Guild Wars 2

Somehow one of my guildies with ADHD ended up spending 40 minutes reading all the text in the library. That was interesting.

Rebound.3409:

*A shoutout to the composers and audio team. I dunno how many of u noticed, but the music they made for this map literally triples the good mood u have in it. Exceptional work on the audio part and hope to see more.

Yeah, I had noticed that actually – the opening theme for the Silverwastes was spectacular and the theme for Glint’s Lair added immensely to the atmosphere. Minimal trash mobs added to the emptiness as well.

My only disappointment is that Mamnoon Lagoon at the north of the old Silverwood seems to have dried up. Very little water left there now.

They’d be chasing any other class too. Especially inside their keep.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Please list your top three priorities for raiding (Challenging, Instanced, Cooperative, Content)

Mine are:

1: Knowledge>
2: Skill>
3: Raid Group Setup

I will leave the thread open until folks have had a chance to put there top three forward and then I will put forward a proposal on behalf of the CDI group to the team.

Thanks,

Chris

1. Every player’s role is vital
2. Two forms of raids – instanced and open-world – for organised and casual players respectively
3. Promote diverse use of mechanics for each encounter

Crystal Reid.2481:

moiraine.2753:

Chris,

I want to ask you something.Will Defiance be redesigned?Is there any plan for it at all?Because right now it is removing the need of any CC in the fights.If raids come will interrupts,stuns,fear become an actual mechanic?Will they be more useful from now?

All I can say on this is we have been talking about it internally and trying to come up with different solutions that make CC valuable without allowing players to “stun lock” creatures (which would be a very real problem if we did not have Defiance). I can’t say any more on that at this time, so here’s a better question for you:

If we removed Defiance, how would you propose a replacement that makes CC (interrupts, stuns, fears etc) valuable without creating a situation that allows players to CC a creature to death.

Aside from diminishing returns on CC, you can use more creatures in an encounter, all of which should be targetted with appropriate CC skills. It’s very difficult to stunlock everything with a player-creature ratio around 1:1.

Supposing, on a 5v5 encounter, a group of creatures had a build synergy where one or two provide stability, you would have to strip that boon before you could interrupt casts on any of them. Like player parties, they’d need their support/DPS/CC spread out among them so you can’t just use a few boon strips while you nail the healer to the ground.
But the focus for any group would be on interrupting the unavoidable offensive skills and denying heal/defense abilities on monsters, while dodging/blocking offensive abilities where possible. There’s only so much CC you can get out of a 5-man group.

In a raid, of course, players have access to far more. Aside from making it a 15v15 (which would be fun in my view but we’ll see) you can still keep a small group of monsters, but increase their synergistic abilities beyond what a normal player group could counter. For example, a single raid encounter could:

• Require constant boon strip – finally a chance to get more people familiar with Illusionary Disenchanter?
• Require certain heal skills to be consistently interrupted, or the enemy group reaches full HP again very fast
• Require a powerful, fast melee mob to be constantly blocked behind Guardian walls / Necro fear walls, or immobilised
• Require a high-damage condition applier and its condition-spreading and duration-boosting ally to be addressed, either through interrupting key skills, spreading out and using single-target cleanses, or by sending them back to the source using Plague Signet etc.
• And of course, require enough DPS to kill them.

The bonus of having more things to target is that you’re only locking down a fraction of the group’s abilities at a time. In the above group, you could stun-lock any one of them easily, but there’d be a different effect for every one you stun-lock. If you just hit the condition-dealer, you’re going to be carved up by the berserker and all your damage will be negated by the healer. So you have to CC all of them in some appropriate way. Fortunately, with GW2’s weapons, basically every class has something to contribute to that encounter.

It is a bit of a back-to-GW1 concept, but with a twist – because raid sizes are bigger, the targetted CC requirements can be less forgiving. Not to forget the support element – a single Save Yourselves! + Contemplation of Purity will eliminate all degen on 5 players for a time, but needs to be used sparingly because of the cooldown.

However, there are ways to break it that would need to be addressed. In GW1 , something like Panic could be used to stun-lock the whole group simultaneously. GW2 has hammer trains – if you could stack them all in a corner, you could just keep all 5 enemies knocked down permanently. It would need a mechanics solution, e.g. only one knockdown at a time – or an AI solution, e.g. soft constraint on distance between each other.

