Guild Wars 2

Proposal Overview

• Metrics-driven dynamic Fractal rewards which update daily or weekly.
• Increase the rewards for completing each Fractal and difficulty level based on objective, live metrics about real playthroughs, instead of using a subjective reward scale
• The rewards for the “easiest” Fractals and difficulty levels should be the same as today.

Goal of Proposal

• Right now, although each of the Fractals are wildly different (as they should be!), the rewards for completing them are identical. By scaling the rewards based on live play metrics, those fractals which are more frequently skipped or which take most groups a long time to complete will have boosted rewards.
• This will also keep the Fractal meta from stagnating. As one Fractal rises the list and is worth more and more rewards, the player community will find more efficient ways to run those Fractals. As they are completed more often their rewards will decrease and other Fractals will get time to shine.

Proposal Functionality

• Every day at reset time, produce a report taking into account the following variables:
  >>> How long each Fractal takes on average to be completed at each Level
  >>> How many times each Fractal is skipped (ended without being completed)
  >>> How many rewards have been given out from each Fractal
  >>> At 30+, how often a Fractal Instability is skipped

• Using the above 3 variables, rank the Fractals and Instabilities in order from “Highest Rewards” to “Least Rewards”.
• At the “Least Rewards” level (the easiest Fractal/Instability), give the same rewards that are given today.
• At each Fractal ranked higher than the easiest Fractal, scale the rewards up.
• If one single Fractal remains in the “Highest Rewards” tier for multiple consecutive days, continue scaling that Fractal’s rewards each day until it is knocked from its tier.
• Publish the daily list clearly to the community, or at least publish the “Highest Reward” fractal each day. If this can be done in game (for example, an NPC who shares the current Reward Ranking)

Associated Risks

• Players can’t choose Fractals, so if Dredge becomes very rewarding as a result of this change, players won’t be able to choose it directly. This may not be a bad thing.
• Possibly subject to player manipulation of the metrics (dying on purpose, going AFK in Fractals) — though with the total playerbase it is expected the actions of a few manipulative players wouldn’t nudge the average. Would need to develop some counter-manipulation measures (Booting AFK players, excluding excessive times/skips, etc)

Blocking Progress.

When we go to start the Scratch Sentry Defense Guild Mission, another guild’s flag is displayed and no event is ongoing. We tried guesting out of Ferguson’s Crossing to Jade Quarry and Dragonbrand and both servers are having the same issue. When you interact to start the mission you get the error “An officer must start this mission.”

It looks like when some previous guild starts the mission it bugs it out for future players. There is no way to abandon the guild mission or fail it because it cannot be started.

EDIT: We’ve tried guesting to every other server and they all have the same problem. We were trying to find one on which to fail the event with no luck. We’re stuck for 5 hours now unable to progress Challenge.

My group is experiencing the same issue. We are stuck and unable to progress to the next Fractal.

I would like to see an Engineer/Elementalist Quality-of-Life change in 2014. Right now, Engineers and Elementalists (rightly, for balance reasons) are not allowed to swap weapons in combat. However, every Engie & Ele worth their salt carries a backup weapon to swap out of combat.

For plain convenience, can Engies/Eles be afforded a second weapon slot, and just limit us so we can only use it out of combat? There’s no difference between this and pulling up your inventory and double clicking the item, it just reduces the hassle and bag space.

TTS has been noticing that Tequatl now consistently spawns at the very end of his window, with maybe 1-2 minutes variance. Is this a change from last week Tuesday’s patch that was missed in the Patch Notes?

An official ArenaNet comment would be helpful as the old window meant we had to wait nearly an hour for any attempt.

Thanks!

Bump for today—still recruiting!

Starting to build a Member Base — please feel free to request Recruiter permissions to help add your friends and guildies!

Invite requests are coming in! Just a reminder that we will try our first attempt once we get enough members to give it a fair try—we just started up this morning, so let’s expect an attempt on Thursday or Friday!

There are a lot of great Tequatl guilds springing up on the North American servers, but most of them are running their attempts at NA primetime. This means those of us who have to play off-hours (6AM -> 2PM PST / 9AM -> 5PM EST) aren’t getting to get with a serious group to take him on. Let’s fix that!

