Guild Wars 2

Based on my experience with grandfathered characters, exploring to unlock the new grandmaster traits is fun. Fun, but flawed, because it relies on timed events instead of set quests. This is one of a few cases where the traditional quest system found in MMOs is better to handle this situation than dynamic events.

However, I admit I fear the idea of starting new alts. It’s not that I mind the new system, but rather how it is executed. This is for several reasons:

• Leveling in GW2 was never that exciting. You unlock your weapon skills extremely fast, and getting rare gear is very rare and very unexciting in this game because the Trading Post exists. For those reasons, most of the progression was felt through traits. By taking the little sense of progression that GW2 had while leveling, I can imagine that leveling an alt is going to be painful.
• Exploring the world to unlock traits is a fun idea, but not when every single little trait is gated by map completion, timed events, or the like.

Solutions

• Revert the gated trait tiers to the old level values.
• Make adept traits significantly and streamlined easy to get.
• Make the first adept tier for each trait line unlocked by default, for the sake of players having at least one option to fill the slot when they invest points into a trait line but have not yet explored the world much.
• Only grandmaster traits should be hard to obtain.

HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION
Horizontal progression can be a great substitute to vertical progression, because it does not (directly) invalidate past progression made by the player, allowing the player to continuously grow without wasting their effort in the past. In fact, this is a problem that could probably be toned down in current vertical progression systems as well.

THE FLAWS IN GW2’s MECHANICS FOR HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION

• They are generally under-developed;
• They aren’t as “visible” as they should;
• They aren’t as “tangible” as they should;

You might ask: what does Diogo means with the “visible” and “tangible” words?

I understand as “visible” any system where the progression can be easily identified or easily followed by the player:

• Gear stats are “visible” (vertical) progression because a player can look at them and directly compare to exotics or other previously equipped items and understand that they have made a progression.
• Achievements are “visible” because they have an entire UI dedicated to them, with bars that can be filled, points and stats that can be increased, a leaderboard system dedicated to them, and a section for long-term chest rewards and unlocked privileges.

So, why is GW2 lacking “visible” horizontal progression?

• Cosmetic progression is “visible” only when the items are equipped to your character. Skin collecting, however, is not a “visible” system – its progression can’t be easily followed by the player. When a skin is transmuted, the old skin disappears. When a skin is not used, it is usually wasting bank slot, which incentives the player to salvage it. When a new skin is obtained, it’s usually used for salvaging purposes or is immediately sold at the TP. No player feels that they are progressing this way.

Solutions to the problem, and other ideas to improve upon it:

• A Skin Wardrobe, where players can visualize all the skins they have collected, and work for long-term goals determined by the UI, like filling the wardrobe, filling completion bars and increasing points (probably through achievements), and gaining rewards out of that.
• Make unlocked collectible recipes and unlocked collectible dyes account-bound.
• A Hall of Monuments map. Even though the achievement system is already “visible” through the UI, it would be even more satisfying if it was “visible” within the world itself, with an incomplete statue of our own character that we would need to complete, several statues for the most important achievements, a collection the models for all mini pets and skins unlocked, etc.

I understand as “tangible” any system where progression leads to consequences that can be “felt” through game play interaction, be it from exploration, customization, experimentation, etc.

• Gear stats are “tangible” (vertical) progression, because they influence the outcome of battle encounters to your favor. When a character equips new gear, the player will feel the consequences of the new stats because battles will become easier as a result. The player gains this way a sense of progression within the normal game play flow.

So, why is GW2 lacking “tangible” horizontal progression?

• Any new non-profession skill added to the game is made to be underwhelming on purpose for the sake of “balance”. This means that said skill never ends up impacting the game play – it never brings any consequence to it. If players won’t experiment with them, if players won’t feel satisfied by using them, and if there’s no potential build in the making in order to take advantage on them, then any sense of (horizontal) progression is left unfulfilled, because the impact those skills have on game play is insignificant.
• Any new stat combo that is added into the game, that can’t be properly built for, will be left forgotten and, once again, no sense of progression will be “felt”.
• Any new mini-pet that is added into the game, and is quickly, automatically stored in the bank and left forgotten since then, does not create a “sense of progression” either.
• Generally unappealing and ignored equipment skins means that the majority of the player base will not feel a cosmetic progression upon acquiring them.
• The home instance as a whole, outside of a few tiny additions from the living story.
• The personal story and character’s personality traits, outside of a few automatically skip-able story instances (which I personally didn’t even like that they were skip-able).
• Dynamic events as a long-term consequence to the “living world”.

HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION
The flaws with its execution in GW2

Skill/ Build Progression
What is skill/ build progression? It’s about getting new tools to improve or customize our builds.

• It is crippled by some of the systems set in place for vertical progression, like stats being tied to gear, which in turn is tied to huge money and time sinks.
• It is further restricted by how trait allocation works, and the lack of build templates.
• Non-profession skills are very underwhelming. Although this is done on purpose for the sake of balance, when they aren’t worth using, they do not serve their purpose to enhance world immersion, as they are left unused, nor do they add any form of horizontal progression, because no build will be created around them.
• Skill hunting is generic and lacks the charm GW1’s elite skill hunting had.
• The skill system is generally very restrictive, with few weapons per profession, very few utility slots tied to high cooldowns, and an elite skill system that isn’t acchieving the epic feel it was meant to acchieve.

Solutions

• Separate the concept of (ascended) gear crafting from the concept of equipment stat customisation. Make it easy or easier to change stats, or at the very least, to craft new copies of the same gear with different stats.
• Add an universal build template system, and allows us to change traits on the fly (while not in battle, dungeons, etc). Creating and saving builds should be free. Loading/ changing them could still require a small money sink, if Anet feels it needs to be there.
• Revise how non-profession skills should be balanced. Instead of making them bad on purpose, make them decent but only fill a certain niche/ tied heavily to a specific area or situation. In theory, the new spray skill does that, but it’s a poor skill even for its intended purpose.
• It’s probably too late for a better skill hunting system, but perhaps that can still exist for something other than skill collection. More on that later.
• Anet is already adding new skills to professions, so this area is already covered.

I’ll talk about skins next.