Apologies for length – seems way too easy to make a wall of text with short column width.

Indeed – light clips as well but because the skirt is short and the vertex weighting around the tail is so tight, it doesn’t look too bad.

Yeah, it’s an underground passage through a house in the west end. People don’t always give serious replies because that question is asked a lot and they’re a little tired of answering.

Most raid boss mechanics are gimmicky by nature – they’re using effects that players wouldn’t normally have to react to purely as another hoop to jump through. You already see loads of that stuff in dungeons, and even the personal story for season 2 is introducing it now. I don’t see it as a failing, so long as it makes sense in its context.

And those suggested mechanics are great – having to make a decision on which skill to interrupt appeals to me particularly. But they work with any number of players, whether dungeon or raid scale.

Honestly though, whether a design needs a certain number is irrelevant. It’s the “challenging every player in the raid individually” bit I’m most interested in. That can be done by requiring a diversity of builds, but can also be done with requiring organised actions and movement. Knowing which 4 players hit an interrupt skill is a great start.

The one suggestion I’d make is that it’s not a whole lot smarter than stack-and-spank if only one or two players need to move at a time. So long as each player has to think, it’s going in the right direction. (And ideally, not all think the same thing.)

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Not counting Tormented, mind you. I’ve never gotten myself any of the following:

Froggy Scepter
Icy Dragon Sword
Vampiric Dragon Sword
Celestial Weapons
Amythest Aegis
Draconic Aegis
Mursaat Hornbow (the drop)

I also never got a Fiery Gladius OR Fiery Dragon Sword of good quality so Koss could swing one around.

Actually bought a Draconic Aegis too, now I think of it. That was only around 30k – thankfully not a particularly rare skin, though none ever dropped for me.

Game itself is alright. Along the lines of Skyrim with people in it, but the gameplay is more structured – for better and for worse – and the areas not as expansive, less dungeons and caves to find. Just steer clear of the forums, the people there can whine for centuries.

Perhaps I should have taken my own advice!

NoTrigger.8396:

you dont have to pay attention to where you go, where you stand, where you meet to interrupt. idk i could give you 20000 reasons why dungeon encounters will never reach the complexity and difficulty of raid encounters. but thats a different topic.

The thing is, you could pay attention to all that stuff simultaneously – even with 5 people. If we’re looking for fights where 5 people couldn’t do the same thing with adjustments to HP and DPS alone, it’s actually going to need more things to watch out for.

This doesn’t have to mean splitting the whole party into different areas, just putting more tasks in.

Perhaps you can do it by requiring very specific skills – for example, short-cooldown reflects, area stealth, boon and condition strips, knockbacks and interrupts, and periodic warbanners for good measure all in the same fight. More than 5 classes can do, but manageable with a well-planned team of 15. It doesn’t scale much past that though, as once you reach 40 you can have a bit of everything and still have 20 players who can read the news while they staff 1 through the encounter.

Or there could just be a bunch of things that require simultaneous action all over the boss room. Suppose there were platforms like Marionette, on short timers – but you can run between them, they’re just too far apart for the whole group to do them one-by-one. But maybe you don’t need to split into five – maybe it’s more effective to place a thief/mesmer pair at each one to soften them up while a high DPS group portals between them and finishes each one off.

However it happens, there are ways to give people more complex tasks than just watching the flashbang show we see in world-boss trains. Avoiding that, though, means adjusting the situation where all of your players are all attacking the same target 80% of the time.

Clockheart has a lot in common with that boss already – you could just about copy-paste it into GW2. Auto-attacks you can block, assuming they’re slow enough. The egg mechanic could scale up by one player at a time rather than doubling – assume only one player can destroy all the eggs.

The thing with attempting something like that with five players is, each one of them needs to know exactly where they fit into the picture. It’s not just two tanks with the important jobs while the other 13 just play by the script.

Most of the combat involving larger numbers of people simply comes down to stacking and DPS tests, which require less skill, not more. Hence my question – is there any way that bringing larger numbers into one fight can still require skilled play from every member, and do so in a way that you can’t replicate with a smaller group?

