Guild Wars 2

I’m a little confused about the acceptable topics for this phase of the CDI. This phase is about logistics and QoL features, so does this mean guild management and communication features only? Are ideas for new guild missions acceptable at this point, or should they be saved for a later phase like ideas for guild halls, GvG, raids, etc.?

Assign one of the tier 6 crafting materials to each individual stat, then let us craft items with anywhere from 3 to all (celestial) stats by using 2 tier 6 materials per stat option.

this means we could craft any of the 3-stat combos as they are presently, or we could craft items with 4 stats or 5 or 6 stats with the points all evenly distributed.

Examples:

• Berserker items have power, precision, ferocity and would require 2 vials of blood, 2 fangs, and 2 other materials to craft.

• A stat combo of power, precision, ferocity, and toughness would also require 2 mats per stat.

• Same with a combo of precision, condition damage, healing power, condition duration, and toughness.

TL;DR: give us complete freedom in choosing our stat combinations and how many different stats we have.

Personally, I find the Wintersday jumping puzzle easier on my max height norn than on my minimum height asura.

I voted for Marcus Greythorne’s Zone Progression and tied it to Chris’ Hero Recognition category( https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/3446808 ), but here’s some ideas I had for Socio-political Diversification:

• Player housing will only be attractive to me if others can see it. Putting it in the open world is likely not feasible, but can you put small markers in the open world that players can double-click to go to a player home instance? This way players could still pick where to build/place their abode and other players could still find and view them but the world wouldn’t be cluttered and load-times wouldn’t suffer.

• Barring this, I want player housing to be handled within guild halls. In a previous post in this thread I imagined a great hall with 500 doors lining the walls that lead to the customizable rooms/suites of the individual guild members. These may or may not have to be instanced, I don’t know what the limitations are. This would still allow many people to see your awesome home.

• As for guild halls, if it is not possible to place them in the open world, or a marker to access their instance in the open world, then I want them to be on floating islands in the Mists. In this case they should be accessible through the UI like other people have said in this thread. It would probably be impossible, but what if for GvG you merged two guild hall instances so we could battle between the two floating guild hall islands in a sort of land-based boarding action in the sky? That’s pretty much the GvG of my dreams. I also like Yalora Istairiea’s guild districts idea.

• It would also be cool if we were able to cosmetically upgrade some of the guild-specific items (like the back banner) with more guild commendations; we need a form of cosmetic guild progression for our characters.

It’s a tough choice, but I pick zone progression. Many other people in this thread and others have discussed how to improve dynamic events and make zones more full of life, so I will focus on the rewards and character progression.

Zones need a variety of unique rewards that can be attained no where else.

• Some of these could be skins that are progressively built from components collected as rewards for the completion of dynamic events. As an example, completing events in Brisband Wildlands would award you with horse shoes, manes, or centaur weapon hafts, which you would combine with hooves (currently a junk item) to create the account-bound Hammer of a Dozen Hooves. These skins should not require very much grind to get, the grind will come later as you will soon see.

• You could also add zone specific skills or traits that are only usable in the zone they were acquired in. These could be earned by killing obscure bosses at the end of long event chains, or even better, they could be tied to the zone’s unique weapon skin (or armor skin).

• There should also be a long title track tied to each zone similar to the title tracks for the different areas in the Eye of the North expansion for GW1. Points for the title could be earned by completing dynamic events or killing specific types of enemies, etc. Upon reaching a new tier of the title track, your zone specific skills/traits would receive a slight buff and you would be able to upgrade the cosmetic appearance of your zone specific piece of gear by combining it with more of the same components awarded for completing dynamic events. Eventually you would be able to upgrade it to a legendary after completing the last tier of the title track. So your Hammer of a Dozen Hooves would be upgradable to the Hammer of a Score of Hooves upon reaching the second tier of the title track, and so on until it is the legendary hammer Thunder of the Herd after reaching the last tier.

• These zone specific title tracks could have a common theme with the similar zones around them, so completing all the title tracks in a geographic area could net you a complete suit of legendary gear. There could also be a title track just for completing all the title tracks of a geographic area (it would be cool if this title displayed a medal beside your name like map completion does). Completion of every zone title track in the game should get a statue of your favorite character erected in Lion’s Arch.