Super Dragon Fight Team Go [SDFT] is a North American guild aimed at downing Tequatl during America’s 1st shift. We’ll be following the model set by other successful Tequatl guilds, and taking advantage of the low server population at these early hours to avoid overflows and get everyone together.

In general any players can apply, but we’ll prefer it if you can meet the following requirements:

• At least one level 80 character
• Exotic or Ascended gear (preferably not Berserker or other crit-focused gear, although you can defend the turrets if this is all you have)
• Access to Teamspeak
• Familiarity with the fight mechanics or a willingness to learn — see http://tinyurl.com/teqstrat for a guide!
• Willing to keep at least one server guest slot open for Tequatl
• Active at some time during the 6AM PST -> 2PM PST window -- we’ll likely pick a dedicated start time somewhere in that window

Whether you live in Europe, work 3rd shift, work from home, or just decide to play while everyone else in the Western hemisphere is at work, Super Dragon Fight Go is the guild for you!

Post a reply here or send an ingame whisper or mail to Marstead.6430 for an invite.*

*If you would like to be an officer and help with recruitment, please include a list of your qualifications in your request. You can also post here, but I’d prefer an ingame mail so I can make sure I get to everyone. We will spend the next few days recruiting and then we’ll use the Guild MOTD to set a start time and add additional details.

Frequently Asked Questions

• When are we fighting Tequatl? I would like to get the guild numbers up before we pick a time, but ideally I’d like to be able to attempt him multiple times in the 6AM->2PM PST window. We may settle on a time closer to the middle of that window but that is the tentative plan for now. I would expect we can make our first solid try this week Thursday or Friday (09/26 – 09/27)

• Do I need to represent SDFT? No! No representation is required, we are primarily using this as an organization tool so we can settle the Roster, have a standing MOTD, pick a guesting server, etc. You are under no obligation to represent.

Please add me! Marstead.6430, full ascended gear, Cleric’s/healing build. Commander tag, can lead at Teq or man/defend turrets.

I wrote this guide: tinyurl.com/teqstrat

If you guys haven’t picked a guest server for this yet can I nominate Ferguson’s Crossing? It’s low population and totally empty, never goes to Overflow during Teq fights. I’m sure we’ll have to move it around when we do win as people guest over, but it’d work well for our first attempts.

Combat Scenarios: Some scenarios using the above examples as reference.

One vs. One

• A Red and Blue player fight each other alone, 1v1.
• The Red player deals 1000 damage with an attack, and gets the +50% damage bonus, dealing (1000 × 1.5) =1500 damage before damage reduction. The Blue player has +50% damage reduction, so she receives (1500 / 1.5) = 1000 damage.
• The Blue player deals 1000 damage with an attack, and gets the +50% damage bonus, dealing (1000 × 1.5) =1500 damage before damage reduction. The Red player has +50% damage reduction, so she receives (1500 / 1.5) = 1000 damage.
• The auras cancel each other out when player numbers are equal.

One vs. Zerg

• A solo Green player attacks a Red player in zerg of 73 Red players.
• The Green player deals 1000 damage with an attack, dealing =1500 damage. Because the Red player is near 50 or more players, he doesn’t get any damage reduction, and takes the full 1500 damage.
• If the anyone in the Red zerg attacks the Green player for 1000 damage, she will take only (1000 / 1.5) = 667 damage.
• The solo player deals a little more than twice as much damage to the zerg as she receives from them.

Small Group vs. Zerg

• A small group of 6 Blue players attacks a zerg of 34 Green players.
• A Blue player deals 1000 damage with an attack against a Green player, and gets a +44% damage bonus, dealing (1000 × 1.44) =1440 damage before damage reduction. The Green player has +16% damage reduction, so she receives (1440 / 1.16) = 1241 damage.
• If anyone in the Green zerg attacks someone in the Blue group for 1000 damage, they will get the +16% damage bonus for a total of (1000 * 1.16) = 1160 damage before reduction. The blue players get 44% damage reduction and only take (1160 / 1.44) = 806 damage.