One notable exception is GvG combat, where the mechanics are completely different from 5v5 fights and you die very fast if you don’t know what you’re doing. Perhaps that might be a good source of inspiration – but it would require someone with more experience than me to explain the mechanics of it.

Why spend extra development time on saving progress etc. when you could just have shorter raids?

Or perhaps a raid could be split into four parts, each taking about an hour to complete?

runeblade.7514:

I see some discussion about splitting up raid groups. Like 3 groups of 5 of a 15 man group. … This is no different than a harder to group dungeon team. I rather have ANet balance around 15 man group.

That’s precisely what it is, a harder multi-team dungeon. What gameplay advantage is there to 15 people together?

If you’re being reported a lot, yeah… it’s quite possible you’re not being honest about what you’re doing.

I ended up buying a Frog Scepter because after about 30-40 runs of Bogroot Growths with no drops I decided grinding was for suckers. So I paid 600 platinum for one instead.

(And that wasn’t really an extraordinary amount at the time. There were items that cost at least 100 times as much.)

Hopeless.5403:

First of all, count me out on raiding with anything more than 10 or more players due to the blinding light(s) not being able to see a boss. Might as well make IO (hero from Dota2) as every boss since that is practically all players can see.

Another issue I would have is the lack of boss abilities or cast bar. Being able to react to certain things during a fight makes it interesting. Currently we’ve had red outlined areas to avoid which is cool up to a certain point.

On the first issue, GW2 seems to work best with smaller groups. Functionally there’s no reason why all 15 people have to be in the same place – you can have 3 parties each having to do their own activity to progress. Even in boss battles, you can have separate groups involved in attacking the boss, defending siege weapons and so on.

Personally I like the idea of groups of adds that are impossible to defeat with 15 people, but if you keep them split up and distracted from the main fight, you never need to engage them fully. So long as the raid narrative makes it clear that you have to do this, it would make good thieves, mesmers or other highly mobile classes vital.

I do miss the full skill bars from GW1 NPCs but to be fair the GW2 versions have been getting better lately. If NPCs are designed as parties for build synergy, it will make things more challenging. Also creates a role for boon strip / interrupt / other CC classes.

Lighting bunnies on fire makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. And outside.

Palador.2170:

Is there a reason we can’t have a raid tuned for level 40 or 60?

Players pass levels 40 and 60. In the end you find yourself working with level 80s downscaled to 40 or 60 more often than not.

Assuming the downscaling was perfect (it isn’t, but that can be adjusted) you still end up with two problems: level 80s are more likely to be running good gear, and even between level 40s you have a huge disparity between players. Some know the game and are levelling an alt. Some are doing it for the first time and will find content geared towards experienced players impossible.

Even amongst level 80s, there’s a disparity between player skill levels, but at least they all have access to the same skills, traits and gear.

Guild Campaigns: Overview
This introduces the concept of a ‘guild campaign’, which would be a new type of guild mission launchable through the guild interface.
It is similar to a guild challenge in that it is an organised combat-focussed task, but differs in that it requires map-wide presence, takes place over a longer period, and encourages and rewards community assistance.
It would be a variation on a raid system in that it takes place in the open world and encourages participation from anyone, where raids would be instanced and require more careful planning and specific builds. Furthermore, guild sponsorship is a cornerstone to the concept.

Purpose
To provide challenge to guilds through inclusive co-ordination of people, both theirs and unaffiliated; to provide a means for guilds to “give back” to the community in a similar spirit to guild sponsorship of Canthan New Year festivals in GW1.

Functionality
Guild campaigns would be launchable once per week per guild. Launching them initiates a meta-event chain on a map (where applicable). This may require the ability to start new maps in order to get guild members in first. The sponsoring guild is shown in the meta-event dialog on-screen.
Campaign events require co-ordinated participation across different areas of the map. Completion time should ideally be 30 minutes to an hour so that casual players can more easily fit this into their schedules.
Completing the campaign provides a weekly reward to all participants, including those not in the guild.

Examples
Straits of Devastation – invasion. A guild campaign would require all three invasion paths and the Temple of Balthazar event to succeed. Adding auxiliary events, requiring scouts/skirmishers to divert Orrian reinforcements from the main assault, may provide additional interest.

