Guild Wars 2

Source

Okay, so the title and the source are a joke – but I do have, what I feel, are two good suggestions for the Shatter mechanic and Mantras. This post was originally a gag written from ANet’s supposed viewpoint, but as you can see in the first couple of responses – that apparently didn’t go over well. I guess if I want to try and pretend to be ANet I need to learn to be succinct (like that will ever happen).

Anyhow, here are my QoL suggestions for these two aspects of the class:

Shatter Suggestions

Mesmer Shatters are highly unreliable. I find that in some parts of the game I can easily manage my Shatters and use them to their full, or at least partial, effectiveness. However, in other areas of the game my Illusions have a snow ball’s chance in hell of surviving long enough for me to summon 3, let alone get them all to the target safely. While my suggestion is far from a perfect solution, I do think that it would go a long way towards adding some much needed reliability to the mechanic.

This idea is sort of based off of how Mind Wrack currently works – the damage per Illusion goes down as you Shatter more Illusions, but the toal damage goes up. Therefore, I suggest that Shatter effects scale in a diminishing returns fashion. Using CoF as an example, rather than having each Illusion inflict a single stack of Confusion have the CoF effect inflict two stacks of Confusion the first time a target is hit by it. If they are hit by a second or third Illusion, have them take a diminished effect of only 1 stack of Confusion. Similarly, Mind Wrack might deal 600 damage from the first Illusion that hits a target, but the second and third would only deal 200. Note that this is regardless of which Illusion hits the target. The first illusion to hit them does the full (in diminished) effect and any additional hits are diminished. If you Mind Wracked three separate targets with different Illusions and with no overlap then each would take 600 damage. Distortion would work much the same, granting 2s duration for the first Illusion but only adding 0.5s for each additional Illusion Shattered.

In this way, you front-load much of the mechanic’s effects and make single Illusion shatters much more viable while not making 3 Illusion shatters more potent. It allows ANet to more freely design encounters with periods of massive AoE without completely negating our profession.

Mantra Suggestions

Mantras are a fun idea, but I – personally – find them tedious. Manually recharging a skill is not fun, no matter how unique a skill-type it is. Having a utility skill that you sometimes feel forced to use the last charge of so that you can manually recharge it to full just isn’t ideal.

My suggestion is to remove the manual charge from Mantras and instead have them gain charges at set intervals. Essentially, they’re a skill that can recharge itself twice, allowing you to pace your uses or else blow them all quickly. It allows for Empowered Mantra based builds to actually use their Mantras or for someone to throw a Mantra into their build for it’s effect without needing to babysit the skill. I understand that some people may be diehards for manually dazing themselves to recharge their skills, but I think this way would open up a lot more feasible build options for players.

You managed to make a song from an educational program grammatically incorrect…

“One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong.”

Potentially Asked Questions:
“You moron. People will just find the most optimal dynamic event paths to do the quickest for gold with the least amount of effort!”

You’ve just described the exact scenario taking place right now within every avenue of content that offers adequate gold reward. This would merely be adding a new lane to that highway, and in terms of time investment, making real money this way would still not surpass other daily methods for pure efficiency.

“What about that happening in the newbie zones? Sure the Queensdale champ train would be gone, but wouldn’t you be replacing it with a constant stream of people doing all the easy events in a set sequence, subject to the same toxic environment?”

Yeah. I’ve thought a lot about this, and I say we just go with Occam’s Razor: this simply shouldn’t be in effect in the 5 newbie zones of the game. Or in more humorous form: No streaking in front of the kids!

“If this wouldn’t actually make me more gold per hour than a dungeon rotation or [other activity x], what’s the point?”

In-game activities don’t have to be the most profitable thing to do to be worthwhile. There’s a “fun vs. reward” dynamic that every player considers constantly during a play session, and the ratio is different for almost every individual who logs in. This simply makes dynamics events- some of the game’s best content- relevant in terms of reward. For my part, I would take advantage of this constantly no matter how outclassed it was by other methods of making gold.

