Guild Wars 2

Vanquishing is an activity in GW1 where you turn on hard mode and attempt to kill every single enemy in a zone. It worked in GW1 because zones were instances, and enemies did not respawn until you left the instance. For this reason, it is assumed that vanquishing simply can not exist in GW2 because uses a persistent environment.

I am here to challenge that notion! * slams hands down *

I have several methods of implementation to suggest. Hopefully at least one of them will sound appealing to Anet.

Guild Vanquish
This is a type of guild mission where a guild leader, officer, or whoever has access can walk up to a gold icon thingie (like that of a guild puzzle) and start the vanquish. It will teleport him in to an instance of that zone, and guild members can join his party to ferry themselves in. The zone can hold as many guildies as a normal open-world zone, but it’s detached from the megaserver so that randoms are not placed on the map, only people joining through parties.

The vanquish itself is a timed event. Your guild has 1 hour to clear the zone of enemies (the time can be more or less depending on the zone). The enemies won’t respawn in this map instance, but they will scale much like dynamic event bosses. So if your guild zergs, even a lowly veteran will scale up and become tough to kill. If your zerg is super strong, this might work or it might not. You can also try spreading out into small groups. The idea is to make it so that a guild group of 10 can complete it if they are good, but allow for up to 100+ to participate with a scaling that keeps it challenging.

Personal Vanquish
This is a vanquish activity that you or a party up to 5 can start by talking to a certain NPC in each zone. It will give you a special buff/debuff which adjusts your stats to make the enemies more challenging; sort of like gambits in the queens gauntlet. You might get a speed buff but also take more damage. The metrics for completing the vanquish are a little more complex in this version because it still happens in the open world. One objective is that you have to find and kill a certain number of a type of enemy, like ogres or flame legion or devourers. Next you have to locate and defeat a certain number of mini-boss-like foes which only become hostile during the vanquish; sort of like guild bounty.

The differences for this version is that it is not a guild activity, and it is confined to the zone in which you activate it. It does not necessarily have to have a time limit, but that’s not off the table. Instead of guild commendations, you earn points toward a reward track similar to the pvp reward tracks. Vanquish 3 zones and you earn a rare chest. Vanquish 12 and you earn a random exotic. Vanquish all zones in the game and you get a title. Previously vanquished zones may be vanquished again for other rewards.

Dungeon Vanquish
Last but not least! This is a new type of dungeon path. Rather than skip trash mobs and speed run to the end, the goal of this activity is (you guessed it) to kill every single enemy in the dungeon. For this unique path, all routes through a dungeon are opened, and the main bosses are not spawned. Instead its all trash mobs and mini-bosses (like the troll in AC). This type of vanquish is designed specifically for 5 players, and can be done for a daily reward at the end, much like any other dungeon path. The difference is that there is a timer for gold, silver, and bronze reward levels. Gold may be 30 minutes, silver 60 minutes, bronze after that. You can keep going back and trying to get gold as much as you like. There’s also a title for vanquishing all dungeon paths on gold.

Let me know what you guys think!

I am only a fan of your third suggestion. In fact vanquishing with scaled up rewards would be a solution (as suggested elsehwre on the forums) for the countering of speed runs and encourage people to play the dungeons to their design.

No – it was a ridiculous thing in GW1 and it would be NIGH impossible to do in this game with mostly open areas. The only reason it was possible in GW1 was that it was a totally instanced game and your party had it’s own instance of the area.

Randulf.7614:

I am only a fan of your third suggestion. In fact vanquishing with scaled up rewards would be a solution (as suggested elsehwre on the forums) for the countering of speed runs and encourage people to play the dungeons to their design.

Seconded. This game wasn’t set up for open world vanquishing, and I dislike the idea of creating instances just for parties. Dungeon vanquishing, however, or perhaps vanquishing something we don’t yet have, appeals to me.

Guild Vanquish

I can’t say I’m a fan of this idea in the proposed implemetation. At the same time, I can’t really think of another way of doing it, short of something like Scarlet’s invasions; you start the mission, and a number of armies spawn all around the map. Maybe a system where the mobs don’t become hostile as well until a guild member is in the area to prevent random people simply killng them.

Personal Vanquish

I suggested a while back that this could be combined with the journals from GW1 to have different sorts of vanquishes:

• Bestiary vanquish – kill x of a species. For example, with drakes you’d have to kill 10 reef drakes, 10 swamp drakes ect to complete that page in the journal.
• Event Vanquish – complete every individual event in an area. Rewards are based on the level of the area.

Dungeon Vanquish

No need to change anything. However, I’d say that dungeons and mobs would need to be retooled before this is implemented.

serapheles.5409:

Seconded.

First off, why not second a post that isn’t so ignorant.

This game wasn’t set up for open world vanquishing,

No it’s not, that’s why I tried to come up with variations of existing things in GW2 to make it plausible.

and I dislike the idea of creating instances just for parties.

This is a silly opinion. You make party instances every time you do a dungeon or join a pvp match.

Dungeon vanquishing, however,

See this contradicts the previous statement.

or perhaps vanquishing something we don’t yet have, appeals to me.

