Guild Wars 2

It’s a good change. Now at least stability has a good impact in fights compared to before, making melee trains stronger. Combined with the 10 player cc cap, one could argue it’s even a tad bit too strong now. I’d suggest playing with the numbers for a bit to try and find the sweet spot, perhaps increase the cc cap to 15 or 20 and see how that goes.

I’d also suggest looking into boon stripping, make it less random. Having your stability being instantly removed after applying it is awful RNG, I don’t think that’s a good thing in what’s supposed to be a competitive environment. You could keep the random stripping for every boon except stability, which should be last in line. With the amount of boon spam in the game right now, it would obviously make the current iteration of stability way overpowered. Such a change would require a lot of balancing across the board (increasing CD on stability sources, lower stacks/duration,…) , but I think it would be for the best.

I have downloaded a 3rd party tool that allows me to remap my mouse buttons to other actions. I’ve used it once to remap double click to scroll up/down, which makes consuming a large stack of luck much faster. That is the sole reason why I want to use this program, for everything that involves a lot of double clicking. I believe what I’m doing falls under the 1 button 1 action rule, but I’d still like to make sure I’m allowed to use it. Can I keep using the program or will it get me banned? If so, I’ll immediately uninstall it.

I don’t get how this still hasn’t been fixed, or that atleast someone from Anet gives us a heads up on this matter…

I get why they removed the greatest fear part, they wanted the PS to be every 10 levels. This would have put the greatest fear part at lvl 70 together with forging the pact etc, which would’ve made that PS arch way to crowded (9 steps as opposed to the usual 5/6, though the level 80 arch has 10 steps so could have kept it anyway…). Why couldn’t they make an exception to the rule and split the 70/80 story into 70/75/80? By the time a player reaches level 70 he/she should be familiar enough with the game to not be confused by the sudden change of ‘every 10 levels’ to ‘every 5 levels’. To be fair no one with a normal IQ should ever get confused by such a change, no matter when and where it happens.

What I don’t understand AT ALL is why they flipped the old 72/80 part with the 80 part. Now that part makes no sense whatsoever and confuses both old and new players alike. If we knew Anet’s reasoning behind this we could help find a solution to make it work, but as it stands we don’t so all we can say is ‘revert back to the old sequence’.

Now if Anet were to unflip the current 70/80 arch, split the story into 70/75/80 and readd the greatest fear arch, it would look something like this:

• Level 70: Forging the Pact – Fear 1 – Fear 2 – Fear 3 – Battle of FT – Fear ending

• Level 75: Temple – Looking glass/Close the Eye – Eye Beholds – Starving/Estate – Osuary/Shipment – Further into Orr

• Level 80: Order plan 1 – Plan 2 – Plan 3 – Corruption – Cathedral/Romke – Source

• Victory or Death

6 story steps for each chapter put back in the normal order so everything makes sense and we get to enjoy the greatest fear story again (which I personally consider to be the best chapter in the PS). That’s like the best of both worlds!

I really hope this gets adressed in one way or another, because currently the last part of the PS is in a really sad state.

runeblade.7514:

You ask for answers, but I give you more Questions!

Controversal Topics v1.01 that I see around this thread.

• Scaling- Should Raids be rigid to make balancing easier or, should Raids be very flexible so that all guilds can be more inclusive to their members?

-If Raids should be rigid, how many party members should be the maximum allowed? 6,10, 20, 30? and why that specific number?

-If raids should be flexible, how can ANet keep difficulty consistent at 15 people vs. 150 people?

• Difficulty- Should Raids be easy enough for casual players, or should raids be difficult so it requires skill on the risk of excluding casual player. How difficult do you want it to be?

This is something I talked about to some extent in my proposal. I really don’t know how feasible this is, but I thought about making multiple “versions” of the same raid.

Imagine having the option to choose between:

Scaling:

• recommended 10 players
• recommended 25 players
• recommended 50 players
• recommended 100 players
• …

Difficulty:

• Casual (this would be the PuG friendly version, with fewer and less punishing mechanics etc. Just so everyone can experience the raiding content to some extent)

• Hard (this would the actual raid designed for small/big organized groups, very challenging)

Then based on this Anet can balance those instances with much more precision, they won’t have to rely on an automated scaling system. They could still use their scaling system for some minor adjustments (like when a group of 30 chooses the 25 player instance) but the big differences will be done manually. There could for example be a mechanic in the fight that can be handled by 50+ players, but isn’t feasible with only 10 players. Relying on an automated process to scale that mechanic correctly might get bad results. However if Anet does it manually, they have more freedom to scale it like they want to, or they could just outright remove it if it’s causing too much problems and isn’t essential to the encounter.

