Guild Wars 2

That is weird. Are you sure you can’t get 6 (?) damage ticks out of it?

Probably a tooltip mistake.

The trait works with Lava Font, as there are entire Staff builds out there dedicated to this combo.

The current system has several flaws (too many passive effects, hard to expand traits without ruining balance by adding way too many combinations or even more unneeded passive effects, vertical progression that ends way too early in the game, unexciting premise) that can probably be fixed with a subclass system.

• If anet wants to expand the professions and their skill sets without coming at the risk of existing way too many skills available to be comboed with each other like in GW1? Just add new subclasses.
• If anet wants more vertical progression and gated content through means other than ascended gear? Expand the subclasses.
• If Anet wants a greater feeling of progression while new players are still leveling? Add subclass tiers on top of what already exists, or whatever else.
• If Anet wants to excite the playerbase with those changes? “omg look they’re adding a guardian paladin and a ranger druid! I so want to be a paladin and a druid.”

Yes, the later one can be done with traits, but traits are – again – too passive, the weapon skills would remain unchanged (sure, a ranger druid could simply get a new weapon type!), and are overall a bit too abstract. No player in this game looks at the trait system and says: “Wow, I can be a paladin!” No, they look at the trait system and say, “let me stack as many +damage traits as I can for pve” or “moar projectile reflection! moar blocking!”

So even though the traits can be customised to fill in a certain flavor, they are too abstract at that, and chances are, those kind of builds would end up becoming unoptimized and gimmicky. Traiting is not about flavor – it’s about efficiency. This is true to all skill systems when it comes to giving player’s control, so it’s up to the developers to give to those systems a “flavorful restriction”, so that flavor doesn’t comes at the cost of efficiency.

Subclasses are perfect for that. Developers set up the flavor through rules and restrictions, and the playerbase worries about their efficiency within the bounds of said rules and restrictions.

Subclasses could also be used as an interesting form of vertical progression. Look at Ragnarok Online.

This could allow Anet to add more “levels” to the game without increasing the current level cap. How? Have it so that, at level 80, and after doing several high-end tasks, you are given the option to upgrade your class and re-start at level 1. Leveling isn’t hard in this game, anyways, and there are players who enjoy that. Of course, it should come with some account-bound benefits, so that players are not forced to repeat it for every alt.

Class tiers would be an interesting system to gate gear tiers, trait tiers, and even some skills or – gasp – skill slots or more complex core profession mechanics that increase the much-needed skill ceiling of most professions.

As an horizontal progression system, subclasses could bring an interesting new build-crafting system. To be honest, I don’t enjoy much the skill and the trait systems. The first is very restrictive. The second is very passive. I would personaly enjoy a fusion of both systems into something else. An universal system for both skills and traits, perhaps tied to each subclass, that would have less “passive spam” and more skill freedom. Perhaps something like FFVII’s materia, where the “passive traits”, the “active skills” and the “runes/ sigils” fought for the same number of slots and, even more so than that, there existed “combo effects” that gave new functionalities to already existing skills.

We already know the skill system in this game must be restricting to a certain extent for the sake of balance. In my opinion, one of mistakes done by Anet was to sacrifice a “fun” character progression system (like GW1 had) for the sake of a balance that has never been acchieved. We’re left with a game that doesn’t have a customisation system as fun as what the top industry can offer (be it compared to the old GW1, or to single player RPGs with excellent cusomisation systems like FFT, FFVII, among others), while seriously struggling for balance anyways. We as players aren’t happy, and I’m not sure if Anet is happy with this either.

I believe it was Colin that has said that, if GW2 had to become GW3 someday, it would. Not sure if I have misread, but I enjoy that quote, despite being too ambitious. Even WoW revamped its talent trees several times, hasn’kitten The beauty of a MMO, is that it is ever-changing – it doesn’t needs to be stuck to the systems at launch.

I would certainly want something funnier – much funnier – than simply unlocking three utilities and traiting 14 passive effects. Don’t we all? this the price we had to “pay” for a balance that has never existed, so yes, i would certainly want something “more” than what we have.

In this way, a subclass system could be an opportunity to revamp the system to something more lasting and easier to expand, both horizontal and vertical, while still offering enough restriction to not come at the cost of balance.

In the end, it’s not that the subclasses can add anything new that the trait system doesn’t yet, because they probably wouldn’t. What makes subclasses so appealing to me, however, is that they can be a great opportunity, a great starting point, for a future revamp of the current skill system, because its an exciting concept that has plenty of potential.

• What is the plan to give higher base survival to the elementalist class?

The profession was initially designed to survive through active defenses, and that’s how Anet has always justified its low health base value. However, many of their active defenses rely on defensive stats (auras require them to get hit, healing skills and boons favor defensive stats too), while Mesmers were given most of the stat-independent defenses (as much or even more CC, blurs, more access to blocks, clones) and a higher base health value. To us elementalists, it feels like Mesmers have gotten, in addition to their better health and and in addittion to their clone mechanic, the kind of defenses that we deserved to receive. Interestingly enough, mesmers have massive base survival in berserker/ rampager gear, and elementalists can’t exist without defensive traits and some defensive stats. It feels like one profession is over-compensating for another.

But it’s too late to change that now. Regardless, something must be done to the elementalist, and it seems that no matter what the solution is, Anet must make a compromise. They didn’t want us to have thief’s mobility, they don’t want us to have higher health value, and they probably don’t want to overload us with mesmer-like defenses, or necromancer-like condition defenses. And realistically, I’m not expecting Anet to create an entire new mechanic, like stealth or clones, just for us.

And THAT’s what makes this an interesting question.

• What is Anet willing to do?

Another issue with elementalists are the poor sustain damage from auto-attacks. Some skills like flamestrike contribute almost nothing for their weapon skillset. Now, I also think (as many of other players) that auto-attacks across the game should be nerfed. I would like to know what Anet thinks about this issue too, both from an elementalist view, and a more global one.

