Guild Wars 2

In terms of gear progression, I believe the current system works but could be greatly improved upon. I like the fact that in crafting ascended and legendary gear, you have to go around collecting rare, exotic materials to forge a powerful weapon.

The problem is that to craft gifts, bloodstone bricks, empyreal stars and etc, you’re merely grinding out the required component materials for these primary ingredients. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, because you have to time-gate the acquisition of top-level gear somehow, so that acquiring these items feels like an achievement. Its also a good thing that many of these things can and sometimes need to be acquired through playing different portions of the game; dungeons, WvW, skill point accumulation, etc.

However, I think that ascended and legendary acquisition and that form of progression could be so much more engaging by revisiting the ways that players get these items.

Think about some of the endgame items you can get in the Zelda games. Biggoron’s sword and the Fierce Deity Mask, for instance. Those were really, really fun pieces of gear to obtain! It was awesome how those quest chains were set up, sending you back out throughout Hyrule and revisiting characters, helping them in unique ways to get yourself closer to that end item. All of these items take a long time to obtain, but it doesn’t feel like it at all since you’re doing so many unique tasks to obtain them, rather than obtaining thousands of rupees, rerunning the Forest Temple a ton of times, stockpiling Deku sticks or killing hundreds of Stalfos for a rare drop.

I think that type of of quest chain could easily be integrated into GW2 to keep the time and effort required for item acquisition similar but reduce the amount of grind. Send players back out into the world, doing new tasks for completed reknown heart NPCs, put a forge at the end of a dynamic chain, make the individual legendaries only craftable at specific hard to reach locations, collect and trade items in a personal story quest chain to get a gift-like ingredient, even integrate spin-off rewards in the process of crafting these items.

Even randomly dropped ascended items could be a bit more interesting to obtain. Instead of dropping the ascended chest, drop a key to unlock an instanced jumping puzzle or special activity that the player would need to complete to obtain the items. Here’s an idea: you get an ascended key drop in a Fractal. You use that key to transport you to a solo jumping puzzle Fractal, that has multiple routes that take you to different areas, each of which houses a different ascended stat set with a theme corresponding to that stat set’s name.

EDIT: Now with a picture of what a Biggoron’s sword might look like!

Has anyone spent much time playing Battlefield 4 or Natural Selection 2? Both of those games have interesting features in their commander systems. The feature that I think could benefit the commander system the most, at least in WvW, is an interactive world map that can be used to issue specific commands to specific people.

This functionality would only work if we had a better system in which to divide players into squads as has been previously discussed. There would also need to be a fair way to eject and replace this Map Commander if enough people believe that they aren’t up to par. (And it shouldn’t just be people from one guild who have a problem with the player!) The interface for this system could be reached by interacting with a map / commander’s table at each world’s starting hill or area.

This Map Commander could better control the deployment of siege weapons and upgrades by being the only one with the ability to drop them, or having the ability to suppress player’s ability to drop sieges or pick up supply in specific parts of the zone.

Battlefield commanders can drop supply, do scans, etc, and it would be neat if a GW2 commander could do something along those lines by creating dynamic events at specific locations on the maps. For instance, if the Map Commander of one world owns all of the mercenary camps, in addition to the usual functionality, they could do something along of spawn a dredge APC at a location, or send a team of ogres to fortify a tower.

Anyways, sorry about the format of this post, just was a stream of consciousness I wanted to drop in here in the short amount of time I had to post something today.

Nick.6972:

So what do you people suggest? Give heavy armor to Ranger? Give reflects to Necro? Remove zerker armor? Come on.

It would take a massive amount of rebalancing, but an idea that came to mind would be to give each of the armor type professions their own unique advantage. A possible idea would be an additional evade for adventures, and for scholars a secondary heal option and higher baseline boon duration.

These would be expansion-level changes though, and who knows if that’s part of Anet’s plan.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Those rewards are not available in the Fractals at this time, sorry.

In my opinion, that is a disappointing decision. If players who missed the original event were given access to these loot tables through the new Fractals, those players who earned these rewards during the original LW events would still have a significant advantage over those who would be trying to obtain them later by not having to deal with a fractal rotation to get a shot at the RNG.