Solutions to the “tangible” problem (phew, this one is going to be big):

Non-profession Skills

• Redefine how to approach balance for all non-profession skills. Trying to prevent them from being too strong and discriminating some races over others is a noble cause, but making them too obviously underwhelming and they will not function as “tangible” horizontal progression. They should be on an average power level, and they should be allowed to shine in some scenarios, no matter how niche or story-driven those might be. Those scenarios should certainly be repeatable, though.
• As an example, the Spray skill is stronger in a niche scenario, which is interesting, but its base power level is too weak, which is unsatisfying and unrewarding. As another example, Light of Dwayna has an average base power level, and is thus sometimes picked up, but it doesn’t shines anywhere.
• Expanding on this, racial skills could be stronger on their respective territory, much similar to what GW1 did with EoTN pve skills. Light of Dwayna could be stronger on Krytan territory, Charrzooka could be stronger on Ascalonian territory, and so on. Dungeons could be excluded from this if needed, but it’s hard to demand this, because dungeons are also the most appealing places to test out new builds with those skills.
• As race discrimination is an important issue, consider a proposal to make all racial skills unlocked to all races, but gated by territory-context “quests” (hearts and dynamic events). Yes, this would come at the cost of some distinction between races, but let me ask you: which distinction exists now, when those skills are underwhelming and no one uses them? Let me ask another question: what is better for world immersion, underwhelming skills gated by race, or appealing skills obtained from exploring the world? Under mathematical terms, there would be more potential for world immersion if all races could obtain them (1. Because it would add less restriction for balance, and thus players would actually use and “feel” them, and 2. because they could be tied to territory and thus add personality to each map) than not (because it would remove race distinction, which barely even exists at the current place for the sake of race balance). Two points against one in favor of racial skills be made available to all races. But let me ask a third question: World immersion aside, how fun would it be to all players in GW2, if suddenly they had 24 (!!) new skills to try out, and 30 new skills (by including the racials they already had) buffed to become stronger? I can tell right now that I would personally love it, and make the gameplay a lot more refreshing, while Anet wouldn’t even need to design 24-30 new skills for this single purpose: they are already there. Anet would have to rebalance them and design “quests” for each of them, though.

Appealing Skins

• There are some serious issues with many of the skins in this game, be them technical or artistic issues. And no, I’m not talking exclusively about clipping issues, which I understand it is a complex issue. I won’t even mention it anymore.
• Technical: When you zoom out, many of the tiny armor details are lost or get incredibly blurred, making any ornamented armory look ugly whenever the camera is not too close to it.
• Technical: Some armor pieces seem to have better textures/ shaders/ whatever while others look incredibly plastic or paper-made, when they could otherwise look really awesome.
• Technical: There’s a shaders mod out there called SweetFX that makes GW2 look much prettier than it otherwise does with its default shaders. If GW2’s default options looked this good, more players would feel motivated to look better.
• Technical/ Design: The dye system was designed to paint different parts of each armor piece – it’s a very flexible system that allows you to make the metal, cloth and jewelry parts of your armor individually distinct from each other, yet for some unknown reason, some pieces use the same color for different parts, making them impossible to look great. More on this bellow.
• Design: Dyes with shaders (F&F, etc) look awesome, and sometimes can make or break a skin. Yet, they’re incredibly scarce and costly. For a game like GW2 where cosmetics are one of the core progression systems, the game should have its more appealing dye options more accessible and less obscure.
• Design: Dyes being soul-bound take away the motivation from working towards alt looks, especially when the best ones can take two digits worth of gold each on the TP.
• Technical/ Artistic: There’s a lack of diversity for many light and medium models.
• Artistic: Anet’s artists seem to have trouble working on some types of gear over others. There are plenty of heavy armor skins that look intimidating, powerful or majestic, plenty of female light cloth skins that look elegant, majestic or beautiful, yet the same can’t be said for, to give as an example, most of the male light clothes. I know this is very subjective subject, but there are specific types of armor for specific genders that seem to have an overabundance of details, lack cohesion, or simply lack any sense of power, intimidation, majesty or other stylish impression. Taking a low-level priest model and adding strips and jewels into it won’t suddenly make it appealing. Sooner that makes the character look like a Christmas tree than an intimidating and powerful individual. It’s hard to make a male character look like a strong, or enigmatic, or intimidating – or anything – spell caster, when most of their options simply consist of generic models over-ornamented with random stuff.

Stat Combos
For stat combos, they lack “tangible” consequences for several reasons.

• Customizing the stats of your gear is clumsy, unfriendly, time-consuming and gold-consuming. It goes against vertical progression, instead of flowing with it. This ties perfectly well with what has already been said for ascended gear, but let met expand a bit on it: it’s still a problem that exists in all lesser tiers in this game, even if to a lesser extent. Stat-experimentation should be streamlined across the entire game, or else any new stat combo addition will only excite legendary (and possibly ascended) players who can (or might be able to) swap stats with ease. Anet should create incentives for players to have fun with stat-experimentation since the very moment they start crafting their low-level characters. For that reason, any changes done to crafting and/ or to gear, in order to improve build experimentation, should also take into account all lesser tiers, like exotics, rares, greens, blues and white items.
• PvE game balance is a serious obstacle against horizontal progression via new stat combos. Until Anet fixes the “dps/ zerker” problem, any new stat combos will have a very hard time at creating “tangible consequences”. This is a very complex problem by itself, and should probably be discussed on its own CDI. But here’s a few suggestions:
• PvE’s mobs should auto-attack inbetween their slower skills, or have their slower skills be made the third attack of an auto-attack chain. This should affect most of the mobs in this game. The auto-attacking dps added to mobs won’t even need to be that high. It just needs to exist. This will change everything. One of the main problems from dps/ zerker gear is that all damage can be mitigated with a single dodge/ block/ blind. This change would make auras, chaos armor, retaliation and confusion useful in PvE. It would give a point to healing spells and defensive stats. It would create incentives for more CC as a form of defense. It would create more incentives for more kiting and anti-movement effects for more survival. It would indirectly make condition damage more useful, as melee zerkers would force themselves to take a break to survive every once and then while condition-mancers would have stronger natural stats and are able to keep damaging their foes while kiting. It would make support and control builds more desired. Finally, by giving bosses strong melee “cleave” (= aoe) auto-attacks, you’ll punish hard the mindless stack abusing strategy seen in dungeons. I feel the need to repeat the following: THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.
• But it won’t fix everything. That’s a complex topic that I won’t delve further for now.

Mini-Pets

• Create a slot in the hero’s page to store one or two of them. This way, they won’t be automatically added to the bank. Add the following option: “Always show equipped mini-pet”, which can be toggled on or off like hear/ hands/ shoulder equipment. Players will be more attached to their favorite mini-pets this way.
• Create achievements for the purpose of living story’s mini-pets and others not acquired from the gem store.
• Create a pokemon-ish mini-game involving collected mini-pets. GW2’s combat system is already pretty good for solo playing: use it, but with fixed skills and stats depending on the mini-pet used.
• Living World patches have been consistently adding mini-games to GW2. I’m sure one of them in the future could be a (permanent) mini-pet game.
• Add rewards and even more achievements for doing the mini-game. Leaderboards too.