Which direction will Anet take with the Elementalist going forward?

Brainstorming some sub-class ideas for the guardian, just for the fun of it:

Guardian

• Knight/ Paladin – Staying close to allies and covering them. Hammer, Mace, Shield. Defensive symbol support. Stronger hammer and shield spirit weapons.
• General – Focused on team mobility and team playing. Staff and something else. Stronger shouts. Stronger virtue’s actives. Stronger shield and bow spirit weapons.
• Smiter/ Punisher/ Judgemaster – Punishing gameplay with retaliation and strong damage support. Greatsword, Scepter + Torch, retaliation buffs, burning.
• Spiritmancer – Uses all spirit weapons. Spirit weapons are tied to virtues. Passive effects that only end when the active effect is triggered.

Ya, I know, most of them can already be acchieved with the correct trait combos…

Which raises a few questions: what can subclasses offer that traits already don’t? Or would they replace them? If so, would people accept possibly more “build restriction” for the sake of flavored subclasses?

EDIT: What if subclasses had their own individual trait trees, even if at a smaller scale?

It’s funny, I don’t even play ranger, but I think the druid flavor would be perfect for staff rangers.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

This is my last day at work before the holiday season and I am going to be very busy!

Once I am on vacation I will have more time to respond and engage.

I am therefore going to postpone the focused discussion on Horizontal Progression until tomorrow. I will catch up post page 36 today (or at least try).

Meanwhile I have a question. This thread is BIG. Would the folks who have already commented on Horizontal want a new thread which is just based on Horizontal or should we just carry on with this thread?

Regarding my reminders from you about comments on some kind of reward for the Fractal reset, I am still thinking about feelings around it.

Chris

New thread please.

About a reward for the fractal reset, I think whoever got high-leveled in the pre-patch fractals and had to see their levels reset deserve some sign of respect. Be it a title, or some gold compensation, I think rewarding those people would be respectful and look good on Anet’s side.

Relair.1843:

Yeah I really don’t see what your complaint is, there is a plethora of great looking light armor. Tribal looking, evil looking, arch-mage looking, priest looking, and any other archetype of wizard you could possibly want. I can’t really think of a look they don’t have covered with a bit of creative swapping.

Most of it is unimpressive, though. Especially compared to some gorgeous female light armor choices.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi All,

Here is the next evolution of the original Vertical Progression proposal based on a summary of our discussions:

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.

A review of current RNG metrics.

The ability to change gear stats (Note there is still a lot of discussion about whether people want this or not)

The ability to build up to Ascended Gear through drops rather than just relying on RNG.

Ascended Gear mats dropping more equally across the game, for example WvW.

No more new Gear tiers that make the existing tiers obsolete.

Additional ways to earn Ascended Gear at accelerated for Alts.

Note this is the formulation of a proposal for discussion. Once the proposal is finalized it will be discussed internally. However there will be no promise of actions or schedule.

Chris

Bump. We are close to being able to move onto the ‘focused’ Horizontal Progression part of this conversation.

Does anyone have anymore comments on the proposal above based on our discussions?

Chris

The ability to change gear stats and a (much) easier way to gear our alts with ascended are the two most important things personally.

You have shown some doubts about the first of the two (if I didn’t interpret you wrongly), but ascended not being an obstacle to build diversity should be a pretty high priority, both because it goes well with how the game is designed, and because it promotes horizontal progression.

Now, the best way to execute that is up to discussion. Being able to change stats is one possible solution. Being able to create a duplicate with different stats is another solution (and the one I’ve been suggesting strongly, because it also helps alt-gearing, killing two birds with one stone).

I just want to note that there’s a risk for a stat-changing mechanic to go horribly wrong. If it works like it currently does for legendary gear, fine. If it requires being at a crafting station every time you need to change stats, it’s not fine. Remember, people want this feature to change builds more often and more easily. Forcing them to go to a crafting station and spending materials every single hour to experiment or play with new builds won’t work.

If a money/ material sink is absolutely necessary here, then I’ll once again redirecttwards my idea to duplicates with different stats. They could be crafted with a small investment, but after doing so, they would be placed at a player’s inventory, and the player could swap them anytime they would wish for.

This suggestion would also create an interesting mechnical distinction between ascended and legendary gear. Ascended gear would promote build diversity with duplicates of the same item type with different stats, demanding more inventory space. Legendary would promote build diversity with changeable stats in the same copy of the item, saving up inventory space, because you wouldn’t need different copies for different stats. Of course, if you just inject the legendary’s stat-swapping mechanic as it is into ascended, I won’t mind either! :P Even better for me, as a player.

Finally, thanks for your (on-going) effort Chris! Can’t wait until we start discussing horizontal progression. This thread’s getting pretty big, though. xP

What about this proposal for time-gated content for players that can’t log in every day:

• Being able to finish/ craft/ create any time-gated dailies or recipes you haven’t yet in the last 7 days.

For example, let’s imagine the following scenario:

• Day 1 – I finish my pvp daily.
• Day 2 – I play a dungeon.
• Day 3 – I finish my pvp dailies for day 2 and day 3.

This would make time-gating content keep its economic value, while taking pressure off players to log in every day to do every single time-gated content.

EDIT: And players would be able to finish all of their weekly time-gated tasks at the end of each weekend, which is when they have more time to play.

Isaiah Cartwright.8569:

We’ve talked about ascended runes/sigls as I think there are a number of balance issues with the current runes and sigils and it would allow us to make some tweaks to it that are harder to make without it but I don’t think we feel any need to do it yet and maybe not even at all. We have talked about how we are going to bring Jewel crafting and Cooking up to 500 but overall we really want to see how armor pans out and we would like to spend our time more on horizontal progression.

I feel that it’s redudant to have both a rune/ sigil slot and an infusion slot in the same pieces of gear. Why do we need both? Doesn’t it goes against minimalist design?

Other professions need to be harder to play.

The question is, will that ever happen, especially when taking into account core profession mechanics behind those classes?