• There are many other ways you could use the title track to enrich the player’s experience. Perhaps a prominent npc in your favorite zone will occasionally contact you once you reach the mid-to-high titles in the track, spawning rare events (maybe even zone-wide events), special tasks, or even story instances. You could put a dungeon in, say, the Shiverpeaks which players who had reached a certain tier in the title track for any of the Shiverpeaks zones could play. Upon reaching the last tier, (I wouldn’t make it higher than 10) there should be an instanced cutscene where the people of the zone honor and thank the player and present them with an awesome looking item, like a shimmering fur cloak for completing Lornar’s Pass, as well as bestowing upon the player their final title, Patron of Lornar’s Pass (or something more epic sounding).

These features could be built upon over time, and they will guarantee that every zone in the game is populated.

I had another thought about stat switching on ascended armor. Since the ability to switch stats is one of the things that sets legendaries apart, to make up for giving this ability to ascended gear you could give legendary gear (when it comes out) an immunity to damage and breakage on the defeat of the player. So a player in full legendary gear wouldn’t have to worry about repairing their armor.

Here’s three ideas I had that I wanted to throw out there.

A different take on ascended stat swapping
Rather than stat swapping on ascended gear, I would prefer account-wide stat unlocking. As an example, when you craft an ascended light armor chest piece with dire stats, any light armor profession on your account would have access to ascended dire stats for their chest pieces. Once they are level 80 they would be able to access the unlocked stats in the hero panel similarly to how Zenith skins are accessed, and apply the stats to their gear skins whenever they want. This system would be more alt friendly while at the same time encourage people to craft more ascended items to unlock more stat combos for specific pieces and armor types.

Guild progression
Several people have posted about faction progression like quests, titles, rewards and the like. While this would be nice, I would like guilds to have a large chunk of this horizontal progression as well. I’m much more interested in helping build and progressing in a faction that is entirely in the hands of players than I am interested in progressing in one of the three orders.
This game is called Guild Wars, and I think guilds should play a significant part in horizontal progression. This is of course much more difficult to design than faction progression, but I think it would ultimately feel more rewarding. Two brainstorming examples:

• What if player housing took the form of your own quarters within your guild hall? How cool would it be to have a voluminous Great Hall with 500 doors to player customizable rooms/suites lining the walls? That’s the kind of place I would hang out in more than LA.
• Guild officers can already activate guild missions, but what if this was built upon? In the Commander CDI one of the devs suggested giving commanders the ability to spawn events. If this idea was applied to guilds in pve, imagine a day when guild officers would be able to function almost like dungeon masters, creating unique adventures by stringing a series of events together, or events like putting a bounty on members of a rival guild on a rival server in wvw.

Zone specific rewards
I made a post about this in the suggestions sub-forum, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/A-rewards-based-solution-to-depopulated-areas/first#post3254272 , but the gist of it is that zones need unique rewards so people will actually play in them. This could take many forms:

• Account-bound skins that are acquired by double-clicking a set of the item fragments that were rewarded individually for completing dynamic events (the same way tri-keys work).
• All events in a particular zone award some crafting materials, and no other zone’s events award the same materials as another zone’s events (Orr would be repopulated overnight if every event awarded one tier 6 crafting mat).
• New skills or traits tied to long event chains that culminate in a boss battle and require the use of a Signet of Capture on the boss to acquire. (similar to GW1).

The head piece on the medium, and I think the heavy as well, has a bunch of little circles all scrunched together just like Orrian architecture. The armors also have a cultural aesthetic that is different from what we’ve seen, particularly the heavy armor. Plus the screenshot of the medium armor on the Wintersday update page was taken in Malchor’s Leap.

Thoughts?

I really like the idea of commander-initiated events, especially what could be done with player-initiated events in pve someday, like guild leaders setting up a guild mission anywhere they want. I do think there should be a limit to how many events a commander can have active, so the screen doesn’t get crowded. So maybe only 2 active events at a time, with the option to cancel them. Or better yet, something like this:

Three commander utility skills:
1. Attack Objective. Creates an attack event on whatever hostile thing you are targeting. Click again to cancel the event.

2. Use Supply. Creates an event to build/repair whatever you are targeting. Click again to cancel the event.

3. Stack. Creates a ground circle for players to congregate in, visible on map, click again to cancel the event.

We have a great TeamSpeak server, many of our guilds are hosted there. I’m not sure about the community forums, perhaps someone else knows.

RiWiJo.7502:

As I see it the main problem I have running as a commander is accurately keeping track of squads and groups. Since I cannot do that I have to run as a blob or zerg.

