Guild Wars 2

Been meaning to throw in this suggestion, hope it’s not to late.

Maybe instead of making the skyhammer a “random” (yes i know it’s not actually random) issue make it a bit more consistent

My idea keep it as is but it will pelt down misery on any/all points that are contested (i.e. not controlled by anyone) If you maintain control of a point it won’t hurt you, with one exception.

When a player activates the skyhammer (by channeling at a panel of some sort obviously) it will perform a huge nuke on points not controlled by their team essentially serving as a bunker buster.

This will make the skyhammer more integral to strategy rather than “control it so you don’t get nuked”

Boss Mechanics, Roles, and “Why am I here?”

Guild Wars 2 faces a unique problem because of the fact that it does not adhere to the traditional trope of the Holy Trinity in MMO’s because of this a non-traditional approach to designing engaging and fun boss fights is; for all intents and purposes, mandatory.

Early on boss design (particularly in dungeons) was pretty basic. Dodge this or die, kill it before it kills you; and while that is a good base for designing any boss as the game has evolved so have the many boss fights that have been introduced since then.

Raid bosses should be no different, a further evolution on the current trends of mob/boss design in GW2.

Making a boss engaging for large groups is no easy task however and as a fight introduces more mechanics in order to accomplish this goal it is very easy to fall into trap of requiring players to bring assets to a raid group that they do not actually enjoy (I.E a guardian for wall of reflection)

My suggestion in order to not fall into this trap would be to focus mechanical design on overall concepts, and when falling into specifics to make sure it can be completed with a wide variety of tools.

Examples of some good mechanics for bosses.

Platforming segments in order to hit a singular or small number of switches. Something like this can be completed by any player regardless of profession or gear.

A boss with adds that have to be managed somehow in a way other than simply killing them. Boss adds have been a staple for some time for a reason, they are an easy way to add to the dynamics of group play into a fight. Having an add that is immune to damage sources from players directly but is susceptible to things that are widely available like bleeds and blinds is a good way to get players to strategize how best to deal with the situation. For further complexity this particular add can be made susceptible to the attacks of the main boss. Now the goal is to not only to blind the add to mitigate its damage but to work together to kite/control it so it can be dealt with.

Then there’s the bundle system already in game, this has already been used somewhat for bosses (cliffside fractal as an example) this is a great way to introduce mechanics that have to be executed by a single player (even if it is with the aid of others, only one person is pushing that button) without requiring they be a certain profession.

Another idea is to implement mechanics that allow for a wide variety of solutions. As an example the boss could have an attack that charges and attacks a single player that must be mitigated or avoided somehow. It’s important there is a charge time so there is time for player to work together to deal with the situation. As to how to deal with it in multiple ways here are some examples; a thief can stealth their ally and the boss will lose targeting, guardians could put aegis on their ally (or themselves), a mesmer could portal the targeted ally out of the attacks range, a warrior could block the attack himself with a shield by standing in the way of it, really it’s just a matter of getting creative. The most important thing is to allow for multiple ways of dealing with any singular problem. Variety is the spice of life.

Lastly while boss fights should obviously not be done in less than a minute, excessive health pools and overly long phases are tiring and even worse; boring so it is crucial to avoid this at all costs.

hybrid.5027:

Accessibility Raid instances will be activated through the current Guild Mission system. When someone with mission control activates the raid portal in the open world, the first players in the guild to interact with the portal are transported to the raid instance. Activating a Guild Raid should cost some amount of Guild Merits, but not an excessive amount. Players should be encouraged to make multiple attempts per week, but discouraged from making hundreds of bad attempts. 1 to 5 Merits to activate seems like a compromise.

There will be no waypoints, and no ability to resurrect in case of a full party wipe. If you wipe players will be returned to the open world. Players can hard res each other as normal in cases of a partial wipe.