I remember saying an year ago that the elementalist is one fo the most well-designed classes in this game, and that all others should have 4 sets of 5 skills too for fair balancing and a balanced effort/ reward ratio.

Ultimately, Anet’s choice to make each profession’s mechanics as distinct as possible from each other will always make some professions require a lot less effort than others, I think. When one profession has attunement swapping and the other has something so drastically different as the the initiative system, the effort/ reward ratio will never, ever, be the same for both players. The game design just doesn’t allows it.

The same can be said for base health values. When the HP gap is so high between two professions, no matter how you much you adjust damage rating in this game, either one will be too slow to kill, or the other will be too fast to kill. There’s no inbetween scenario here, unless the profession with the lower base health is entirely build around defensive skills (guardian), or has strong stat-neutral defensive mechanics to support it (stealth, clones, evades, etc).

An elementalist doesn’t have much of that, and many of their defenses rely on defensive stats (auras, healing spells), making them incredibly lop-sided towards defensive stats to be able to survive. Which would justify a higher base health.

It’s too late to remove WPs, because GW2 is designed with them in mind. However, I would love for future maps to have less WPs.

The Bazaar map did it perfectly. You get a single WP to access it. And then you must explore the map, make use of its mechanics, and work to progress towards a second WP. This second WP is great for convenience, but you still need to explore on foot (or on air :P) everything around it, or inbetween the first and the second waypoints, in a map that has plenty of hidden small locations to explore. It was a beauty to explore and to immerse into, and the second WP felt like a “reward” for progression instead of a tool for excessive convenience.

But then again, the bazaar map was extremely well-designed. Unfortunately for all of us, it was temporary.

I hope future maps have a better balance between convenient WPs and exploration/ world immersion. And to be honest, I wouldn’t mind to see already-existing maps slightly revamped to get more places to explore, more rewards, and less (and more carefully-placed) WPs.

@At cmc and other good eles,

I’m a decent (= not top tier) ele player, but I’ve been having a very hard time lately. I feel that sustain damage has been my biggest weakness so far. I have a hard time killing plenty of tanky builds nowadays, even with fresh air, and warrior’s cc or necromancer’s condi-spam always seems to get me no matter how hard I (successfully) attempt to survive against them initially. My skill cooldowns will eventually make me lose, while I keep getting bombarded by condis/ ccs. Any tips for players like me? And what has changed since last patch for you that is worth taking notes of?

zilcho.7624:

But I’m not sure how ele’s could be buffed without making them absolute gods in PvE. It’s like the entire class was designed without one thought given to PvP.

Elementalists are a decent choice in pve because of lightning Hammer’s auto-attack.

Lightning Hammer’s auto-attack.

Restricting base survivability (= dependence on strong, defensive water and arcana traits) and weak auto-attacks are the two biggest problems with this class, from my point-of-view, and I hope Anet makes steps toward improving that in next patch. Dependence on arcana’s lower attunement cooldown was a third problem, but I feel the 10th dec patch fixed it.

Balancing an elementalist is a paradox.

If you make it about as strong as any other profession, the higher skill ceiling will increase the margin for error (or make errors far more punishing), and players will reroll “easier classes”.

If you make it slightly stronger than any other profession, top ele players will dominate the meta, because the slight advantage will be worth a victory, and in turn will justify the effort in playing with one effectively.

Ultimately, an elementalist will never be balanced until the skill ceiling of most of the other classes is greatly increased and made to be on par.

The buffs to all other professions, that have been coming since June, should have been tied to or promote higher skill ceiling. But they mostly weren’t. They were tied to passive effects. Passive healing, passive AI, passive critical triggers.

Besides, core profession mechanics being so drastically different from each other is also part of the problem. By having four attunements, an elementalist must work harder and use twice the skills to be as effective. That means it’ll take longer for them as well. Meanwhile, at the opposite end, thief’s initiative promotes using the same skill several times in a row, demanding little to no skill dancing and for little to no time investment. Conclusion? A thief can kill an elementalist with half the skills and half the time than an elementalist can to prepare a defensive sequence to defend themselves.

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)’

Those are all good ideas to improve ascended gear’s accessibility and build diversity, but I feel that they aren’t enough to make alt-gearing more appealing.

They certainly help at that indirectly, but unless they would suddenly be too easy to get, which would make no sense considering that ascended gear was designed exactly to prevent that from ever happening, then alt-gearing will remain insane. Currently, the idea of crafting ascended gear for each weapon and armor type, and then for each stat type (which would certainly be fixed if their stats could be changed), and then multiply that for each alt is a monstrous task. It scales exponentionally. Making it slightly easier to get an extra piece of gear is fine for a single character, but will still scale too hard for alts.

That’s why I’ve been defending the idea of duplicates of the same item type (with a stat combination of choice) instead of the current legendary’s stat-changing functionality. There is an advantage and disadvantage to this approach:

• It would be much easier to gear alts. Each type unlocked could be duplicated to every character and every stat combo.
• It would occupy a lot of inventory space.

But that disadvantage… is actually a positive thing for the game! Why? Because it would preserve the current functionality of the legendary’s stat-changing mechanic. Want to save inventory space? Get a legendary, and you won’t need duplicates for different stat combos!

I’ve talked about this in a previous post in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression/page/19#post3376875

However, Mr. Chris, if you feel that this idea is problematic and not viable to acchieve, then please, say so. I’ve been pushing this idea very hard in this thread, so I would like to know if I should keep doing it or not.

Another thing I would like to add is to make soul-bound, (and previously-used) gear to be account-bound.

I brought ascended trinkets with +toughness, and then I found out that I should have gotten berserker trinkets instead. So I replaced them all. So, what should I do with my old trinkets? I would wish to be able to equip them on my alts. But they’re soul-bound now.

If that is out of possibility, then at least let us do something with unneeded/ previously-used ascended gear. So they’re not gathering dust in my bank.

