Guild Wars 2

Frank.7452:

Uh, no. I played PvP before reward tracks existed because I found it fun. The same goes for WvW and the chests.

There are players that only do the most economically incentivized thing, which is why there are some commanders that will run in circles in the Silverwastes for more than 10 hours straight. They are the minority in the game. They are the people freaking out right now, because someone moved their cheese.

PvP and WvW are similar, because they’re both considered “player vs player”. It’s like Battlegrounds vs Arenas in WoW. They’re both PvP. You also don’t really play PvP in other games for monetary gain, you play it for a different gain. Satisfaction and renown. That’s entirely different from PvE. Much of the content in PvE isn’t exceptionally challenging, so it lacks satisfaction and renown (until Raids, of course).

Anyone who doesn’t PvP and wants to progress in the game needs gold. Therefore they need to participate in content that gives them gold. If they want gold, then they’ll do the most effective method to gain gold. It’s just as simple as that. The massive number of players who partake of SW and who participated in the Boss Blitz back in the day illustrate this pretty well.

Behellagh.1468:

You don’t get it. The devs don’t want to develop dungeons any more. They decided that fractals give them a greater opportunity to innovate, try out new mechanics and not be tied into the PvE maps.

Because that’s where the devs are investing development time, it would be counter productive if players don’t play them so they are discouraging the existing PvE instance content by limiting the gold rewarded, yet again.

You want rewards, don’t do dungeons, do fractals. If they lose players who are doing dungeons solely for gold, oh well but they hope you will try the new fractals that is coming with HoT, you may like it. But since existing legendary weapons still require dungeon tokens, they will still be needed, but needed for dungeon specific rewards and not as a gold faucet.

Nothing said here, suggesting alternatives or warning how this is a bad decision isn’t going to change anything. The word came down a long time ago that all future instance party content will be fractals and raids and that’s it (besides future living world seasons). It was on the HoT site the day they announced the expansion.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of this is also part of the “let’s kill the Zerk meta”.

I get and fully understand that they do not want to develop dungeons anymore. That is their choice. I am disagreeing with their blanket chances that affect all the dungeons. As it is right now dungeons are not the best way to spend your time on GW2. SW is probably the best place to be. Dungeons offer you a decent reward, though this applies to a relatively small amount of paths across a fair number of dungeons. This means that a number of paths simply go ignored because they’re not economical to run.

I don’t care if they want to stop production on dungeons. I don’t care if they want to stop support for dungeons and just focus on fractals and raids. That stance, however, does not address the fundamental problem with dungeons. They’ve been ignoring the fundamental problem with dungeons for multiple years now, and this change will address none of those problems. All this change accomplishes is sweeping dungeons under the rug.

If they really wanted to change dungeons for the better, than they would treat them like a valid part of the game and make them balanced against the other parts of the game.

Dungeons are a casual 5-man experience. Fractals are a difficult 5-man experience. Raids are slated to be a very difficult 10-man experience. World event chains, such as the Silver Wastes, are a casual experience on a massive scale with a difficulty far lower than dungeons.

They should have Raids give the greatest rewards, which seems to be the intent. Fractals should give the best rewards for 5-man content. Dungeons should honestly be on-par with a casual experience, so that you can choose if you want to do 5-man content, or open world content. Right now they’re not even close, and they’re going to be kicking them down another rung with this change.

Perhaps the biggest spit in the face is that they’ve still ignored the disparity between time invested vs reward. You get a far greater reward for running shorter paths than you do running longer paths. This is the fundamental issue with dungeons that has gone ignored for years, and now they’ve pretty much announced that they don’t care at all.

Great precedent to set. A selling point of the original game was never addressed and simply abandoned. I can’t wait to see what they abandon from HoT. Will it be raids? Perhaps the “new and improved” fractals? We shall see, huh?

Ravion Hawk.4736:

So…

Casual players get excluded from Raids and Fractals by the Elitists that ANet is pandering to (which honestly will leave the Dungeons to the Casual players) BUT you are going to nerf the Dungeons in an attempt to push players to Raids and Fractals.

This sounds a lot like modern politics and Class Separation. The Elitists get what they want with ANet’s blessing (by pushing everyone to other content) and the Casual Players get kicked to the curb.

