Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone, I’ve been a player for Guild Wars 2 since Beta. I’ve played the aspect of the game a lot, always falling down to my favorite PvE and WvWvW.

I’ve come across some ideas.

After my time hunting down events with the occasional “Where’s the train” always popping up in map chat. After my time seeking dungeon runs that always involve skipping over content, bosses, and loot. After my time when I realize that people have revolved around the fact that ‘Zerker’ is always the way to go.

This is ONE idea.

We as players enjoy variety in the roles of Guild Wars 2. We no longer have a trinity, we now have 3 new roles.

Damage. Support. Control.

The Damage role has been seen as the all-mighty role above the others to a point where Damage has become the Support and the Control.

Support and Control are valuable, we are glad that practically all of our professions can do each role. Yet, for example, a Support Guardian will never out-damage a Damage Guardian. Yet wouldn’t this fall in the tree of Tank/DPS/Heal? Anet wanted something different. What we as players want is to see the Support and Control tree as useful as the Damage tree. But that serves up the million dollar question doesn’kitten

-What Mechanics can Arenanet add in order to stop everyone from always going into absolute Damage and instead find an equal role in Support and Control?-

Well.. what options can there be? I’m sure there’s a thousand ideas that can be thought up.. but this is mine.

We have Statistics with our characters. Power, Precision, Toughness, all of that. From my own opinion, the Toughness and Healing tree has not become as useful as they should, or as we witness in other games. BUT! Is that really a problem? If Toughness worked as your character taking less damage from a hit. Or if Healing made your healing spells twice as powerful. Then Arenanet would of brought back the Tank/Heal/DPS tree. What could they change?

What if every Stat that once it reached a specific threshold, it granted the character something? What if, this threshold not only affected your character, but the mechanics and the environment around them?

I will mainly list examples…

A Guardian in full Knight’s Gear plays as an Altruistic Healer, he does a lot of shouts and gives a lot of boons. This is how his Trait-build is setup. What if there is a threshold he hit, where having 2,000+ Toughness has unlocked a bonus for his set profession. This bonus could be that his boons now last 50% longer? Or that his Boons give his fellow allies a 1% damage increase per boon? These are only examples.

But what if instead of Toughness, he hit 2,000+ Vitality? Well then, because he is a Guardian, he has gained an ability where Critical strikes against him are reduced by 30%?

What about 2,000+ Healing power? His weapon skills are now reduced by 20%?

What about 2,000+ condition damage? His burning condition now also causes vulnerability on the target? Again, these are only examples.

I know what you’re thinking, some of these could almost be like having an extra 10 points in your trait-build right? Well, the mechanics can always change, they can even be completely new and interact with the environment. But as I got to thinking about this, it lead me to an idea involving WvWvW…

What if these Stat Thresholds affected more? Like the Siege Equipment we use? Let’s look into it.

Say a Zerker hops on a Ballistae. He his the Precision Threshold, and this makes it where the bolts he fires can go much farther.

But if a Tougher (Toughness Threshold) hops on a ballistae, is creates a dome around him and the ballistae that doesn’t allow projectiles to hit them.

What about a Vits (Vitality Threshold)? This could make the Ballistae gain 3x as much health.

Now this wouldn’t be Profession based! It would just be based on Statistic Threshold. This could also introduce a series of new siege weapons and mechanics. Let me guys show you an example of a WvWvW battle that could happen…

A mass of Zerkers head for a Tower Keep with only 10 defenders. A Vitality Threshold defender creates an arrow cart increasing its Hp and now firing down on the Zerg. A Condition Power Defender creates an arrow cart, firing down on the zerg with a 50% chance to create a random condition on its enemies (Threshold Bonus).

The Toughness Threshold defender hops on the Oil Cauldron, creating the Protection dome and laying waist to those at the gates. The Zerker Zerg is not looking good, luckily some Healing Threshold players on their team arrived with Two golems. Because of their Healing Power Threshold, each of their Golem’s attacks also causes an AoE cleanse to help with the Conditions.

A Condition Power player who is attacking the fort sets up a Ballistae and hops on. His CP threshold has unlocked it to where the Ballistae bolts do 2x more dmg to Siege. He can’t hit the cauldron because of the Tougher, but he takes out the Arrow carts.

As you can see, it narrows down the battle to where more Tactic and a variety of Stats is involved to get the upper-hand. But what if this happens..

What if an entire line of Toughers hop on all of the Siege equipment, causing domes to protect them from all projectiles? Well, this could be changed where specific Siege equipment will give a dome bonus and that is ONLY projectiles. AoE can still damage it, along with Melee. Perhaps a Condition Damage Threshold creates a Catapult, his threshold unlocks it wherever the catapult hits creates a damaging AoE? Again, it’s about Strategy.

