I would appreciate more constructive feedback. Did you enjoy any suggestions?
Stacking bleed as you suggest is impractical, for several reasons:
First, it would trivialize combat from the get-go, because the target would be deluged with 150+ bleed conditions from every party member that was capable of bleeding a target.
Second….do we really need 150+ tall stacks of bleed on a target? Just get in there and hit the kittening thing!
When I’m solo I find weapons like Warrior sword or Ranger short bow fun weapons. Unfortunately, in standard group or large group situations they become much less enjoyable as a result of the attacks relying on dealing conditions instead of meaningful base damage.
In the end, I always prefer more options than restrictions.
Only thing I don’t agree on is combat. The golem is essentially just a boring puzzle-y fight and IMO we have more than enough of those in TA aether. I’d love more fights in several phazes that require some skill like Lupicus, he’s a great boss. Also if you change defiance now without an AI boost, bosses would get facerolled even more than they are now.
Weapon sets… if you mean shortcuts for easy OOC swapping, I’m completely on board. In combat seems kinda unnecessary and OP to me.
One thing I rly agree on is that condi damage should be on par with direct damage in PvE so you can choose between the 2 and there’s more variety in the meta.
My point with improving the combat beyond simple “dodge one-shot cheap kills and make sure you press 1-5 when they come up” is why I mentioned the terminator golem thingy at the end of SE story. I really had fun with that one. Maybe it’s just me… I don’t have fun in most of the “challenging” encounters. They’re either too slow because the monster has massive amounts of HP, or the monster has too many cheap shot attacks, or both.
Supported, a lot of the stuff you listed is quite easy to do and really benefits players a lot (account wide dyes, turning soulbound items into account bound are my favorite two)
I’m glad you like some suggestions. I realize I put a lot of focus into Ranger abilities and pets but that’s a result of my familiarity with the class. The broader changes apply to everyone, and ultimately I want everyone’s experience improved.
I appreciate the feedback I’m getting on this. Been making a few changes here and there. Gonna have to take a second look at the ability stuff. I really liked what Lalangamena.3694 had to say regarding death penalty and how your build could modify the 1-5 attacks on weapons. Probably easier to execute than my idea of manual skill flipping!
tl;dr: buff all players, nerf all monsters, make gemstore free!
Or, more accurately, “Lets suggest a few adjustments which have the potential to increase the amount of fun people have. That’s what games are for.”
tl;dr indeed.
A couple of years ago, I’d have agreed with this. Now, not so much.
The problem is, what’s fun for one group of players is horrible for another group of players. A percentage of players want things easier and find this game too hard. A percentage of players find this game too easy and want harder content.
Yes, games are here to have fun. If we all had the same idea of what was fun, designing games would be a whole lot easier.
For as long as the developers insist on tying achievements and rewards to difficult content, even the worst players will feel entitled to the rewards. Many areas in the game are open to the public and are therefore subject to random participation. Basically, everyone who isn’t a min/max / adept dodger / doesn’t know the event will be a handicap for those who do. It makes content difficult without even adding cheap one-shot mechanics and things which are counter-intuitive or difficult to set up / execute.
Diablo 3 has transitioned to a lower default difficulty and a vastly more rewarding experience for each individual player.. I wonder if there’s anyone who dislikes those changes?
also any kind of death penalty when you revive via waypoint.
regarding conditions, my personal opinion is that conditions are too abundant, even power builds have conditions.
conditions should be less common, and have more damage per condition.
classes ( except necros) should be traited properly before being able to use conditions.
for example:
non traited weapons should do basic damage only,
if traited in power line, they will do more damage, if traited in precision line, they should crit more often or crit harder.
if traited in condition line, it should inflict corresponding condition and rarely more than single stack.
for example warrior using MH sword auto attack:
basic auto attack damage 160 damage.
basic auto attack while traited in power line is 202 damage.
basic auto attack while traited in condition line is 160 damage and 1 stack of bleed
warrior using offhand sword impale:
basic impale damage: 168
impale damage if sword traited in power line->adds rip: rip the sword for 643 damage
impale damage if the sword is traited in condition line: 3 stacks of torment for 5 seconds. etc
You make good points I had not considered. I put some time into my suggestions but I realize many are under-developed and overly wishful. Thanks for taking the time to sift through my lengthy post and add your two coppers!
Make Radiant/Hellfire skins both available at the same milestones. Lower the milestones required to earn Radiant/Hellfire boots.
Increase the Achievement point reward for Legendary weapons. A lot of time, effort, and money goes into crafting them but they’re somehow worth only 5 points each. I’d say 200 a pop is not too generous.
EVENTS
Capture and hold/defend and protect events max at 1 minute. 6 minutes or more at an area becomes tedious when mobs trickle in gradually.
Proper scaling to world boss events. (IF scaling isn’t viable then consider making reasonable static values) Maintain 15-20 minute event window but change health values. A success should take 5 minutes at most. For example, Foulbear dies way too quickly but Shatterer and Jormag take way too long.
