Guild Wars 2

Abilities need to have different coefficients depending on which target they are hitting.

For example, if an ability is hitting a player (be it in WvW or SPvP) It will have different scaling and coefficients compared to what it would do upon hitting a NPC.

Let’s put it like this.

Let’s take an ability that stuns and does damage, for example the Shiro Elite, Jade Winds.

Under normal situations this ability does the following:

Damage: 399
Jade Duration: 3s
Number of Targets: 5
Radius.png Radius: 600

Here’s what i intend to change.

This ability will remain the same when attacking an NPC, however upon this ability hitting an NPC, it’s base damage will instead be either 75% of the current amount (this is just an example) and the stun duration would be half (again, just an example)

This would be a fair bit of work but would allow for the game modes to be balanced and tweaked without effecting another area of the game.

This would allow anet to fulfil their intended design of “mixing up the meta” for PvP without screwing over the PvE component of the game.

Would it be confusing for new players? Not really. A new feature could be implemented in which you could switch between the coefficients (just the tooltip, to see what the numbers are) by shift & right clicking on an ability, this would switch between showing you the numbers it would do against an NPC and player.

In the long run I feel this would help the game tremendously, as it allows Anet to balance on area of the game without any fears of it effecting another, thus screwing up the balance elsewhere, it also frees up design plans for more bosses because you don’t need to take into account the unintended effects that PvE or PvP changes on abilities could have on the opposite game mode.

Thoughts?