Guild Wars 2

Forgive me if this thread exist else where, but the search tool took the day off, so I figure we could refry this topic. Originally, I was going to post in Dungeons/Fract but with all the “Challenging Content” talk, and “BWE will be more difficult than ever before” why not open the discussion to all PvE content.

So what mechanics would yall like to see in the future? New mechanics, old mechanics, borrowed from other game mechanics. I liked alot of the stuff from the old CDI threads, but your ideas and explanations dont have to be as extensive. Bullets are always appreciated. Share your thoughts.

There are lots of implementations I would like to see, but start of with just 2.

Heroic Events and RNGeesus: Specified “Dynamic Events” in instanced content(i.e. dungeons,raids,etc) in which;
-RNGeesus selects player(s) to complete a task that non-selected party members can not assist in. Possibly by locking room, creating a ward, environment separation, w/e.
-Task is needed to progress to next “phase”, but can be failed.
- In case of failure, remaining Party gets a “rallying event” to complete which in turn assist the “hero(s)” originally selected.
- Bonus chest based on completion
EX.
1. P1, P2, and P3 are called upon by RNGeesus
2. P1, P2, and P3 enter 3 individual rooms with 3 individual elite/champ lvl bosses
3. In case of Failure, remaining members complete trash mob and pull lever task which debuffs bosses for easier clear
4. Bonus chest for each boss completed w/o failure

Since dungeons have been beat to death, I think this would be a nice way to add “feeling”/“meaning” to our experience. Couple this with the new A.I. and mechanics that Anet is trying to use to base content going forward and hopefully a new way to role(making zerker risk/reward “riskier?” w/ new mechanics). More loot too

- I want content that push us to use more of the current mechanic in the game. Right now we use offensive buffing, reflect, aegis and blind a lot. But condition removal is niche to specific situation, same with stability. We almost never really need vigor, weakness, protection, resistance, boons removal, etc. CC is also niche (useful in specific situation, but not often or in coordinated group). We never really need to put poison on a boss to keep his healing in check or thing like that. A lot of mechanic are just not really utilized in PvE.

- I want more impact from failure. With down state, rally and waypoint, it doesn’t really affect the party if someone down or die. You just keep dpsing with some support and if you go down, not a big deal, you’ll rally.

- Attack that are hard to mitigate, but that you are able to mitigate. Attack that you can’t mitigate are not fun, you just absorb it, it’s passive. But slow easy to spot attack isn’t really fun either. Attack like the kick from lupi really need you to focus and I want more of that kind of stuff. If you die you know why and you can try to figure out what to do better next time.

- Range of difficulty. I don’t want new content to be so hard that a lot of people won’t have fun with it, but I also want new content to be hard enough to satisfy hardcore gamers. You can’t do that with one difficulty so you should be able to select the difficulty you want and it should range widely without relying on simply buffing the hp and damage of the mobs.

- A good reward/time/difficulty ratio. Good content is nice, but if the reward isn’t worth it, it will fade away over time. Some story mode, aetherblades path and fractal are relatively good content imo, but most of them have poor reward for the time or the difficulty they impose compare to some other dungeon or silverwate for exemple. Harder content should yield a better reward than easier content.

Thaddeus.4891:

- I want content that push us to use more of the current mechanic in the game. Right now we use offensive buffing, reflect, aegis and blind a lot. But condition removal is niche to specific situation, same with stability. We almost never really need vigor, weakness, protection, resistance, boons removal, etc. CC is also niche (useful in specific situation, but not often or in coordinated group). We never really need to put poison on a boss to keep his healing in check or thing like that. A lot of mechanic are just not really utilized in PvE.

