Guild Wars 2

Suggestions by Nike. Other commentary not included (watch the video if you want to hear that).

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=721PbmPYmEg

Dungeons
-Rewards generally where they should be
-CoF P3, SE P2: examples of dungeons that rewards should be rebalanced

Other suggestions such as randomized encounters (too hard to balance for Anet team), changing boss fights (interesting for short period of time), Hard Mode from GW1 (attacking faster and/or more HP) don’t really address the issues for a long term plan.

Long term solution
-Gambits for dungeons. Stacking gambits would add to rewards multiplicatively. Comparison would be like the Fractal Instabilities. Individual instabilities for the most part aren’t too bad. 3 or 4 of them at the same time will be challenging.

Fractals
-Dredge fractal. Remove clown car. Go straight from bomb/gun path to the end boss.
-Daily loot. Gold reward should increase 10s per level instead of per tier. Level 50 would reward 5g, lvl 45 4g 50s, etc.
-Remove uninfused rings at lvl 26 as it used to be.
-Remove infused rings at lvl 40.
-Use the empty space in the loot tables from taking rings out and add a chance to drop asccended weapons, ascended armor, and fractal weapons
-Replace all ascended armors and weapons with the stat selectable boxes
-Implement the fractal weapon box where you can pick the skin
-Add the removed TA path F/U as a third tier fractal. Either change it by causing spiders to despawn on wipe in the last room or have the fractal end after the Vevina fight.
-Open up new fractal tiers each month until the end of the progression is reached.
-Datamined information showed fractals going up to 140. This can be done gradually over time.
-Increase drop rates as difficulty goes up.

Open world bosses
-Buff loot for Triple Wurm boss. Suggested amount: 20g
-New raid bosses should be new not revamps of existing bosses
-Turning current world bosses into raids will create content that the majority of players won’t be able to do. This would also remove an efficient dragonite farm for people working for ascended items.
-Create bosses for different group sizes. Boss tuned for 20, 40, 60 man groups and create a way that only your guild or group can do it.

Guild Missions
-Create new uses for guild commendations. Only real current use is to get ascended accessories or Sentinel’s gear.
-Create new uses for guild merits. Current uses not worth doing.
-Instanced raids for example.

Solo play
-Bring back Queen’s Gauntlet as permanent content
-New bosses/gauntlets periodically
-Rebalance bosses/gauntlets/rewards aggressively so if a farm such as the Deadeye farm is discovered, it is only there for a short period of time
-Provides solo players who are looking for challenges something to do that changes instead of just soloing Arah over and over.

Long term
-Elite zones
-DOW/FOW/UW type zones.
-Non linear, do objectives in any order.
-Unique rewards for each zone. Tradeable rewards
-Do all objectives for large reward. Get smaller rewards per objective completed.
-Each section difficulty comparable to a dungeon path
-Some kind of cost to open the instance.
-No waypoints. Death is a death unless rezzed by party.
-Team wipes would end the instance.
-Character swaps would spawn you in dead.

I agree 100%!

Please Anet, listen to your hardcore player base. We are the ones who have been here since the start and will keep playing until GW3 comes out (unless you don’t give us a reason to stay) .

It’s an interesting editorial.
I don’t always agree with where Nike goes with solutions, but I prettymuch always agree with the overarching problem areas and how he describes them.

In particular, I agree, dungeons do need to figure a way to keep things fresh and interesting. And glacially slow path revamps doesn’t seem to be the ticket.

You know what I’d like to see?
I think dungeons should recycle living story army content in the same way fractals recycle living story boss content.

That way dungeons have some churn to keep getting new experiences that benefit from the living story’s advancements in fight design. And you also introduce the ability to wrap up old living story rewards which gives trash mobs unique loot tables.

(Like, I can’t imagine why we couldn’t see Molten alliance in CoF and SE, or Toxic alliance in TA. And I also can’t imagine why they couldn’t rarely drop blade shards, blueprints, past living world crafting mats/recipes, etc. up to the point a new living story army came along to depose them.)

Bosses would still be in a not so hot place.
No real suggestions there.

Thanks for posting this here on the forums, too! Nice summary of the points made.

Nothing really new.

Just alot of repeated ideas, that have been already suggested many times earlier in the past. Mostly in the last CDI threads and in tons of even much older suggestion threads in the old suggestion forum aka garbage box.

I doubt that we will see anything of that list so quickly this year, unless ANet will use the rest of this year to make after the Feature Patch also at least one big Content Patch based on stuff that we discussed in the CDI’s to let us see, that the participation in these threads comes also somehow to fruition.

More “give better loots” instead of “create fun gameplay”. Why do so many suggestions come down to better bribes for doing something repetitive?

Nike.2631:

More “give better loots” instead of “create fun gameplay”. Why do so many suggestions come down to better bribes for doing something repetitive?

Because exciting game play isn’t exciting after the 100th time doing it.

So then the only reason beyond that to continue with the content would be the rewards.

GW2 at launch has had issues with time investment vs reward. Over the course of the games life span it has begun to slowly improve and thus more people are doing more things.

Also, and this is related to one of the above posters. Hardcore player’s are not the target audience of this game and never were – they make up far to small a percentage of the player base. It’s a casual game with a casual mind set thus most (not all) of the designs will be based on that ideology.

Just an FYI. If you suggest Elite Zones, the Casuals will complain that it’s too hard for them. It’s best to leave zones to be doable by all players, but just add more Elite Content within the zones.

the no wp is tricky

what happen if u fall in the lava?

This video has some excellent ideas that have been suggested by the community before, it summarises everything I want from Endgame pve in GW2, and speaks on behalf of a section of your player base which doesn’t get the time of day.

Brilliant as I and many others on reddit think these ideas are, I don’t believe that one will reach the game, I hope I’m proven wrong.

Excellent video Nike

Balsa.3951:

the no wp is tricky

what happen if u fall in the lava?

You take the consequences of falling in the lava.

Balsa.3951:

the no wp is tricky

what happen if u fall in the lava?

Your character gets deleted.

Welcome to hardcore mode.

All excellent suggestions. Sadly the most unrealistic one (FOW and UW type instances) is the most awesome one. This specifically is what’s missing in PvE imo considering how awesome it was in GW1.

Enko.6123:

-DOW/FOW/UW type zones.

I’m really looking forward to the DOW type zones. Sounds like the mobs will have great chemistry.

Please yes to Queen’s Gauntlet being up all the time. Liadri was a great fight and I’d love to have more difficult solo content. Even if it was completely instanced, there’s really no need to have a crowd watching me waiting for their turn. (or at least the option to chose)

And gambits in the dungeons is a great way to change the experience. Casual runners can still run casual paths, but there’s the option to add some flavor. Perhaps even an anti-stacking gambit? Lose X health every 3 seconds if you don’t move 300 units. It could also increase build diversity with the right gambits. Like, physical damage reduced 95%, 3x condition damage. Or, effective healing reduced 75%, healing power scales at 500%.

Adding new gambits in with patches could give plenty of new challenges to an otherwise “beaten down” path. There’s a ton of potential, but more balancing.