Problem

• WvW can quickly devolve into a numbers game—if the enemy force has superior numbers, they will usually win.
• Although this makes sense logically, it isn’t very fun to be on the outnumbered side, and it makes individual player effort feel less significant.
• It’s also less conducive to player-created WvW “roles” or a real individual meta to develop outside of small skirmishes.

Requirements

• Any new mechanics should give outnumbered groups a fighting chance against zerg, and make zergs work harder to deal with small threats.
• This mechanic shouldn’t make zerging impossible or even really discourage it. A coordinated zerg should still be able to defeat a group they outnumber.
• The mechanic should not affect fights between equal groups of players. 1v1 and Zerg vs. Zerg fights where the player counts are the same should behave as they do now—they are already fair.
• The effect should impact player vs. player fights only and focus on the use of profession skills. Siege is already tactically interesting and fair, and should behave as it does now.

Suggested Mechanic: Aura of the Mists: Add a global buff/debuff to all players in WvW with the following features:

• Aura of the Mists grants +50% bonus damage against other players.
• Aura of the Mists reduces damage received from other players’ attacks by 50%.
• When within X Yards of an allied player, the benefit of Aura of the Mists is reduced by 1% for each allied player in range.
• Aura of the Mists only affects direct damage dealt and received from player skills, and not from siege, fall damage, NPCs, or any other damage sources.

Examples: Here are some examples to clarify how the mechanic might work. There are some combat scenarios based on these examples in the second post.

• If you are alone with no allies in range, Aura of the Mists will grant the full +50%/-50% bonus.
• If you are near 20 allied players, Aura of the Mists will grant +30% bonus damage vs. other players and 30% damage reduction from other players.
• If you are near 50 or more allied players, the Aura of the Mists buff will be totally negated—you will get no +Damage or +Damage Reduction bonus.

Impact & Commentary

• Sample Numbers:The numbers above are just an example and will be need to be improved with playtesting.
• New Roles: Solo players and small groups will be able to build for new WvW roles—a stealth class might build an Assassin aiming at picking off stragglers in a Zerg just on the edge of the aura. A tanky class with lots of disengagement options like Engineer might make a Harass build to break up a zerg, making them easier pickings for an Assassin or delaying their approach to the objective.
• More Zerg Strategy: Zergs will remain effective based on numbers alone, but will need to be more careful. They will need to travel closer together and keep an eye out for small groups or solo players harassing them. Very coordinated Zergs might decide losing the buff is not worth having so many players in one place and may try to keep multiple groups split up just outside of range of the Aura.
• New World Abilities: New world ability lines could be added that play on this buff. A small group ability line could increase the threshold of nearby players before the buff reduction triggers—useless and unnoticeable in a big zerg, but beneficial to a small group. A solo ability line could increase the damage or damage reduction bonus, but only when alone.
• Calculation Rate: Calculating the buff could be computationally expensive if done in realtime, so it might have to operate on “ticks” like many Pet abilities. Even if it’s a relatively short (5 seconds) or long (~15-20 seconds) “tick” coordinated players will learn to work around this and it will increase the overall skill cap in WvW.

TL; DR: Add a new mechanic that impacts damage dealt between small & large groups in WvW to encourage more solo & small group play. Reduce the dominance of zergs without making them unviable.

I am addicted to hard content and I love the brutally difficult games like I Wanna Be The Guy, Battle Kid, Super Meat Boy that inspired Tribulation Mode.

However, one thing is that attempting any zone in Tribulation Mode is usually at least a one-hour time commitment; for some of the later zones often 2-3 hours. In addition, disconnecting, crashing, or otherwise having to log off will ruin an attempt in progress, which can be very disheartening.

For the next SAB release, Tribulation Mode would really benefit from a system to save your last reached checkpoint mid-zone. The last checkpoint you reached is preserved and you automatically return there provided you go back to the same zone. If you go to any other zone the next time you return to SAB, you are warned you will be overwriting your progress.