Obviously this will take way more time than just making one version of the raid and having it scale automatically, but if they can find the resources to do this I bet it’s worth the effort.

Proposal Overview

I’d like to touch on the accessibility of raids. I think it’s important for everyone to be able to experience raiding content, you shouldn’t be forced to be part of a big organized guild. Then again the big organized groups also deserve some really hard raiding content and the experience shouldn’t be dumbed down just so that less skilled players can acces it too.
What I’d like to propose is to have multiple versions of the raids. At the very least an easy PuG version and a hard guild version.

Goal of Proposal

• Everyone can experience the raiding content
• Different versions for different skill/organizing levels with rewards scaling accordingly

Proposal Functionality

Start with designing the challenging version of the raid for the organised groups. Once that’s done, figure out what will make less skilled/organized groups struggle and proceed to make a dumbed down version of the raid for them. You could just lower the health pools and damage, or you could even remove certain mechanics from the fight. Your goal here is make the raid accessible to PuGs while keeping the experience as close to the original as possible.

A simple example: The original raid has a phase where lots of adds spawn and the group has to work together to kite/kill the adds. A PuG might get overwhelmed too easily, so get rid of that phase in the PuG version. They’ll still be fighting the same boss, the only difference will be that they won’t get distracted by those adds.

The guild raid will obviously be an instanced version that is started by the guild leader/officers. There already are some great proposals out there about how this could be implemented, so I won’t talk about it.
For the PuG version you have two options. Either make it an open world raid like the current world bosses or also make it instanced. Have this version on a rotation like all world bosses. I personnaly feel like putting it in the open world will make the world feel more epic and alive, but then again an instanced version probably gives you more freedom in designing the fight. I really don’t know which one would be better.

When it comes to rewards, make sure to give the PuG version some interesting and good rewards, but keep some exclusive rewards for the guild version. Maybe add a new armor set much like the glorious (hero) armor. The PuG raid gets the simple version while the guild raid gets a really shiny version. New minies with some exclusive to the guild raid, new titles,…

Associated Risks

Not sure, haven’t put enough thought in it. It’ll probably be more time consuming to design multiple versions of the same raid and have them go through QA etc. But I believe the outcome is very much worth it.

Extra

One more thing I’d like to mention that isn’t necessarily a part of my proposal, but is somewhat related to raiding. People disliked the living story because it was mostly temporary (see mariotette), they wanted permanent content. What I loved about the marionette is that we fought it in the open world and afterwards we actually saw the remants of the marionette lying there. It made the living story that much better, the world felt alive. You can’t really do that with permanent content, unless you use instances. I’m going to use the marionette as example:
You introduce the marionette as a new raid boss with the living story. There is the challenging instanced guild version and the easier PuG version. The first two weeks the PuG version is in the open world only, no instances. Then the LS chapter ends and we get to see the remants of the marionette in the open world. Now instead of completely removing the fight, give us an instance of that fight as PuG version of the raid. Everyone is happy! (:

Hey Chris,

While reading this thread I came up with an idea for the ease of reading proposals, following discussions, summarising, … It has to do with forum functionality. I think it ties in nicely with The Lost Witch’s forum navigation idea.

I was thinking of adding a filter function to the forums, specifically built for CDI threads. This could be a dev only function, or accessible to all posters.

The first thing that could be added is a tag function. Give posters the option to tag their post as a ‘proposal’ or ‘discussion’ post. Then, based on that tag function, make a filter function that shows only ‘proposal’ or ‘discussion’ posts. This way you can get a very quick overview of all proposals that have been made.

The second thing I thought about, was to link every discussion post to the main proposal post. This can be done with normal links or tags. You could also add a spoiler drop down to every discussion post, which contains the main proposal.
Again, make a filter function to filter out discussions about a specific proposal.

Obviously, if this is implemented it has to be easy to use. If it’s tedious to use, then it will just annoy everyone.

The first idea is simple: put the two options at the top of the reply box. If you pick ‘proposal’, the correct format for your post will load. Same with ‘discussion’.

For the second idea I was thinking about giving every ‘proposal’ post a number. Then when you’re writing a ‘discussion’ post, give the poster the option to pick a ‘proposal post number’ from a drop down menu. This will automatically link that post to the original proposal. If you reply to a discussion post, the proposal number will be copied. You could make it so that if the poster doesn’t link a proposal to his post, someone else can still do it in his place.

Of course this has to be coded by whoever is in charge of writing code for the forums, so it all depends on what they think about this. I’m not a programmer so I have no idea if this is feasible, but I thought I’d post my idea in case it helps. (I’m sorry if the post turned out a bit too long)

Gonna go for bolt and flameseeker, the defender of Lions Arch!