How about while you nerf Dungeons into the ground, put the Hero System from Guild Wars into all the modes (Story and Explorable) so that the Casuals can see the Arah path 1-4 without having to pay other players to put up with our Non-Meta play style.

That would require a lot of effort. They would have to ensure the NPCs were powerful enough to not die to the mechanics of each boss fight. A lot of players resorted to stacking on bosses because it was the most effective/efficient way to deal with bosses. Because of the combat system, most NPCs would just fall over and die.

It would make more sense to simply make all dungeons kitten-easy so you can solo them. If we’re going to make them irrelevant, than you shouldn’t keep them as challenging content. Some people will argue about the “challenge”, but to casual players it can still be a challenge. Elitist attitudes don’t mean much in this context.

Frank.7452:

I’m a little disturbed by the level of antagonism here over the gold reward going down for dungeons. I think the concern is less over the content changes, and more over your 40g a day cash flow.

Running a series of the easiest and fastest dungeon paths, skipping as much content as possible, is generally not done to be ‘fun’. It is done strictly for gold, and it’s easy money.

The gold rewards are going down to disincentivize running easy paths for gold. People will continue to play dungeons for tokens, and if the drops are improved – people might even kill things in dungeons instead of skipping to the boss.

You’re forgetting one major aspect of GW2. You only participate in content because it gets you closer to your goal. Right now gold is the end-all-beat-all. Gold is what drives the game, and if you cannot get a reasonable amount of gold from a dungeon run, then there is no reason to run a dungeon. Simply nerfing dungeons across the board doesn’t really do much to rectify this massive problem, it just removes dungeons from the equation entirely.

What they should have done is have each dungeon give you a moderate reward based upon the time investment. Figure out an average “gold per hour” for each dungeon and push for that. Have them be lower than something like the Silver Wastes, but not so low that you should simply run the Silver Wastes instead.

This isn’t addressing the core problem with dungeon speed running. It’s ignoring it entirely, and just slapping all dungeons at the same time for the hell of it, while claiming that it’s going to address the problem.

Akikaze.1307:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

@ArenaNet, you’re taking the game we paid for away. Do you really think people will keep paying long-term for this? Or have you become like EA – just interested in quick moneygrabs no matter what great games and stories you ruin?

Please tell me that is sarcasm. Updates in mmorpg often involves them fading/removing older content (Dungeons was highly neglected from updates too). Ultimately, you got what you paid for, the value of “time spent playing”. They’re not deleting dungeons, dungeons will still exist.

If you’re going to bring up other MMORPGs, let me bring up WoW. When the very first expansion came out, vanilla dungeons became trivial. The increased levels and increased gear stats meant that eventually you’d just be able to solo all the dungeons in vanilla without much effort. The same happened when Wrath came out and suddenly all Burning Crusade content became trivial.

Unfortunately ArenaNet have adopted the stance that all content should be challenging at all stages of the game. This means that even if you’re at level 80 with max level gear, your stats will be downgraded when you step into a dungeon. The dungeon may not be as difficult as it was when you were the appropriate level, but you can still die to the content. For a lot of players, this means that you simply cannot solo a dungeon, it requires a group.

Imagine if those vanilla dungeons were still difficult. Why would anyone run them? The rewards are worthless compared to TBC dungeons. Why would anyone run TBC dungeons when Wrath came out? The answer was “Primarily for fun by myself when I am bored”. You do not have that luxury in GW2. Most players don’t have that luxury in GW2. The dungeons will not be decreasing in difficulty, they’re just decreasing the rewards to make them worthless to run. Why bother running a dungeon when you can run a fractal with rewards that were not nerfed to the ground? Why bother running a dungeon, when you can try a raid and try to get those rewards? Why bother with a dungeon, when you can just farm events for gold?

Konig Des Todes.2086:

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Is the intention to reduce targeted liquid gold earning, or are you putting that liquid somewhere else thats targetable?
The intention is not entirely to reduce liquid gold earning, we’ll be using up the slack we generate in other locations

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?
Fractals

This is a very sad thing, in my opinion.

Dungeons in GW2 have their own niche, but you’re removing them in favor of Fractals because…

No reason given.

Allow me to state one thing:

Dungeons are NOT the same as Fractals.

Fractals are NOT the same as dungeons.

They care to two different groups of players, even though they both focus on 5-man groups.