Southsun Cove – Karka queen. While it can already be initiated by a guild, this may become a suitable candidate if several queens appeared in different places, each requiring simultaneous participation.

Marionette. This wouldn’t even require any changes; it’s perfect as-is.

Dry Top – Tier 6. Probably the best example going forward, this requires several teams of different sizes to be responsible for different areas. While it must be started on the hour unlike the others, the reduced vendor prices and a bonus reward at tier 6 provide an excellent opportunity to give something to the community and keep t6 attainable long after Dry Top’s launch.

Risks
The present eligible meta-events are so diverse that balancing the difficulty in a Guild Campaign might be complicated – T6 Dry Top simply requires people in the right place at the right time, where Straits of Devastation requires knowing how to keep Veteran Risen Subjugators etc. from wiping the escorted NPCs. As the concept is intended to be accessible to new players and veterans alike, it would require adjustments to events that leave little margin for error.

This system would be in addition to raids, meaning extra development time. However, this is mitigated in that it can work with modifications to existing or previously existing content.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On scaling: it is true that we have a certain amount of “magic” scaling in the game, commonly seen in dynamic events. The intent of that system is to keep difficulty consistent across a variety of player counts. The sticking point for myself on raids and scaling is that while we can scale enemies, it is far more difficult to meaningfully scale objectives.

To elaborate, in a 10-player raid, each player is responsible for approximately 1/10 of challenge. As you add players, that challenge share diminishes, so in a 20-player raid, the individual role is about half as important as it would have been with 10 players (challenges of coordination aside).

Of course, group content is rarely so singular and for a good reason. If we have 3 objectives, we divide the focus of the group and your ownership of a 20-player challenge goes from 1/20 to 1/6ish.

Is it possible, then, to just scale objectives along with the player counts? Perhaps. But it seems that would equate to just making many tiers of the content which, to me, sounds like a good way to diminish the total amount of content we could build. What do you guys think?

I prefer the kind of tack you’re taking now, where the best way to proceed is to split into smaller groups – but it’s preferable to restrict min/max player counts than diminish the amount of content by making several versions of it. If you can find a way to scale the number of objectives without hitting development time too hard, then go for it.

If all the objectives are already there, but the number activated depends on population, it might work. Consider the Marionette battle – the number of active platforms might scale from 1 to the full 5 depending on the population at each gate.

I remain unconvinced that instancing all raid content is a good idea. There are plenty of open-world raid-like scenarios – Marionette and Dry Top for example – where it’s possible for ad-hoc additional players to contribute meaningfully without being amazing players.

So long as the organised group has the ability to start a map instance and get all their people in first it means that a) they don’t have to have a full map queue, and b) random players get to experience and complete this content without it being gated by membership to specific player communities.

Now that’s what you’d expect, so it wouldn’t be weird.

When everyone else was seeing a number of new guilds and way more people than usual even for a tournament, when CD and DB together could barely match their numbers despite both having tournament influxes as well, and when they shoot straight to the top of T2 despite claiming the PvE players would evaporate after the season, it’s pretty obvious that Yak’s Bandwagon is no illusion. The only people claiming otherwise are (some of the) YB players.

Omega Mccoy.4237:

Not sure where you get the mentality YB is a bandwagon when we have less than 15 people that transfered to the server before and during the season.

Weird how people on other servers know more about your server than you do.

Fought against them often enough – the amount of bad behaviour from that server is astonishing at this point in the game’s life cycle. Don’t get me wrong, you’re in for an easy ride on YB but at the cost of being despised by everyone else.

Well, if EotM revolved around fighting players it’d make a more compelling study. Right now it revolves around the middle; let never the three servers meet.

I struggle to come up with any ideas for how to improve the karma train tendencies of WvW without making it boring for someone. One of the greatest battles I’ve ever seen was a three-way fight over a SW borderland tower involving 6-7 trebuchets, several ballistas and arrow carts, and 8 hours of trying to wrest control from JQ.

Problem was, that was in the beta. Because matches were so short and we were waiting at least a week between them, fighting like that made sense. People weren’t bored of siege warfare yet. These days if a force gets repelled on the first attempt they give up and attack something else more often than not, and heaven forbid they need to think about building countersiege ballistas, ACs or trebuchets.