With this, more players could attempt SAB Tribulation Mode in bite-sized pieces, doing one checkpoint at a time and taking a break, instead of the marathon it requires now. With Tribulation Mode, you already cannot join a run in progress, so similarly if someone boots up their old run no one can “cheat” and join in the middle of it.

tl; dr: For the next SAB Release, the game would benefit greatly from a limited progress saving feature that remembers the last checkpoint you reached in a Zone if you didn’t clear it.

Same. I am at 10/11; didn’t get credit for the Candle shop.

Where is the store where you can buy the Nunchaku? I’m sure it’s in W2-Z2 but haven’t found it.

Hey there,

I’ve been having the same problem since the patch you mentioned. Did you ever figure out a solution?

I am experiencing the same bug. I got 2 tiers of “Baby’s Second Super Adventure” from running Normal Mode, and now I am stuck at 31/33 on this achievement. I’ve done a careful comb of every checkpoint in Infantile Mode and can’t get it to increment to 33/33.

I haven’t been able to find any details and I don’t want to spend a ton of money to try it out.

How to beat Liadri’s Hard Mode – Light up the Darkness Achievement

I tried to paste the text here but it’s too long for the forums, please check out the Reddit thread for details.

With the new change to Rocket Boots, the Blast Finisher can trigger when you land for the dodge roll. The way the distances work out, you can use Elixir Gun’s 4 Skill (Acid Bomb) to trigger one blast finisher, and then instantly Rocket Boots back to your original location, triggering a second blast finisher. The two skills have similar cooldowns so this combo can be activated every time.

This is very useful in PvE and PvP because it’s usually difficult to get the advantage of the Acid Bomb as most enemies will pursue you out of the Acid Bomb’s damaging area. In addition, sometimes moving far from the Bomb site makes it harder to take advantage of the Blast Finisher; this gets you right back into the fray and gives you two blast finishers to boot.

This works especially well on a Bomber Engie as you can drop Big Ol’ Bomb, Fire Bomb, Acid Bomb, Rocket Boots for 9x Might.

I understand the logic behind restricting Engineers and Elementalists to a single weapon set, owing to our versatility from weapon kits and attunements. However, most Engies/Elementalists still carry a second weapon set for different situations, and it is frustrating to have to manually switch them out in the Inventory or Character panel all the time.

I think it would be a nice quality-of-life/convenience change to give Engineers/Elementalists a second weapon set slot, but only allow weapon swap out of combat for those two professions.

Come join DMT on Ferguson’s Crossing! For one of the lowest populated servers, it’s often tricky to find an active PvX guild with guild missions unlocked. Look no further—we are able to complete Bounties and Trek weekly, and we’re working toward building Rush now!

The guild has active Dungeon, WvW, sPvP, world boss and general PvE players.

Send a mail to Marstead.6430 for an invite!

Problem: There are two problems with guilds as implemented right now:

1) Small guilds are unable to compete with large guilds in influence gain, and are unlikely to be able to run the new Guild Missions.
2) Large guilds tend to require 100% Representation, which makes it difficult to have a small/social guild and a large/serious guild.

Solution: Implement a Guild Alliance system that allows small guilds to align with one larger guild, with the purpose of splitting influence gain and having separate simultaneously active chat channels.

Major/Minor Guilds
- Each guild is able to set itself as either a Major Guild or a Minor Guild.
- A Major Guild can create alliances with multiple Minor Guilds.
- A Minor Guild can join an alliance with one and only one Major Guild.
- A guild can switch its Major/Minor designation at-will, but all existing alliances must be dissolved first.

Influence Gain
- Members representing a Minor Guild allied with a Major Guild split all influence gain in half with both guilds.
- Possibly allow Major guild leaders to set an Influence tax rate anywhere from 0% to 100%.
- Events/Dungeons completed by Minor Guild members with Major Guild members grant bonus influence to both guilds.

Chat Channels
- Members representing a Minor Guild allied with a Major Guild have two chat channels, one for each guild.
- Members representing a Major Guild see only their own chat channel, and not the channels of any of the Minor Guilds.

Upgrades
- New Major Guild upgrades in Politics can increase the maximum # of Minor Guilds that can be allied with
- New Minor Guild upgrades in Politics can grant small bonus Influence for completing events to the Major Guild when allied

Comments
Please share your comments/thoughts!