I think it would be a mistake to implement this sort of system in terms of accessibility. There is already to much incentive in the game the join a single large guild and basically ignore the rest of the community as well as for large guild to try and hoard their members as much as possible (as seen in the rise of 100% mandatory rep). While there should be some sort of entrance barrier to keep those obviously not prepared for out of it, I think i should play off of already similar content in the way of explorable dungeons. My suggestion, you have to complete all the dungeon paths in order to enter any raid, additionally every piece of gear you have equipped must be exotic when you enter (once your inside you can switch as you please but that’s your prerogative at that point)

Second NO entry fee. This discourages inexperienced players from entering and punishes those trying to learn a new system. While I do agree there should not be multitudes of waypoints a simple rez checkpoint systems (like fractals) is enough “punishment” for failing. Being put into the open world is too much for the majority of players and while it may be compelling to you as a the leader of DnT it will deter more players than welcome.

A nice medium for accessibility and difficulty would be to have the usual raid setup for those who want to participate but for those seeking a bit more of a challenge they can optionally sacrifice some kind of resource (gold, rare mats, tokens, really anything) as a sort of wager that they will succeed. If they go through the raid without wiping then they not only get what they paid in back but an exponential amount more as they continue without dying. This will also be a good way to incentivise players to return to the content once it is on “farm” as a way to gain more wealth/resources.

Rewards: Once a raid size has been established this is the most important thing to consider. Rewards can and will determine who will actually attempt the content as well as how long they are willing to repeat it. One of the biggest current complaints of fractals is the lack of rewards for the time and difficulty they present. Raids by their very nature should be more challenging than even this content and I think it is very important that the rewards they actually give (not only OFFER) is reflective of their investment. The highest quality equipment should be the baseline at this level of play (currently and hopefully forevermore ascended). GW2 however is about more than just what numbers are on your equipment (thankfully) so unique visual rewards in the way of weapons, armor, and outfits would be a compelling way to get players to run the content. In order to give this content a healthy lifespan however these kinds rewards cannot simply be given away all at once. Implementing a system similar to the existing dungeon tokens would be my suggestion for these particular rewards, a good short term goal. As for long term introducing gold, rare materials, and a long term synthesis track (more on this in a second) will give players incentive to run the content repeatedly.

Synthesis Track: As I mentioned in the last bit a good long term goal for raiding would be a Synthesis Track. A hybrid system of the current PvP track reward system and the Mystic Forge, this system will give raiders a long term goal that can evolve as the game does. Using materials that can be obtained from all aspects of the game the player will be able to spend “Raid Experience” to synthesize these materials into new items giving access to difficult to obtain items that span the entire game (i.e precursors, exotic/ascended runes, ascended armor/weapons)

Lastly (at least for now) the most crucial thing for raiding to become a health part of GW2. I believe that the raids MUST be instanced for the groups entering them. Large open world content is difficult to coordinate and is subject the outside influence that most raiders quite simply do not want to put up with.

I’ve probably already run out of space so I’ll throw this out there and start talking about boss design (which Anet is already very good at as shown by recent living story updates) if it comes up in the discussion later.

Hello everyone, I’m Evee from Relics of Orr (both the guild and the podcast). In the past I’ve been quite vocal about my support for bringing raids into GW2 and I’d like to share my ideas here as to how this could be achieved. Please note that this is a bit of a long post so a lot of people are posting while I type this so if I’m cutting in between a reply I’m sorry but such is the nature of the beast with a forum thread like this.

I should probably also mention that I do come from a long history of raiding in other games (including WoW) and think it’s important that people know that so they have some insight into my particular perspective as a former World First raider in several AAA MMO’s

Proposal Overview

To not only introduce raiding as a fun system for the majority of players to enjoy but implement it in such a way that it is healthy during the entire lifetime of GW2

Goal of Proposal

To fill the current lack of challenging but fun content for large groups of friends that is consistently rewarding.

Proposal Functionality

Raiding has been a long standing tradition in MMO’s for quite some time. That I can remember; all the way back to Everquest in fact; before the move forward to instances that was popularized by WoW.

