Guild Wars 2

If GW2 is to survive, Arena needs to remember its roots and bring back horizontal elements from GW1, like more skills, more abilities, more elites, stuff like that, as well as expanding on it further. The current abomination of a trait system tries, vainly, to capture the old GW1 skill capture system, but fails, miserably. It doesn’t give me the feeling of, hurray, I have more building blocks to play with, instead, it gives me the feeling of, oh, wonderful, I have to complete annoying jumping puzzles to unlock a trait. GW2 desperately needs more GW1, it needs more if x then y abilities, more fun, random skills, some quirky and useless, some useful, some situational. GW2 has a lot of potential, but it doesn’t act on any of its strengths, nor does it shore up its weaknesses, it just kinda sits there. It doesn’t need raids, it doesn’t need gear grinds, GW1 survived just fine without these and few complained about the endgame in GW1, we always had something to do.
Expanding on the old wouldn’t hurt too much either, an alternate advancement system, housing, and bigger, better guild halls would really breathe some life into the game. As it stands, when I reach level 80 I just make an alt, there’s nothing else to do, but in GW1, I kept going, there was always more combinations, always more skills to play with, always more builds, always more this and that. Everything here is empty, and there is so much wasted potential.

They should be buyable, or droppable, or grindable, or somethingable, though, at least. As it currently stands there is no way I can get these items whatsoever, save for crafting, and, as aforesaid, I hate, hate, hate crafting with every last molecule of my being. I don’t mind the other way being harder than crafting it directly, or more expensive, so long as there is a way around everything being gated behind an anvil. For instance, the ascended weapons and armor could be purchasable for a ludicrous laurel amount, as a tertiary path to getting. It would be something to grind towards.

I’ve noticed that at 80, most of the shinier or living story related things are unsellable craftables, like the new amber bug trapped weapons. I find it rather annoying that, as a person that hates crafting with a burning passion, there is no other way to get these shinier things, they don’t drop, nor can they be bought, it seems. I can’t think of a way to alleviate this other than allow them to be purchased on the trading post. Would give crafters more revenue I spose.
As an aside, I would love to see crafting materials like dragonite ore and bloodstone dust be sellable, I have so much of both that I’ve just started deleting them as there is literally nothing worthwhile I can do with it as a noncrafter. At least put in an NPC that converts the ore into rocks we can toss at other players for our amusement.

I still cling to the idea that alternate advancement would help everything. Reach level 80, do some stuff, be better. It’s like a gear grind but without all the nasty gear grind. Maybe give us some stuff to furnish our home instance with, that too would make a nice end game retreat for some, I know it’s what I did in RIFT when I reached level cap there. Just litter, and I mean litter, the game world with furniture drops and recipes for crafters to make.

Just an idea: have it so that, upon reaching 25 stacks of something such as bleeding, the 26th or impossible stack immediately deals the full damage of that bleed instead of over an instance of time and refreshes the duration as if a 26th bleed was applied. It’s like a reward for reaching maximum stackage. This could work for a number of other conditions, such as confusion, too.
An alternative (or an addition) to my idea would be implementing purge abilities across all the classes that devour/consume/wipe an entire stack of X in order to deal a variable amount of damage that would be higher than if the stack had actively run its course. This would work for burns and poisons, I think, better than the previous idea due to the manner they stack.
Thoughts, concerns, suggestions?

Hello there, I’m Gerbilforce and I’m a forum lurker. I do not post much, if at all, but I realized that no one has suggested this feature/idea/concept/thingamawhatzit. Now, I hate gear grinds, but also love them, and hate them, and love them (it’s an abusive relationship), so I was thinking, why not drop in a little extra progression to make up for what we don’t have?
The idea would be that, once a character reaches 80, they may work towards a new set of traits aligned in a little web or path of some kind. These traits would be PVE only and mirror those little WvWvW thingamawhatzits that are unlocked as one progresses in WvWvW. They would encompass such unique things as increased movement speed, or increased damage (tiny increases), or new abilities. A general line of post 80 traits, a class line, and even a race line could be designed all rather simply, all they need to do is rehash some of the old code for the traits.
The way this little post 80 bar of traity goodness could increase is by dumping either skill points into it, or doing stuff in the world, or maybe from items that drop every now and then. It should be a slow slog to get it up to max and it should get harder and harder to pump points into it. But, it would give the vertical players something to do, something that can be perceived as meaningful, when, in reality, the weight of each post 80 trait is rather minimal on the character as a whole, so as to keep the horizontals happy. Plus, the system should allow every play style to advance it equally, so no worries in that regard.
Now, I know this flies in the face of that whole “endgame is all game” thingy, but, bear with me, we need something meaningful and weighty and statty at the end, not everyone can live on roleplaying and fluff and shiny armors alone. I personally unlocked my favorite set on my main at level 40, so I’ve got nothing left to do besides hang around and roleplay. It just isn’t enough, sometimes, especially with what seems like the sparseness of open world RPers these days.
Thoughts, suggestions, concerns?
Squeak.