On Ferguson’s Crossing, Tarnished Coast or Crystal Desert? Looking to drink my Karma items and wanted to borrow it. You can whisper me in game, Marstead.6430.

Thanks a bunch!

Most classes have a Utility weapon or weapons which offer convenient out of combat travel features, such as the Warrior Sword/Warhorn, Thief Shortbow (5), Guardian staff, and so on.

Since we are already able to change weapons out of combat, it is really just a nuisance to have to go into the character panel and manually equip one of these utility weapons whenever you need them.

The suggestion would be to add an additional Main Hand/Off Hand “NoncombatWeapon” slot to the character panel, and a new bindable hotkey to swap to this weapon set. The caveats:

1) Swapping to this weapon set does not work in combat
2) Swapping to or from this weapon set does not activate runes that trigger on weapon swap

Because the swap feature would be limited to out-of-combat this should not affect class balance much, if at all. Potentially it could be used for an initial buff at the start of combat, for weapons that grant boons, but as soon as the player swaps to a main weapon they would be unable to access the Noncombat weapon slots until combat ends. So really it is just a convenience.

In addition, this feature should be available to Elementalists and Engineers, who do not have a weapon swap feature.

There would be no need for this feature in SPvP so it could be disabled there to prevent any balance issues.

It isn’t really fun that I need to stack up on karma boosts like the Guild Buff and Guild Banner in order to use all my karma containers; this is similar to having to swap to an entire set of MF gear before opening a chest in a game like Diablo.

My suggestion would be to increase the base amount of karma offered by all karma containers so that it equals the amount a player would receive with the maximum boost effect. Then, remove the ability for karma boosting effects to increase karma gains from consumables. Then we can just use these items when we get them instead hoarding them until the stars align, and newer players aren’t punished for not knowing about the karma boosters affecting these items.

Tahantos.5106:

Ok, so theoretically the dungeon paths run on average would even out then, correct (in your theory that is)?
After everything gets evened out, isn’t this mechanic kind of useless then?
Just saying why make a new system to encourage people to do tedious paths in dungeons that don’t have time/reward ratio correct instead of making all dungeons all paths time/reward balanced so that they are more enjoyable to do. That’s what Anet is going to do.

I think it would still be interesting once the paths even out because, regardless, there will still be a “least run” path every day, so there will always be an incentive to run a “new” dungeon at least once per day.

Path Bonus Rewards: Track daily statistics on the # of dungeon paths completed for all servers in each data center and then rank them from most completed to least completed. The dungeon rewards for the most-completed path remain the same (so no nerf to COF Path 1), but the rewards scale up for each path below the most-run path. The absolute least-run path should get a huge reward scale, such that running it once should be worth 4-5 as many runs as the most completed path.

Player Information: The new Herald NPCs or similar NPCs could broadcast to players the dungeon path ranking, so it would be very clear at the 7PM EST reset time which dungeons are giving the most bonus rewards.

Dungeon Variety: The theory here is that the “player market” would balance the dungeons pretty quickly. Immediately you’d see the most difficult/tricky paths least run, but players would rush to complete them for the bonus rewards. But now that they have been rushed by players, they will move out of the “least played paths” and some other dungeon will take its spot. This should add a lot of variety to the paths run by all players!

Least-Run Path Multiplier: It’s possible that even with the new incentive that some particular path might be so difficult that no one will run it at all. I think if a particular dungeon path remains the overall least run path for multiple days in a row, the rewards for it should continue to scale indefinitely until it is no longer the least-run path. Someone will eventually run Arah Path 4 if it is worth 10+ COF Path 1 runs!

Other Thoughts: This idea is based on the world “exploration bonus” XP awarded for killing enemies that have been alive for along time—that isn’t, haven’t been repeatedly farmed. Although ideally all dungeon explorable paths should have a similar time investment/reward, that’s going to take a long time to develop, so allowing the “player market” to determine it might be easier for now, and even in the long term. Going as far as offering a laurel for the first completion of the day’s “Least-Run Dungeon” might offer some more incentive to get folks into paths other than COF Path 1 and AC.