Did anyone notice that, no matter how much the meta evolves or gets nerfed, the combat in GW2 always revolves around some sort of spam?

Condition spamming, AI spamming and CC spamming are more “recent”. They were, exceptions aside, underwhelming before, and the moment they became good, they became spammable.

But before them, we already had clone spamming, stealth spamming, boon spamming, aoe spamming, auto-attack spamming, etc.

No matter how hard Anet tries to balance their game, the meta always revolves around spamming what is strongest while (obviously) ignoring what is weaker.

This is no longer a problem with the balancing team, I think. It’s not a problem about “Anet not knowing how to balance this game”, because to be fair, they did make some mistakes, but they also made several steps into the right direction, yet we are nowhere at a better place.

The real problem with this game’s balance, is the lack of a solid, universal mechanism that can ease the game’s balancing and control the pace of combat. I’m talking about the classic and proven Energy System + Cooldown System combo, folks. If GW2 had an energy system like, say, GW1, “spamming” would be a high-risk/ high-reward strategy, and toning down the pace of skills usage would be a valid strategy instead of suicide.

Anet took way some of the funniest systems found in GW1 (like cross-classing) because they were a balancing nightmare, yet they’ve designed an alternative system that is insufficient at keeping the game balanced and at an ideal pace. In the end, no one gets satisfied by this.

Harbard.5738:

ASCENDED GEAR AND ALT FRIENDLYNESS

Why simply allowing ascended copying is not the way for alt-friendlyness

If you have a warrior and and elementalist, you’re pretty much at the same place you were before. Can’t copy much from a warrior to an ele.

Excellent point.

It might not mean much in the long-term, if Anet is willing to add new weapon choices to professions. But that depends on how long we’ll have to wait until that happens, and at how frequent will new weapon choices be added.

Malediktus.9250:

Stop suggesting stat switching for ascended. It should stay a legendary only perk. Most legendaries look terrible enough so there is no other reason to build them.

Diversity for build-crafting and alt-playing should be higher priority, as they are core playstyles to GW2’s design (and manifesto).

I did make some suggestions that would allow to preserve legendary equipment’s convenience bonus. They’re a bit scattered through the thread, so here’s them:

Ascended Gear

• Being able to create duplicates of the same item type with (the same or) different stats.

This would fix the restrictions for build crafting and alt playing that come out of ascended. In fact, it would go deep the opposite way, and make ascended gear highly desired for horizontal progression. It is therefore a superior suggestion than a system to simply change stats of an already existing set at will, because this one would do nothing to fully gear alts.

This solution doesn’t needs to come for free, either. Each duplicate (with stats of choice) could require a small/ modest material or money sink. Just not something too high.

Legendary Gear

• Being able to create duplicates of the same item type with (the same or) different stats.

(Just like for Ascended).

• Being able to change stats at will on the same piece.

(Just like what Legendary Equipment already allows you to do).

So, what would be the big difference here? Which bonus convenience would legendary gear have over ascended?

Inventory Space

While you would need several different copies of the same ascended gear set for each different stat combination, quickly filling in your inventory bag space, the same wouldn’t (and already doesn’t) happens with legendary.

This way, the current system to change legendary’s stats would be preserved and players would still desire it.

The more I think about Profession sub-types, the more interesting they seem to be to me.

PROFESSION SUBTYPES

• They could ease this game’s balancing, unlike a cross-class system.
  What is the biggest problem with a D/D elementalist? Survivability. Give them a Battlemage subtype that would use heavy armor and melee weapons, and D/D elementalists would be at a slightly better position without affecting non-melee weapons.
• They could offer more visual diversity to players.
  Using the above example, professions wouldn’t be stuck to a single armor type, and maybe, who knows, some subtypes could even have hybrid armor type combos, for never-before-seen equipment combinations. Like, for example, heavy body and leggings armor, but scholar head, shoulders, gloves and boots, for a Battlemage type of character.
• They would offer a lot of room to be expanded upon, horizontally and vertically.
  Anet could add more subtypes with time, and even a system to upgrade subtypes through tiers. This could then be used for gated content or gated equipment. A Guardian “Paladin” could have access to hammer and mace, and a player could later down the road, through gated content and story-driven content, upgrade that subtype to “Crusader”, unlocking new skills (yes!), unlocking access to new equipment tiers (“Paladin” could only equip “rare” equipment, “Crusader” exotic, the next tier could go for ascended), unlocking new story-driven quests with unique guardian-esque or paladin-esque skins as rewards, and even unlock or expand core mechanics per tier (“Crusader” could unlock a F4 virtue skill, for example).
• They could have a direct influence on core profession mechanics.
  For the players that love pets, they would choose the “Beast Tamer” subtype for Ranger, and later upgrade it to “Beastmaster”, for a deeper pet control system. The lower tiers would offer simpler systems for the sake of the learning curve. But what if a player wants to be a ranger, but not be stuck to pets? Then they could choose to go for the “Hunter” and then “Sniper” subtypes, with less pet control and new sniping/ hunting mechanics. Meanwhile, higher tiers of Warriors would add “stances” with drawbacks into their F skills, much like how GW1’s warriors played, which would add to the profession much needed complexity, without affecting lower subtype tiers, and thus without overwhelming newer players.
• It would give to Anet greater control to design an ideal learning curve
  Without sacrificing end-game complexity.

A system where we could improve the power of our racial skills would be really cool. Kinda like the GW1: EOTN titles. It would also make for a more interesting vertical system than extra stats on your gear.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Morrigan.2809:

I came about this post of a several month s ago and what I really liked about it was the fact that it expanded on the current professions but added horizontal progression-without the idea of balancing classes nightmare please consider something like this:

I will just quote:
Warriors > Berserker —- Legionnaire —- Duellist
Guardians > Crusader —- Augmentor —- Patron
Necromancer > Occultist —- Visionary —- Witcher
Rangers > Hunter —- Strider —- Mystic
Thiefs > Rogue —- Infiltrator —- Saboteur
Engineers > Alchemist —- Artificer —- Pioneer
Mesmers > Chronomancer —- Fencer —- Bard
Elementalists > Runologist —- Sorcerer —- Arcanist
—-NEW CLASS – 3rd Soldier—-
Lancers > Dragoon —- Templar —- Partizan >
That way players can:
progress with their characters
individualize themself better and make them more unique
unlock alot of new skills, traits, weapons ect. just through progressing with their class specific Talents that define, into which direction you specialize your character

Yep we chat about this a lot (-: It get’s me excited as a player to.