In all honesty, I don’t mind the “no more dungeons, only fractals and raids” but to deincentivize dungeons is no different than removing a gamestyle that a certain group will only like. And that means losing players. Which means no future profits from said players.

What’s worse was that back in 2013 you guys promised to revamp dungeons, with the changes to Ascalon Catacombs being the first set of such, but then you decided to just go do other things. You said the same with world bosses, with Tequatl being the first one, but then you just decided to go do other things. How does that make us feel about these promises of “the first of many” with HoT? How do we know you guys aren’t just going to not only abandon raids after the first one, but then deincentivize them later down the road?

In all honesty, I don’t get the intention behind doing this. And you guys don’t explain.

What the hell is so bad about dungeons that you would rather give them Isaiah’s Balance than to make them proper gamestyles that get discontinued?

I bought HoT two weekends ago because I figured you guys were actually going down the right path again.

Apparently I was wrong.

Though employees of ArenaNet will vehemently deny my claims, and will deny that they’re doing so based entirely on the fact that their jobs depend on it, the reason they made the base game free is precisely because of this. I can almost guarantee it.

Over the years ANet has made an impressive game, but they’ve made a lot of promises, and broken the majority of them when it comes to content. UI? Quality of Life? Sure, they’ve made some decent changes there and come through more than once. Content-wise? Guild Wars 2 is spiraling out of control as a failed and mismanaged experiment.

I’ve opted not to purchase Heart of Thorns. (Cue White Knights saying “Nothing of value was lost”, because they’re mindless drones conditioned to blindly support what they enjoy like religious zealots). I’m not avoiding the game specifically because they’re reducing the incentive to play dungeons, but because this is setting a negative precedent that will impact the rest of the game as time goes on. When will they start to nerf world events like Tequatl and the rest? Probably around the next expansion when they want you to play the newer content. They can’t have you wasting time and resources on older content. It’s why WoW always ups their level cap, so the older content is no longer necessary and they do not have to keep pouring in resources to keep it up to date. (Which is why Cataclysm was such an utter failure).

GW2 is trying to be different, and it is failing utterly at doing so. They had the chance to be unique, but they’re squandering the chance. Though it ultimately boils down to economics. You cannot make a profit off of older content, so removing it is your best option. How much do you want to make a bet that they’ll eventually just start offering dungeon skins in the gem store? Probably around the next expansion. I doubt it’ll happen anytime soon.

Again, cue the White Knights. And we’ll see how the future goes.

John Smith.4610:

Ashen.2907:

John Smith.4610:

Q.
why are you nerfing the income of players who prefer your old content over your new content? I for one don’t care much for raids but really enjoy dungeons..

A.
We don’t intend to nerf income, just shift where most players derive their income. You won’t be forced into raids in order to earn value though.

Players who enjoy playing dungeons will have either lower income or will have to play content they do not enjoy as much in order to maintain their existing level of income.

The only way you can accurately claim that you did not intend to nerf their income is to state that you intended to reduce their enjoyment of the game instead.

Edit for clarification: I did not mean you personally, but rather the collective of those who made the decision.

This is called false dilemma. I think you should probably restate this.

What incentives will players have to run dungeons after these changes go live? The entire game is based around doing what gets you to your goal fastest, and as of right now gold is the end-all-beat-all. If dungeons do not bring players to this goal, what incentive is there to play them?

As of right now if you play a dungeon you will get some gold, but the increase will be nowhere near that of farming the Silverwastes. The only reason to run dungeons is if you want the skins for armor/weapons. However, that goal isn’t as expansive as the pursuit of pure gold. Is ArenaNet aware of this disconnect here, and how they may be making finding a dungeon party immensely more difficult?

How do you suggest I find a group that is willing to participate in part of the game that will give you subpar rewards, just so I can get some weapon or armor skins? You need to pay close attention to a major aspect of psychology: When a player feels as if they’re actively wasting time participating in content, then something has failed utterly in the design of that content.

You never want players to feel as if they’re wasting time, and if you just nerf dungeons without adding any compensation for that nerf, then you’re going to severely hinder members of your community. There just needs to be some incentive for players to play this content, or else just remove it entirely and allow other means of getting this content. (Forcing players to PvP for the skins, by the way, is a bad idea. Leaves a sour taste in their mouths when it was originally PvE, and then you pull the rug out from under their feet).