“If you already have the same dyes unlocked on multiple characters, when you log in on additional characters, you will receive one unidentified dye for each duplicate dye already unlocked on your account.”

This is in the paragraph right after the one you quoted.

Skin/ Cosmetic Progression
What is skin/ cosmetic progression? It’s about upgrading our looks until we get satisfied or impressed by our own character.

• There are no incentives nor any system to collect different skins.
• The best dyes mostly come from permanent content.
• Dye collecting is soul-bound.
• (Somewhat related) But technical or artistic issues take away the motivation from working towards cosmetic goals.

Solutions

• Add a Skin Locket where we can collect all the skins. Account-bound, please.
• An expanded list of acchievements for filling said locket.
• Expand the crafting system so we can pick the skin of the item we’re going to craft, based on what we have collected. There should exist several skin options right since early-game, so that newbies don’t all look the same either.
• Unique account-bound-on-acquire skins dropped by unique bosses, or found while exploring the world of Tyria. There you have it, the substitute for GW1’s elite skill hunting.
• Add more dyes with shaders, and spread them more through the game.
• Dye collecting should be account-bound. Talking from personal experience, not having access to my costly celestial and black dyes on my alts takes away the motivation from working towards their looks.
• Improve the quality of the shaders (look at how sweetfx (?) mod makes GW2’s armor look much prettier), some technical issues about armor pieces or dyes looking too plastic-like, and seriously reconsider what it takes to design appealing armor skins, especially for anyone besides heavy male armor and scholar female clothes.

I’ll talk about my take on ascended gear next.

Other topics

• The problems with personal story, home instancing and world exploration/ dynamic events are also complex on their own, and I’m tired for now. I’ll just skip them and let other discuss solutions for it in the meantime.
• I’m also interesting in making a comparison between GW2’s crafting and the crafting of a game called Vagrant Story (made by the Final Fantasy Tactics team, btw), which felt a lot more personal and satisfying. Vagrant Story’s crafting allowed you to dismantle all the small parts of your gear, re-combine them the way you wanted, and ultimately give you an option to rename them. I can’t express by words how great of a system this is for horizontal progression. It’s very personal yet flexible and there’s plenty of opportunity for experimentation. Perhaps a system like this should be taken into account when discussing or implementing an ascended/ craft system to change stats. Vagrant Story also allowed you to create stronger gear by fusing together several pieces of unnecessary gear, kind of like mystic forge, but with less RNG and more “visible”. This one feels great for vertical progression.

CONCLUSION
By lacking visible or tangible progression (be it vertical or horizontal), the player won’t feel that they are progressing at all, even if the progression is clearly there in the game.

That’s why Anet keeps throwing new horizontal progression items each patch (new stat combos, new skins, new recipes, new mini-pets), yet players barely feel that they are progressing their own characters. Why is that? There’s a disattachment here between Anet and the community, for while Anet believes that they are expanding the game with horizontal progression at a steady pace, the player base does not feel that progression in practice. This is all because many of the new horizontal progression items that Anet is adding to the game lack a “visible” progression rate and a “tangible” consequence rate.

Thank you for reading.

fixit.7189:

Welcome to the new and improved free to play business model; toxic behavior goes hand in hand with f2p like cookies and cream.

F2P players can’t use map chat nor do they have access to raids and HoT maps. And dungeon elitism has been a thing for years.

Appealing Skins (Again)

• Example 1 for underwhelming armor: Male Light Armor from the nightmare dungeon. If we look at its artwork, it makes male humans look intimidating, “evil” and very, very mysterious/ enigmatic, especially with the mask skin that takes the pupils out of their eyes and adds a face tattoo. Looks very otherworldly, and isn’t that an awesome recipe for an appealing magical individual? But when we look at the model that exist in-game… Oh my. First, the mask skin does not even exists, and it’s incredible how much of a difference that makes, stripping the entire other-worldly, surreal feeling from it. The result is an ordinary male-looking guy within a weird dress. It’s clashing and not very pretty. And then the horns have lost their symmetry from the artwork, and look something hunted from a random animal instead. And then the chest hole seems somehow bigger in the model than in the artwork, giving way too much emphasis on their skinny chest (or worse, on their hairy chest!). It just… doesn’t works. Yet, the artwork version looks great.
• Example 2: Male Light Armor again, this time the Winged set that can be crafted at rank 225+ in Tailor. While the female version looks incredibly awesome (as usual), the male version is another disaster. The artwork for this piece of armor gives a very stylized, ancient/ mystic look to spellcasters. Again: wouldn’t that make an awesome recipe for awesomely-looking spellcasters? Again: the in-game version does not even come close. In fact, this one is so poor, that I can’t stop feeling that it was rushed or no real effort was put into it. First, it looks as if made of plastic or paper – it has a very fake feeling into it. Second, the feathered strap through the body looks like a toy instead of real feathers. It could’ve been a beautiful detail, but it’s ugly and it sticks. Third, it’s not even possible to dye the armored part of this piece of gear individually from the cloth part, for no apparent reason (isn’t the point of GW2’s flexible dye system to prevent something like this from ever happening)? Forth, when we look at the artwork, the shape and the curves of the hood are more stylized than their model version, looking very appealing in paper while being completely forgettable in-game. Fifth, the artwork for this piece of armor has some magical runes/ words ornamented within the cloth or the armor (if my memory does not fails me). This is yet another very appealing detail that could have made the armor piece look awesome, but which barely if even exists in the actual model. All of this adds up to the point that a cool-looking drawn set looks really bad in-game.
• The solution for this? Anet should make a “skin pass” – go through most of the armor sets that already exist in the game, compare them to how they were envisioned by the artists, and improve their models in an attempt to make them as impressive as possible as they are on paper.
• I used to think that GW2’s artists couldn’t simply draw male scholar armor, but the few artworks available in the net have shown me that the problem lies in the actual models and not so much on the artists.
• If Anet is unsure of this “skin pass” solution due to time or budget restraints, and the uncertainty of being well-received by the player base, why not target such changes for a future patch that would introduce – say, ascended pieces to dungeons and the like? This way, in a single patch, players would not only replay dungeons for their ascended stats – they would also do so for the improved skins (if they haven’t stored them already)!

Increasing base HP for ele is more valid than it seems. Initially, the ele was designed and advertised as a profession of destruction, but anet has eventually settled it as a jack-of-all-trades, probably due to the nature of the attunement system. For this reason, they could very well get jack-of-all-trades levels of HP, like engineer or ranger have/ are.

Of course, this would make HP distribution across professions a bit uneven. Each spellcasting class has different levels of HP. Although the same doesn’t applies to adventurer classes (both engie and ranger have same hp/ armor), so why not for ele sharing mesmer’s hp/ armor stats?

