Guild Wars 2

I do not miss The Holy Trinity.

It’s one very specific and unrealistic fighting mechanic that is in close to every single mmorpg game.

There are some good examples where a few players dominate a much larger group due to good teamwork: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-919RMwyfnk

In Guild Wars 2, healing is weaker such that fights are resolved, and it’s easier to develop more complex and interesting combat, when you have to take care of all roles by yourself. It’s also alot more fun to do solo PvE with a hybrid build.

Norn and humans are to similar to humans to be considered inventive, but the other races are definitely above the average fantasy races. The races are inventive and interesting.

The charrr run animations appears to be similar to a lion running very fast, only the charr doesn’ move very fast. This comes down to the fact that races are only meant to be a visual difference, and charr are very large. They could consider altering animations. Although cat like, they aren’t built like normal cats. They have hands.

Two possible candidates that may have more suitable animations for charr, are gorilla’s and bears.

Ofcourse run speed being equal put aside, I’d rather see them be able to run like now, only very fast.

Respawn rate is generally a bit high, and it is certainly way to high in certain areas. Some areas are made difficult because the spawn rate is incredibly high and the density of mobs is high. They also have CC skills to force you to fight them.

In my opiynion this is a bad way to introduce difficulty. Challenging areas does not mean that you must be constantly forced into fights across the entire map.

Challenging areas should have mobs with more abilities, faster attack rate, but only a minor increase in health/armor.
The mobs should typically be in smaller groups, attacking together, and possibly have some group synergy.
Veterans, should be replaced with lieutenants.
It should be possible to run through most areas without drawing aggro, particulary by following roads, but challenging areas are more cruel, and hence you may run into ambushes. These ambushes have the skills to pose a threat, and a solo player will need some survivability skills to escape.

Dungeons are instanced areas, and making this the most profitable farming location will make the world feel empty.

The drive for dungeons, should be that they contain some unique loot you can only get there, and completing all branches atleast once. They should not be the main location where people farm gold.

The champ rotations are very bad though.

They should make rewards, such that the most profitable is to roam the world in small groups (3-6) completing unique events across many maps. Event completion resets after doing, say 1/4th of all events in the world. More challenging areas should reap better rewards.

Before GW2, I really thought it would be cool to play a jedi in an MMO.

Forget jedi’s. GW2 elementalists are way cooler

Exploring the world is a big step up from other mmo’s, and I do hope they continue improving this (as it can go much farther).

Gabby.3205:

1 – Queensdale is not nearly as profitable as higher level areas because the chances to get exotic champion bags are lower. If you try farming champions at Orr or other lvl 80 area, you will see the difference. So yeah, that part is balanced already, even if not everybody knows that.

Dunno what rewards the most, the fact that there is a large zerg there is testimony that rewards are to high.

Gabby.3205:

2 – Why? Because that’s how you want to play? What if other players like to run around with a zerg? You don’t have to think a lot, it is relaxing and a lot of people have fun doing that. Why do you get to tell what should be considered to be fun?

Let me rephrase it in a different way.

Do you believe that the highest rewards, the most profitable gameplay in guild wars 2, should be gained by doing the extremely unchallenging champ rotations?

The high champ rewards should have never been added, and there’s a very important reason as to why that is so.

In GW2 rewards are given to everyone who participated in killing an enemy. The problem is that with to large groups of players, they will simply kill enemies to quickly, and only a few of the players will actually get hits on the veterans and normal mobs. The champions are the exception here, because their very high health and scaling, enables every player to deal some damage.

Say, ANET managed to make some changes to the reward system such that the most rewarding content, would be to roam challenging areas in 3-6 man groups. Don’t you find this to be a better candidate for high rewards compared to the champ trains?

Gabby.3205:

There is nothing to be fixed.

Yes there is. A rewards system that draws a large amount of players to a few number of zergs across the entire game world, repeating a very limited set of trivial tasks over and over is about as worse as it can get. If farmers were in instanced areas, these players wouldn’t be a nuisance to others.

What should be fixed:

1. Queensdale is easy as it’s a starter zones. Starter zones should be balanced so they’re less rewarding than other zones. The world bosses will still draw players.

2. The most rewarding content should consist of gameplay that encourages a populated world with good spread of players, and it should also be considered to be more fun. The most rewarding setup should be a small group of players (party size) roaming in PvE doing unique events (lower rewards on doing same events over and over).

Content that will dissapear from the game should not attempt to achieve grandeur. They will only fail, and that focus should have been put into something more permanent.

Adding more locations with living world is not a good idea, as the problem is that many of the current areas aren’t populated enough.

My suggestion is to periodically come with small overhauls, adding something new to an area, and that the living world is the story of how this change came to be.