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If you want dungeon tokens… then run dungeons….

Dungeons are still the best source of XP for masteries, the only source of dungeon tokens, and we don’t know what the “shifted” rewards even are yet.

As long as there is still a strong incentive to play dungeons. Right now the way they phrased their stance on dungeons implies that they want to phase out/remove the content entirely by making it worthless compared to other content.

Sizer.3987:

Youre grossly underestimating the population of this game as well as that populations desire for account bound rewards. Just because dungeons arent going to be the best gold/hr it doesnt mean people wont run them, either for skins, legendary crafting, or just for fun.

Lvl 1-9 fractals give like the worst gold/hr you can get and you dont even get ascended drops or fractal weapon skins, but you can still find a group for them in minutes, because people want the account bound rewards, or they are simply doing it for fun.

Same thing with dry top, or LS instances, or orr zones (no acc bound stuff there, but people still do it), all of those things are “dead” content and still have huge populations doing them.

No reason why dungeons will be any different. Yea you wont get the speed runners that can do a dungeon in 5 minutes, but youll still find groups.

I sincerely hope you are right, sir.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

gets out fire extinguisher

Here you are going to need this…

Good luck with all the forum warriors who will probably never set foot in a raid or have a snowballs chance in hell of ever beating it.

DPS meters really have no place in this game, or in any other game. I’ve participated in a lot of raid content, and DPS meters never really served and purpose aside public shaming. Did they help us beat the content? No. All they did was destroy morale.

It is up to the player to ensure that they do the best they can, and bring their A-game. In this sort of game it should be clear who isn’t pulling their weight. It’s clear on other games. If you know what your doing, you’re likely going to survive until the end of the fight. If you’re not, then you’re probably going to die having not paid attention to the mechanics, and your DPS will fall flat on its face.

First I will start with a disclaimer. I am not a PvPer. I do not enjoy PvP, and I am not interested in PvP. I don’t like the idea of being forced to PvP, so I’m going to ignore this method.

With the recent announcement from ANet it appears as if they are finally phasing out dungeons and making them almost pointless to run. You’ll no longer have any incentive to run a dungeon when other content is more lucrative. However, what happens if you’d still want the Dungeon Token Rewards?

As it is right now, it is relatively difficult to find a group willing to play certain dungeons, which makes certain dungeon sets difficult to obtain for some players. If this change goes into place, will there by any incentive at all for groups to run dungeons? Not every player in the game has access to a guild that has players who are willing to put aside time to help others, while receiving an inferior reward for their time invested. Why would I want to play a dungeon that will offer me a pitiful reward, when I could do new content that would be a far better usage of my time? Consider that this selfish view isn’t uncommon, and saying otherwise is just wishful thinking.

Will ANet address this issue, or just sweep it under the rug and treat it as an acceptable loss? If it is the latter, then my desire to actually purchase HoT and continue playing the game will be shot. What’s the point of continuing to play the game if ANet is specifically sabotaging your ability to seek the rewards you want? They introduced a LFG system to help groups form for dungeons and fractals, but now it seems as if they’re desiring to destroy dungeons while offering no compensation for this loss.

How will I be able to recruit players to run a dungeon? Will I just have to wait hours and hours in LFG hoping that the one or two people that may trickle in have the same level of patience?

It would be smarter to have the difficulty of dungeons scale based on the number of players present. Thus: If you are going to remove the incentive for players to help other players, then remove the need for multiple players. Make dungeons easily soloable for the majority of the playerbase. The massively reduced rewards that ANet is spouting will ensure that these dungeons are not abused, since only those who desire the skins from the rewards will bother wasting their time by doing this content.

Otherwise, will ANet offer an alternative method to gain dungeon tokens, or at least the rewards offered? Perhaps exchange fractal tokens for specific dungeon tokens?

I’ve been wanting to get some of the armor sets from the more unpopular and longer dungeons. I’ve managed to get one or two runs every few days, because so few people are willing to run them. As it is right now dungeons are only worthwhile if you want to get dungeon tokens, and all the armor pieces are so expensive that this has turned them into the most ludicrous grind in the game simply due to how unpopular they are.