Guild Wars already has in place a system reminiscent of EQ with it’s world bosses. However, most players nowadays look for more of a WoW-esque platform when they think of raiding. So in the in an effort to be as direct as possible I’ll now go into the features and implementation of raiding I think should exist in GW2 in order to set it apart from an old, well-known system that I think GW2 should take some lessons/influence from but should in no way try to reproduce (as so many others have tried)

Size: Finding the right size for a raid is the most crucial part when looking at designing. It determines the amount of logistics needed by the players as well as what kind of commitment and audience will actually go into the new content. To small of a number and many won’t consider it a “real raid” too many and participation becomes too much of a scheduling nightmare among large groups of people. Additionally having a set size is important in how the raids are designed for balance purposes; making an engaging boss fight for 10 people is very different than making one for 40. With that said I think a happy medium of size and convenience would be a raid size of 15 people. Large enough to have multiples of multiple professions while also being small enough to not deter the more casual players which are numerous in GW2 (which I would like to emphasize to everyone should be given every opportunity to be able to enjoy this content)

(continued in my next post)

So I think it’s time for a little bit of a far reaching idea for expanding fractals.

User Created Fractals

Currently Guild Wars 2 has very little “sandbox” in it. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a fan a heavily sandboxy games, but a little sandbox can lead to a lot of fun.

The biggest issue however comes up every time someone suggests user created fractals, hwo do we keep creators from allowing players to exploit their content for more rewards?

Numbers, lots and lots of figures, values, and quotas that have to be met and not exceeded.

My proposal would be to add an architech tool to allow a creator to “forge” a map with terrain of their choice, however the space must meet a certain amount and not exceed another, in order to keep all fractals relatively the same size.

Next enemy mob amount, in order to prevent players from simply creating a big arena and sticking one boss in it and BOOM fractal! require mob spawn areas to be placed. Creators will be given a choice of different mob templates that will include many different (yet similar like all dredge or all grawl) that cover an area that can be adjusted slightly.

These templates must be a certain distance apart and there msut be a certain amount placed and another slightly higher that can not be exceeded within one fractal. Additionally players will get 1 boss template they can set parameters to spawn upon certain conditions (killing all other mobs, escorting blah NPC, entering BLAH area) per fractal.

All of these will not affect however how many friendly non-combat NPCS a players can add (within reason) and how much dialouge, in the form of text bubbles or perhaps even uploaded sounds clips they can give these NPCS (also allows dialouge for enemies because reasons)

Simply adjust the values that must be met and not so much exceeded to match the “normal” fractals and give equal reward.

Give them the tools, and they will build for you a magnificent land to enjoy to slaughtering of your enemies for your profit like the true merc..ermm….uhh… HERO you are!

I’m a bit late to the party but let’s get started shall we?

Currently Fractals are in a weird limbo of being the “most hardcore group content” in Guild Wars 2 yet do you provide the “I am a better than you” factor often found in this type of content.

This is not a bad thing. However, having lackluster rewards from content that demands a relatively higher level of planning, coordination, and skill makes no one a happy camper. Those that enjoy the content feel cheated for not being able to get rewards comparable to other aspects of the game, and those that do not enjoy the content not only don’t participate in it (which is not a problem) but look down upon those that do as they are “wasting their time”.

Fix?

Well try to put yourself in the shoes of the “average” player. Players usually have goals, right now those goals are probably somewhere between the lines of “get better gear” and “get better looking gear”. For the first crowd there are ascended items, which are actually necessary to progress further into fractals. Only, there are many ascended items that can not be obtained in fractals, this is a problem. Then the items that are available are rare on top of being varied from “this is useless to me” to “this is the one item I need”.

Proposal: Guaranteed Item drop dependent on level

I propose that upon completion of a level 30+ fractal every player in the team receives a new ascended item, this item (which is not a currency) will be BoA so no trading it between players obviously. The purpose of this item is to act as a sort of psuedo token, it can be taken to our lovely golem friend at the entrance of the fractals and traded for either a ring of your choice, a rather large lump sum of fractal relics, or (in higher quantities not exceeding 5 for a single item) all of the ascended gear boxes (both for armor and weapons) currently available as well as amulets and acessories.