Chris

Advanced Profession subtypes would be incredibly exciting for me as a player, and it would also be easier to expand it than adding completely new professions. And if done right, it could also make the game easier to balance, because it would further categorize build options.

However, it needs to have something “special” behind each subtype to make them worth it. Or else, those subtypes would just be an excuse to restrict builds.

What could that “special” thing be?

• Break some equipment rules

For example, the elementalist could have a Battlemage subtype that would use heavy armor! Mesmer could have a Duelist subtype that would use adventurer armor! Guardian with a Cleric subtype for scholar armor.

• New mechanics

A Ranger “Beastmaster” could have a deeper pet system, while a Ranger “Hunter” would have a more shallow pet system but some new mechanics that would rely on long-range bursting. Finally, a Ranger “Druid” would have nature spells on their core mechanics, and be able to enchant themselves and their own pets.

A Mesmer “Bard” would have a different Shatter System, where shattering would give benefits to allies (untraited), and phantasms would affect allies instead of enemies. They could also get some songs out of their core mechanic. Meanwhile, a Mesmer “Illusionist” would have less shatters available, but get an F skill to swap with a random clone, and their illusions and shatters would mostly revolve around control.

Another problem against personal progression (lack of challenge, lack of viable builds and skills) is BALANCE.

And I’m not talking about the balance done by the balancing skill team, but the broken pve design that nullifies almost any depth this game’s combat has to offer.

Seriously, just make pve mobs auto-attack inbetween their “slow” skills. Their auto-attacks don’t even need to be very strong. This solution won’t fix all problems, but it’ll make a significant impact. Suddenly, zerker geared characters won’t be able to dodge everything, and they’ll need team backup to survive. That’s the entire point behind such a high-rish/ high-reward gear, right? Suddenly, defensive stats will become more desired. Suddenly, those crappy heals, confusion, retaliation, auras, and the like will actually become relevant enough to mitigate or deal damage. Condition damage builds will indirectly become stronger because characters will have to kite more often when in danger.

I don’t want to turn this into a balancing discussion, but I feel that pve design needs to take some clues from basic pvp/ combat tactics if we can ever hope to get more viable stat combinations. Auto-attacking mobs is the first step. An AI that can kite and (sometimes) dodge some big skills will be another step.

The day a zerker geared character will want to KD, immobilize or cripple someone to burst them down, or will be at a serious risk of danger when they can’t kill fast enough unless they have party support, is the day support and control builds will become more desired, and so will some extra splash on defensive stats.

A question to necromancers: is your heal skill good in dungeon group content? I mean, when bursting down bosses, it’s pretty much buffing your entire party’s damage, right? I don’t know, because I don’t play with a necro, but that seems like the absolute best situation to use it.

Now that we are at it, legendary equipment could also be unlockable account-bound items much like acchievement armor, so that the player could create as many copies of it as they would wish. Would that break the economy? I don’t think so, because by having no need to get a second skin of it, the player would instead dedicate their efforts to a new legendary skin. They will do that, because each build uses at the very minimum 2 weapon sets (two professions excluded), because many of the weapon sets consist of two legendaries (MH and OH weapon types), and because, later down the road, new legendary types will exist.

Likewise, I think ascended gear should also inherit some of those mechanics. Account-unlockable skins (via a skin locket system), changeable stats. Perhaps not to the extent of legendaries. Maybe changeable stats would require multiple copies of the same ascended gear, and a small material sink from crafting, unlike legendary gear, where you can change stats without creating a second copy. This would still maintain the extra convenience advantage that ANET wants legendary gear to have: in this specific case, it would free the inventory slots a bit, and it would not require a money sink nor being at a crafting station to do it.

Ultimately, I don’t even mind the fact that ascended gear offers better stats. I don’t even find the stat boost to be high enough, to feel satisfying. I’ve got my ascended staff, I don’t notice any difference in stats, and I don’t find the skin anything special. It didn’t excite me at all. However, I do mind how better stats clashes with horizontal progression, especially when it comes to build crafting, skin customization and alt playing.

With a skin locket system similar to what I mentioned, a player would be able to craft each piece of equipment with any skin unlocked of their choice with only a small extra money/ material sink. And in my opinion, the same should happen to create a new cope with different stats.

After working so hard for vertical progression, it shouldn’t come at the sacrifice of our personal, horizontal progression. So after each piece of ascended gear is crafted, the system should drastically ease the horizontal goals for that piece, skin-wise, stat-wise, and even alt-wise.

A skin locket, the ability to choose a skin when crafting, and an easy way to create multiple copies of the same item with different stats/ skins, would all greatly fix this issue, and suddenly, ascended gear would no longer be an obstacle to invest on ALTs, to invest on looks nor to invest on builds. THREE horizontal progression flaws fixed here.

The Hall of Monuments map already exists in GW2. Expand upon it, bring it back to its former glory. It would add more charm to the acchievement system.

It would be very sweet if it could create a statue of our former hero in GW1, but that would probably be very hard to acchieve due to different graphical engines.

Also, give us a customisable “home” in the home instance district, and allow us to warp to the Hall of Monuments from there and vice-versa, perhaps through a magical mirror or a magical closet. It would feel very magical, surely, but also very personal.