It would be nice, I suppose, if commanders had to think about strategically dismantling a defense again, by making it more rewarding to defend and perhaps by allowing a small number of players to still mount an effective defense. But I’m not sure I’d want to do it in the current WvW maps – honestly, they don’t have the soul to make it compelling. The territory you can conquer just feels like a large arena.

Now, if it were a battle over Ebonhawke I could get into it. If holding stuff overnight was possible, and felt worthwhile to the players involved… and if it wasn’t so boring between battles.

It’s the last one where I’m stuck. I play with a group who’s quite capable of making a fort a nightmare to capture, but I can’t for the life of me think of any way to make us want to stay on the map when there’s just nothing going on, no matter how good the rewards are. I’m leaning towards suggesting automated scouts / sentries / radar as a solution instead.

T1 isn’t actually a bad place for new players; that’s where most of them go for WvW. Any of them have enough population that someone is doing something you’re interested in.

Would stay well clear of YB though, they’re easily the most repulsive and obnoxious server of the lot at the moment. Bandwagoning does that to a place.

That’s a hash code of some sort. The number means nothing.

The Renegades have only been around for four years.

Another? They’re still in one – and they’re losing. Badly.

And yes, it is ridiculous to RP Flame Legion. There’s only a tiny fraction of the available world where they wouldn’t be shot on sight.

Imbune.5497:

That dress is misogynistic and sexist. It objectifies women as it shows cleavage and is completely impractical in a combat scenario. If women wear dresses men should wear dresses as well.
#equality
/sarcasm

It does look cool though. If I were inclined to return that would surely be a must-own item.

I was wondering how hilarious female charr would look in it. Then, menswear.

Ah well. I still have the Wintersday outfit.

One plus is that it doesn’t clip with the tail for once. But it’s not really charr themed, nor is it absurd enough to be worth picking up for the comedy value. Not bad, but not my thing.

[Edit: What would be nice is multiple versions, like the Chef’s outfit, that suit different races. A high-ranking charr is not going to wear that.]

It’s less offensive than people who pretend to be members of real-life racist/misogynist groups, but it’s equally as ridiculous.

Ok… aside from that I’d like to be able to buy gems in increments of 50 or 100, there’s one huge problem with this system.

I don’t want to spend X gems to get 100 gold. I’d rather spend 100 gems to get X gold. Suppose I bought 800 gems to convert to gold – what am I going to do with the 67 gems left over? You can’t buy anything on the TP with an odd gem count.

Seems that more of the rewards should come from completing the event, rather than drops during it. Presently the copper/karma/XP rewards are so small they’re not even a factor.

draxynnic.3719:

(there are apparently other legions beyond the Big Four, they’re just not as significant)

Is there a credible source on this?

The one thing I can agree with is that Barrage is a silly skill at the moment. Even when a glass cannon build uses it, it’s little more than a tickle with a bit of crippling, and is negated really easily. What I think could help is downscaling the AoE a bit in exchange for higher damage per hit so that it’s at least tactically useful against stationary targets. Might be interesting in combination with a preparation that applies burning as well, but… I’m getting ahead of myself there.

Rapidfire is fine as-is and means that playing against LB rangers means you have to watch what they’re doing. It’s countered by one dodge-roll, interrupt, short-duration invuln or even standing behind minions/pets. It’s dominated by reflects.
The stealth, especially on trapper builds, can be a bit annoying but it’s not that bad compared to thieves and PU mesmers. Glass cannon LB rangers are pretty easy targets still. And that’s why I don’t play one.

Fernling.1729:

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

I think he meant a meaningful difference. I’m sure across the board there are noticeable differences, but as a single player I don’t notice anything.
It sucks when you use magic find booster, birthday booster and food etc. to boost your magic find and not run into a single exotic.
I’ve ran down entire 24 hour birthday boosters without a single exotic drop.

That’d be one of those outliers. I switched characters halfway through playing last night to one running a WvW dolyak boost plus birthday booster (something like +150% MF on top of my existing ~130%) and suddenly had a lot more rares drop. Just one exotic though.

With any luck that wasn’t an outlier. It’s all a matter of perception but that did seem like roughly double the MF.

Astral Projections.7320:

Ben K.6238:

Astral Projections.7320:

Karizee.8076:

Any word on the wings for this set, Gaile?