“What about event contribution levels- Gold, Silver, Bronze medals? What about failure?”

Good questions. One way of handling it would be to have only Gold give you the full, n+1, reward, while Silver and Bronze give roughly what they do now, but still increment your streak. I think this would be a good balance between rewarding the prime contributors over tagalongs and tailgaters, but without punishing them too harshly- stick around, get gold on the next one and you get the full reward.

If you fail an event, I’m totally down with giving XP, but you really shouldn’t get any gold for it.
I don’t understand why that happens.

“You’re dramatically upsetting the rate of gold acquisition during the leveling process. You really want first-timer level 30s earning multiple gold per hour?”

No, that’s a good point. I think I’d like it most if the ability to earn “streak” rewards was just something that you unlocked per character by reaching level 80. This would mesh well with the “entire game is endgame” motif- after all, you’re not doing anything you couldn’t have done while leveling- but also provide a new answer to “well what am I supposed to do at level 80?” as suddenly every zone in the game is a newly ample source of fun and profit.

Congratulations on making it to the end of my idea! I’ll take your questions and criticisms now, though beware my concept is completely bulletproof.

Once you break 30 events in my system the gold reward begins to grow quite quickly (4.6g for 30, 8.2g for 40). However, most zones have a total somewhere just a bit above 40 unique events, so that would mean either literally (or quite close to) clearing an enter zone of every dynamic event it has to offer. Frostgorge Sound, for example, has 53 including every Group Event, and every single step of both dynamic events- this would be quite a feat, and you’d be in that zone for hours. I legitimately believe that the ultimate gold-earning potential here isn’t a deal-breaker. Many events have self-limiting timers, and plenty of chains consume time just progressing between individual steps. It wouldn’t be physically possible to just clear an entire zone in an hour- and if someone wants to spend 4 hours in a single zone tackling every single opportunity they find, why shouldn’t they be rewarded as though they’d done, say, 2 hours of dungeons?

Alternatively, if the gold acquisition rate was deemed a serious problem, the streak could just be capped- say after 25, no new events would reward you- though if you left and came back, you could start a new streak with the events you hadn’t gotten to yet that day, starting back at 1. Though again, I don’t think it would be necessary.

Your streak could even be represented as a simple little stack buff in the UI (“Wildlands Samaritan,” “Kessex Defender”) that simply drops upon leaving the zone.

Think about how this new system would feel in practice. You’d get your party or guild together, pick a zone and head out into the world to start adventuring. As you clear more and more of the problems you come across, the gold starts to pile up- the denizens of that zone offering their thanks for your hard work. Soon most of the obvious, high-profile events have been done- but there is more of Tyria in need of help, more insidious evil to fell. So you’ll press deeper into the nooks and crannies of the zone- maybe there’s one underground you forgot about- maybe there’s one you’ve never seen before. Every unique event represents an opportunity to keep your streak alive in that zone, and once you’ve got an “epic streak” going you’ll just be hunting for more to do in that zone. Each explorable map in Tyria is a playground of opportunity. Bonus points if you get some sort of recognition for maxing your streak, literally clearing every single event in the zone, which I suppooooooose could be an achievement, though I’d feel sorry for the OCD-laden out there.

It’s not an uncommon topic: how do we make just playing out and about in the open world of Tyria more rewarding?

Seems the suggestions forum is gone so I’ll just drop this here…

So, I’ve thought about this a lot and I like my simple solution so much that I’ll permanently be a little bit sad unless something like it happens one day. This all stems from the idea that Dynamic Events in Guild Wars 2 are the meat, potatoes, veggies and dessert of the game. They’re great, and a ton of work was put into them. They are primarily unique to GW2 in that even games with similar contrivances (Rift and Wildstar each have their variations, as I understand it) are rudimentary in comparison.

