Guild Wars 2

Chris Whiteside.6102:

’Is it fair to say that regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method?

The ability to change gear stats.

The ability to potentially use tokens from encounters (allowing users to work toward acquisition of Ascended Gear) that would otherwise only offer RNG chances on Ascended Gear, allowing users to work toward the items (courtesy of Nike and others)’

Note this is the formulation of a proposal for discussion.

Chris

I would be largely in favor of adding the ability for gear to change stats. One of the main issues that I have with ascended gear is that the stats inherent in the armor actively impede my horizontal progression – I feel that I have to 100% plan out a build before I can choose my armor/weapons/trinkets, as it is currently such a large investment that a change of plans requires a lot of time/effort/$$$. (I had this issue with exotics to a lesser degree, but there overall the main issue was acquiring skins for the gear I wanted)

As for improving the RNG on ascended gear, I wouldn’t mind it, but I don’t believe RNG is the correct way to go about vertical progression. One of the strength of vertical progression is seeing yourself grow, and tying this progress to RNG means that I cannot see any growth until I get a random drop. In fact, I make absolutely no progress towards growth until I make all of it at once, which makes the progression completely and utterly frustrating.

Using tokens would be a good step up, but I worry about the timeframes involved. Using crafting as a base, it takes a month to acquire full armor. If it would take about a month to get the tokens involved for a set of armor, then we run into a similar issue with RNG progression, where the progression is so slow as to be more or less zero on a day-to-day basis. For me, this feels even worse.

One nice thing about ascended trinkets is that you can obtain them in parallel (you can get laurels, relics, and guild thingies on separate tracks). If the amount of time it takes to craft an individual piece of armor absolutely cannot change, how about this: each piece of ascended armor requires different rare materials. I could get the pieces in parallel, instead of being time-locked to getting them one at a time.

This doesn’t do a ton to alleviate the cost of crafting, which is also a huge problem in my opinion, but that can just be numbers tuning.

Now, Guild Wars 2 actually has a system that shares the characteristic of increasing horizontal and vertical progression, namely, the trait system. As you gain access to more trait points, you not only gain access to more abilities, but you also gain access to more configurations.

However, there are a couple of differences in the two systems that limit the other strengths in comparison:

1. Switching trait configurations is highly cumbersome. Not only does it require paying gold to reattune, the process to retrait is a large amount of downtime for a player, especially as they cannot take back accidental point assignments. Losing your old trait configuration is just icing on the annoyance cake.

2. Retraiting doesn’t change much about your character. In guild wars 2, by selecting traits, it largely changes aspects of your skills, but they generally remain the same skill. In golden sun, you can fundamentally change what you can do by retraiting. For a less fundamental change, in Diablo 2, traits give you access to skills that you otherwise would not have available, and can get you the passive changes as well.

3. Trait configurations are very tied up in other vertical progression systems. Namely, ascended armor stat configurations. If I want to change my traits, I hypothetically could as there is horizontal progression in the system, but then for a lot of the changes I need to change out my gear, which means that I need to reset my vertical progression in terms of armor configuration. For ascended armor, this could take a month for this single horizontal change I want to make.

4. The trait system is intrinsically bound another vertical progression system (i.e., your character level). This is a highly limiting factor for the system, which limits both the vertical and horizontal progression of the system. Now, this is not inherently problematic, as many other game systems do so as well, but it is a limitation worth noting.

Overall, the most problematic aspect of this system is how many horizontal systems are tied into stats. While this is a huge problem with ascended gear, I suspect that this would have shown up as a concern even with exotics if berzerker gear wasn’t 100% sufficient to do pretty much all of the PvE content in the game. This speaks to the need of a new system outside of the stat and level-based vertical progression.

Interestingly enough, Guild Wars lore has four schools of magic that are built in, which could play well with a golden sun-esque djinn system. This may lead to too many configurations if done strictly like golden sun. A suggestion I have is to die this in to a sub-class system that people can use for a secondary class. These secondary classes could be based on configurations of magical signets that add skills that can be used for that class. For instance, Guardians could infuse themselves with Destruction and Aggression to gain abilities that allow them to be more damaging in combat, or they could infuse themselves purely in preservation and become even tankier. The configuration could be relatively shallow (such as a maximum of 4 magical infusions), and could perhaps allow more infusions as the game evolves. If people want to try out new sub-classes, they have to earn new infusions (which could be relatively hard to find), but they can always reuse previous infusions found. The idea being that there is added customization, there are added things you can do in certain configurations (but not others), and that this is a system that is outside of the current stat and level vertical progression.

Hey folks, I’m a bit late to the party, but I would like to talk about the character progression in Golden Sun.

For those who don’t know, Golden Sun had a bit of an unusual class system. The core game revolved around four different types of elements (water, earth, fire, air). Each character starts with five “levels” in one element. Their class is derived from this element, and they can only cast spells from this element.

The key idea that makes this concept work is the game’s “djinn”, which are associated with the same four elements. Each “djinn” you assign to a character raises the level of the djinn’s element by one. If I had two fire djinn and an air djinn attached to an earth guy, his elemental levels would be as follows:

5 earth
2 fire
1 air
0 water

By adding elements, you can change the class of a character substantially. For instance, say I have a bulky earth guy. By default, he has a strong attack score, a small healing ability, and mostly single-target or small AoE spells. However, if I give him a bunch of air djinn, then he keeps the same score, loses the healing spells, and gains a whole bunch of status effects (buffs and debuffs). If I combine him with fire djinn, then he attacks harder than the other two, but has worse spells overall.

There are also some very specific combinations of abilities too, such as having a mixture of fire and air djinn on the earth guy that makes you a fast single-target warrior.

The more djinn you have assigned to a character, the more powerful they will become. Their classes will improve the more elements you add. This is not to say that all assignments are equally powerful, as going for certain classes will be more powerful. The most powerful classes tend to follow specific patterns (max 1 element, equal levels in 2 elements, equal levels in 3 elements. There are not enough djinn to get equal levels in all 4).

You don’t just get djinn for free as you level, instead there’s a pokemon-esque aspect to the game where you have to track down djinn and add them to your party. The game can also throw imbalances at you even if you find all of them, such as a temporary surplus of wind djinn.

In addition, you can expend the djinn as a resource. Each djinn has a skill associated with it, which can vary from a selection of offensive, defensive, and utility abilities. Each djinn also raises certain skills of the character. When you use a djinn, it doesn’t increase your elemental level anymore, which can lead to losing your class bonuses. However, if enough djinn have been used, you can utilize them in a powerful summon attack, after which they (one-by-one) recover and contribute to your class level again.

The class system used by this game has a couple of amazing features that lead to really cool and interesting gameplay features:

1. Power is a limited resource. You can only have so many djinn at a particular point in the game, and you have to figure out how to utilize them at a given point. There is a game to figuring out how best to assign your djinn so that you get optimal classes for an entire party.

2. An increase in the vertical progression of the system corresponds with an increase in the horizontal progression. As you gain access to more and djinn, not only does this result in more powerful classes, it results in more types classes being available, and more and more configurations of an entire party.

3. Multiple uses for the power resources. I can leave the djinn alone and get a powerful class, I can sacrifice my class to use the power of the djinn, and I can use a lot of djinn to work towards a powerful summon attack. There is a balance between the three that the player can decide for themselves.

(continued in next post…)