In fact, I think it would make more sense for a mesmer’s hp to get switched with ele’s. Sorry, Mesmer fans, I don’t really want to suggest nerfs to you! But if we think about it, mesmers, much like thieves, have build in defenses (clones, and a bit of stealth). The AI will attack clones often, and clones + stealth + tab targetting is strong versus players. That’s why mesmers, like thieves, are the two professions that can most afford using berserker gear in pvp. Not only that, but mesmer’s passive playstyle makes it a bit too easy to play, so less HP would make them a bit harder to master. But I understand that they are not really top-meta right now, so this nerf is probably unfair.

Another possibility, is to shorten the HP gap between professions. Give 13k base hp to eles/ thieves/ guardians. But maybe it would break the other two professions? At the very least the Guardian?

The problem with ele’s HP is also the skills, which in theory should justify it, but in practise does not. Most of ele’s survival comes from traits. Vigor, protection when swapping to earth, and regeneration/ healing/ condition removal/ on swapping to water and dodging while in water. When it comes to skills, a non-water/ arcana ele can’t stack enough heals, nor do they have enough protection available on earth (not talking about the boon, but that one is also missing). Most of their earth skills revolve around short-term disruption, bleeding, or cripple, which is fine, but it lacks serious defensive skills, with the exception of focus.

This is the perfect opportunity to emphasize my suggestions for a healing frost fan in the frost bow, an healing signet of water, and I would go further and suggest serious defensive traits for their earth traitline. This would give eles more sources to stack defense/ healing without relying on water/ arcana traits so much.

Air and fire traits also need more defense. An auto-cleasing flames in fire, vigor in fire, blind and weakness in air, etc.

EDIT: And please, switch fire’s condition duration with earth’s condition damage. It just makes more sense this way. Many burning effects only last 1s, which makes duration underwhelming, and many conditions are available in earth’s skills or traits. Besides, burning is ele’s main source of condition damage, not bleeding. Swapping those two would be a nice buff to both traitlines, without being overpowered, broken or anything. The current stat placement has little synergy, ad that’s also bland and unfun. And if devs’ intention is for players to make specific trait combos… well, they would still do it. A condi-ele would probably still want both.

One of my biggest problems with GW2 is the lack of new content. There’s way too many “feature patches” and too few “content patches”. There’s way too many “old systems revamps” and too few new maps/ events/ stories/ etc.

Mike, when I was reading your post, about halfway, when you said that your goal was to give us always something to do, my first reaction was “but not everyone wants a legendary, and for those that want it, not everyone wants a short bow!” Then I read the part where you confirmed that the legendary journey would be over, and I’m actually happy with that decision, even if it is very controversial.

That being said, I think there are flaws with the current living world systems that need to be fixed/ improved:

• There’s a lack of additional story content outside of big living story seasons/ expansions.
• There’s a lack of linear sidequests that can tell stories. Collections are cool, but they’re heavily non-linear, with interesting lore but little narrative, and are, well, more about collecting stuff than doing an actual adventure.
• Most of the content being developed is targetted way too much at niches. Raids are heavily social-driven, fractals are heavily agony-grinding driven, etc. I would like to see more content that can appeal to a larger majority of players (generally, new maps with new stories do that), or see existing content be made more accessible to non-hardcore players (removal of agony and much improved LFG for raids, in my opinion, would go a long way towards that).

VERTICAL PROGRESSION
The flaws with its execution in GW2

Ascended Gear

• The crafting process is convoluted.
• It’s not tied to immersive content, and therefore lore-less and lacking charm (Tequatl skins being an exception). Mostly a soulless grind.
• The infusion system feels redudant when there’s already a rune/ sigil system set in place.
• Very unfriendly to many forms of horizontal progression (build-crafting or playing with alts).

Solutions

• Add a crafting “roadmap” in the crafting stations, some sort of tree of all the materials required, and where to obtain them. Kinda like what already happens in dedicated fan sites, but within the game itself.
• Create new content and new stories with the purpose of obtaining ascended gear.
• Remove the infusion system from weapons and armors, and expand the rune/ sigil systems instead. Add ascended versions of runes and sigils that can only be applied on ascended equipment.
• Separate the concept of “upgrading stats” from “customising stats”. Upgrading stats could require all the work and time-sink it does now for ascended gear, but it should be much easier to customize/ change those stats regardless of their rarity tier.

I’ll probably talk about alt-playing next time.

The feature pack usually includes one or two “game-changing” features, and then several tiny but important QoL changes. It’s interesting, but certainly not “enough”. With LW offering us a new map and new story instances, and feature packs “only” offering enhancements to already existing content, it’s clear that GW2 is not getting enough content compared to the competition.

The first thing they choose to announce, for the next massive feature patch, was a pvp exclusive armor set to farm, another one for the top 15 players out of the many thousands, and a beta model option that is only available… for a few hundred players as well.

Sure, that’s not everything, but then we also know one other upcoming feature is an enhancement combat log and colored commander icons that fail their purpose.

Where is the game-changing pvp features? Leagues? New game modes? Better matchmaking? Nope, only tiny, even if interesting, additions.

colesy.8490:

You only ever have to grind for aesthetics in this game, getting a full set of exo gear and jewelry is easy and does not need to be grinded for.

Wrong.

First, ascended gear takes quite a while to get. Unlike GW1’s elite gear, GW2’s ascended does offer a stat boost.

Second, you need to grind for aesthetics OR whenever you get bored of your build and want to change it. In comparison, although GW1’s equipment affected you power, it did not strongly limited your build diversity. It was just an universal stat boost.

Third, there’s little else to do end-game, outside of grinding, so the main choice pvers will have to make in this game, is to keep grinding or stop playing altogether (with the exception for the days where new content patches hit).

By end game, you grind for map exploration, farm cof 1, wander around for the sake of grinding dailies or mindlessly farm events or world bosses. Someday, you’ll also be need to farm for acchievements. There’s nothing else to do.