PVP
…Balance?? :o
Not particularly helpful but I didn’t want to omit PvP from the list and pretend it’s working as intended.
No more contested waypoints. Remove the waypoints and replace nearby if necessary (from inside a temple to just outside, for example).
Reduced monster density throughout the game. Too many monsters cluttering places between waypoints, nodes, points of interest, vistas, etc. Amongst other things, this makes getting around and harvesting tedious.
Make more Mystic Forges, crafting stations, bank and trading post NPCs available. Forges in every home city seems reasonable. Centralize necessities without forcing
players to buy convenience items from the trading post.
Add vendors, repair, crafting stations, bank, guild bank and mystic forge available in the Eye of the North (added bonus for GW1 veterans).
Allow for multiple trait sets, swappable out of combat. (templates like GW1?)
Improve the effectiveness of racial abilities. Include a cooldown reduction trait and / or effectiveness traits.
Prevent Ranger and Necromancer pets from taking a significant portion of AE damage. (taking this one from RIFT). Consider attaching this as a passive effect in the Beastmastery trait line for Rangers and the Death Magic trait line for Necromancers.(Possible first minor: each point into beastmastery increases pet’s AE resistance 3%)
Piercing shots should go through block / reflect, but not invulnerability. If this creates a balance issue allow shots to go through block but not get reflected.
Allow for alternate abilities in the 1-5 pane. Appropriate swapping could, for example, remove CC abilities on the warrior hammer and replace them with higher DPS equivalent or trade attacks with conditions for non-condition but higher base damage (adding diversity and increasing the effectiveness of less favored weapon types).
Each weapon could contain skills which add mobility, condition damage, direct damage, or crowd control in multiple slots—just an example.
At least one heal and elite to match each type of utility skill.
Remove weapon cooldown & improved effectiveness traits from specific trait lines. Many of these end up in strange trait lines that compromise an intended use of a weapon. Consider re-working the trait system to allow for more diverse selection of “Major” traits.
Ranger: Rending attacks, Stability Training, Intimidation Training, Vigorous Training… should be on all the time by default. Makes pets more useful regardless to how you spec. They become fodder quickly in most situations as it is. Note for non-rangers: These traits only affect specific pet types exclusively so I’m not asking for god mode)
Combine Mighty Swap (Beastmastery VI) and Companion’s Might (Skirmishing V) – into Beastmastery VI – “Vicious Bond” (Pet and owner gain 3 stacks of might on swap, Duration 10 seconds. You and your pet also grant might to each other on crit. Duration 6 seconds, no cooldown)
Reduce pet swap to 10 seconds (20 seconds if dead).
Change “Rampage As One” from “Pet.” to “Shout.” so it is affected by shout modifiers. Reduce cooldown to 80 seconds.
Remove “Loud Whistle” (Beastmastery 15 point minor) and replace with “Resilient Bond” (For each point into Beastmastery increase pet’s resistance to area effect damage by 3%)
Remove pets, minions and illusions from possible targets of instant death effects. (Jade maw ‘gaze’)
Increase duration of “Revealed” on “Sic ’em!” to the full effect of the ability (10 sec).
Other class specific changes pending better understanding of their current state / possible improvements.
Make forge automatically upvert if possibile (4 blues automatically turn into 1 masterwork, 4 masterwork into 1 rare, 4 rares into superior, etc.); If you’re taking the time to use the random return device, make it worthwhile.
Gem prices are more reasonable if one purchase becomes account-wide (bag slot unlocks for all characters @ 400, armor skins available unlimited amount 800, etc.) OR reduce price to 10% of current because pricing is silly. My warrior doesn’t need a 10 dollar cosmetic.
Remove seller’s fees and listing fees (taxes!) from black lion trading post.
Make the conversion between gold and gems a non-variable rate.
Improve birthday reward system (Remember how good GW1 was? Try any random mini from Mini Set 1: Year 1, any random mini from Mini Set 2: Year 2, etc); not just half a dozen Queen Minis.
Experience scrolls should add +20 levels / +20 skill points, making them viable for all people.
No respawning enemies during instanced dungeons and fractals, except where absolutely necessary. This is the main problem which drives player creativity in circumventing events (ie. Dredge fractal).
Remove green sigil / rune drops from dungeons. Consider removing rare sigil and rune drops as well.
Dungeons become repetitive and dull. Consider open-instance dungeons for solo / group farm (I miss my dungeon romping days of EverQuest—especially Lower Guk / Sebilis).
Open instanced dungeons would be like standard world zones and could be utilized for world completion. (dungeons already have points of interest / waypoints). It could also allow players to obtain dungeon tokens gradually without having to do daily paths (monsters dropping bag of wondrous goods? Chests spread out through the dungeon?) — side note — this would also make dungeon expansion interesting. I remember finding a covered grate above the first boss in path 3 Sorrow’s Embrace that looked like an entrance to a tunnel that could go someplace extraordinary.