I would like to see three tiers of commander tags that can be chosen when a commander logs up.
Green Tag would be a group level tag
Red Tag would be a squad level tag
Blue Tag would be a map level tag

The Blue Tag would be able to see all Red Tags on the map and in a list form such as:
Red Name of Commander (20)
Red Name of Commander (15)
The number in the parenthesis is the number of people running in that squad.

Red Tag would be able to see all the Green Group Tags that are in his squad and in list form:
Green Name of Commander (5)
Green Name of Commander (4)
Green Name of Commander (3)
Green Name of Commander (3)
Only people in Groups could see that groups Green Tag Commander

Only people in Squads could see that squads Red Tag

People in a group and a squad would see their group commanders green tag and their squad commanders Red Tag.

Everybody could see the Map Blue commander tag.

Of course this would allow groups to run with a Green Tag and if they are not in a Squad they would be essentially anonymous as an individual havoc team that no-one could see except other group members.

This would work without the necessity of building a complex raid management system such as might be found on other games. This would allow for much better field management of personnel.

Later the ability to kick individuals or groups, or move players could be added.

I think this is the best thought out system for differentiating commanders, I give it a big +1. One additional tag I would add is a guild leader tag that just comes free by virtue of being a guild leader. Only actively representing guild members would be able to see it.

On a different note, what do you all think of this idea:
When the winning server in a match-up achieves a point total equal to the sum of the point totals of the two losing servers, a new pane appears in the wvw tab where 10 commanders from each of the losing servers can vote to form an alliance. If the vote carries, those two servers’ colors would merge, they would appear as allies to each other, and their waypoints and siege would become available to each other.

I like it. What if you were to design a challenge mission like this, but scale it up for an entire guild? Same mechanic, increasing pressure until the guild wipes. I think it would be really fun and give guilds more opportunities to get commendations and higher standing on leaderboards.

Judging from my experience, the pve community is mostly focused on rewards. The maps with the greatest populations are the maps that are the most lucrative. As such, we are missing a huge percentage of the game. I have two ideas to use rewards to entice players to empty content: institute area-specific unique rewards that are desirable, or equalize rewards for all content based on the time invested (thereby making running constant events in zone Y for an hour as lucrative as running the Frostgorge Sound champ train for an hour).

Solution 1: area/content specific unique rewards
I propose that the best solution is to tie specific unique rewards to every zone, and perhaps even more locally in some cases. If we look at the current state of the game, The only reason people do the temple of Balthazar event at all is because it has a unique reward, obsidian shards. People do dungeons for unique gear. We see that unique rewards draw players to content.
Anet has already been slowly heading in this direction since release, and it shows in the content they have updated rewards for. People now fight champions, kill world bosses, run fractals, guild missions, dailies, and work on achievements. I think it is safe to say that all regularly played pve content gives unique rewards or reliably gives valuable rewards.

How would you implement zone-specific rewards?
- Before anything else, make them account-bound. This is the only way to make them unique and meaningful.
- One way to do it is with a karma vendor who appears once an event chain has been successfully completed, just like the current temple of Balthazar.
- RNG (boo, hiss)
- Reward players with an item piece on successful completion of an event, and when they get all the fragments from other events they can double-click them to assemble the reward like with tri-keys.
- Zone-specific currency (this would get super annoying when you open your wallet).
- Give a specific crafting material or narrow range of materials on event completion, with only events in zone Y giving material X.
- Tie new traits and skills to bosses in specific zones and bring back the signet of capture from GW1.
(Off-topic: pvp and wvw could use their own unique reward skins.)

Solution 2: rewards based on time to complete
There is definitely something to be said for this on a selective basis (it has helped populate dungeons and world bosses), but I don’t like this idea as the sole solution because ultimately I don’t think it will work. Basing the content on time invested doesn’t take into account the difficulty. People, especially gamers, look for the path of least resistance and would naturally coalesce in the easy content zones. We would be back at square one.

What are your thoughts? Any ideas for what should give unique rewards, or what the rewards should be?

My necro has nearly 80% boon duration (15 trait points, 40% from runes, and 24% from platinum doubloons). With this, FitG, and the 30% faster recharge on death shroud, I have 5 seconds of stability every 6 seconds (apparently the recharge trait is actually 40% instead of 30%). I’m also traited to remove one condition when entering DS and to apply 9 seconds of fury. The high boon duration also allows me to maintain might stacks through Blood is Power, sigils of battle, and the trait that applies might when using DS skill #1.