1. Guild content is lacking, the new guild missions are gated/ restricted, and there’s little to no party-driven content. There’s little investment to keep playing GW2 for the community.
2. Challenging content to keep the more dedicated players on is mostly non-existent.
3. Profession balance and character building is crippled by very slow balancing, and by many, many restrictions, like stupid boss mechanics, poor AI, money sinks, equipment availability, etc, so those who like to customise builds and shape their own character, will find GW2 a mediocre game to do it, especially in comparison to the (flawed) brilliance of GW1’s character build system.
4. Likewise, the players who care about the story or the promise to shape their characters to a personal story have little to no reason to stick to GW2. The main story was rushed, the personal story concept was barely developed and has little to no mechanical impact, the event/ heart systems can’t substitute the traditional quest system to tell a story, and the new updates are taking forever to bring a new, well-developed story for those players, and it’s possible that new story instanced content won’t even be repeatable.
5. For those who like the combat system, the extremely dps-driven meta and the mediocre (or non-existant) team-driven mechanics is not helping much.
6. For those who love to explore the world, they will find a very pretty but shallow and repetitive Tyria. There’s little to no lore shown or to be read, map exploration is repetitive and a grind, all maps feel and play the same, and so it’s only an exciting experience for new players, before it reveals itself to be forgottable. There’s no adventure, there’s no danger in the world, there’s little to no reward, there’s no excitement; it’s all about mathematically visiting spots and never looking back, grinding hearts.
7. Finally, GW2 is not very rewarding except for those who love repetitive content. Exploring and enjoying Tyria is not very rewarding, but farming easy world bosses for months is. Doing hard content is not very rewarding compared to farming COF. Finding a champion and having an epic battle trying to beat him down will be mostly pointless, but farming for magic find gear and then farming mindless orr events will make you rich. The game even rewards more the players who repeat the same dungeon over and over, than those who like to diversify their gaming experience and do a little bit of each dungeon.

GW2 is a game that currently appeals to solo casuals and loot grinders. Community-driven casuals, hardcore players who want to see their skill rewarded, story-driven players, exploration-driven players or deck-building/ character customisation lovers will not find a lasting place in GW2.

I’d say you should go forward and make this change. If people like the current look, they can simply get the blue Jellyfish. More diversity is better than unneeded redudancy.

Some stat combos with 4 stats distributed instead of 3
Note: total stat count should still be equal to 3-stat combos.

This benefits professions that rely on more stats the most, like the elementalist or the guardian, who generally want to have healing power or vitality in addition to their other specializations. This is especially important when moving those combos to pvp’s amulets, and even more so now that jewels are being removed.

• (Main) Power – (very minor) Toughness, Vitality, Healing Power;
• (Main) Power – (very minor) Precision, Toughness, Healing Power;
• (Main) Power – (very minor) Precision, Toughness, Vitality;

More stat combos that enhance support or control builds
Note: unfortunately, there are not many stats that support those roles…

• (Main) Healing Power – (Minor) Boon Duration, Toughness;
• (Main) Healing Power – (Minor) Boon Duration, Precision;
• (Main) Boon Duration – (Minor) Any;
• (Main) Condition Duration – (Minor) Any;

When GW2 has the reputation of being a poorly rewarding game, when the community has criticized the game for that for 3 years, when Anet devs became sensible to the problem and started to invest heavily on new reward structures… you would expect something better than what we have gotten in the past. It happens to be right the opposite.

1. This game has achievements and collections. None of those systems were used to improve the rewards.
2. This game is a RPG with experience points, loot and magic find. All completely ignored.
3. This game has exp and magic find boosters in the gem store, that can also be obtained in-game every once and then. Yet, they have no purpose.
4. This game is a MMORPG, while events take half an hour only to offer you nothing if you get disconnected.
5. This game has an event reward system based on tiers that does nothing at its current implementation, while plenty of feedback has been given to improve the purpose of bronze-silver-gold rewards. No improvements were done, while event tagging continues to be a thing. Players are still punished for investing their time into any event at a time. Players are still rewarded for mindless tagging and minimal effort.
6. This event was meant for new players to enjoy, yet most good rewards require a significant gold sink (plus, they can’t level their characters).

The rewards are abysmal. They are truly, truly terrible. In a genre that greatly relies on progression, sense of achievement and item collection for playing pleasure, GW2’s Mordrem Invasion is almost devoid of that. In a game that wants to value cooperation and bring new players in, Mordrem Invasion happens to be a caricature of one of GW2’s biggest design weaknesses, the rewards.

Every single reward item is insanely calculated to be as stretched and grinding as it can possible be, leaving the whole experience feel soulless, and as dry as a desert.

MF Gear was just wrong. Anet realized their mistake. Account-bound mf gear will be much better, as it’ll allow you to diversify your farming experience through several characters, while having them stronger than they would be with MF gear as well.

Also, what has MF gear have anything to do with the problem with the zerker meta?

Which direction will Anet take with the Elementalist going forward?

What, seriously? What happened? I liked how he was pretty open in his posts, and I was interested to see wha he would do for his next content.

I love all the upcomming changes.

One of the things I’m worried about, is how much gold per hour will a player get on average in pvp versus how they would in pve. I hope they’re close enough in this regard. For example, 40 minutes of playing pvp should be a dungeon’s worth of reward (based on what Anet intends each dungeon to last on average).

Less is More, so I like the removal of ranks, glory and the like in favor of systems/ currencies that already exist.

“Every facet of the game was touched, polished, tweaked, or overhauled.”

PvP has gotten a broken and unfair league system that goes against Anet’s esport dreams, while the meta won’t be fixed until the season ends.

Fractals have gotten a convoluted and uneffective reward system, so they’re as unrewarding as ever.

WvW is officially incomplete by Anet’s own words.

The storyline is clearly rushed.

Existing reward systems like pvp reward tracks and luck consumption are now locked or hindered if you want to invest on guild halls with pvp potions/ luck, effectively making the game a less rewarding experience, which goes against Anet’s goals.

Guild Halls are solely designed to function as a massive money sink. Any potentially fun content, like guild upgrading and guild decoration, are gated behind massive money and time sinks, and it takes forever to get the smallest of benefits. Have fun cleaning your entire bank for months before even being able to enjoy decoration.

Medium-term rewards are almost non-existent. After some easier achievements, all that is left for you to do is to invest on legendaries, with nothing inbetween. 3 transmutation charges for completing your bladed armor chest in VB. Have fun.

Precursor hunting is, after 1-2 days of completing collections, nothing but yet another generic and convoluted money sink, not very different from the classic buy-from-tp precursors, which effectively added very little to the game.

And convoluted crafting everwhere. Trees and trees of material requirements specifically designed to suck gold and materials out of the economy, with little regard to the player’s enjoyment.

Divinity’s Reach is one of the most impressive cities in a RPG, there’s plenty of storytelling potential in there, and I was getting worried it would get forgotten by Anet in favor of Lion’s Arch. Glad to know it’s going to get its day, and I hope it’s relevant enough.

GW2 is, by design, heavily driven by cosmetic items. Yet, it seems like Anet has decided that the production of cosmetic equipment should be under a low budget. We rarely get equipment skins, and when we do, they’re either incomplete, or only available from the cash shop – and almost always pallete swaps.

It’s just an example of how inconsistent Anet is with its own game.