Fractal rewards feel insufficient. New fractal reward system should be implemented. (Fractals are approximately equivalent to 4 dungeon paths with the guaranteed reward of 1)
Agony Infusions should have a more significant effect on combat throughout the fractal. Instead of just reducing the amount of agony damage you take (which matters less in some fractals than others) use agony infusions to also increase damage to all npcs in fractals proportional to the amount of resistance. I’d even consider calling it “Fractal Infusion” or “Fractal Empowerment.”
Agony Infusions should not require so many combines to become useful. How many million infusion items is it for the maximum value? :P
Reduce the difficulty scale on fractals so time expended on a fractal run is approximately 10 minutes per path. Overall fractal run should take approximately 40 minutes.
A vote-based progression of fractals would be an interesting change. Allow players to choose their adventure?!
Completely do away with the Soulbound attribute. Account bound legendary weapons, at the very least.
Increased availability of precursor drops. Instead of giving a specific precursor consider a “Chest of Almost Legendary Quality” or something like that so players can select their preferred precursor.
More Legendary weapons (or just new skins?). The only Legendary skins I’m fond of are the underwater weapons.
Increased chance of getting a Glob of Ectoplasm from salvaging. Minimum 1.
Make back items impervious to “Damaged Equipment.”
Make all vendor-type NPCs able to repair.
Add a function of items to remove upgrades without requiring an Upgrade Extractor.
Remove Transmutation Splitter from the game; Replace function with a forge recipe.
Copper-Fed Salvage-O-Matic should function at the level of Black Lion Salvage Kit, not a basic one. Remove cost per use. Change name if necessary.
Properly finish design for Asuran armor (Cover all the toes, please)!
Make Black Lion Chests rewarding. Currently, chest contents feel unrewarding. Filler and junk do not constitute the rarity or price of keys.
Remove Black Lion Claim Ticket Scraps from the game. Replace with Black Lion Claim Tickets. Whole tickets from now on, please. Do not offset this by increasing price of claimed weapons to higher values.
Remove Transmutation Stones from the game; replace entirely with Transmutation Crystals.
Remove breathers from the game. They aren’t necessary nor are they available in higher quality and force players to manage a 7th armor slot.
Holiday bags don’t feel sufficiently rewarding. 0.0001% chance of getting desirable loot only manages to needlessly inflate the amount of holiday bags people open. (Ten thousand double clicks takes a while.)
Make WvW items purchased with Badges of Honor salvageable / forgeable.
Make dyes account wide instead of requiring unlocking every color with each new character. In the case of limited availability dye packs, take out the ones that aren’t new (100% chance to get new colors).
Refining takes too long. Some objects refine faster than others.
Crafting feels unrewarding and dull. Time and resources are poured into various trades and they are required for crafting Ascended and Legendary items but only Baking recipes and Artificer’s potion recipes feel creatively inspired.
“For fun” items should not utilize the same ingredients as legendary
weapons.
Remove timelocks on crafting.
Improve availability of un-harvestable objects utilized in crafting (leather / cloth).
I’m posting this with the hope that someone who can make changes happen will consider even one of these possibilities. I admit that some of my ideas are a bit radical. Others are just no-nonsense solutions to things I have difficulty in tolerating. I like Guild Wars 2.
List of proposed changes:
COMBAT
Combat shouldn’t be an “endurance” issue. Long, battles are not fun. Big bosses should contain interesting fight mechanics in place of ridiculous health bars. For example, the minotaur golem at the end of Sorrow’s Embrace story has a fantastic fight mechanic. More of this please!
Smart mode. Burning should apply large amounts of damage to wooden structures. Rocks shouldn’t bleed. Enemy types should take bonus damage from opposite elements / effects. Conditions do bonus damage on events where multipliers occur (ice elemental in dredge fractal). Speaking of ice elemental… Apply this ‘intelligent combat’ to forced triggers (pouring molten steel on ice elemental should cause significant damage (10% per pour?)
“Soandso’s bleeding shouldn’t stack over mine”. Each person’s conditions should have their own place in the fight. In large fights I feel less effective with conditions because mine give the appearance of not causing their damage every second. Give each player a chance to stack their own 25 bleeds, burning, poison, torment and confusion… now that would make conditions a little more useful.
More weapon sets. (2 isn’t enough) Consider a “Weapon swap modifier key” or other system to facilitate quick-swapping.
Finish/Improve water combats. Many classes experience reduced effectiveness while fighting under water. (Some utility skills and elites are not even available)
Remove “Defiance.” Allow champion and higher NPCs to instead gain Stability for a short time after each control effect. I feel like Defiance empowers NPCs too frequently and for far too long. It makes certain weapons less desirable.
No NPCs above level 80. HP seems to scale ridiculously.
Faster weapon swap for everyone. Make the warrior minor reduce weapon swap to 1 second (reduced to 0 with 6 Superior Rune of the Warrior).