Expanding upon the skin locket idea, many of the low/ mid game skins could be sold (= unlock) through karma merchants. This would give a new point to those NPCs, make exploration more interesting to completionists and cosmetic-seekers, and make newer players more exciting to try those skins out, especially under my suggestion that crafting and skin collecting should be tied to each other. It would create that exciting feeling of finding how the new skin looks like, and knowing that, once unlocked, you would be ble to use/ craft it anytime you wanted to any item regardless of level or rarity. Completionists wouls feel more satisfied by filling in their skin locket, and cosmetic seekers would have more motivation to plan their long-term goals for their looks thanks to a more streamlined and addicting cosmetic system.

Savoy.6824:

@DiogoSilva
Awesome man, I said something very similar to this a few post back. Loved the FF7 materia system.

If we look at it, the materia system does something similar to GW2’s systems with far more simplicity. And, perhaps, with potencially more depth too.

• Slotting materia on equipment? Runes, Sigils and Infusions.
• Red, green and yellow materia? Utility skills.
• Purple and Blue materia? Traits.

One system instead of three.

Not only is it simpler and easier to understand, but by being so, it prevents a few problems found in GW2 from existing.

• Too much passive play in pvp? That’s because almost the entirety of the trait and upgrade systems are tied to passive effects. In FFVII, slotting passive effects came at the cost of active effects, and vice-versa – and with blue materia, its “passive” effects won’t even work if they’re not tied to active effects.
• Lack of skill collecting? In FFVII, collecting materia was possible and part of the fun.
• Too busy/ complicated? If we look at ascended gear, we’ll see it overloaded with upgrade slots, which is not very elegant design, especially when most of them are for only for stat boosts.

In many ways, materia and GW1’s skill system were both simple, easy to understand, yet lead to plenty of different combos.

I remember the lead system designer Izzy talking in the last CDI thread about elegant/ minimalism design, and I would be interested to know what he thinks of GW2’s systems he designed, when directly compared to the two examples above (one of them which was also designed by him, I assume).

Why not fuse the trait and the skill systems into one? Traits offer way too many passive effects – 14. Do we really need that many passive effects? Meanwhile, the skill system is a bit too restricted.

We could get something like this:

• Progressing through traitlines cost skill points (so they don’t become useless);
• Some slots would unlock active skills (utilities), and at grandmaster tier, they would unlock elite skills.
• For some slots, players would have to choose between active and passive effects, or, if that’s a bad idea, in some slots, players would be able to enhance unlocked active skills with passive effects, or even with runes/ sigils/ infusions, effectively fusing all three systems into one.

Example of this:
Elementalist’s Fire Magic Traitline

• Adept tier: unlocks signet of fire and conjure flame axe.
• Master tier: unlocks cleansing fire.
• Grandmaster tier: unlocks conjure fiery greatsword.

And then there would exist slots inbetween:

• Attach choosen utility with a trait or a rune.
• Signet of Fire attached to trait that makes the signet’s active add an extra effect.
• Or attached to a sigil that would make the signet apply a lightning bolt on activation.

Just food for thought. ^^

ColinJohanson.2394:

A question to help direct the discussion a bit:

What are some of your favorite progression systems of all time in others? Be they horizontal, or vertical, just which ones really got you excited and were fun for you to continue to progress in?

For me, Final Fantasy Tactics is one I loved, where I was able to continue to unlock new jobs and advanced professions for my characters, as well as level up their abilities within those professions. It remains one of my all time favorite games, and one of my favorite systems of progression in any game. I’m also pretty darn fond of that Guild Wars game and skill collection.

+1 for mentioning Final Fantasy Tactics. <3 And yes, Guild Wars 1 was somewhat close to FFT in that regard. Which effectively makes GW1 one of my favorite progression systems in gaming too. MTG-esque deck-building (GW1), secondary professions (GW1, FFT), and “slots” for unique cross-class abilities (FFT – active, passive, reactive and movement abilities).

It was very fun to make, say, Ramza a Squire with Counter, Blade Grasp and Teleport-on-Move. Which reminds me, EverQuest next is going to have something “similar”, where each profession will have “slot types” (offensive, defensive, movement, utility) where they can equip abilities from other professions. It’s also rather similar.

One system worth looking at, is Final Fantasy VII’s materia system. That was excellent horizontal progression. And I wonder, could something like that be simulated in GW2, perhaps with a slight revamp to the way runes and/ or infusions work?

Like combining an upgrade that adds damage on critical with another upgrade that makes that damage AoE (similar to FFVII’s classic Magic + All materia combo). But, perhaps, that could be redudant with the trait system.

As a quick note,

If skills like the new healing spray are part of your plan for horizontal progression, ANET, they must not be as underwhelming as they are. Horizontal progression through skills is not only about collecting them, it’s also about having fun using them, and creating builds around them. They’re not skins. They’re mechanics: they’re meant to be played with. If they’re weak, there’s barely any “progression” here.

The skill balancing team should reconsider how they approach the balance of non-profession skills. Making them underwhelming on purpose so that balance doesn’t break is a noble cause, but it’s not working out. It’s not making anyone happier by wasting 25 skill points on that. It’s not even enhancing world immersion if players don’t get to use them and have fun with them.

I’m enjoying Arcane Brilliance a lot. I like how fun it is to play with.

I do hope they rebalance the spray too. In fact, I would like ANET to reconsider their approach to balance all non-profession skills, because making them all bad on purpose is just… not working out.

Savoy.6824:

@DiogoSilva and @Evee.2714 that sounds great guys. Can you repost the suggestions and the suggestions only here in a bulleted list format. It might be easier to read than a wall of text and require less research (post spread out all over the forums even when you link to them are hard to find). Thanks for all you do.

All my posts are already in a bulleted list format, to make them easier and cleaner to read (right, ANET?), but I’ll do that once I have the time, tomorrow maybe, if an anet dev doesn’t do it first.

Already spent most of my time contributing to this thread, and need to take a break. :P

Savoy.6824:

I dont think we need 8+ pages telling them that ascended gear was a bad idea. If we can lets focus on ideas to make obtaining it easier and other ideas for progression other than vertical.