There are so many. In every zone, so much content that is underutilized at best and entirely ignored at worst. Ignored! Some of the best content in the game, completely passed by, not even touched once a day. There are event chains in this game I absolutely love, some that can even last upwards of an hour, ultimately rewarding you with 20 or so silver and a few blues, greens and mob drops. This is a shame because even a player like me, who is happy to do content for the fun of it rather than the reward, will triage activities based on reward. In other words, if I’m choosing between two types of content, both of which I substantially enjoy, I will far more often choose the more lucrative one.

I attempt to solve this problem by unifying a few different concepts:

• Playing in almost any zone of the game should be substantially, and in some ways equally, rewarding
• Dynamic Event completion (success) should provide tangible rather than incidental rewards
• Adventuring throughout a zone clearing many events- making an impact on the fabric of that zone- should carry a sense of gameplay momentum with it
• Doing many different events should be rewarded greatly; repeatedly doing the same events should not be rewarded at all (thematically, the same idea as the changes to dungeon rewards)
• Ultimately, the best currency that can be delivered as a reward is always gold, because it’s the language of the trading post

I have framed this idea largely in cold, mathematical terms, but perhaps my favorite thing about it is that it makes a fair bit of sense in roleplaying terms, especially compared to the existing system. I’ll touch a bit on that again at the end.

Here goes.

Each unique dynamic event completed to success awards n silver, where n = the number of unique dynamic events completed in that zone. Repeating completed events would earn you no silver reward at all (XP/karma unaffected).

Put more simply: every new event you do in a zone earns you one more silver than the one before.

This would reset upon leaving a zone, and your “streak” potential for each zone would reset on the daily timer.

So as an example, if you go to Metrica Province and do 1 event it gives you 1 silver, do another event and it gives you 2 silver, do another and it gives you 3 silver, for a total of 6 silver for having done 3 unique events in that zone. The formula for how much you earn by doing how many events would be: (n * (n+1)) / 2.

So if you continue adventuring in that zone:

• 10 events will net you a total of 55 silver.
• 20 events will get you a total of 2 gold, 10 silver- on par with a run of COF1 + SE1.

That seems like a lot of gold for “just events” at first, but think about it: if you’ve completed 20 unique events in a row in a single zone, you are a force in that zone. You’ve severely shifted the battle lines with the centaurs in Kessex Hills, you’ve taken out a ton of Branded threats in Blazeridge Steppes, you’ve given the Inquest a run for their money and driven them from the Infinity Coil in Mount Maelstrom. There’s no doubt this would take longer than a couple of the easiest dungeon paths- but if you didn’t mind spending the time, you could keep going.

Under the existing system, event silver rewards vary by zone (and are apparently being further nerfed per devaluing champ trains), but 20 events would get you somewhere in the ballpark of 70 silver, and you’d be rewarded just the same even if you just repeated the same 4 events five times.

Seras.5702:

What are you wearing “Jake”?

…she sounds hideous

(sorry, couldn’t help myself)

Well, she’s a guy so…….

Since we’ve started to see more items get moved out of our inventory and into their own UI (dungeon tokens, finishers, transmutation stones) I’d like to suggest another area that could be applied to: boosters.

The “Booster Wallet” would be a tab on our Hero panel and work in a similar manner to the Finishers tab. The UI would display all the different booster types (experience, karma, magic find, etc) and how many “charges” of each you have. Click the “Activate” button under a booster to use it. Click the “Buy” or “Buy 5” buttons to purchase more. If you receive a booster from game-play (daily rewards, achievement chests, Black Lion chests, etc.) it will simply add another charge to that booster type in your wallet.

There are two benefits to this system. First, it will free up some of the clutter in our bank storage. Second, it will provide easy access to use your boosters out in the field without having to carry all of them around (and switch them between characters) to be ready for the off-chance that you might want to use some of them.

A similar “Utility Wallet” (or maybe “Utility Belt”?) could also be used for all the convenience/services items like Bank Access Express, Trading Post Express, etc.