I think the Engineer build variety will improve significantly if Engineers are allowed to customize their Toolbelt skills. It can work exactly the same way as Utility skills; you can select any four Toolbelt skills related to the Utility Skills you have unlocked, instead of the Toolbelt skills being automatically equipped based on your selected Utilities.

As a Bomb Kit Engineer, I do agree that distance AOE abilities are a little crazy in Dungeons and WvW since you can nuke down mobs fairly safely. However, my PBAoE bombs are a real risk; I am effectively a melee character with this kit and I have to play very smartly in order to be able to bomb effectively. Are bombs (and other PBAoE abilities) included in the upcoming nerfs?

The Gift of Mastery is the only Legendary component that doesn’t require any Gold to obtain, just in-game dedication. It feels like a pretty big accomplishment to craft it, but you can’t show off that accomplishment in any way until you amass the ~700G to finish crafting a legendary. Some ideas for alternate uses for the Gift of Mastery:

Achievement/Title: Award a special title when the Gift of Mastery is crafted

Legendary Dyes: Allow a small handful of unique account bound dyes to be crafted with the Gift of Mastery, which grant special particle effects in addition to their colors. Even better would be the addition of a “Legendary Dye” slot unlocked on the dye panel for players who have crafted the Gift of Mastery, which accepts Legendary Dyes only (adding some sort of spell/particle effects to the armor in addition to the selected dyes). This would make it really fun to collect multiple Gifts of Mastery to get several different effects on one’s armor!

Unique Armor: Create new unique armor skins craftable only with the Gift of Mastery, but no additional major gold requirement.

The point, I think, for any additional use for the Gift of Mastery would be to keep the gold component low, or at least low in relation to Legendary Weapons. Perhaps something like Gift + 100 Icy Runestones + (2 relatively inexpensive items to determine the output dye/armor) would be reasonable.

Right now, there’s no official way for individual players to chip in small amounts of money/karma toward upgrades. It typically requires one very wealthy player or a guild who takes Guild Dues. It would be more fun for the loner WvW players if you could contribute any amount of Coin/Karma to upgrading a location. I think upgrades would be better used with this change.

Additional Bug Info: The Rune of Lyssa effect actually completely fails to trigger if Dagger Storm is interrupted in any way (Dodging, being downed, etc). It will only trigger about 1 second after the channeling is 100% successful. This extremely reduces the utility of the rune for channeled Elites.

Steps to Recreate
1) Equip 6 Superior Runes of Lyssa
2) Activate the Thief elite ability “Dagger Storm”

Expected Results
The Rune of Lyssa ability, “Remove all conditions and activate all boons” should trigger the instant “Dagger Storm” is activated.

Actual Results
The Rune of Lyssa ability does not trigger until after Dagger Storm finishes channeling.
I assume this issue also occurs for any channeled Elite ability.

New Feature – Siege Rank
- Create a Siege Rank value associated with every defendable location.
- When a location is being attacked, defending players receive Active Defender Rewards (XP/Karma/Coin) every X minutes spent there. This is how it works today.
- Players who remain at a defendable location that is NOT being attacked receive Passive Defender Rewards (XP/Karma/Coin) every X minutes spent there,. These rewards should be less than Active Defender Rewards.
- However, every time a player earns Passive Defender Rewards, the Siege Rank value is increased by 1.
- Similarly, every time a player earns Active Defender Rewards, the Siege Rank value is increased by 2.
- The Siege Rank value should not have a cap.
- The current Siege Rank for every location should be visible to all players, either on the map (preferable) or in the “Assault/Defend” event details in the top right of the screen.

Reward Multiplier
- The Siege Rank value acts like a multiplier for the rewards for capturing the location. A location with Siege Rank 25 will give significantly more XP/Karma/Coin than a location with Siege Rank 0 (completely undefended).
- This will self-correct for people sitting AFK in a Keep or Castle to farm XP/Coin/Karma. They’ll be able to do it for a little while, but every time they get the reward they make the defended location more enticing to the enemy teams.
- The Siege Rank value also acts like a multiplier for Active Defender Rewards. It does NOT increase Passive Defender Rewards, which are flat.

