PvE content. My suggestion is basically individual difficulty setting, which could work by “under-leveling” your character, while giving you an appropriate boost in experience-gained (and possibly loot drops). Of course, the reward should scale with your contribution to each kill, so it can’t be abused by fighting alongside players at a higher difficulty/effective level.

As it stands currently, the only way to make open world PvE combat more challenging is to handicap yourself in some way (e.g. fighting with weaker/no equipment, fighting in zones above your level, soloing group mobs, etc). The problem with this is it ends up taking longer to level; It takes longer to kill mobs, but they still give the same amount of xp. While this is good for casual players, those who want a challenge have few – if any – good options (at least that I’ve found find).

So, in order to justify an increase in difficulty (and therefore time-to-kill), you have to have an appropriate increase in reward-gain. Now this should, at the very least, sufficiently offset the time added, making the average time to level about the same. But, I would like to argue it would be more prudent to actually give a greater reward. Competent players performing well at a higher difficulty should be able to earn more than average experience-per-second, and should be leveling faster, for these reasons:

• It incentivizes learning the game and developing skills (more skill = more rewards)
• If the player has proven their mastery of the current mechanics available to them, they should be ready to move on to other challenges
• It allows veteran or advanced players a fun way to level alts that isn’t grindy

I would like to add that this shouldn’t, in any way, take away from the normal leveling experience. You should be able to level at the same speed and difficulty as you can right now. That way, both hardcore and casual players are satisfied.

What prompted me to make this thread is actually my single biggest obstacle so far in getting into this game: Leveling. Every person I find says the leveling experience is one of the best parts of the game, that it shouldn’t be a grind. But so far, the combat has been so mindless it makes the whole experience feel drudgingly repetitive. Mechanics and abilities are introduced with no real impetus to actually use them. Exploring new zones gets stale fast as the novelty is introduced at way too slow of a pace for me. Leveling tasks bog-down my ability to explore; just when I’m starting to have fun moving through a new area, I venture into areas too high level for me. If I slow down to level and do stuff like hearts, it gets very dull. Too many menial tasks and un-engaging combat.

This is the simplest solution I could come up with, and I’ve found it done well in other games just as I’ve suggested. Many RPGs accomplish this by making items in the game with stats that actually boost experience gained. These stats usually result in a trade off for power, effectively acting as an increase in difficulty and reward for the player. I could see this working well in GW2 if implemented properly.

Let me know what you guys think.

Have you tried speed-leveling with dungeons. Each dungeon path clear rewards you around 0.7 level. By speed running all current dungeon paths, you can level up your alt in a few hours. It’s inarguably more challenging than exploring, doing hearts and open world events. You can also spice up the challenge by doing the run with your very under-level alt (instead of swapping to it for credit reward at the end of the path) or low-man/solo the path. Before tomes were a thing, that was how I leveled up 4-5 alts of mine.

Waaaaaaaaaaay to easy to exploit if this is open world.

Just be a “hard mode” player and team up with a fully geared player, run around and randomly tag 20% of each mob with your pathetic damage, then let him kill them instantly. If you think the reward would scale with how much you do damage, people will just find a way to tag and have mobs killed faster than the scaling.

The most they could do is give you more XP. They couldn’t give you any other rewards because people would just exploit it. It should be simple enough to increase the XP based on level difference, but the risk in doing so is people forming zergs to grind, then it’s the Queensdale train all over again where new players think the game is nothing but a grinder.

Personally, I level on hard mode naturally. It’s how you normally play when you simply play through the game. You rarely get gear as you would in other MMOs, so you’re always severely undergeared here. At around 55, I always head to the level 75+ zones for the free exotics to 80. Play condition builds if you want deadly enemies without the damage loss.

So on the one hand you say its to easy to level then complain that you dont level fast enough when you map complete, since you run into the higher level part of the zone.

You nailed the only ways we have and need to do this.
Ofcourse you do it for the challenge not the reward right?

Give me hard mode for central tyria or just let me level 50% slower, i dont need stupid rewards for it.

Iris Ng.9845:

Have you tried speed-leveling with dungeons…

Good to know, I’ll try it.

Dawdler.8521:

Waaaaaaaaaaay to easy to exploit if this is open world…

Not quite sure how that would work. If you only did 20% damage and you only get 20% of the reward, other peoples presence makes virtually no difference. The most they could do is give buffs/debuffs to increase your contribution, but keep in mind you’re still going to have to do all that damage, so it wouldn’t be a huge amount.

Healix.5819:

The most they could do is give you more XP…

Good point, limiting it to exp makes sense. Tho up until this point gear has made little difference for me, I always found fighting things my level easy regardless of gear.
I’ll give condi a try but I heard that got patched and isn’t a viable way to solo higher level mobs anymore.

scorchbomb.3750:

Dawdler.8521:

Waaaaaaaaaaay to easy to exploit if this is open world…

Not quite sure how that would work. If you only did 20% damage and you only get 20% of the reward, other peoples presence makes virtually no difference. The most they could do is give buffs/debuffs to increase your contribution, but keep in mind you’re still going to have to do all that damage, so it wouldn’t be a huge amount.

You kill lets say 1 mob every minute (100% kill) for 1000 xp…

With the help of a friend you kill 10 mobs every minute (20% kills) for 2000 xp.

Its not hard to figure out what would happen. Thats why its called farming.

scorchbomb.3750:

Iris Ng.9845:

Have you tried speed-leveling with dungeons…

Good to know, I’ll try it.

Dawdler.8521:

Waaaaaaaaaaay to easy to exploit if this is open world…

Not quite sure how that would work. If you only did 20% damage and you only get 20% of the reward, other peoples presence makes virtually no difference. The most they could do is give buffs/debuffs to increase your contribution, but keep in mind you’re still going to have to do all that damage, so it wouldn’t be a huge amount.

Healix.5819:

The most they could do is give you more XP…

Good point, limiting it to exp makes sense. Tho up until this point gear has made little difference for me, I always found fighting things my level easy regardless of gear.
I’ll give condi a try but I heard that got patched and isn’t a viable way to solo higher level mobs anymore.

You don’t get partial rewards if multiple people tag something. You get full rewards regardless of if it’s just your or 10 people attacking it.

Otherwise you wouldn’t want other people to show up because just 1 person showing up would reduce your rewards in half and I can’t think of many people who would want that to happen consistently.