You would think that a heavily cosmetic-driven game would have more unique medium armor by now, or scholar’s male armor that wouldn’t make us spellcasters choose between picking generic cleric cloth or exaggerately ornamented, hyper-realistic, non-sense grabs. :P

What is GW2 about? This is one of the biggest problems with GW2: it doesn’t knows what it wants to be.

Is it a story-driven game? It sorta wants to be one, but for months, it has been lacking infrastructure, systems and cutscenes to present its story, and the story itself was rushed. It still sorta wants to be one, with new content being called Living Story, but we’re still at an experimental phase, and no one knows when it’ll kick off for real.

Is it a party-driven game? It sorta wants to be one. The damage/ control/ support trinity is broken, party synergy is lacking, events are completed with mindless zergs, and the only places that are designed around parties, are few and thrown to a few corners of the world.

Is it a skill-driven game? It sorta wants to be one, it surely was the devs’ original intention. The devs wanted this game to reward players for skill instead of farming, but it completely failed at that. GW2 is an extremely casual game that can be farmed, explored and completed mindlessly. There’s little to no adrenaline, tension or epic adventuring going on, challenging-wise.

Is it a pvp-driven game? It sorta wants to be one, but its pvp was completely bare-bones at launch, and only very slowing have they been expanding it, but at least it’s going there.

Is GW2 a casual-driven game? Yes, absolutely yes. Outside of the initial challenge of learning how to dodge and some other mechanics, GW2 is all about casuals doing braind-dead stuff for “fun”. Farming events where you are highly rewarded for watching your characters auto-attack, grinding mindless, repetitive, story-less hearts, grinding numbers for repetitive world exploration, not requiring any form of coordenation and near to no strategy, etc.

GW2 has some good foundations, but it greatly lacks polish. Many of the things that it tried to accomplish, it didn’t. It’s a game that wants to be a little bit of everything, and ends up having little to no identity.

In comparison, GW1, even though it was far from a perfect game at launch (and even for its lifetime), it accomplished a lot of its goals.

GW1 knew it wanted to be a story-driven game, and revolved around a mission structure to tell its story, with quests inbetween to keep the storytelling flow, and with cutscenes to boot. GW2 launched with neither of those features, and slowly has been bringing them back. We’ve seen cutscenes in F&F, we’re starting to see quests to tell small stories for the living world content, and we know the devs are working on infrastructure/ systems to improve the way the story is presented and guided.

GW1 knew it wanted to have a deep party-driven system, and so its content revolves around parties and its skill system around party synergy. For solo-players, it very elegantly features a henchmen/ hero system, which would allow players to play alone in instances, without sacrificing the party-driven content.

GW1 knew it wanted a very fun building system, and so it streamlined building, with no money sinks behind it, featured rules and restrictions to keep each build unique, and had a skill-collecting mini-game that also added an unique twist to the concept of exploring a world.

GW1 knew it wanted to have strong pvp, and had multiple game modes, matchmaking, etc. GW2 is slowing going the GW1’s way.

In the end, GW1 knew what it wanted to be, and attempted to be as good as possible at what it was; while GW2 wanted to be a little of everything, and failed at being great at any of those goals.

Hello everyone.

Currently, Anet balances the skills and traits mostly by shaving their efficiency, which is generally a slower-paced, more conservative set of buff/ nerf changes.

However, sometimes many of those changes do not account for how easy or not those skills are to master, nor subtle playstyle tricks that are lost in the process. In turn, it has been a common occurrence for new balancing patches to bring new unbalanced, generally unfairly easy-to-play builds, or for the opposite effect, remove some depth of play from stronger skills once they’re nerfed. We can simply take a look at the current pvp meta, and all of its variations since the june patch, for plenty of examples of what the community calls the “cheese builds”. They don’t stop coming, with condi-sword warriors, MM necros and PU mesmers being the latest new “cheese” additions.

Meanwhile, and deeply related to this issue, readjusting how skills play to make them harder to use efficiently can be an excellent way to tone them down without taking away their potential max power level (however high that it might be), AKA, without directly nerfing them.

This is best explained with an example:

What exactly happened?

• Anet detected a problem (all cantrips being stun breaks);
• Anet nerfed/ shaved the skill by removing the problem;
• Anet compensated the nerf with a buff elsewhere;

Although I think that’s a fine practice for balancing alone (although the skill in question certainly needed its CD pushed towards a bit more to become more appealing), it won’t always work very well from a design point of view, because it comes at the risk of dumbing down the game. In fact, elementalists have many more examples like those, unfortunately. Let’s take a quick look:

So, what is my proposal?
My proposal is that, upon detection of balancing problems, Anet should readjust each effect’s functionality to make them harder to use or to offer more counter-play from your opponent, and only consider shaving the skill’s max effectiveness after doing so. Emphasis on the “consider” and “after” words. Why is that? Because, by simply making the skills harder to use, not only that makes them more satisfying to master, but it indirectly nerfs them, even when played skillfully, versus good players.

Considering the amount of time I have to spend to complete hot meta maps, and then dailies, and then dungeons/ fractals/ whatever, each single day, the rewards are actually worth it now and they finally feel like they are taking me somewhere. I mean, I don’t even have time to do all that except at weekends.

Elementalists are underpowered because you must swap attunements, because you must chain you abilities, because you must dodge and kite like crazy, because you must make the best use of your combo fields and because you must interrupt your own burst to survive against pve enemies, which are generally weak, easy and killed in seconds by the standards of the best professions out there, like the guardian and the warrior.

About skill count (weapons + main mechanics), the Warrior and the Ranger have 12, the Thief has 11 (+2 stealth skills? And steal is not a fixed skill), the Guardian has 13, the Mesmer has 14 skills (4 shatters + good auto-attacks), the Necromancer has 15 (DS + DS skills) and the Engineer has between 9 and 29 (?), considering kits are their own version of attunements.

When an Elementalist has effectively 16 skills, and several (= most) of the other professions have more complex and detailed skills than the Elementalist, while having more diversity in range and smaller cooldowns, then I wonder where the advantage is?

Finally, the elementalist is not even the best at AoE. With 3 button presses, a Greatsword Guardian, without weapon swapping (which is as important to them as attunements are to us, but they seem to rely much less on that mechanic) can make a huge aoe burst (burning + symbol tick damage + whirling + leap), stack retaliation from two different sources (for even higher damage), remove conditions twice and blind all foes. 3 buttons. It’s generally enough to take down most of the HP from most pve enemies, and you can pre-use another skill for more damage-over-time (+ interruption), and spam auto-attack for might-stacking and clean up respectively before or after the combo.

Enemies will die before you even have the opportunity to swap weapons.

