Guild Wars 2

For me, the first four episodes of LS season 2 have been pretty fun. Weve had good storytelling and decent, challenging fights – alongside new open world content that seemed a good mix of cooperation and freeform play.

It really feels like the system they put in place could lead to something much better – if they address 3 small shortcomings – specifically to include players beyond the single player/open world model.

Below are my simplistic ideas about how they could do that -

1. Nothing new for 5-player parties to do.

This is the biggest one and why people are upset about the possibility of no new dungeons anytime soon. Reality is, we dont need new dungeons, we just need new content for 5 player groups.

My suggestion to deal with this is simple – alongside the living story instances every two weeks, craft one short instance/boss that is specifically designed for 5 person parties – it could even be a carbon copy of one of the single player scaling instances. The best example I can think of from season 1 is the boss at the top of the Tower of Nightmares.

2. No incentive to revisit the content once you’ve gotten achievements – and no way for new players to get older items/consumables.

This is a tough one, but still important. Why have content just stagnating in people’s hero tab if there is no reason to revisit (especially if they were to include 5 man focused one offs like I recommend above)?

The solution to this issue is already in the game – the PvP reward track sytem (not the same paths, just the system itself). Implement a similar system for instanced content – where players can (once a day) repeat LS fights to advance a reward track. This would be an easy way to give players access to items and consumables from past seasons as well (like Blade Shards – if they picked a LS1 reward track). Using the reward track system would allow them to throttle the rate of acquisition to avoid hurting the economy – while still giving players an incentive to repeat content if they wanted to.

3. Nothing new for guilds to do.

This is another big one that hasnt been addressed in a while. For this one, we just need new guild missions. There are tons of season 1 bosses and events that would make great bounties/challenges.

For me, those are the three elements missing from the second season of the Living Story so far. It isnt a criticism of what they’ve done so far (again, I like it alot) – it is just suggestions about how to take that content and extend it out to different types of players in game.