-Ditto. I know some players would rather not see AI with higher and/or random attack speeds, but I think that would increase the use/importance of vigor, protection and weakness. I would love to see more healers (i.e. Mordrem Menders) they are annoying as kitten, but turn facerollable mobs into pretty intense, which would boost the “spam” of poison

Thaddeus.4891:

- A good reward/time/difficulty ratio. Good content is nice, but if the reward isn’t worth it, it will fade away over time. Some story mode, aetherblades path and fractal are relatively good content imo, but most of them have poor reward for the time or the difficulty they impose compare to some other dungeon or silverwate for exemple. Harder content should yield a better reward than easier content.

More bonus chest…they don even have to rework tables(maybe a little) just give us more chance at something good for completing a more difficult task

I also believe GW2 is missing something that was a big draw during the original reveals. Battles and Siege. I would like to see “raid content” less like dungeon and more like a battle. Two missions I enjoyed were the defense/capture/recapture of Claw Island and Fort Trinity. It would be cool to see iconic places (to Tyria) turned into instanced raid like content. Claw Island, I think is perfect for raids. For those who know its story pre gw2, it significance is greater than the story mode.
- Replace NPCs with players; maybe a minimum of 4 full parties
- Give it Teq like coordination w/ siege and defense
- Provide Dynamic(Heroic) events for phases
- Good loot at base but Bonus chest based on how well done (think the dry top tier progression)
- Two separate versions defense and capture
I did have a longer more thorough write up for this idea, but it could be applied to any of the iconic Forts from lore or Storymode. Add the challenging A.I. to come. Could be dope.

I would like to see people stop using unnecessary apostrophes.

I like the event structure in SW, the way a lot of stuff ties together into a bigger event, almost like the whole zone is one big raid(ish).
Though it could use some tweaking, I really like the large scale of the event.

I would like to see more interesting mobs.
Note, that this does not mean mobs with tons of CC, like Orr used to be and like the Mordrem currently are, that’s a cheap mechanic that doesn’t bring anything to the fight but tedium.
Likewise the Mordrem’s extra health and frequency of Elite mobs, bullet sponges are another cheap and lazy solution.
I’m fine with good intense fights, but the more intense a fight is the shorter it needs to be.
For example, CoE, Subject Alpha, don’t remember which path, it’s basically a 10 minute DPS slog while having to perfectly time a bajillion dodges to avoid the AoE that one shot downs you and there isn’t time to rally before the next.
That is mind numbingly tedious, figure out your opponents fight pattern!
Good, now do that for an hour and you win this mid boss fight!
It’s utterly stupid, it’s perfectly possible to have good fights without having to resort to maintaining a 3 skill rotation and dodge for half an hour.
They can do it, I know they can.

Events requiring coordination, like Teq, are cool, although there could be a little tweaking.
I’d love to see the auto WP feature used in PvP for things like this as well, although there’s then the question of do you charge people for the auto WP (people would complain), or WP them for free (people would be cheapskates and wait for the timeout to avoid the pittance cost of using the WP, but I guess if it was short enough they’d at least stop scaling things up)

One interesting thing I think would be interesting for WvW would be to include some things that require coordination like Teq and TT.
Having to hit multiple places at the same time to win (although knowing this the enemy zerg would only have to defend one)
And maybe a zerg size based Crowded debuff, something that starts to hinder zergs over a certain size, making it more advantageous to split up?

Jumping Puzzles + Dungeon Paths + World Boss Coordination.

Did you ever played Shadow of the Collossus?
Yeah, that’s what I’ll like to see, just with the entire map working togheter

Climbing over and through Mordy, following separate paths (with varying difficulties so everyone can choose), traversing mazes, jumping across its moving limbs and fighting mobs to finally defeat him. Yes, that I want to see.

More exotic and interesting jumping puzzles with lots of exploring.

I would like to see anything that promotes a deviation from zerker meta, and less jumping puzzles, hate those things.