This along with a revamp on T6 material drop and an increase in gold as a completion reward will entice many to continue to do fractals in the future.

With that said however, no matter how good the rewards will be if the content itself is not fun players will not participate in it.

So how can we make fractals more fun?

First off, and I know this has probably been said too much. The length/difficulty of all the fractals needs to be normalized at an individual level. The biggest outliers of this are Dredge and Swamp. Dredge is too long, some would say even artificially so with the “clown car” and Swamp is ridiculously short compared to every other fractal. Which would explain why so many reroll their first fractal to get it.

I’m not a balance person, I don’t like numbers. However I like concepts and ideas so it’s time to throw a newish one (that I certainly hope I am not alone in suggesting)

Scaling Fractals

Particularly Fractals that Scale to the amount of players inside ranging from 2 to the highest number over 6 the developers find manageable to make a balanced and fun experience for players. This of course would mean having to introduce a way to make parties up to that limit, but I’m sure that can be handled.

Why do this though? Simply put, for flexibility and convinience! There are many players that would benefit from being able to run fractals under the current magic number of 5 players and there are also many who would enjoy (I know I’m one!) being able to bring all their friends in to kill virtual baddies for digital goodies.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading and I hope this inspires the developers to do more amazing work on an already great game.

TooBz.3065:

I feel like I have to say, I wish you guys had come out with ascended gear before launch. It would have saved everyone a lot of angst.

honestly they probably would have jsut lost a considerable chunk of sales, with that said there’s no point looking back. We should look forward as to how to improve the game as a whole. Ascended gear included

ColinJohanson.2394:

A question to help direct the discussion a bit:

What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others? Be they horizontal, or vertical, just which ones really got you excited and were fun for you to continue to progress in?

For me, Final Fantasy Tactics is one I loved, where I was able to continue to unlock new jobs and advanced professions for my characters, as well as level up their abilities within those professions. It remains one of my all time favorite games, and one of my favorite systems of progression in any game. I’m also pretty darn fond of that Guild Wars game and skill collection.

I wasn’t too fond of Guild Wars skill collecting honestly, I just unlocked everything in PvP and used books as needed. :P

With that said my favorite progression system is actually from a spanish indie game so I’ll just explain it.

Basically your character starts with a somewhat generic look, when you choose a class this look is modified in a pretty basic way. I chose thief so he got a bandana as a mask. Then as he leveled I could specialize in one of the talent trees (which was actually similar to traits in guild wars 2) when I reached level 10 in Espionage he lost the bandana and got an earpiece. At this point I decided to go into a more damage oriented tree of dueling at level 10 he got a guantlet on his left arm, at level 20 the guantlet got much more elaborate, at 30 it got a gem that glowed differently depending on what specific talent i had equiped. If I ahd the talent that would allow me to counter attack after a parry it was a red gem that had a glowing white sigil over it. It i took the talent that caused bleeding when I crit it was a black gem but my character recieved a bleeding type particle effect off his guantlet.

I really would like to see a similar system applied to traits in guild wars 2

Quite some time ago I wrote a blog post over on Relics of Orr basically just about this which can be found here http://www.relicsoforr.com/?p=2680

I don’t expect anyone to actually go read it (though it would be awesome) so I’ll go into a short bulleted form of suggestions for ascended gear and horizontal progression (if I can figure out how to make bullets on these forums otherwise just a lot of returns)

-Ascended gear is here and it’s probably going to stay, we need to look forward at this point rather than try to get rid of it. A large of this is to not undermine the effort people have already put into the gear they currently have (much like the fractal level reset to 30)

-Exotics are become less and less useful as ascended gear has been released, seriously jsut look at the price of exotics on the TP now. If it’s not an exclusive skin, it’s at an all time low.