Personally I’m hoping for them to be a reward for the Halloween meta.

Actually, adding them as a separate backpiece is not a bad idea.

…I don’t think that would give tails back though.

No, it won’t. My guess is the costume “removes” the legs and hips of the character model and puts on the legs and hips of the costume model. This would explain why the Charr’s tail is removed. That there is only one model and it of course is tailless.

Except that the legs have different proportions on charr and still animate like charr legs. Considering how the other costumes turned out, this one was a specific design decision.

Only precursor I ever had came from the TP. Rodgort’s Flame only cost about 60G.

Also possible that the destruction of the Flame Legion would remove the need for that technicality. If it’s needed at all; Flame excepted, the charr don’t think much of following obsolete traditional rules.

Any claim on the title of Khan-Ur will require a show of leadership to earn the respect of the three relevant legions. Smodur has a shot if he plays his cards right. He’s not in a position to vie for it now but he knows what he has to do to get there.

Also that’s a tribune of the Ash Legion, not the Imperator herself – fairly sure Swordshadow remains in Ash lands. Desertgrave and Brimstone are the highest ranking representatives of the other legion in the Black Citadel.

To be honest I’d craft an exotic set rather than overwrite an ascended set with travellers’ runes. If there’s enough spare materials to go around some of the pieces (chest and leggings first) will be ascended. But I won’t delete expensive stuff.

It would be nice if every piece of armour or weapon had swappable runes after you apply more than one, but that’s likely going to do nasty things to the database. Perhaps the most reasonable compromise there would be providing a set of 3 rune slots to choose between, with the ability to purchase a couple more on the gem store.

Astral Projections.7320:

Karizee.8076:

Any word on the wings for this set, Gaile?

Personally I’m hoping for them to be a reward for the Halloween meta.

Actually, adding them as a separate backpiece is not a bad idea.

…I don’t think that would give tails back though.

GW1 had no more levels or gear for expansions. (Just more classes and skills making the task of balancing ever more untenable.)

This is not an easy one to come up with a top 3 for. Last one was more of a feature request – here a lot of the features are logically derived from higher-level concepts that may be implemented, e.g. progression mechanics will usually entail providing merchants.

So to make it easier, I’ll just give a top 3 of what I’d like guild halls to do:

1. Provide access, whether on the same map or somewhere else, to GvG play.
2. Provide a staging post for guilds to gather and set up (gear, builds or whatever) for any kind of content.
3. Provide a progression system for guilds to enjoy upgrading their hall, but with a low or no entry barrier.

The PvP thing is fine except that it’s all about cap points. Which is the same thing that’s wrong with WvW, incidentally.

If it were just a battle to the death I’d play it.

I’m not too bothered by it. I’ve seen it used, but only by players with rocks in their heads.

Stylo.6259:

Rangers are exactly where they need to be. If you’re getting exploded by a ranger that ranger has no defense and can get downed in 3 hits.

This.

I’m loving these rapidfire rangers because one dodge negates the entire burst and they don’t handle my answer so well.

YB was actually trying to force the other server into 3rd – not because of anything about NSP in particular but because DK doesn’t particularly like the other T3 servers. It didn’t work on DB in week 3, so this matchup happened. No coincidence that the one compelling matchup in silver league this season – and where for the first time in history things like bloodlust control and sniping yaks actually mattered – was one that YB wasn’t in.

For the first time I can remember, WvW worked as it was supposed to (or at least my best guess as to how it’s ‘supposed’ to work). Three relatively even servers, with different timezone advantages, who’d adjust their focus to keep any one from getting too far ahead. NSP timed their defensive rally perfectly and it paid off, leaving SBI and DR to fight over second place in the last 12 hours, and that only passed beyond doubt with 30 minutes to go.

It needed three even servers with no (or relatively little) bad blood, no remaining bandwagons and no sustained 2v1s. Getting those conditions right requires an enormous amount of luck in the present system.

(And a defensive effort was what kept NSP in front, rather than sheer numbers or karma training. Who’s ever heard of that in WvW?)

SBI doesn’t show on Fridays so it’s a contest between the other two for the win.

Jerus.4350:

Not if you learn to fight, you can do a lot more with smaller numbers than people might think.