Bottom line: provide a more convenient and accessible way to use those items and people will probably use them (and buy them) more often, rather than just throwing the freebies we get into our banks and forgetting about them.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I know I love the idea of a maniacal engineer who spits flames all across the battlefield. His enemies fear him and either run or seek to kill him quickly, due to the large threat he poses.

The reality is quite different. For those who don’t know, flamethrower autoattack, the topic of this thread, is the most stylish autoattack ever. However, it’s quite weak – it spits flame particles everywhere, but actually applies very little burning. It does around 2/3 the DPS of the rifle in the same cast time. It also has a low AoE damage cap, at 3.

If we take a closer look, we can quickly figure out why the flamethrower autoattack is so weak. While on paper, the DPS of Flame Jet is low, it has what’s one of the most consistent attacks in the entire game – Minimal cast time and minimal aftercast for a long, long, multihit attack. It has a moderate range, can’t be reflected, and dodging will only slightly mitigate the damage, since it’s almost always ticking. It’s not easy to kite, since the engineer can freely move while casting. Flame Jet will literally burn through aegis and other single-hit blocks, and stealth is ineffective because the attack has a wide AoE that doesn’t rely on a target to deal damage. Probably the only “counterplay” to Flame Jet is to spam retaliation and facetank. That’s why the autoattack is so weak. If it were stronger, it’d be ridiculous to play against.

If we look at higher dps autoattack abilities like grenade, bomb and rifle, they all have much stronger counterplay options. Grenades are projectiles that travel relatively slowly, so they can be dodged or reflected. Bombs require you to stand in them, and rifle auto is a single attack and targeted, so stealth and blocks work well. All of these are also effectively dodge-able attacks.

Because the flamethrower has so limited counterplay, though, it has to deal less damage. The autoattack can be freely spammed with no cooldown, and has limited counterplay, so it’s weak. If the autoattack was more powerful, something else would have to go.

Personally, I’d like it if they could make the autoattack stronger, but gave it more counterplay options. Say, if you were interrupted anytime during the cast, the skill would go on cooldown for X seconds, but if you weren’t interrupted, you could freely go on spamming it forever, spreading burn everywhere. It would be exceedingly easy to interrupt so it would punish for not doing so. I think weakness to retaliation and weakness to interrupts would be enough to buff the autoattack somewhat. Maybe it’d be on a trait, so that you could still have your ultra-reliable DPS skill if you wanted it.

Or, they could also increase the AoE cap heavily, to 10 or more so that it would be a tool for hitting a lot of opponents at once, which would at least give it a niche role.

Currently, it’s extremely rare for it to actually be worthwhile to spam Flame Jet, since the 2 skill does way more DPS, has a bigger AoE cap, and is still pretty reliable damage. The cooldown is short enough that between healing, swapping to other kits, and using autoattacks from other weapons, there’s very few opportunities for Flame Jet to actually be useful.

The message of the day needs to pop up in the chat window. It’s frustrating that my custom arena does it, but not for my guild.

Dragon Ruler X.8512:

Btw where is my guild hall Anet? lol

And I’ll add something like a counter of guild members by maps. You open the map, you put the cursor on the name of a map and you know how many guildmates are on the map, refreshed each time you reopen the map.
That’s sexier than looking at the register and I don’t think that’s really hard to implement.

WoW is dead too, apparently since it’s release 10 years ago.

Ok I know I am going to get a lot of hate respond from this topic but some 1 has to call it out and so I will. Also sorry for any bad spelling or bad grammar, English Is my second language

As every player know that now on days doing pve dungeon every one demands for a zerker class. Reason for this is because it aloud player’s to put so much damage that bosses get kill in just a matter of seconds

So how is this ruined the game?