If you want to change things to this degree, make them soloable with next to no effort, and make the token gear non-salvageable. It’ll serve their purpose to kill the dungeon-aspect of the economy, and still allow players to get what they want.

Or just do the smart thing: Remove dungeons, admit they were an utter failure, and more the gear to other parts of the game that people will actually play.

This is a terrible change and a terrible idea, based off the information they’ve offered us right now. Completely cutting off support for dungeons is as smart as cutting off your own leg after stubbing your toe on a wall.

The problem with dungeons is, and always shall be time investment vs reward. The reward for running shorter dungeons has always been greater than running longer, more challenging dungeons. And dungeons have always been a subpar way of farming, when you have SW and other more recent events popping up. Who even runs dungeons anymore? One of the reasons I lack all the armor sets that I want is because it’s a ludicrous grind to get the armor, and no one is ever willing to run it. If this change goes through, they may as well make dungeons soloable content, or just remove them entirely and allow us to earn all of the rewards through other means.

Cyninja.2954:

starlinvf.1358:

Mechanically GW2 is based on Warhammer Online (which died years ago). The next closest I can think of is TERA Online, which has a notability different, but also very movement oriented real time combat system. Its easily one of the best combat systems for an MMO to date…… enough so that I wish GW2 took a few cues for its own combat system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk1Is8WoRW0

The downside for TERA is it being very much a Korean MMO in every other aspect of the game. The combat is super fun, but you can see where they stuck with the classic RPG design. After playing GW2 you can see how both of these games got things right, and the places where they both didn’t do nearly enough.

I have to disagree. I played Warhammer Online in the first year and was like top 3 or 4 of Swordmasters on my EU UK server with renown rank 65 before quitting. The game was way more similar to WoW mechanics, gameplay and design wise.

The only thing slightly similar with GW2 is the Realm vs Realm, and even there GW2 shares more similarities with DAoC than WO.

EDIT: On topic, try TERA or ESOL. Both are f2p now I believe. FFIVX is also quite popular, but shares nothing with GW2 and is definately p2p.

Is TERA playable with a controller? I know it has support for controllers, but are you at a disadvantage for playing with one?

Also if I want to pay a subscription, FFXIV is my MMO of choice. That game was a lot of fun to play. It feels the healing niche that I enjoy, and was sad that GW2 didn’t have. I enjoy playing the healer. :<

notebene.3190:

MallowOni.1578:

Guild Wars 2 combines so many features that I like that it’ll be a nearly impossible act to follow, but I’m going to try anyway.

If it has what you want, then why?

Perhaps he just wants something new? Imagine having tacos every single day for a year. Wouldn’t you love to have something else that has meat, cheese, veggies, and a starch? Pizza comes to mind.

1. Engineer (Flamethrower!)
2. Ranger
3. Mesmer

While I may not agree with the suggestions posted, I do agree that the event is currently a failure. The content ANet has created is incredibly challenging, unique and interesting. However, at this point in time the event isn’t worthy of the effort it demands.

I do not believe the rewards need to be guaranteed ascended weapons or anything of the sort. However, currently the rewards are no different than any other world boss, but other world bosses take a fraction of the effort and time. If all world bosses are updated like this, then people will ignore them in favor of dungeon bosses. People will migrate to the easier content, especially if the award-to-time ratio is superior.

I would love to see the Kodan added to the game as a playable race. Of all the races listed, they make the most sense as they already have some armor modeled for them.

Originally I would have liked to see the Tengu added as well, but after looking at them for an extended period of time I realized it would be rather difficult to map all of the armor pieces to the Tengu while still keeping the epic feel of the armor pieces themselves. The Tengu model doesn’t seem to inspire.

Skritt and Quaggans have already been touched on why it wouldn’t make sense for them to work.

Dwarves. We have plant people, why not stone people?

Since I’ve yet to figure out how to quote someone, I will have to do this the old fashioned way.

@JustTrogdor. I should make it clear that I am not for or against mounts. I am for equality of movement speed for all professions. Mounts, however, seem to be the most logical source of such equality, as ANet shipped the game with profession inequality in movement speed, and has gone a full year without addressing such.

Your arguments of screen clutter, rendering issues, and clipping issues are completely valid in this instance. However, I would like to point out that the game suffers from this already, and there is no guarantee that adding mounts would actually influence this to any large degree, depending on how ANet decided to handle them. Also, I do not agree with the argument that mounts should not be added simply because a vocal minority of players do not want them.