-Fix: Bump exotics to ascended level of stats number wise, keeping them relevant OR allow exotics to be upgraded to ascended with the use of a vision crystal

-Alternative leave exotics as is allow to become salvage/skin fodder, Make ascended gear much more acessible without gold through guild commendations, laurels, pristine fractal relics, fractal relics, dungeon tokens, badges of honor, WvW rank up chests, WvW season chests, and semi-regular drops (similar to exotics now)

-The above changes would undermine the effort players have put into previous ascended gear, how to compensate? Let the current ascended gear swap stats on the fly, much like legendaries do now or alternatively have those specific armors and weapons be part of what is needed to craft new legendaries when they are released.

-Would the above undermine legendaries? I honestly don’t think so because they have such unique skins and that was their purpose.

Beyond Ascended gear

-Traits should be more flexible, much like guild wars 1 I feel they should be changable with no fee in a city. Also keep working on making ALL traits feel wanted, there’s quite a bit of “why would you ever use this?” in each profession.

-Skills, simply put: more. More weapons (thieves could use a 1200 range weapon jsut saying) more utilities, the heals are a nice start but for some professions they jsut not that good so it’s kinda a “meh” point"

-Personality: Currently this is just a bar in the hero panel that might be full or not. Make it MEAN something. I personally would love to see combat quips change depending on personality

-Make professions more “unique”, not that every profession doesn’t have it’s own flavor but with shared armor it’s hard to look at a PC and go “THAT’S A BOMB GUARDIAN!”. Have profession specific challeneges with profession specific rewards like idle animations, new attack animations, particle effects for basically anything, and unique armor skins like a long scarf for a thief.

-Orders: Right now it’s just a bit of fluff for the personal story really, I say add order specific skills much like in Guild Wars 1, fucntionally they’d be the same but they would LOOK different. Could even have order specific challenges to acquire them!

I could keep going but I’ll just let this sit and see how people like it.

Savoy.6824:

I dont think we need 8+ pages telling them that ascended gear was a bad idea. If we can lets focus on ideas to make obtaining it easier and other ideas for progression other than vertical.

there are plenty of suggestions for it, they’re jsut getting a bit drowned out at this point but hopefully Anet can pick them out.

With that said I agree. As I said in my own initial post, Ascended gear is in the game and we need to look forward as to how to implelment it in a way that is more constructive than it’s current implementation

iniside.4736:

It’s bad thing for the reasons that I posted in previous post, but make “short” summary:
1. There is no other progression, beyond stats and skins. Skins didn’t worked, so they tried increasing stats. We all know how it went.

2. There is no skill collecting/hunting. You can get all skills extremely quick. It’s not bad thing on it’s own, if not for the fact there are very few skills to play with in the first place.

3. There not much to play with in terms of customizing your character. I’m not talking about looks, I’m talking about gameplay. Very simple itemization combined with very few skills, and tiered traits, prove to not be enough in that terms, and people got bored quickly. Those limited options can get you only this far in terms of experimentation.

4. Add on top of that that items lock you in single build, and customization is even more severely limited. I personally could get over it, if the items were not boring in the first place.

1. Stats went the way they went we can both see that, as for skins I think the issue is less “no interest” and more “not enough diversity”. Key example, medium trenchcoats, not much point going after skins when they are all similar.

2. I agree that the game could use more skills, HOWEVER they shouldn’t be grindy to acquire.

3. It’s funny because I think there’s plenty of customization here, it’s jsut people are adverse to playing around with it due to the cost of getting multiple sets of armor, storage, and re-traiting.

4. See 3 Honestly, I’d love if they jsut scrapped stats one gear altogether and made traits THE customization for a build but that’s unlikely.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

Fractal Progression Reset

As we were looking at the fractal reworks we wanted to change the relative values of how hard it was to work through the fractals, because of this we wanted to bring everyone to a common starting point. We knew this was going to be controversial but we really wanted everyone to be on an even play field and once we got the feedback about it we started looking into ways we could mitigate this risk. This is a common practice we do with all releases and risks and sometimes like with this one we were not able to do anything due to time constraints and tech. It’s wasn’t our goal to devalue peoples time and effort and when reworking stuff sometimes these types of tradeoffs happen. We wanted to create a new scaling paradigm that would give us more room in the future for adding fractals and we felt the current systems was harder to scale. Our original design was for players to go past 50 but this wasn’t able to happen in time.