Lingering into PvE, what could change about it? How could this change Dungeons or Champ-Trains? Very little.. unless new mechanics and Environment mechanics become involved. Every time I play the game, I run around and see an item laying on the ground that I can pick up and use. Whether this is a boulder or feathers, it grants me something new. Well, what if more of these items showed up and grants you new abilities based on your Profession AND your Threshold? What if an Elementalist picks up a boulder and his Stat Threshold causes it to do a Knockdown AoE? What if a Guardian picking up feathers with a Healing Power Threshold grants mass swiftness to his allies?

Imagine a dungeon with a new series of environment items and mechanics. Where a Tougher Guardian has unlocked a 3,000+ Toughness threshold, sure he’d be tough.. but then we still have the question. How can this make him as useful compared to a Damage Guardian? Players love seeing those high numbers, but Anet doesn’t want to turn the Damage/Support/Control tree in a Tank/Heal/DPS tree.

What can a Tougher Guardian do in damage that a Damage Guardian can do but to not treat him as doing damage greater than the role of a Damage Guardian? Well, perhaps his toughness threshold, for being so high, gives him a chance that when hit he grants his allies Aegis? Or if every one of his boons also increases damage output by 2%? Or when hit, the enemies around him become immobilized for 5 seconds?

Many of these ideas I’ve seen from the Traits, I know. But I didn’t spend the whole day thinking of ideas. I am merely seeing this as a way to build Variety, especially in WvWvW.

Now I’m sure there are HUNDREDS of ideas that can be thought up, but they need to stay into Damage/Support/Control. Support and Control need to be seen as useful as Damage can be. But with new mechanics, it can not only change how damage is treated but also how a player can become all 3 roles in his own style of playing.

What if bosses in Dungeons didn’t just have increased health, but had such mechanics where complete Zerker damage just couldn’t keep up? But if they had a Condition Damager Threshold Necromancer that unlocked the bonus where every condition on an enemy increases the damage against him by 1% per condition? Or that a Healing Power Threshold Necromancer not only has the base of more healing, but has unlocked the bonus of treating his allies with a Lifesteal aura, giving his allies a Lifesteal attack every kittens?

It’s the different combinations that could be put in, not to mention a series of Tiers per combination. These are only example numbers..

Tier One = 2,000+ Stat

Tier Two = 2,500+ Stat

Tier Three = 3,000+ Stat.

This leads to where combination Thresholds can be made. This also leads to a question a friend told me… “What about Celestial Players?”

Well, Celestial was quite tricky. Would they have ALL Powers but be only locked on Tier 1 because they couldn’t get any higher with their thresholds? Would the have their own base bonus of say 20% cooldown reduction on all weapon skills or abilities? Would they not be grant a bonus?

I’m not too sure on it, after all.. I only thought up this idea today. But I told you only ONE of my ideas. One of Two…

This is my SECOND idea…

Simply put, we all see a bunch of Champion Trains in every map. What they do is quite as simple as it sounds.. they gather up and run around the map like a train killing Champions for the loot.

Nothing wrong with this.. but.. it has created a slight problem. Champions exist in all zones, including beginner zones. Thus beginner players have come to believe that this is the way Guild wars 2 is played. What can change? Not a whole lot.. but.. this is an idea.

Every Map has a series of many many events. Some have Meta-Events. One of my favorite Meta-Events to this very day are the ones involving Orr. Specifically, the Gates of Arah. Why? I love that we as players are given a choice to do a series of events that when successful unlocks new mechanics and bonuses towards the Meta-Event.

What if it was like this for all the Maps? I’m not saying put a Gate of Arah in each map, but to allow all maps to have a prime Meta-Event that is affected by previous events. But wait, we already have those don’t we? Harathi Highlands? Diessa Plateau? Cursed Shore? Well.. yes we do, but they still don’t seem to bring the desire for players to do them compared to something like the Shatterer, Claw of Jormag, or the infamous Tequatl.

What can be done? A few things.. one… better rewards. A huge Champion should be given to each map, not just a handful. And every bonus Champion should have his own kind of mechanics that of course is in dire need of the different Stat Threshold Players then just a huge Zerg of Zerkers. ( I’m talking for example how a Tougher on a turret firing at Tequatl would take less damage, or a “Healer” would have the turret ability cooldowns reduced. )

This lead me to another ‘phase’ of the idea.. what if players involved in doing all of these events are given a big end bonus? It’s not rated on the damage output they do, but the INVOLVEMENT. We all know of the Bronze/Silver/Gold reward you get when completing an event yes? Well, what if you got +10 gold rewards for all of the events involved with the Meta? Wouldn’t that give you not only the bonus chest at the end, but a big fat handful of rewards for practically being there and helping 100% of the time?