I’ve written a few walls of text already where I analyzed the current situation and made serious suggestions to improve upon it.

HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION

Skin Locket

• Make skins “unlockable” (and account-bound) and not consumable. More on that bellow;
• Make some skins not tradeable to incentivate players to explore the world;
• Expand the crafting system, so whenever we craft a new item, we can choose a skin for it based on what the list of skins we have unlocked. This doesn’t needs to come for free. It would cost either a transmutation item, materials, or a combination of both.
• This system would make crafting a lot funnier, and greatly improve horizontal skin progression. So please, don’t lock it to players who don’t have in-game transmutation stones. A solution to that is that players with transmutation stones could craft items with skins of their choice without a time-gate, or with less materials involved, or with more crafting experience gained, so that there’s some sort of benefit to still having transmutation stones around, without locking this exciting new feature from other players.
• Make it so that each new item crafted with a new skin counts as a “discovery”. This way, players have more options to level their crafting other than creating unneeded stuff, furthening making crafting funnier.
• This system can make world exploration funnier and more rewarding (unlocking, collecting, hunting for skins).
• This system works well with the online shop system. Not only because skins can already be purchased with gems, but because if more players want to fill in their skin locket, more players will want to purchase gems to get more skins. Keep in mind that, in my suggestion, skins should be a one-time-only account unlockables, but not freely duplicated. They would still require crafting or transmutation stones to be used.
• Several acchievements can be tied to this system, which is another plus.
• Dungeon tokens can be removed, and have dungeons unlock skins after being completed several times, to simplicy the number of currencies in this game.
• If popular enough as a long-term goal (horizontal progression/ collecting), as a material/ money sink, and as a reliable way to make cash through gems, it’ll create more incentives for Anet to work on more skins, which is what the playerbase wants.

Story-driven and World-driven horizontal progression

• Personal Story Instance: Make it customizable and as a long-term goal. Unlock more shops for convenience or for unique items, influence which NPCs go or stay there and their respective dialogue, have the NPCs offer “personal quests”, allow us to invest on buildings, etc. Acchievements tied to that. Unique rewards tied to that.
• Datalog UI: Allow us to collect (unlock) books and unlock piece of information from exploring the world, fighting unique bosses and talking to key NPCs. All this information tell us more about the world of Tyria, and is all gathered in the Hero menu page. This adds even more incentives for world exploration, improves world immersion, and again, it’s yet another amazing opportunity to expand the acchievement system and tie unique rewards to that.

TL;DR: A world of Tyria where you can gather and collect LORE and SKIN PIECES, working for long-term ACCHIEVEMENTS tied that, influence your PERSONAL HOME INSTANCE and customize your own BUILDS, makes for a better world of Tyria.

I also agree that, at the game’s launch, GW2 was not only lacking vertical progression (something that I didn’t mind), but horizontal as well. Without meaningful skill progression, hardly any skill/ skin collecting, a personal story that went nowhere and a dynamic event system that was still at its infancy, there was never much character or even worldwide customisation.

When Anet went full on with the idea of adding vertical progression, several players were justifying that change based on the number of players leaving. But I always felt that players left not because of the lack of vertical progression, but because of the lack of any progression at all.

It’s also worth noting that in the upcoming MMO EverQuest Next, equipments will offer unique abilities instead of stats. How fun and exciting is that? But guess what? This already kinda happens in GW2 with the sigils and runes.

More of a reason for why I think infusions should be removed, and ascended sigils/ runes added in their place. And I’m talking about ascended upgrades with “cool” effects, not just slight stat boosts.

BACK TO HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION

Playing with alts
Anet had some sort of strategy about using player’s alts as new sources of money sink, but that has clearly failed, and we’ve been getting changes towards the opposite direction lately. This is great, because the more incentives there are to play with alts, the more incentives there are for a portion of the playerbase to log more often into the game.

• Ascended gear discriminates the players who like to invest on multiple characters, as it demands from them a much higher money sink than from players that stick to a single character.
• Likewise for dyes.
• Likewise for several soul-bound items.
• Exploring the world is very repetitive the second time.

Solutions

• Make ascended gear significantly easier to get after the first copy is crafted/ obtained, similar to the acchievement’s skins. After getting the first copy, the player could get the ability to create as many duplicates as they would wish for their other characters.
• Make dyes account bound.
• Make most non-story soul-bound gear account-bound. If I just replaced my ascended trinkets for new ones, why can’t I equip the old ones to another character I have? The money sink is already done. I have already contributed positively to the game’s economy. :P Let me at the very least use it somewhere else.
• World exploration is very complex, and I won’t dwelve into it for being off-topic. But it would be nice if, at the very least, the WPs were account bound, so we could quickly go to our favourite area or help our friends in a specific dungeon without being restricted only to our main.

VERTICAL PROGRESSION
The flaws with its execution in GW2

Ascended Gear

• The crafting process is convoluted.
• It’s not tied to immersive content, and therefore lore-less and lacking charm (Tequatl skins being an exception). Mostly a soulless grind.
• The infusion system feels redudant when there’s already a rune/ sigil system set in place.
• Very unfriendly to many forms of horizontal progression (build-crafting or playing with alts).

Solutions

• Add a crafting “roadmap” in the crafting stations, some sort of tree of all the materials required, and where to obtain them. Kinda like what already happens in dedicated fan sites, but within the game itself.
• Create new content and new stories with the purpose of obtaining ascended gear.
• Remove the infusion system from weapons and armors, and expand the rune/ sigil systems instead. Add ascended versions of runes and sigils that can only be applied on ascended equipment.
• Separate the concept of “upgrading stats” from “customising stats”. Upgrading stats could require all the work and time-sink it does now for ascended gear, but it should be much easier to customize/ change those stats regardless of their rarity tier.

I’ll probably talk about alt-playing next time.