As someone who had a high fractal level I jsut wat you to know I think you made the right choice. Getting past 30 feels much more rewarding than before due to the new instabilities and now because many more people are above 20 it’s easier to find nice groups, so ultimately. Thank you for being decisive when you needed to be

VOLKON.1290:

This here sounds like you may still, in the subconscious recesses of your mind, have a smattering of the vertical progression system left over from other MMOs. With the flattened progress, you don’t need to get your ascended gear to be able to play. I don’t have an ascended weapon or piece of armor yet, but that in no way impairs me from participating in anything and having fun doing so. I like that it takes a long time. It’s a long term goal that doesn’t affect the short term fun.

Quite frankly the playability without it is irrevelant, you can play in full yellows or even greens but do you want to? NO

More stats = more power = more possibilites. People want the gear becasue they feel they may actually need it at some point (and in the case of fractals this is entirely true).

Simply put it should be reasonable for anyone to obtain in a relatively good time, several months for one character a good time is not.

I talked about Ascended gear in my last post so now how’s abouts some horizontal progression ideas?.

A large part of horizontal progression is cosmetic: particularly armor and weapons as it stands now. Players work to obtain the looks they want for their character, after some time they may get bored of the look and want a new one. This is fine and great, but why does this wonderful system have to be limited to armor?

How about new animations, particle effects for casting/attacking, in-combat quips, hairstyles, tatoos, (visible) jewelry, or even alternate skills?

A long time ago, while Guild Wars 2 was still in development the idea of profession specific skill challenges was touted around. Ultimately the idea was scrapped for the (much better) current universal approach, but what if profession challenges made their way into the game in another form?

Example: A Thief challenge to climb a trap riddled tower, without being able to actually walk. A puzzle built specifically for shadowsteps. The reward? Unique attack/skill particle effects like shadow refuge but are sick of seeming the same ol’ house? How about a cloak of shadow of the area instead? Sick of that mediocre -woosh- effect when you slash and stab? How about something a little more…red? ;P

The possibilities are endless here as to what the challenges could be and what their rewards could entail, but the core idea remains. A challenge tailored to a single profession, with a reward to match.

Moving on we can look at the (currently) under utilized personality system, currently you make a choice at character creation and as you speak with certain NPC’s sometimes you are given a choice as to what to say and there’s some bar in your hero panel that shows which choices you pick most often or something. What if personality went further than that though? What if it affected the way or characters look and act? What if a honor bound human would never say “I can outrun a centaur!” but instead opted for a simple and somewhat self dignified “I will outrun you!”? This would be a great way to personalize our chracters even further in a manner that would be.. refreshing.

I could go on and on about more ideas for horizontal progression, and even more ways to improve the acessibility of the current vertical progression system but this post is getting long and I’d liek to see what people have to say about what I said.

With that said if anyone dev or not wants to speak with me about this topic or Guild Wars 2 in general you can find me in-game, live on the relic of orr podcast, or on twitter. Jsut remember keep it civil and look forwards toward making Guild Wars 2 the best game it can be, not back at past mistakes or whatever; I’m horrible at being deep.

Greeting and salutations citizens of tyria, my name is Eveenus though most of my friends call me E.V.

This time around Arenanet has asked for our opinions and thoughts on the matter of vertical and horizontal progression in Guild Wars 2, and by association the reward system.

I’m going to start this off very blunt by saying I did not like the implementation of Ascended gear (and how it currently exists within the game), and am probably one of the most vocal people against it you will find. I feel it goes against the beginning philosophy of Guild Wars (or at least the one that was publicized).

With that out of the way I will not be advocating for the removal of ascended gear, which I have no doubt some people would enjoy. It is in the game and all we can do now is look forward as to how to improve not only it’s implementation but also the way rewards as a whole work in Guild Wars 2. Oh I should also probably also mention I will not be covering vertical progression beyond ascended gear, there are plenty of other people that will no doubt touch on it and I personally do not want to see any more implemented into Guild Wars 2.