Perhaps consider bringing back The Frog in a CDI role to get a livechat / irc-type discourse going on the individual servers at scheduled times. At least it could help bring in talking points from those outside of the forums, and refer more of those in game to get in on the discussion.

Will the new fractals revisiting the Aetherblade Retreat and Molten Facility give us another chance at getting the Decorative Molten Jetpack and Monocle drops?

I suppose this question also extends to the minis and recipes that were also previously available through these instances.

Another issue I’ve seen brought up a number of times is the tendency of LS releases to add dynamic events that cause players to create giant, map-circling zerg groups to complete them, simply because that is the most efficient way to complete the achievements or farm for LS release-specific drops. This can be fun in moderation, but the WvW aspect of the game already gives players who are looking for this type of gameplay all of the opportunities necessary to play this way.

You should consider funneling players into different parts of the world based on their choices made at character creation and during the personal story. This would accomplish two things: break up the zerg, and bring more personal involvement with the player character into the LS. The most obvious distinctions between characters are race, profession, and the PC’s order.

It would make sense to send Vigil, Whispers and Priory characters to different fronts where they could focus on events, or send players back to defend or take part in events within their racial homelands. Either way, you would really need to make it worthwhile for players to stay in these separate fronts to split them up, and you could balance events accordingly.

You could split up players by profession, either individually or by the soldier/adventurer/scholar categories. Each group of players could approach a twist in the LS with not a unique experience, but one that is at least more tailored to their personal playstyle based on their choices.

Also, the time was taken to add a personality roleplaying mechanic to the game. Why not use that system in LS releases to funnel players into needing to do different things, or at least say different things while participating in LS content? A ‘brute’ and a ‘noble’ character wouldn’t always deal with Scarlet in the same way. Consider developing and using this system more, or do away with it.

One thing many seem to have brought up is the temporal nature of Living Story updates. Personally, I’ve missed a number of updates when life has has been busy, so when I recently came back to the game it really is not a good feeling to find that I missed out on some permanent content; most notably for myself are the permanent home instance nodes, titles and back items. This isn’t as bad as of a thing as some players make it out to be, but the best perspective that can be had from players who have missed some content is a passive acceptance of the situation, which doesn’t foster the personal involvement and interest I would assume the writing time is trying to engender in players.

Now, I think that making these releases temporary is a vital part of crafting a living world, and I believe that you should continue to craft more and more engaging and surprising releases. However, since you are taking some inspiration from the format of releasing episodic television, remember that many people who missed out on the original airdate enjoy getting the DVD boxed set later to catch missed shows, or simply wait until they can go through the show at their own pace after it has been released to physical media.

I think Guild Wars 2 has a way of doing that in a way that fits in with the world of Tyria through the Fractals of the Mists.

What I imagine would be a good solution to players missing out on temporary content would be to create a fractal for a Living Story arc once it completes, allowing players a chance to experience the highlights of the story arc, and getting them caught up with the world of Tyria. Firstly, I think this would probably give the developers a good way to reuse temporary LS content assets to create permanent content. I could see this going a few ways: one way having a large, permanent fractal added for a full story arc, another way with smaller, time based releases that show what happened during the last one or two LS releases, or a combination of the two. These could either be a traditional fractal group instance, or perhaps a new group entrance or solo instance. You could also choose to give players another opportunity at some or all of the rewards of the released LS content they may have missed.

Rather than changing scaling of the encounter, perhaps a better solution would be for Anet to create quasi-guilds like TTS that players are either automatically added into on boss content releases or can choose to opt in on.

Perhaps a Sparkfly Fen Defense chat channel that spans several or all servers and includes a waypoint on the tab that players can click on to head to an overflow that is filling up to fight Tequatl or future world bosses.

(They could even keep the chat channel itself or the proposed waypoint unaccesible until the player has completed the activities designed to familiarize them with the encounter.)

Yeah, 8/9 here too. I feel like an idiot for staying up and trying to get this done. Work is going to be awful tomorrow.

Any kills planned for today? I’d like an invite if there’s room, please!

The dynamic even within Valslake in Snowden Drifts appears to be bugged. The NPC needed to be escorted is spawning within terrain in the lake, becoming stuck and making the event impossible to complete.

The bug is live right now on Blackgate.