The devs always intended for them to be different kind of games. However, in my opinion, that was a mistake. They should have taken the GW1 formula, and expanded it with the new GW2 ideas (trading post, every class being able to fill every role, dynamic events, etc). But they decided to expand from the generic mmo model instead. This still makes GW2 an unique game, but in many ways, GW1’s design is superior.

Based on anet’s own manifesto, GW1 is ahead of its time while GW2 has yet a long way to try and catch it up.

Basically, thieves are not only the best at their role, but they are also the best at countering other builds with the same role.

Hello Karl and Anet’s balancing team,
Here are my comments about the elementalist’s changes.

I’m a bit worried that you’re choosing to buff already strong skills, instead of picking underpowered skills instead. This goes especially for Water Trident. If you want to give more sustain to scepter, please, look at Rock Barrier and, especially, Dust Devil. If you keep buffing our best skills forever, then you’ll put elementalists at a situation where buffing the underwhelming skills might come at the risk of making the class overpowered. This is unfair.

However, I think buffing the already strong Burning Speed is justified, for a specific reason: you’re giving a new active defense skill that does not depends on defensive stats to be good. This is something that elementalists really need, and I can’t see this kind of change making sense in any other MH dagger skill, so making burning speed even stronger is justified in this case.

For Water Trident, it is just excessive. I can understand that you want us to take the grandmaster Cleansing Water trait, but no one will take it anyways. The 5 second cooldown has ruined that trait, because it’s unpractical. You’re asking for elementalists to wait 5 seconds before using Water Trident to make use of it (after proccing on elemental attunement’s regen). Sometimes, it will simply, randomly, not proc, because it was automatically put under cooldown from the new water’s adept trait that gives regen on being critically hit, without the player not even realizing it under the heat of combat.

As it is now, Cleansing Water is almost always a worse option than the master trait Cleansing Wave, with some clumsy exceptions.

If you want to promote this trait and make players use it again, consider instead reverting the nerf and removing the cooldown or, alternatively, reduce the cooldown from 5 to 3 seconds, so that switching to water, proccing on elemental attunement, dodging on water, using heal nº5, and finally using Water Trident or Glyph of Harmony can actually make the later skills remove a condition with the grandmaster trait. This sequence usually takes around 3 or more seconds, but usually not as much kitten seconds, and elementalists don’t have the privilege of waiting doing nothing, which makes the grandmaster trait at the current 5 seconds cooldown very weak on practice.

To strengthen my argument, please, keep in mind that our condition removal was further nerfed last patch, when you made soothing disruption and cleansing wave both at master tier. This made it impossible to have both those two traits and cleansing water slotted in the same build.

As long as cleansing water trait is kept with its clumsy, hidden CD, players will shun from having several different sources of regen, due to fear of some of them not reliably proccing the effect due to the hidden CD. And because cleansing water’s main appeal is that it is meant to proc on multiple sources, no one will invest 30 points in water for the sake of a cleansing water trident every 20 seconds, when 1/4 of the effect of Evasive Arcana offers as much cleansing and more healing for half the cooldown.

About Armor of Earth, I’m glad you realize our weakest cantrip needs buffing. However, instead of making its cooldown directly compete with Mist Form, and considering it is generally weaker than Mist Form except in few situations, I would suggest to push the cooldown even lower with a slight nerf to the boons to compensate for it. So instead of 75 seconds cooldown, I suggest 60 seconds cooldown and protection and stability last for 1 second less.

Finally, and going into Guardian’s new heal, I think the casting time reduction is important, but won’t do anything by itself. The playerbase is being very vocal on this, and with reason. No one likes useless changes, because they’re usually a waste of time for both players and the devs. I understand you don’t want to make heals instant in this game. Making the casting time even lower, or/ and increasing the healing from 20% to 25% are possile solutions to further push this skill. However, another problem with this heal, is that the traitline that improves meditations is also the traitline that makes shelter increadibly stronger with the might on block grandmaster minor trait. I’d say that it’s about time to shave shelter by giving it 5 extra seconds of cooldown, and maybe the trait could be revised to only offer 3 stacks of might, instead of as many as the number of blocks. still, the medidation heal is still incredibly weak, being a weak heal even when fully traited, and that should be revealing enough to prove that a slightly lower casting time won’t be enough.

Overall, I was hoping for something new we could discuss. This thread is currently just a recap of what has already been said and discussed. I can understand you don’t want to spoil the new skills yet, but what about a preview for all the individual changes done to sigils and runes?

Let’s not undervalue good buffs because “lazy players exist”. Active skills are more healthy to this game, specially for the competitive side (pvp and wvw) than mindless passive procs and pets that play the game for you.

Being able to trigger a 6k heal whenever you want, every 15 seconds, will be simply great.

It would be interesting if tab targetting ignored all pets, with the exception of clones. Tab targetting through pets should be an optional keybind feature.

Seriously,

I do not mind the high price that much. I’m willing to buy the expansion at €40-50 anyway, even if it seems to be a bit short on content to justify that cost. It does seems a stretch to buy it that high, but I’m willing to do it. And to be honest, I even think that for non-gw2 players, the expansion happens to be a great deal as well.

But having to eat that price, and still get NO character slot? Am I understanding this right? That I’ll have to spend 40-50 to buy revenant, only to not be able to play with him at all, unless I delete one of my characters? Unless I pay 800 gems more, which is about €10 added into the original price in a sneaky, schemy sort of way? Unless I mindless farm chest farming and cease to play the normal game in a normal way, and cease to seek my personal objectives and rewards, so I can get the “privilege” to play a revenant after spending kittening €40-50? Why would I even bother doing all that after this expansion’s pack basically being a huge middlefinger to the existing playerbase?

The fact that they included a character slot in their $99 bundle is nothing more but some sort of unitentional trolling that leaves an incredibly bad taste to my mouth. When a MMORPG expansion comes out with a new race or class and a new character slot, the purpose of that character slot is to give purchasers garanteed access to that race/ class that they have paid for. This is common sense. This is pure, basic common sense. That’s even how GW1’s campaigns worked.

If a player is already mad at the price, if a player is already mad at having no free access to the revenant in addition to that price, if a player already feels cheated by all that, then what will that player’s reactions be when they read that the character slot is included in the ultimate edition? “Oh, the marketing team wants us to churn $99 for the revenant. Right.”

I could spend my time chest farming for 800 gems. I could cease all my current in-game objectives for this “oh so amazing” privilege of gaining access to the revenant, because, apparently, churning €40-50 won’t be enough. I could, but I won’t waste my time in a game that treats me as an exploitable idiot.

Considering that the last and costier HP unlocks are tied to two cosmetic items and to runes/ sigils, perhaps you’ll only need 200-300 to get all the skills/ traits you need.