Now to the nitty gritty and to begin by looking at the current and how it can be improved to better facilitate all players.

As it stands Ascended Gear as whole has many ways of being acquired laurels, fractals, rng, guild missions, gathering, gold, and cold hard cash (witch translates into gems then gold). However Ascended gear is acquired as individial pieces, and each individual piece has a very limited avenue of acquisition.

Armor and weapons can be crafted which in practice means they are acquired with gold either buy getting it and buying what you need or going out and getting what you need yourself hence losing the opportunity to get gold. The most conservative measure for armor on one character is roughly 400 gold in the current market (which is flooded right now so I would expect a rise soon and that is AFTER reaching 500 in the appropiate skill). This is fine, it’s an avenue for those with lots of gold (or money) to get what they want without a time restriction. However, for the more average player this is a lofty goal which is quite frankly, ridiculous to expect them to achieve in any sort of timely manner. My suggestion, add other avenues that are strictly about the time invested, no influence from the market at all. Currently there are three ways to do this pristine fractal relics, laurels, and guild commendations. I say why pick one? Have a general idea for how long each piece should take and just go with it for all of them. For the sake of an example let’s say a full set of armor should take 20 days to get (going by the time gated materials this seems a close number to what would be appropiate). that would be 20 laurels, 20 pristine fractal relics, or 12-14 guild commendations.

This would allow those that do not enjoy crafting or more importantly farming gold for extended periods of time an enjoyable avenue of acquiring their gear. While still giving those who do enjoy acquiring gold for their rewards or skipping time gating to acquire it their way. Oh this would also mean that those ascended pieces that are currently only available through time gated or RNG means (rings, necklaces, acessories) should probably be available through means of gold. Ascended level jewelcrafting should handle that nicely though.

Then there’s the area of the game that lacks any true way of ascended acquisition through itself. WvW, Arguably the game type that having Ascended gear matters the most. I’m not much of a WvW’er but I feel this should be said. Please make all Ascended reasonably obtainable with Badges of Honor or from rank and season chest (or even all of them!)

If this is implemented I think it would be a boon to the current state of affairs. Ascended gear was said to be implemented to serve to purpose of something for players to aim toward after exoctics but to be much less daunting than a legendary, which some do not even want (including myself but that is personal taste). Right now however, ascended armor in particular is too much of a lofty task for some (including myself) because of it’s single avenue of acquisition that is very very very (am I making my point?) steep. Steep enough that I could actually get a legendary in a similar timeframe to ascended armor/weapons. Obviously, not really filling it’s inteded role there.

1. Armor Diversity; not just a PvE concern actually. Looking at medium in particular there’s basically no options that are not either a trenchcoat or some kind of “buttcape” this extends to both heavy and light as well though not to the extreme found in medium

2. Build Diversity; Due to the nature of Ascended Gear and stats being on gear people are much less able to “experiment” with builds which has contributed to the zerker meta (among other things)

3. Lack of difficult organized group content; While Tequatl is a step in the right direction in terms of difficulty due to the nature of it being in the open world it’s not exactly ideal for groups of friends (small or large) to tackle. Explorable dungeons were expected to fill this void but they are lacking in difficulty (Aetherblade path of TA is basically the best example that exists)

4. Class balance; Many look at Warriors in particular and wonder why they are so “powerful” in PvE expecially compared to say a thief who has to sacrifice much more to attain the same level of damage or support (keypoint of it not being both)

5. Ascended attainability or rather lack of methods. Right now both weapons and backpieces only have one path to be acquired and for those who do not enjoy crafting or fractals these are long arduous grinds jsut for max stats.

6. Effort vs Reward it seems like the most difficult content available in the game is also some of the least rewarding

Many people here are voicing concerns over having in-game polls and while I personally may not have an issue with them could I offer a quick suggestion as an alternative to both in-game polls (which can be obtrusive/ immersion breaking) and web polls (which will go ignored by most players).

