Guild Wars 2

I know it’s late to discuss this, at this stage of the development process, but anyways:

Welp, what is PvE progression in Gw2?
First of all, what is progression at all in MMO’s?
Progression is the virtual experience of going further, accomplishing/exploring harder and/or different tasks/content and working towards improving and empowering the own character.

How is this accomplished by MMO’s like WoW and most of its clones?
1.) Provide a variable leveling experience (many zones, classes, quests). Introcude more complex class-mechanics step by step, to properly prepare the player for their usage.
2.) Provide challenging 5-man content to learn basic boss-mechanics and the end-game identity of your class.
3,) Provide challenging content for bigger groups, requiring solid knowledge of your class, preparation & communication.
4.) Provide achievements & titles for completing this content, allowing you to brag with your character, and set yourself above others, depending on how challenging the content was you’ve cleared. This also allows a group of players to form a sense of solidarity towards each other (guilds), as well as providing measure standards for the success of a PvE guild. (“We cleared this, we stronk, bow before us and beg for invites”)
5.) Constantly introduce new stages of complex raid-content (raid tiers), along with new raid-gear so people can constantly progress & develop their skill / equipment / bragging rights.
This conect is called the gear-treadmill. And it#s highly effective for keeping players engaged with their MMO of choice, since they can not only feel their personal progression, but also measure & share it.

So, how does Gw2’s PvE progression look like?
1.) Enjoy the well-made leveling experience via world completion (alternately grind your way to 80 in PvP or Eotm). The fact that there are easy and fast short-cuts to lvl 80 especially for new players, without a lvl 80 character yet on their acc, nullifies most of the learning experience, resulting in a majority of players, who don’t understand their class, nor most parts of the game – not because they’re lazy or dumb, but because they got tricked & robbed off their training by the shortcut.
2.) Gw2 has 5-man content. But since players are simply overpowered in comparison to the trash and bosses in dungeons, the mentality of stack-clearing has spread throughout the whole game, not because it’s easier for vets, but also because newcomers never felt pressured to learn it differently. And sadly, our powerful characters get away with it, regardless how bad we are as a player. The only boss that punishes a lack of knowledge or skill is lupicus, and there are people who solo him. This has led to 5-man content being trivial in terms of what one can brag about.
3.) We don’t have raids. We have fractals, another form of 5-man content, able to be trash-skipped & stack-tanked in most of its maps. the only “difficulty” is the agony-check, but as long as you have enough agony infusions, and know the right tactics, lvl 50 fractals can be cleared in 20-30min. (Or much faster, if you look into some of DnT’s speedrun records.)
4.) We only have 2 titles: Dungeon master, indicating that we cleared all the trivial content at least once & dungeoneer, indicating that we’ve cleared all the trivial content a good load of times. We can not brag, AP are not accounting for the bug in front of a players PC, and when we decide to brag (to make guild-invites and recruitment-messages more appealing), we naturally receive ironic or toxic responses, explaining how insignificant dungeons and fractals are. But since it’s this way, no-one is bragging about it anyways, leaving us with a bunch of PvE guilds that are either try-hard guilds, or a vast majority of guilds that you’ll never hear of again. There is no competition in the PvE portion of the game. there are no world first-achievements, and there is no one that would care anyways, since we have a mega-server (which is overall a good thing), and the content being as trivial as it is.
Therefore we can scratch 5.) right of the bat. You need ascended gear for the agony-checks in fractals. if this artificial border were not their, there would be no reason whatsoever to ever touch ascended gear, given its price-performance ratio. (Keep in mind that every little stat-increase can save your cat in WvW, this is a analysis, purely from a PvE POV, also speed-runners usual mantra “SECONDS COUNT”)

So, will the new mastery PvE Mastery-system fix that for HoT?
Temporarily. In the beginning you’ll be happy for every mastery-point you get, so your gliders let you travel further, and you can unlock bonus-content (like this speechcraft check for the native NPC’s). But this progress is acc-bound. So burn trough it once, and you’re done. No gearing up and making other characters xpac-ready. Bring them on 80, slap some exotics on them, done.

To fix these issues, 4 things must happen for HoT:
- Deactivate Eotm / WvW for acc’s that don’t have at least 1 lvl 80 character (this still allows you to enter them freely after you’ve got your first char on 80 with all following toons).
- Introduce actually challenging instanced content, forcing people to learn about their class, organize themselves with fellow players, and learn the encounters. Preferably make it 10man & more, but at least make sure that groups of any size can’t skip and stack-tank their way trough it. Keep in mind, if it takes less than half a hour to clear it, you did it wrong. Also Making Trash & Bosses able to sense you when you’re in stealth & too close, would be a start to fix skipping.
- Introduce meaningful rewards for this content, in form of titles, achievements, and rare acc-bound skins with decent drop-rates. Alternatively introduce the ability to buy unique, acc-bound skins for a huge amounts of badges, decently reflecting the amount of effort one went trough to purchase it. This also includes the negation of path-selling, by introducing “attunements” for each instance, forcing you to have participated in a certain amount of events inside the instance to get rewarded with the badges and bonus chest.
- Regularly introduce new instanced content, and since you dislike the idea of a gear-treadmill, make sure that each new instanced content tier comes with unique titles / achievements, unique & new encounters, as well as thematically fitting, acc-bound skins.

We maybe don’t have a gear-treadmill, but at least the looks of our gear should reflect our accomplishments independent from our gold-amount.

Ty for giving us instanced 1-man challenges. At least it shows you see the Problem, but they are not enough by far, given that this is not a single-player game, but a MMO. They will not really fix many of the issues ith Gw2’s current PvE progression.

And sorry for the bad grammar.
Got a tooth pulled by my dentist today, and due to the partial sedation, I must have had several brain-farts while typing…
Also too lazy now to fix most of that mess

I skipped everything above to sum this up…. there are 2 types of progressions in game. One where you make numbers go bigger, and ones that bring new experiences.

Numbers are cheap, hence why they get used a lot. And when you run out of numbers, you add an order of magnitude and simply keep it going.

Then there are experiences, which are harder to do, and ultimately finite within any frame work. While much better, you can’t get as much mileage out of it.

Now skimming over your post, I wanna point out 2 things….. Carrot on a Stick, Time gating, and artificial barriers are NOT progression. They are literally the opposite of progression. And forcing people doesn’t make it more enjoyable. It only makes the situation worse by putting sole emphasis on the rewards schedule rather then the activity. Consider the entire design of Silverwaste, and how only staggered unlock caused to us to hate events (within the same event chain mind you) that we previously took some enjoyment out of.

The trap we need to get out of is “needing progress” or “looking to rewards”, when the game play itself should be fun. I would give more credit to the sPvP community, if they weren’t just as toxic as the other hyper competitive areas of the game.