Allie Murdock.8152:

We expect the feature build to sufficiently shake up the current meta. There will be lots… of fresh… stuff…

Monthly basis is not 100% feasible right now like it was before. We tried to bring you guys consistent updates, but as you noticed not all of them really shook up the meta. The upcoming build will do a better job at that for you. Hopefully in a good way.

Hello, Allie.

The monthly balance updates weren’t always enough to shake the meta, because the designer’s “shaving” balance philosophy is, by its very nature, a slow, safe, “let’s push it a bit further until it works” process. That means that, it sometimes took several attempts until it started to bring real consequences to the meta.

And this is not exactly a bad thing when balancing patches are frequent enough. Small shaving balance passes every two weeks or every month, and one or two months later, the changes started to become very apparent.

For that reason, the longer the patches take out to come to us, the more underwhelming that shaving philosophy feels to us players. An 8% nerf to Healing Signet would be nice if it came quickly, like, say, one month after the community deemed it to be too strong. Would (will) that nerf be enough? Probably not, but then Anet could shave it a bit further the following month, and a bit further the month after that, until it is placed at an “acceptable state”. Monthly balance shaves gives to anet and to the community the opportunity to analyze every small change frequently enough, and adapt to it. But when a patch can take 4-5+ months to come, that 8% nerf might come at the risk of being a slap to the face of every competitive player, especially if they must wait 4-5 more months for the next shaving.

I personally feel that there should exist two different types of balance patches. The shaving passes, that would come out monthly and slightly tone down the meta, and the big balancing patches, that would bring a lot of buffs, re-designs, new skills or traits, etc, but take several months to come. Those two types of patches should co-exist together. This game’s pvp would be at a much better state now, if the previewed shaving changes were already in-game.

It would be interesting if this issue could be discussed in RU. Like, what does Anet thinks of this situation, and how are they approaching it now.

The dominance of zerker gear is not the fault of the players, but of this game’s balance and design. It’s a direct consequence of GW2’s innovative “party-roles-shouldn’t-matter” battle design.

BACK TO HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION

Playing with alts
Anet had some sort of strategy about using player’s alts as new sources of money sink, but that has clearly failed, and we’ve been getting changes towards the opposite direction lately. This is great, because the more incentives there are to play with alts, the more incentives there are for a portion of the playerbase to log more often into the game.

• Ascended gear discriminates the players who like to invest on multiple characters, as it demands from them a much higher money sink than from players that stick to a single character.
• Likewise for dyes.
• Likewise for several soul-bound items.
• Exploring the world is very repetitive the second time.

Solutions

• Make ascended gear significantly easier to get after the first copy is crafted/ obtained, similar to the acchievement’s skins. After getting the first copy, the player could get the ability to create as many duplicates as they would wish for their other characters.
• Make dyes account bound.
• Make most non-story soul-bound gear account-bound. If I just replaced my ascended trinkets for new ones, why can’t I equip the old ones to another character I have? The money sink is already done. I have already contributed positively to the game’s economy. :P Let me at the very least use it somewhere else.
• World exploration is very complex, and I won’t dwelve into it for being off-topic. But it would be nice if, at the very least, the WPs were account bound, so we could quickly go to our favourite area or help our friends in a specific dungeon without being restricted only to our main.

I really hope this thread persuades anet to make a second nerf pass on top of the already announced nerf before the patch hits.

When a single rune set, and nothing else, can transform a non-confusion build into a better-than-mesmer confusion build, it doesn’t deserves a nerf shave, it deserves a flat-out nerf slap.

I want to add something different:

Tie living story content with new mechanics.

If you’re adding new ascended or legendary gear, add a story behind it. Add lore behind it. Add some epic quests behind it. Add something that makes gear-collecting memorable, instead of being a pure, soulless mathematical acchievement.

If you’re adding guild missions, and that suddenly changes how guilds play in the game, then how does Tyria reacts to it, or better yet, what happened in Tyria to create this situation?

Etc.

It’s a profession that was originally designed to survive around active defenses.

However, unlike thieves or mesmers, elementalist’s active defenses are heavily driven by defensive stats, or mostly only available through defensive traits. Usually a combination of both. This means that without healing power, toughness and vitality, elementalist’s active defenses are too weak to sustain a glass cannon – but with those stats, those defenses could scale really high and make them excellent bunkers (in the past). Not only that, but the elementalist’s best traits and best utilities were mostly defensive, and some of their best trait combinations also so.

So it was a mix of poor design (a profession designed around active defenses that depend too much on defensive stats to be good compared to the other 7 professions), of massive defense stacking (where elementalists stacked as many defensive effects/ stats as possible and acchieved some overpowered combos), and Anet nerfing all of their defensive options one by one without fixing the core problem of the class, that lead to the current situation.

Going to make a list for my arguments, for a clearer presentation.

Change
Elementalist’s base Health,
10,805 -> 15,082
And
Mesmer’s base Health,
15,082 -> 10,805

Why:

• Eles have a hard time if not heavily specced in stronger passive defense;
• Mes have an easy time even while in berserker gear;

• Many of the eles active defenses are stat-biased. They rely on defensive stats to be strong enough. Examples: healing skills which rely on healing power, auras which require eles to get hit, boons.
• Most mes active defenses are stat-neutral. They excel at reflection, blocks, invulnerabilities, stuns, teleports, stealth etc. Some of them are already present in the core profession mechanic. Many of them are under low cooldowns, or are offered by very strong traits. In addition to all this, they have illusions.

• Eles were officially designed to rely less on passive defenses, and more on active defenses. However, the most neutral active defenses were given to mes, not to ele, alongside the higher health value too. It’s unfair that the “profession officially designed to rely on active defenses” has weaker or more restricting active defenses than another profession that also happens to get higher base health and equally strong burst/ damage potential.

• If Eles had higher health, builds with more offensive stats/ traits would become viable. However, players would still desire defensive stats because their active defenses depend a lot on them.
• If Mes had lower health, their offensive builds would come at a higher risk, but players would still have enough stat-neutral defenses to compensate for that. Meanwhile, defensive stats would be more desired, due to the risk of the low health.

Mega bosses will still offer garanteed golds (once per day). And there are still several mega bosses to battle. In other words, players will still keep doing them, and the rewards will still be good.

Great fix.

EDIT: If each dungeon path offered one gold per day, it would also be pretty cool.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I hear you mate, but while it’s beneficial to you, multiplied by the thousands of players getting too many rewards, and there runs the risk of not only crashing the market, but also inflation and the ever scary “running out of things to do/collect”.

For the TP market, perhaps, but for all the in-game merchants with fixed prices, the rewards actually feel meaningful now. For me, it’s the difference between being worth it or not being worth it (I was pretty much not playing the game until last patch).