What if someone just got the simple Bronze metals for only 2/10 of the events but fought the big end Boss? Sure, he gets the chest.. he didn’t help as much, but hey.. he didn’t get as much of a big bonus reward as you did!

Wouldn’t this create more involvement in events? What if Arenanet gave an event for practically -all- of the Champions in the maps? Sure, players would have to do the events, but what if those events were all linked towards the Big End Boss who gives practically the same loot as the Dragons do but.. well, just a bit smaller because let’s face it, they are NOT Dragons.

Sure, we’d still have the Champion Train.. but we also have given Event involvement, a huge bonus to players who gave their 100% time to the event, and also a cool new Boss with new mechanics!

What else could be done? What if everyone failed… well, this probably will NOT happen.. but this is ONLY an example. Say you are in Frostgorge Sound and everyone has gotten killed by the Claw of Jormag (Due to his new mechanics). Would we just have to start over on events? Well, they could be on a set timer as they already are on now, but what about the zone? What if because the Claw of Jormag was totally undefeated, a HUGE blizzard now takes up the ENTIRE zone of Frostgorge Sound! This causes the Dragon to fly around, spitting down the large chunks of ice spawning Icebrood that are practically attacking almost ALL of the settlements! This can go on until we do the events to take back the settlements and bring the Dragon down again until we kill it!

So in a way, this gives 2 series of multiple events. Winning the Big Boss or Failing the Big Boss. This changes the environment (Which Anet likes but on a bigger scale) which gives us a NEW kind of interaction in the map. And that is only ONE map. Could this give us the motivation to return to the other maps? Do we really want Blizzards roaming all along the Shiverpeaks? Or firestorms causing balls of fire to rain down in Ascalon? Or giant rainstorms that flood the settlements in Maguuma? Or Pirate ships roaming the waters of Kryta, sending out pirates to attack and burn villages and settlements?

I would like to hear all your thoughts. Would this bring back the balance of Damage/Support/Control being useful and needing each other? Could this create a better play-style and new strategy in WvWvW? Could this bring back the play in Maps and create a new Dynamic Outcome for us?

You decide… This is Our Story.

Kinda sorta related to your second thought…

Anet has always thrown around their “dynamic events” phrase left and right. But really they aren’t so dynamic when you can count on them to do the same thing over and over and over again. Like right now I bet you can go into snowden drifts and find the same events in the same state they are always in because nobody EVER goes there except for map completion on alts, or if you are new.

But what if there was a definite punishment for not succeeding in even the most trivial dynamic event? In wayfarer foothills if someone is not around to stop the stampeding minotaurs they shouldn’t just run in circles for hours on end until someone shows up and single handedly kills them all. After a certain amount of time that an event runs without being beaten, or if an event fails certain number of times in a row it should grow into a an event which DEMANDS player attention or the consequences would be actually consequential.

For example, I will stick with wayfarers foothills because I can remember a lot of those events offhand easily.

In wayfarer foothills the maw gets more than enough attention, this is good it is the big meta event after all. But what would happen if nobody ever collected enough meat for Gareth’s lodge? Or worse, if someone succeeded in the meat collection and killing the animal for the head mount BUT nobody ever stopped the bears from rampaging through Victors Point? Right now the bears just sit there waiting, and nothing punishing ever comes of it. What if the bears started to take over? Victors Point suddenly becomes uninhabited and the entire area between the mountain to the south and Twinspur Haven to the north is impassable without defeating HORDES of veteran bears. Not necessarily this example, but what if some other punishment event got so out of hand that it threatened something outside that map? What if the Maw meta event is not progressed? What is to stop the Shaman from summoning some horrific effigy that will attack Hoelbrak?! Imagine having to free Hoelbrak from Svanir control!

Each map could be split into zones such that these punishing failure chains do not overlap but serve to lock down large areas of the map as punishment for players not keeping the map in peaceful operating order. This would open the door for new events related to old familiar content, more chained events, and a way to force people to re-engage old content to get to what we have gotten used to as the “safe” same old map. I would like to think that with proper scaling event these punishment events could be beaten back to the safe event mode by a single person but it should be something that brings people back to our wasteland zones that are empty, and shakes things up in corners of zones that are void of life due to lack of rewards.

@OP: Your first suggestion sounds really familiar. Mostly because it is essentially the trait system: you have a certain amount of points to spend, and as you spend those points you gain access to more and different abilities the more you invest in a single trait. But, those trait lines aren’t necessarily DPS related.