Siege Rank Tiers & Daily Chests
- At certain Siege Rank tiers (for example, Tier 1 Siege Rank 10-25, Tier 2 Siege Rank 26-50, etc) an Attacker daily reward chest is granted to enemy players who successfully capture the location. This would work like FOTM and you could get a daily chest for every tier.
- Similarly, players can earn Defender daily reward chests whenever they earn Active Defender rewards at locations in each Siege Rank tier. So players can earn both Attacker & Defender daily chests every day for each tier.
- Daily chests should have item rewards similar to the WvW Jumping Puzzle chests.
- The quality of items contained in the daily chests should increase with each Siege Rank tier.
- The quality of items in Attacker daily chests should be slightly higher than for Defender daily chests.

Other Ideas
- Other things could increase the Siege Rank of a location, for example reinforcing the walls or gates. This would give Defenders a good reason to want to hold the locations in which they invest (their personal rewards and daily chests get better and better faster and faster), and make reinforced locations very appetizing to attackers. Right now I would rather attack a Tower without a reinforced door, and that’s less fun.
- Supply camps could empart their Siege Rank onto their Dolyaks. As this would significantly increase the rewards for stopping supply chains, it would be reasonable to restore the reward for escorting/defending them.

Summary
In summary I feel that this idea (or some version of it) will achieve the following goals:

- Creates significant defender incentive by giving players a personal, selfish reason to defend locations, even ones that aren’t being attacked.
- Maintains attacker incentive and self-balances for the new defender rewards by making well-defended locations
- Creates personal incentive to invest in a location’s defenses by increasing the Siege Rank and
- Makes WvW enticing to players who don’t typically participate by granting them a chance at daily rewards. They might only defend one keep or attack one supply camp, but that would still be more interesting and more immediately rewarding for players of any level.

Thoughts?

I love Guild Wars 2, I love all of the dungeons and I am a huge fan of the Fractals of the Mist. I also really enjoy the final dredge fractal encounter, where you have to kite the boss underneath buckets of lava. It is very challenging and rewarding to coordinate. However, I feel that two of the fight mechanics make the battle a little too punishing, in a way that isn’t fun. I think if one or both of these mechanics were removed or toned down it would remain a very balanced, difficult fight that would be less frustrating to PUG.

Heal Mechanic If the group misses a lava bucket, the boss heals a large percentage of his HP. I’ve read that this can be interrupted but haven’t had a group pull it off before. The problem is this, the really good groups and even PuGs who are capable of interrupting the heal are likely also skilled enough to simply complete the entire encounter perfectly, without missing any lava buckets, so they will never have to do the interrupt. On the contrary, less stellar groups who do a decent but not perfect job coordinating are already going to be having problems with that, let alone stopping the regen.

The heal mechanic just isn’t very fun; all it serves to do is undo progress on the fight. It would still be very challenging without the heal mechanic, it would just be less tedious.

Downed Players The boss seems to like going after Downed players, which really gets in the way of the whole kiting process. Especially when the boss drops his 1-shot mines on a downed player. If he were recoded to target Downed players much less frequently or not at all it would still be a skillful, but less frustrating encounter.

On Fun In my recent encounter with a group, there was a potential for a really fun story to tell. We had the boss down to ~35% and everyone was dead except for our Asura warrior buddy. Slowly but surely the Asura managed to kite the boss around in circles, and after the 5th or 6th pass finally managed to finish getting one of us back up. Then we rezzed the whole party while he kept kiting. This would be a great story to tell, of triumph when hope seemed lost—except in the time it took him to get us up, the boss’ heal mechanic had brought him back to full health. We would have been better off wiping intentionally. It just erased our progress and that sort of thing usually isn’t a good time.

Thanks!

The “Collectible” tab is an amazing improvement to the MMO Genre, and as the game expands I think we are all starting to wish for more items to be considered “Collectible”. However, I’m sure bank tab upgrades are a decent source or revenue for ArenaNet, so any expansion of the Collectibles tab will just make bank tabs less desirable.