I don’t know if this is really a mechanic, but I’m hoping this expansion will add content that won’t just be about ‘speed runs’, where you rush through the encounter as quickly as possible so you can grind through it over and over again, just to pick up those collectable currencies. I think they were more successful when implementing their incentive system to dynamic events, rather than with instances. It made them seem really superficial and it became all about having that one specific team of professions, rather than about the experience itself. Ok, to a certain extent, the original GW was a bit like that when it came to the tougher missions, but that was only for beating the missions and you wouldn’t need to grind them dozens of times over. There was incentive to beat them missions in order to complete a larger storyline, which made it feel less rushed and was about the game rather than about the collection grind. Zaishen missions allowed you to play through all the content, which is way different from finding the shortest explorable path and grinding that endlessly.

It wasn’t intentional and players ended up ignoring all the cool stuff Anet made in favor of an endless vanity item grind. With a new focus on tiered (terraced?) maps, it looks like this won’t really be as much of an issue, at least on the surface.

Haven’t really made a list or anything but one thing that came to mind shortly after the big 6/23 update was that I want more healing mechanics on mobs in PvE.

Since poison stacks intensity now, it sounded like a more viable option to have some poison in a condi build instead of just bleeds and the rest that stack. Sadly, although it does stack allowing more consistent damage, it’s still outdone by bleeds. I understand it is lower because of the healing debuff, and i think that’s the right thing to do, but I think I’d feel more fulfilled using poison if the debuff wasn’t a wasted mechanic for like 95% of mobs. I play a class with an entire trait line revolving around poison and I really want to try and make a build around that, but as far as PvE goes, it just sort of acts as a weaker bleed and no utilization of it’s debuff, making it seem not worth the time.

YOUNGaz.5690:

Haven’t really made a list or anything but one thing that came to mind shortly after the big 6/23 update was that I want more healing mechanics on mobs in PvE.

Since poison stacks intensity now, it sounded like a more viable option to have some poison in a condi build instead of just bleeds and the rest that stack. Sadly, although it does stack allowing more consistent damage, it’s still outdone by bleeds. I understand it is lower because of the healing debuff, and i think that’s the right thing to do, but I think I’d feel more fulfilled using poison if the debuff wasn’t a wasted mechanic for like 95% of mobs. I play a class with an entire trait line revolving around poison and I really want to try and make a build around that, but as far as PvE goes, it just sort of acts as a weaker bleed and no utilization of it’s debuff, making it seem not worth the time.

Yea, more mobs that have a dedicated healer like mordrem menders. Poison is almost entirely a PvP condi/much like confusion pre batch. I’m sure we see more of the mender types. Easy to kill, but effective in numbers.

Which reminds me of the skritt. They suck in individually but become more intelligent as they group together. I would like to see more mobs that effects/skills change as they congregate and fight together. This could possibly already be implemented but I don’t remember seeing a tool tip/descript like that other than skritt.

More conditions.
Unavoidable smaller amounts of damage.
Faster attacking enemies.
Better enemy AI that has groups of AI working together as a team.
Enemy AI that tries to stomp you.

All of this can promote CC, Focus fire, more dedicated support roles in PvE other than mass DPS AoE spam. You’ll also get more gear variations as people need to add more Vitality and Toughness to counter the unavoidable amounts of damage as opposed to actively dodging the massively telegraphed, one-shot ability the enemy casts every 6-10 seconds.

I do think they want to make it harder to zerk and want to promote mixing of gear, but I also wish they would promote/buff the usage of boons, for both sides. I think it would help in PvE, but also slightly lessen the dependence on Burst in PvP/WvW. Sustained battles.

I was discussing how many people want their prof to have access to everything everyone else has, and Anet tried to accommodate a little bit over the years, but do think, in terms of boons, profs should offer multiple boons to their party, but be the master of only. For instance I run a shout Guard(secondary) and I try to boon and block everything I can for my group or against others in PvP(as I should) but there should be something that I offer like no other. Currently protection is high on my list but stability might be Guards calling. Who should master what boons, and what can be done to make lesser used boons, more important?

p.s. I really dig Feel my Wrath, but I wish my thief(main) was able to invigorate a group with Quickness.

Costume brawl events.