Perhaps a good compromise would be to put the polls as part of the launcher for the game. To those not familiar with the term; the launcher is the small window that appears before the game itself launches that allows you to log in and download any updates to the client.

Also as another suggestion for the time frame of new polls, perhaps having new polls coincide with living story releases could be a good idea? That way there’s enough time for the majority of players to see and it coincides with new content/concerns.

I run rampager’s on my thief due to it’s high damage output versatility and the fact that survivability stats don’t really help a thief (not that staying alive is a huge problem)

With the prospect of finally being able to obtain ascended gear i’m left wondering why Precision-Cond Dmg-Power is not on any of the ascended items. Basically forcing me into a completely different play-style if I want to upgrade my gear, which is disappointing to say the least.

Did I miss something or are they putting it in later?

AidanTaylor.3872:

DownAndOut.8590:

Hello guys i was thinkin about another classes, my idea was like a monk. very cool i think. please Share ure ideas!

Changed the thread title to reflect the actual question

hold up, there’s is a proverbial kitten storm on the forums and you reply to this?

ok

hplee.2839:

right….“millions of people on your side”

The grind-for-stats World of Warcraft still has more people playing than this so-called “grind-for-appearance” game.

that is the inconvenient truth fanboys don’t want to see. lol

then they can go play WoW, this is a different game

they advertised it differently than WoW

If you want WoW go play WoW or one of it’s clones, leave this game alone

Sadly I didn’t do this Jumping Puzzle because after 3 hours of fighting with a janky camera I just gave up.

I have no problem with difficulty, (I LOVE the harder jumping puzzles in open areas)

But when something is difficult and something I have NO control over like a camera zooming in for no explainable reason is also getting in my way it’s frustrating.

You did an amazing job with this puzzle from what I did see and the videos I watched (trying to figure out if the camera was being janky because the path I was taking)

It is not your fault that someone else programmed piss poor camera angles, zoom distance, and FoV

So please, hold your held up high, and make something just as hard for whatever new maps is coming out……just fight for a large open area to make it in :P

Alternatively yell at your co-workers to get them finally fix all the camera bugs littering what should be an amazing platforming experience.

you’re probably not going to get much response because those that left probably are not looking at the forums anymore

as for me, i have hope they’ll fix dungeons to be a proper endgame pve content

basically playing borderlands 2 until this is fixed, at least that feels rewarding

because some people want to have max stats before throwing themselves at the proverbial flames

Good riddance?

I honestly can’t see how the loss of any sort of dedicated player base is a good thing.

Enjoying borderlands 2 though, everything is akittenloot pinata it’s kinda funny

So I logged on today to try and do some dungeons (i figure if i do a reasonable amount a day I would eventually get a full set)

NO ONE wants to do dungeons, like not even CoF which I found odd and people started talking about a patch and blah blah after I LFG’ed in LA Chat. honestly thought it was just a bunch of trolls but curiosity started to set it

So I came to the forums (something I tend to avoid), and holy crap…. is this even real?

I get buffing the difficulty of some parts of CoF path 2 but reducing the reward of all dungeons?

The grind was bad enough to start with but that was ok for me because “oh hey I can make a little cash on the side if I don’t die too much”

All of my guildees are basically saying “We’re playing Borderlands 2 until they fix this”

I’ve already gotten a full set of exotics (crafted leatherworking and jewelcrafting), and don’t have the people to even try to aim for the cosmetic set I want.

Obviously the fix you implemented stopped people from farming CoF too bad no one wants to run anything else

Guess I’ll spend my money on Borderlands 2, was actually thinking of getting some gems today for dye or something. No point now

Where the hell did you get the idea of the average player having at minimum 15k hp?

EVERYONE I ever run this with was sub16k with the majority under 13k

My groups guardian which has full vitality gear is nearing 14k

Seriously….if that was your trashold no wonder people are complaining (i ahven’t run it yet because all my friends are now playing borderlands 2 and have no interest in guild wars 2 till it changes endgame pve)