As a compromise I would suggest adding unlockable “Collectible” tabs to be purchased with gems. The tabs could be sorted by item category, here are just a few examples which would be very useful:

Runes
Sigils
1 tab for each craft (All Filigrees/Settings/Hooks/etc. for Jewelcrafting, Hafts/Blades for Weaponsmithing, etc)
Festival/Event items
Town clothing, including gem store purchases
Boosters

And so on. Charge a small fee similar to the Bank tab unlock fee for each tab. Because hardcore players will want to buy all of the tabs eventually, and the utility of each tab would be much lower than a bank tab (holding only a set of specific items), there should be a much lower charge—maybe in the 200-400 gem range per Collectible tab.

I know I would pay ArenaNet monthly to unlock each Collectible tab if such an option was added to the game.

The Collectibles tab is a brilliant addition to the game, but with the exception of Mini-Pets, it doesn’t really hold collectibles so much as it holds a bunch of very useful crafting materials. It would be nice to have a second Collectibles page devoted only to non-functional, aesthetic items like transformation tonics, holiday gear, gem store town clothing, armor sets from dungeons, and so on. I worry that I am going to run out of bank space just from holding onto things like Candy Corn, witch’s hats, and so on from events.

That’s a good idea; in fact, all of the Gifts are achievements in their own right, so they should find an alternate use for each of them. One player might enjoy grinding karma and little else, so his Gift should be able to get him a reward other than a Legendary, if he so chooses.

Right now it feels like there isn’t any incentive to complete maps on more than one character. Some sort of unique reward for each 100% World Completion after the first would be awesome—a series of titles, unique skins, soulbound permanent items like the permanent banker express, etc.

Please add an Inventory filter for item rarity, to show only items with Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange rarity, etc. This would help with salvaging and banking.

As an kit-using Engineer it is disappointing to never see my weapon change, and to almost never experience the stat benefits of my main weapon, as the stats are deactivated while I’m using a kit. I propose a new only Engineer exclusive item slot for Kit Upgrades.

The item slot could go where the second weapon set typically goes for other classes on the Character Panel. Kit Upgrades roll stats just like any other weapon but only grant their bonuses while the Kit is equipped. They accept Sigils just like any other weapon which work only when the Kit is active.

For simplicity I envision just a single class of “Kit Upgrades” instead of having a Bomb Upgrade, Grenade Upgrade, etc—having one of these equipped grants stats to all your kits. Since the game would be using stats from equipped kits the base damage of these kits would have to be decreased to compensate (alternatively, the base damage is overridden by an equipped item.)

Perhaps most importantly this would allow ArenaNet to add a Legendary Kit Upgrade that would enhance the appearance of all equipped kits. As an Engineer main I feel no desire to work toward a Legendary because I will likely never see it in combat, but if I could upgrade the appearance of my Bomb Kit or Flamethrower I would devote a lot of time to it.

Thank you! This is perfect; this is exactly what I needed.

I know we’ve banished the Holy Trinity and everyone should be tanking, but it is hard to tell what I need to do in order to pull aggro off my buddy and trade aggro. With the game out for a few weeks now, has anyone figured out how Aggro works in general yet?

It definitely doesn’t seem to be raw proximity, damage, or healing.

In the game, mobs who have been alive for a long time grant bonus XP to the player. As there is currently an economy problem around fine crafting materials (which may have to do with the anti-bot code), a potential solution to this problem would be to give a high increased fine material drop chance from mobs who give this bonus XP, and have drop chances ignore the anti-bot code for these mobs. Bots by their nature will not be farming these mobs routinely (and if they did, they would lose the benefit immediately).

This could inject more of these items into the economy but still reward players who are exploring to farm their materials rather than fighting the same group of enemies over and over.

The “Experience Survivor” monthly achievement should only reset when the player is defeated, according to its description.

In game, the achievement appears to reset when the player logs off, changes zones, moves to an Overflow shard, or is Downed.

Logging off, changing zones, etc. should not reset progress on this achievement. This makes the achievement difficult to obtain for lower-level players, even with perfect play.