All you have to do is take out at least 1 for every person you have. If it’s 20 vs 60, if you can outplay them and take out 25, you’ve just gained points.

And I see this happen regularly, a team will bait the larger force stretching them out letting them loosen up, hit those that overpushed taking out 10, suddenly it’s 20 vs 50, rinse repeat and while you may lose the battle in the end you’ll have done so after taking out a mighty chunk of them.

You see that now because it makes minimal difference to the score, so commanders don’t care. As soon as that changed there’d be an immediate difference. Zergs of 60 would stop getting strung out. Groups of 20 harrassing them would cease to be an annoyance to the karma train and instead become a target. Tightening up and spiking damage would become the norm, and that group of 20 will be lucky to down 5 before they’re all dead.

Nova Stiker.8396:

I’m right now doing a research paper on game improvement practices, needless to say, it’s been unbelievably challenging, up to 20 pages and most of it is unorganized gibber-gabber.
I need a focus so I wonder if the community can aid me on this one.

---

You are a designer for ArenaNet working together with the balance and design team.

- You are given the task to change every trait in the game that is underwhelming in performance (weak in damage or defense) and traits that are boring and don’t do much (Dealing X more damage with non-max endurance etc.)

• Revised traits MUST have some fun-factor.
• Revised traits MUST have ease of use.
• Revised traits MUST have a variety of uses.
• Revised traits MUST be useful in some form.

In other words, it’s your job to give high quality to the entire trait system.

---

I’ve already made a thread regarding improving something useless, but I quickly came to terms it’s significantly deeper than that.

---

As a designer for Guild Wars 2 with a job of improving most of the traits in Guild Wars 2, what do you do?
What do you determine is fun? What factors determines the quality? Is quality measured by personal taste? Experiences with others? Should it be up to a single person? Should there be numerous tests? Compare it to other games?

At the core of game designing and improving the base of your game, what is the ultimate factor of quality?

I don’t like your brief. Now that’s out of the way, I’ll explain.

Fun traits will differ between people. As you’ve just seen, some people want to stack % to get some effect as high as possible; usually raw DPS, but can be permanent vigour, might, burning or anything really.

Other people look for bonus effects that give them some functionality they wouldn’t already have. That’s a very different sort of trait but both have a place in some builds.

There are some traits in any class, falling under both categories, that aren’t used. They’re out-competed by other traits that are just more useful, or they achieve an effect that players aren’t looking for.

You’ve got 65 traits per class. That’s variety already; you don’t need each trait to have a large variety of uses. What you need to do is figure out what players would like to do with their characters and open some options up (there’s a progression CDI with a lot of discussion on this – huge amounts of reading but trust me, it beats trying to wrap your head around academic papers).

Identify some archetypes, essentially, and think of how you could add traits that make those archetypes more effective. Figure out which lines to put them in – often you can’t get everything into 3 traits, but that’s why you can split them up along different lines. Imagine the offensive, support, and control aspects of the archetype.

Suddenly, it becomes pretty clear that this is what Arenanet has been trying to do all along. hehe

Of course every trait has to be balanced against the others, and that’s where things get rough – some archetypes end up watered down so much you can’t really play them anymore, and you’ll never find all the overpowered combinations until they’re released for players to use them. But fortunately we’ve had two years of observation to figure out which ones need some adjustments and which other archetypes players would like to be added.

So my problem with your brief is that it expects all traits to do all things. As far as I see it, the trait system is not designed for that and nor should it be. It’s meant to give flavour that makes a class more interesting to its player, and some players will get that out of flat 15% bonuses. Others love something that’s tricky to use but works wonders when you nail it.

So what I’d do in that role, at this stage in the game’s lifecycle, would be look for player feedback on what they want to achieve with the trait system, and covertly sample some players’ opinions on what other fun stuff they’d like to do with their classes (in this case, plagiarism is totally allowed ). Specifically, I’d bribe Izzy with cookies for a Kamohoali’i Kotaki start with making sure players always have a functional, if not always compelling, choice in the Adept trait lines – sometimes you just can’t find one that adds much to your build – and think about niche roles for the Grandmaster ones, e.g. what would players expect a beastmaster ranger’s special ability to be?

I’m sorry if this comes off a little rambly but with any luck it gives you one or two ideas.