As for extending trait abilities to the actual gear involved… I’m not so sure. I do know that the idea of statistical benchmark requirements is something used a lot in different games, but I’m not sure it is right for GW2. Gear itself is difficult to swap out, and can become expensive as you try more and more builds.

It was always my understanding with GW2’s build system that different stat loadouts weren’t meant to make roles, but to allow for preferences. Choosing between similar gear (solider, knight, valkyrie, assassin, berserker) was all meant to accomplish a main goal: how you like to play the class. You’ll have access to the same utilities and weapons, and so the gear choice is there to reinforce how you’d like to fulfill that same “role”. The traits themselves have a relatively minor impact on build stats themselves, and with a free-form selection of utilities and weapons, the flexibility of the build system is its strength.

Benchmarks reduce that flexibility to a large degree. Also, currently without additional benchmarks, most classes can run pure DPS fairly easily already. Adding further support or further control through alternate stat investment won’t be well received, because there simply isn’t a demand for more support or control as a whole. You’d need to have a demand for such additions before adding them.

@Kortam: A good rule of thumb to go by is this: punishment causes aversion.

When the punishments for failing events are severe and limiting, this doesn’t cause people to complete the event. It causes people to shy away from that area, instead gathering in one spot where all the events are already completed en mass. The end result being that these events are abandoned completely, and exist only to ambush newbies who wander into an area.

This is called negative reinforcement: instead of rewarding a player for doing something, you are punishing a player for not doing something. In general this isn’t healthy for one’s psyche, and years of aversion therapy testing can attest to that. It is the most sadistic way of getting a player to play the game. I’ve played games that did this, and I can happily say that I will never go back to them. Heck, I once played an MMO that would automatically disband your clan if you didn’t get enough people to log in regularly and grind materials for the base…

Make an npc with 1,000,000 hp and 3k armor that does 20k dmg per hit to zerker.

No stability and no defiant. It attacks around the speed of two staff 1 for guard per hit.

Now you need support and control, no CC or aegis or immob = you die.

@ Blood Red

Perhaps my use of the word Punishment was too strong of a descriptor. Really what I described is not out of the scope of events as they are now, but what I want to try to get them to do is be used in a way to make interesting and drastic changes to map zones based on player contribution.

Right now when a zone has very little to no player contribution life goes on as if nobody cares. Those tamini, dredge, grawl, skritt can attack those villages they normally do a BILLION times with ZERO adverse affect because once one player walks up that silly event is still running like nobody was ever there. Worst case you may have a few dead npc’s that need reviving or a shack that needs rebuilding. Then life in Tyria is back on track and nobody knows anything bad ever happened.

What I am suggesting is just an extension of the normal dynamic events such that you have a firm grasp on the fact that if players do not contribute in an area, things will change for the worse. Whats that can’t run a champ train in Queensdale because the Tamini own the entire map because nobody has done the events in east queensdale in 4 hours, well i guess the train needs to reroute and do some tamini killing to get things back on track then. Your server hasn’t beaten Tequatl in a week…. do you think a dragon is just going to up and fly off when he isn’t defeated?! HELL NO! He needs to raze that map to the ground, corrupt everything in sight, destroy every structure on the map and keep doing so until players decide hey we should kill that dragon already.

To dwell on that example for a second… I hate Tequatl, but in a good way I suppose. I hate him and the fight because I want to do it but I have not put forth the effort I need to in order to defeat him because I don’t think it is worth it. Personally its because the reward sounds too small for the effort, but also because I have to go out of my way to organize with others, more than 4 others and outside wvw, in an open world event to do a boss fight. But if he were to take over that map because my server never fights him, I would go check out what new different events and big fight had to be done to try to reset everything. If only for the fact that is new and different and could be interesting.

I would think such drastic changes would lure people in at first just like any other new changes to content would, because well it would be new and fresh. Its not like you would not be rewarded for overcoming these obstacles, not at all. You would still be getting loot for killing things. Im sure players would manipulate what happens just like any other aspect of the game, “hmmm if we fail this event10X, we get THIS event, and that ones more fun” or more rewarding. But what it would definitely not be is the same old empty mapped staleness I believe. Because really, why are the empty maps empty? No easy fast loot, and because they are old and boring. Loot is an easy fix, because loot is getting close to equal no matter what you do in the game over a period of equal time. The new content, which is what this would be, addresses the other problem.

This isn’t even really something different or new for the game when you stand back and look at it. It is just a viewpoint of a way to refresh all old maps content with new content in order to stimulate the existing playerbase that is stuck in their bored daily routine, save for that 2 day period when they run around to do new LS content.