@Ghertu. According to your argument, there is no point at all in movement speed boosts in the game. Every profession should move at their base movement speed, and rely entirely upon the waypoint system to get around an instance, because they’re not as open as WoW. Try playing a profession without movement speed buffs for a week. It will start to feel sluggish and slow when people zip by you at 25% or 33% movement speed.

Where exactly did I say people who hold views different from my own should be ignored? I stated that the reasons given from those opposed to adding mounts to the game border on being fanatical. Perhaps I should rephrase this slightly:

I have yet to see a solid argument stating why the addition of mounts to GW2 would be detrimental to the game.

Many of the arguments against adding mounts to GW2 are fanatical arguments where players are opposed to the idea simply because they want to have their game be the special snowflake that defies logic. A world with Centaurs that lacks actual horses?

I will concede that both groups can have arguments that are baseless, but I have only seen pro-mount arguments have any depth outside of “I am right and you are wrong.”

Personally, I would be happy if all professions had access to the same level of movement speed buffs and passives. As it is now, there are some professions, coughGuardiancough, that are kind of screwed out of a reliable means of movement speed out of combat. Compare that to a Thief, Necromancer, Ranger, and Elementalist.

Mounts would be an easy method to equalize the out-of-combat movement speed disparity and lean away from a “have” and “have not” profession system.

Why exactly are half the professions restricted to the base movement speed, by the way? (Outside of extraordinary circumstances, such as spam-equipping kits, specific trait builds + weapons, and constantly spamming utility skills?)

DISCLAIMER: I have never played Guild Wars 1. I realize that the Monk existed in GW1, but I am led to believe that it filled a different character archetype.

So what is a monk? The best way to sum this up is a quote from Wikipedia:

“The monk is a character class in a number of role-playing tabletop and video games. In those games which follow the Dungeons & Dragons traditions, monks are characters with martial arts skills and have very powerful strategies.”

Before I continue on, I would like to touch on two points. Do you see WoW listed there? I certainly don’t. I believe it mentions Dungeons & Dragons, which has been around for far longer than WoW, right? Right. Moving on.

“The Monk was a profession in GW1!” If it is physically impossible for people to accept the fact that you can re-interpret how something has been presented, there are two alternatives.

The first alternative is to refer to the GW1 Monk profession by another name, such as ‘Priest’ or ‘Cleric’, as that is the archetype it filled in the original game.

The second alternative is to refer to this new profession by a new name. What name? Well, there are a number of options. Ascetic, Chanter, Martial Artist, etc.

Finally. Why would GW2 benefit from a martial artist profession? AKA the “WoW has a monk class! I want GW2 to remain a special snowflake. We don’t want monks because WoW has monks!” argument. To put it simply, the martial artist archetype is beloved by many people, even some that play this game! It has been around for an incredibly long time, and has spawned games entirely focused on martial arts. (Age of Wushu, as an example.)

How would a martial artist profession work on GW2? Well, there are a few ways to approach such a profession! However, I am only going to offer one, while keeping in mind that each profession in GW2 has unique mechanics that differentiate them from the other professions. I am also not going to go into great depth, as that is the job of the developers.

The Martial Artist is a Scholar class that utilizes a stance mechanic somewhat similar in concept to the Elementalist. The Martial Artist has two stances: An offensive stance and a defensive/control-focused stance. These stances do not completely change the Martial Artist’s weapon skills, but rather influence how they function. Let me give an example:

Let us say that the Martial Artist is using a block skill of a staff. The ability uses the staff to block the next physical attack. The followup used depends on the stance the martial artist is in. If the martial artist is in an offensive stance, perhaps they counter-attack with a strike to a vital area that is now exposed. If the martial artist is in a defensive stance, perhaps they counter-attack with a trip or knockdown, thus unbalancing their foe.

These stances could define how the martial artist approaches each fight, and could change how each of his (or her) abilities function depending on the situational need. Some additional examples could include: An attack where the martial artist leaps to an enemy. An attack where the martial artist grabs an enemy, rolls backwards and throws the enemy behind them.