Indeed if they came up with a new type of content that we could vanquish, like a… zone of some sort full of non-respawning monsters… that was an instance because, well, you cant have non-respawning monsters in open world…

I mean, you see where the logic is heading here?

Sorry, I’m very nit-picky. :P

TheDaiBish.9735:

Dungeon Vanquish

No need to change anything. However, I’d say that dungeons and mobs would need to be retooled before this is implemented.

Yeah, I imagine they would need to simply replace all of the mobs with generic ones, or even new ones designed specifically for vanquishing. For example there’s a lot of gravelings in AC that despawn when you get the scepter pieces. For vanquishing there would be no scepter pieces, just an open map and mobs to kill. Furthermore it would be more fun is the packs of mobs were more interesting, such as special patrol patterns, more diverse group comp (like enemy healers) or some such things.

Xenon.4537:

TheDaiBish.9735:

Dungeon Vanquish

No need to change anything. However, I’d say that dungeons and mobs would need to be retooled before this is implemented.

Yeah, I imagine they would need to simply replace all of the mobs with generic ones, or even new ones designed specifically for vanquishing. For example there’s a lot of gravelings in AC that despawn when you get the scepter pieces. For vanquishing there would be no scepter pieces, just an open map and mobs to kill. Furthermore it would be more fun is the packs of mobs were more interesting, such as special patrol patterns, more diverse group comp (like enemy healers) or some such things.

I was thinking more about mob AI and mob group composition.

In terms of replacing and removing mobs for Vanquish mode, just ‘mark’ which mobs count towards the vanquish i.e. Mobs not tied to dungeon objectives, that are constant regardless of path.

I like the idea of a guild mission vanquish, but maybe a special instance (it could be a re-used map).

It spawns a bunch of bosses/minions and they have to be killed in a certain time frame.

I don’t know why you would have to use the /join in, seems unhandy.
Just give all the guild members who are in the area a pop-up (like with all instances)

I would also love to see a sort of arena where you and your party(5 people) have to defeat a certain amount of foes before the timer runs out, every round more mobs spawn and the rewards scale higher as well. the game ends when the party is defeated.

wouw.5837:

I like the idea of a guild mission vanquish, but maybe a special instance (it could be a re-used map).

It spawns a bunch of bosses/minions and they have to be killed in a certain time frame.

I don’t know why you would have to use the /join in, seems unhandy.
Just give all the guild members who are in the area a pop-up (like with all instances)

I would also love to see a sort of arena where you and your party(5 people) have to defeat a certain amount of foes before the timer runs out, every round more mobs spawn and the rewards scale higher as well. the game ends when the party is defeated.

These,
sound like fun.

The guild option would be good if it was set to a number of players chosen by the guild. So large guilds would have equal challenge compared to smaller guilds.

but yeah, guilds need the ability to create an instance. Would be cool to create a new mission that requires it.

Questions: Was this mode timed in GW1? What happened at disconnect?

Rouven.7409:

Questions: Was this mode timed in GW1? What happened at disconnect?

GW1 was not timed. If you disconnected you had to redo.

Rouven.7409:

Questions: Was this mode timed in GW1? What happened at disconnect?

You burst into tears

Dusty Moon.4382:

Rouven.7409:

Questions: Was this mode timed in GW1? What happened at disconnect?

GW1 was not timed. If you disconnected you had to redo.

Some maps are really large, even without respawn … not sure how long that would take?

Realistically I don’t see much of a difference between an event that sends out waves and I will kill X amount of mobs and this (other than moving the character in a sort of map-complete fashion).

Sounds to me like a not so dynamic game mode … sorry, not trying to be negative, maybe one can be more enthusiastic if he knew the original “feeling”.

Having something more to do for Guilds might be nice. Maybe once Guild Halls are out we could sort of “invade” these maps through portals.

Since all the zones are instanced anyway and not “truly an open persistent world” as many people complain, I vote they give us back our heroes and hench, nix the ‘open world’ in general and give us our own instanced zones just like in GW1. Roll it back. Then we can have our vanquishing and such back. Who needs people anyway.

(Yes there’s sarcasm in there)

I like Guild and Dungeon Vanquish.

In Guild Vanquish, the trick would be finding the right balance between scaling, number of players and the timer. It should be possible for small guilds to do this as well as large ones — remember the kitten-storm that ensued when guild missions were first implemented and small guilds felt left out. The complication here is that — since there are different numbers of mobs and different difficulty of mobs, each zone would have to be balanced separately. Also, any instanced content is going to face the question of where is the difficulty balanced. If it’s hard, more players and guilds get shut out. If it’s balanced at average player skill, then the better players will find it too easy. Since this is likely intended as more challenging content, balancing somewhere between the average and the high-end would probably be better. The game does not need hard content that isn’t.

In Dungeon Vanquish, there are fewer issues, but there are still some. I don’t think all dungeons are the same as far as numbers of mobs, so the timers might have to be tweaked separately. Also, rewards are always going to be an issue for the varied demographics in the player base.

Still, I think that a vanquish option could be designed that would add more challenging content to the game. My main concern is that ANet seems to want to shove players together to enable their “vision” of huge numbers of people in the same place fighting the same things so as to maximize particle blur. Additional instanced content is probably going to be seen as detrimental to this vision — as sad as the reality of that vision’s implementation is.