Creates bad player’s :
since player can kill bosses so fast, they have no clue on how to avoid getting hit or aren’t used to the idea of avoiding damage that if they are in a group that cant down a boss under 20 sec they start dropping like fly’s and start blaming there death for the lack of dps not b/c they didn’t use there dodge when standing on the red circle

Shuns Classes:
I have play all classes to lvl 80 and I find none of them to have any dps issue , yes some class will do a bit more then other but no such a huge difference to call the class bad or unplayable but the zerker build works so good with a warrior and guardian far better then any other class because there classes is build to take on some damage before they have to pull back on the defencive making them the class of the month since the point of zerker build is to stand in 1 spot and burn the boss HP

Destroys game mechanics:
MMO RPG are all about learning mobs weakness and strength , always been about what is the best weapon or skill to use on a boss and learn what attack a boss does.
This game has all that but can be completely ignore since zerker build can dps the boss so fast that it doesn’t aloud the boss to do much.

If you’re going to reduce the stats of 1-30 mobs, won’t they become easier for a a lvl 80 with full exotic/ascended? It was easy as it was before..

they mentioned to make the downscaling hitting harder.

another thing, it would have made more sense to make the trait books be buyable with karma than gold. Karma is a better currency for representing playing the game in any mode, where as gold represents how well you can merchant or farm

but i suppose the problem would be karma is currently pretty unbalanced currency, some have millions sitting around, some have like 0, then again the same can be said of gold.

Source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/traits-unleashed-forty-new-traits-and-more/

As part of this approach to making traits more approachable, we’ve pushed back the level at which the different trait tiers unlock for new characters in order to better pace the early game experience and to add more meaningful character progression from levels 30 to 80. Starting with this feature pack, new characters will unlock the adept tier at level 30, the master tier at level 60, and the grandmaster tier at level 80.

TLDR at bottom. I don’t do a TLDR very often, so count yourself lucky if you’re the kind of person who looks for them :p

Most of what I write here, will concern new players, and people new to a class, not people who have 1 of every class at level 80. It focuses on the LEVELLING aspect, and how they are removing player engagement, customization, and fun.

So instead of unlocking your trait access at level 11, it is being pushed back to 30?

Instead of getting the second tier of traits at level 40, new characters will now get access at level 60?

Instead of playing with and testing the Grandmaster traits at level 60, access is being withheld until level 80?

I’m sorry to say, but this damages your game. So do not do it.

It does not impact me, I have 9 characters, 7 are level 80, 2 more (that I never play anyway since launch) are almost there, and will be before this debacle.

Here are my reasons for why this proposed change is bad. Not that it matters, you’ll still charge ahead like a bull and release this monstrosity anyway.

Experimentation

A new player in the current system, can experiment with builds, in a minor way, once s/he hits level 11.

In the proposed system, a new player/character CANNOT even begin to experiment with builds, until level 30.

The core of this game revolves around what your trait build is.

If you TRIPLE this from level 11 to level 30, new players/characters are taking LONGER to learn the core part of the game. This is a bad thing. You want them to start learning the game as early as possible, not as late as possible.

At level 80, a characters first (sometimes only) build is finalized.

Currently, a player that reaches level 60 can experiment with different trait lines and find a play style or build that suits them. Once they get to level 80 they then gear up and trait up based on their favoured way of playing the class.

By pushing Grandmaster traits back to level 80 instead of 60, you stop people from learning the game, and deciding on how they want to play their character at level 80, until well after level 80.

This is bad, and you do not want this. So do not make this change to traits.

Boredom

A new player/character now has less to do, for much longer.

When I was levelling up different classes, I always hating having to wait until level 11 to start playing with traits, which define a class and the players play style. This was just level 2-11, technically not very long, and I was always bored waiting for it.

Now the only thing a new player/character has from level 2-30 is… unlock weapon swap… unlock 2 utility slots.

Ok, that’s incredibly boring.

You are locking a new player/character out from learning about, and engaging with, the class, until level 30, that’s a freaking long time.

You want people to customize and engage with their character, not bore them to death.