Skin/ Cosmetic Progression
What is skin/ cosmetic progression? It’s about upgrading our looks until we get satisfied or impressed by our own character.

• There are no incentives nor any system to collect different skins.
• The best dyes mostly come from permanent content.
• Dye collecting is soul-bound.
• (Somewhat related) But technical or artistic issues take away the motivation from working towards cosmetic goals.

Solutions

• Add a Skin Locket where we can collect all the skins. Account-bound, please.
• An expanded list of acchievements for filling said locket.
• Expand the crafting system so we can pick the skin of the item we’re going to craft, based on what we have collected. There should exist several skin options right since early-game, so that newbies don’t all look the same either.
• Unique account-bound-on-acquire skins dropped by unique bosses, or found while exploring the world of Tyria. There you have it, the substitute for GW1’s elite skill hunting.
• Add more dyes with shaders, and spread them more through the game.
• Dye collecting should be account-bound. Talking from personal experience, not having access to my costly celestial and black dyes on my alts takes away the motivation from working towards their looks.
• Improve the quality of the shaders (look at how sweetfx (?) mod makes GW2’s armor look much prettier), some technical issues about armor pieces or dyes looking too plastic-like, and seriously reconsider what it takes to design appealing armor skins, especially for anyone besides heavy male armor and scholar female clothes.

I’ll talk about my take on ascended gear next.

HORIZONTAL PROGRESSION
The flaws with its execution in GW2

Skill/ Build Progression
What is skill/ build progression? It’s about getting new tools to improve or customize our builds.

• It is crippled by some of the systems set in place for vertical progression, like stats being tied to gear, which in turn is tied to huge money and time sinks.
• It is further restricted by how trait allocation works, and the lack of build templates.
• Non-profession skills are very underwhelming. Although this is done on purpose for the sake of balance, when they aren’t worth using, they do not serve their purpose to enhance world immersion, as they are left unused, nor do they add any form of horizontal progression, because no build will be created around them.
• Skill hunting is generic and lacks the charm GW1’s elite skill hunting had.
• The skill system is generally very restrictive, with few weapons per profession, very few utility slots tied to high cooldowns, and an elite skill system that isn’t acchieving the epic feel it was meant to acchieve.

Solutions

• Separate the concept of (ascended) gear crafting from the concept of equipment stat customisation. Make it easy or easier to change stats, or at the very least, to craft new copies of the same gear with different stats.
• Add an universal build template system, and allows us to change traits on the fly (while not in battle, dungeons, etc). Creating and saving builds should be free. Loading/ changing them could still require a small money sink, if Anet feels it needs to be there.
• Revise how non-profession skills should be balanced. Instead of making them bad on purpose, make them decent but only fill a certain niche/ tied heavily to a specific area or situation. In theory, the new spray skill does that, but it’s a poor skill even for its intended purpose.
• It’s probably too late for a better skill hunting system, but perhaps that can still exist for something other than skill collection. More on that later.
• Anet is already adding new skills to professions, so this area is already covered.

I’ll talk about skins next.

Fresh Air was not touched. If anything, you should have an easier time with it since the meta builds from other professions were toned down. And if you use a Rock Solid variant, stone flesh (minor #5) was improved. I recommend Focus over OH Dagger here, personally.

One thing you might want to try out, is going for a full cantrip-traited build with 30 points in fire for persisting flames and the new arcane heal. That gives you plenty of self-survival and condition cleansing, a lot of offensive party support, and an easy 25 stacks of might. You won’t have any investment in arcana, but you won’t need it much.

Diamond Skin = forced 30 earth. :P
Persisting Flames = forced 30 fire. :P

We do have survival problems, and elemental attunement is pretty big at helping us fix those, but you can substitute it for other trait combos.

You’re better off waiting for future announcements, I think.

Anyone having success with builds that require no arcana investment? I’ve been trying a few and I don’t feel any weaker (in fact, somewhat stronger) than before the patch, but I’m only scratching the top 850-1000, so I don’t know how feasible my builds would be in higher-end pvp.

Let’s imagine an alternate reality where arcane wave was already ranged and, after this patch, they made it a PBAoE spell instead.

Everyone would complain about it and ask for a revert too.

In the end, people are complaining because it’s something new, it’s out of their confort zone, it demands them to adapt, and not everyone reacts well to that.

Elementalist boards

• Our profession sucks! All other 7 professions were buffed and ours wasn’t. Reroll!

Any of the other profession boards

• Our profession sucks! All other 7 professions were buffed and ours wasn’t. Reroll!

Zephyr’s Boon (air) is usually more popular, especially for a defensive d/d build in pvp.

With two anti-projectile skills, an invulnerability, perma-vigor, and some decent healing, a fresh air has enough tools to delay their death while they attempt to burst down their opponent. More so if they bring valkyrie amulet and spec for 30 points in water.

Cantrip Mastery working with Burning Fire is a “new feature”, because utility cooldown traits didn’t affect any traits that triggered those utilities before this patch, and from now on they will.

I’ve asked about this to two Anet devs in-game, and their answer is that old, already-existing traits aren’t still affected by this. That’s a bug that they expect to fix “as soon as possible”.

So Earth’s Embrace + Cantrip Mastery should work someday, and I assume the same will apply to Arcane Mastery with arcane-triggering traits too.

roamzero.9486:

I said this in the other big thread, but IMO Diamond Skin should just be a Zerker Stance copy paste. Triggers when hit with a condition at above 75% HP, 100% duration reduction for 8s with a 60s+ CD.

This would make the trait too passive and mindless. The cool thing about DS currently, is that even though it is a passive trait, it demands some active behavior, and can be counter-played. In your suggestion, an elementalist wouldn’t need to bother to keep their health high, and the opponent wouldn’t be able to counter-play it outside of waiting.

Diamond Skin has some issues, but I don’t think passive playing is one of them. The “problems” with DS lie on the fact that it is either a very specific hard counter, or it does nothing instead. That’s why the community can’t get a consensus out of it yet. Time will tell.