What sort of weapons would a martial artist use? The most logical weapon would be a fist weapon. However, here are a few examples based off current weapons: The staff as a non-magical physical close-ranged weapon. The mace as a potentially dual-wielded close-ranged physical weapon. The torch as a potential magical utility weapon. The shortbow as a physical long-ranged weapon. The spear as a close-ranged physical aquatic weapon.

Utility and elite skills would likely include signets, meditations, shouts, and physical skills. The names of these skills could easily be changed to keep certain profession skills unique, but the general idea is the martial artist is a master of one’s own body. Some possible abilities could include: Cleansing conditions and converting them into boons. Briefly making the profession immune to damage, or significantly reducing damage taken. Focuses upon evasion or control, etc.

Any thoughts and/or other ideas are more than welcome.

After reading through most of this thread, I believe I have come to a reasonable conclusion that there are two groups at work here.

The first group is made of players who desire mounts added to the game. Their reasons are numerous, but mainly boil down to furthering immersion and status. The addition of horses, for example.

The second group is made of players who are opposed to adding mounts to the game. Their reasons border on being outright fanatical, with many of their arguments being of the quality seen on 4chan or SomethingAwful.

The most common argument against adding mounts to the game seems to be “Lawlnope, I want my game to be unique, and I am entitled to being a special snowflake.”

The most common, and somewhat reasonable argument seems to be that players feel that adding mounts would unbalance the game, or open a can of worms that would result in what happened in WoW. (That is, the introduction of flying mounts invalidating most of the game)

Of these arguments there are two points that are brought up again and again. These two points seem to be poorly thought out and seem to play into the original argument of wanting to be a pretty, unique snowflake. So, let us look into them, shall we?

Point #1. Mounts will allow you to avoid mobs by simply running past them.

How is this different from how the game works right now? If I have a 33% movement speed boost, I can very easily just run right by a mob and they wont be able to touch me or catch up to me. Only ranged mobs can actually put me into combat, but not every mob is ranged.

However, it seems as if a number of players feel that being on a mount would prevent you from being marked as ‘in-combat’, and thus losing the speed buff, so you’d simply be able to ignore mobs. These same players also seem to believe that there is no way that this could be fixed. It is impossible. Well, let me tell you something that might surprise you: It is possible! Shocking, right?

There are a number of methods we could use in this specific circumstance. First, we could have a system similar to Aion, in which every strike has a chance to knock you off your mount, with each additional strike having a higher chance. Or, we could simply treat a mount as a passive speed buff with a unique animation, and have you enter combat normally once you’re struck with the mount vanishing in a poof of smoke. (Oh noes, mounts going poof is breaking my immersion, because magical clones are completely realistic!)

Point #2. Waypoints are there for a reason. They are the method intended to act as transportation throughout the game.

I’ve seen this argument many times, and ironically I’ve seen it used in the same paragraph as when someone suggests that mounts would remove a player’s ability to enjoy the scenery. At this point I have to question someone’s sanity, as porting around the map clearly allows you to enjoy the scenery more than running slightly faster, right?

Because of the instantaneous travel of waypoints, the addition of mounts will not invalidate their use. If you need to get across the map for an event, you will still use a waypoint, because the speed of a mount will never get you there in time, unless it was something like 5000%.

Now, what are the benefits of having mounts?

Well, one benefit of having a mount is giving all professions an equal ability to cross terrain at a reasonable pace. Take the Guardian as an example, due to the profession’s lack of a passive ability to increase their movement speed to 25%. This makes them feel incredibly sluggish when compared to other classes outside of combat. A mount would allow them an option to catch up with other characters!

There are, of course, roleplaying aspects of adding mounts. Think of the amount of money ANet could make by introducing unique mount skins! I know that some of you will complain about immersion in this area once again, but let me ask you something. Why are you willing to accept 8-bit swords, and not someone riding on a deer with a red and green saddle?

The final point I’ve heard discussed is what speed a mount should give. If mounts were ever to be added to GW2, it is my belief that they should have one speed, and one speed only. Should this speed be 25%, 33%, or something higher is entirely up to ANet. However, if you truly want to make this game unique and stand out, then have them be one uniform speed. Have players grind for skins, not how fast your mount can go.

TLDR:
Stop being lazy and respect the amount of work people put in responses. If you don’t want to read it, then go take a breath and relax for a while, as you’ve no real purpose on this thread to begin with!