The best part of starting a new RPG, or a new character in an RPG, is character and class customization. What you are doing is punishing your player for even playing your game. You are locking them out of the most engaging part of RPG’s, for literally no logical reason.

Again, this is a bad change, listen to these words of wisdom, you do not want to do this.

Unlocking traits

As for unlocking skills by doing various in game feats? I’m all for it. Sounds fun, and it is a great part of any classic RPG.

Last but not least,

TLDR;

Raising the level at which players can customization their character, engage with the game/class, learn about the game/class, is a terrible change, you DO NOT want to go ahead with this. You WILL bore the player, and make them learn slower.

Between levels 2-30, the player is going to have less to do. LESS than current. LESS character engagement. LESS game engagement. While also being significantly weaker due to loss of stat points during this entire 2-30 phase.

Shockwave.1230:

Astralporing.1957:

Lostwingman.5034:

“Dye unlocks in the CN version are account unlock instead of character unlocks.”

BRING THAT HERE!

Haven’t you read the article? They intend to bring it here. But when they do, they will remove dyes from drop tables. You’d have to hit gemshop for them.
If that were to happen, i’d likely forget about getting any dyes ever again. And with only basic dyes (no, we don’t know what would happen to dyes we already have), i might as well forget about worrying about skins for my characters as well. They wouldn’t look good in them anyway, after all.

It says they plan on reducing drops.

…yeah

With this new system you only need to collect a dye once and you can use it on any character. This is more convenient, but it means demand for dye will go down, so we’re also reducing supply. Dye unlocks now come only from crafting and from the gem store.

Reducing drops indeed. From current level to zero.

What I do is attach 1 file, press preview and then attach another and so on.

Three weeks ago, the Ranger CDI was opened. With bated breath, I followed closely the debate and issues raised. Many of the issues with the Ranger were as old as beta, but at least now the Ranger profession had center stage to discuss these issues. Or so I thought …

As time went on, I was struck my the lack of response from Anet. It seems that Allie Murdock did not have the time to devote to this massive topic. I can count on two hands the responses she made in the 67 page thread. I can only find one summary thread, and that thread only included a few ideas.

Frankly, how was this collaborative? Compared to the other concurrent CDI threads, the Ranger thread was ignored. The Edge of the Mists thread barely crested 11 pages, but saw more posts by Devon Carver, even though he took almost two weeks off. PVP Ladder and Seasons thread was a paltry 4 pages, but, as all things PVP, got many responses and personal time with Anet staff. Fractal Evolution, which hit 30 pages, got the usual multiple-posts-per-day attention from Chris Whiteside. What about the Ranger thread? Each of the other CDI threads saw more red posts than the Ranger thread. That is shocking considering how the Ranger thread dwarfs the other CDI threads, bringing in more posts than all the others combined.

Because of this lack of communication, we have no idea what is being discussed from the Ranger thread. We never built a discussion. Every time Allie did show up, all she did was shoot down ideas or put out fires.

I politely request that Anet make a new Ranger CDI thread. To start the thread, Anet should summarize the previous thread (yes, all 67 pages please), including the ideas that are feasible, liked, and possible. This would help guide discussion into fruitful territory. Next, I would ask that Anet allocate an appropriate amount of staff to respond and collaborate with posters. Looking at the size of the previous thread, likely 3 staff members would be needed. This would go a great deal in making that 67 post thread not feel like a waste of time.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Oh, and I want to add to my last post:

Everybody can simply roll over their buttons and play a class well enough, but when you start to get to the higher tiers that doesn’t fly as much. You need to time your stuns/condis/stability/heals/etc. if you want to “play with the big boys.”

I know that there are some specs right now that are particularly spammy, though. We’re hoping that some of the changes we make in the feature build will help with a lot of that. One step at a time!

That’s exactly the point!
Our pet behaves like rolling over buttons all the time and no matter how much you will tweak the AI, it will never become as skillfull as the player and that’s the reason why the pet oughtn’t be burdened with dealing our damage.