The starter areas are great, but most of the other areas are not very well made. They have less beautiful stuff, and they have a lack of locations that aren’t filled with homogeneously spaced red mobs.

Areas that have few locations with friendlies or yellows are depressing. They are claustrophobic. They need green pockets of air (friendly npc’s).

Higher level areas tends to get more difficult because mobs have more skills. This is a good way to increase difficulty.

Higher levels areas also have fewer green and yellow npc’s, there are few locations without red mobs, and they respawn faster. This is a horrible way to increase difficulty, and they simply make the areas depressing.

Example: Firebreak Fort

Firebreak Fort in Mount Maelstrom is anything but well defended. The 2 normal risen mobs that spawn near the siouth gatee will kill the guards protecting the entrance , and they’d kill anyone inside if they’d ventured there. This fortification is a good candiate to make some alterations to.

Act1:
Firebreak fort and the surrounding areas have been overwhelmed by risen. The survivors have set out camp to to the north of the fort. Merchants, repair, trading post and bank npc’s are dead along with most of the guards. A powerful necromancer servant of zhaitan, is responsible for this uprise in risen. By killing Risen, he will eventually show up and you must fight him. By succeding you will only weaken him, but it will reduce the number of risen for a certain period (and give some nice rewards).

Act2:
The necromancer were unsuccesful and decided to retreat (you’ll may meet him again later). Firebreak fort has been reclaimed, but it lacks proper defense and there are a large number of risen lurking outside the walls. The fort is to be improved and there’s a series of smaller events related to this.
Caravans are coming in with supply to repair damage dealt to the base, and new recruits are arriving and they are in need of safe passage to the base. Also soldiers needs more training, and there are events related to soldiers going on patrols to gain combat experience, and players need to help them stay alive.

Prologue:
After Act2 there will be some changes

- All damages to the fort have been repaired (possibly improved and better looking).
- Risen will be gone from the vicinity.
- The two entrance guards at each entrance will be veterans, and there will also be a few veterans inside the base.
- There will be a safe passage from Fort Firebreak to the base right to the south, with a patrol containing one veteran and two normal npc’s.
- A new event will be available, where some soldiers at Fort Firebreak will launch a raid into the risen infested murkvale bog, south of the fort. The npc group consists of 2 veterans and 4 normal soldiers. They can handle most encountered fights on their own, but to continue between fights, all npc’s must be rezzed, and atleast one of the normal npc’s will tend to die, which imposes the need for a player.

The underlying problem is not really the health of the keep lord, but rather the fact that WvW mainly consists of stacking the largest zerg.

Not giving rewards to multiple persons in Warhammer’s RvR made zergs unrewarding, and it often resulted in large zergs splitting up. This mechanism had flaws, and to large zergs were still a very common problem. Guild Wars 2 on the other hand, lacks any anti zerg mechanism. It rewards them. Everyone gets full rewards, regardless of how many players helped.

Regardless of players, I believe the keep lord should be made such that he can’t instantly be killed.
Instead of scaling the keep lord, the keep lord should be similar to some special boss fight, where there are mechanisms to ensure that the boss will atleast stay alive a certain period.
There are many options. Invulnerability, dissapearing for a fixed time and having to fight some mobs, or something more special. The keep lord could unleash a trap that freezes himself and everyone nearby with the upside that they can’t be damaged, and this trap will linger and freeze for one minute. This allows retribution from another world, as the zerg may be split in two between unfrozen and frozen, making them vulnerable to a smaller zerg.

It’s most important that they keep quality over quantity. The class must be made well, and different enough from the other classes, and here’s two things that should be taken into account:

1. The skill cap/ complexity of the class should be among the harder ones. The elementalist is somewhat unforgiving if you don’t use attunement swapping correctly, but it’s a very fun class to play once you get the hang of it. Many classes are simply to simplistic, and because combat must be balanced for highly skilled players, these tend to have an advantage. Introducing more easy classes is not the way to go.
2. There’s only 2 heavy armor classes, and they have lots in common. A third more different heavy armor class would be nice.

Suggestion:
A heavy armor class that plays a bit similar to the elementalist class.
The elementalist wepon attunements tends to give you a little bit of everything : damage, heal/buff, CC, mobility.
This heavy armor class, could have one weapon, but only 3 attunements at his disposal, with each attunement having a specific strength.
One weapon could yield good damage, CC and mobility, whereas another weapon could yield good damage, CC and buff/heal.

onemeg.2190:

…

I agree that they should make this optional.

There should be options to select wether you want to see those “screen fillers”. One for each option:
- show/hide daily
- show/hide monthly
- show/hide meta event
- show/hide living story

Personally I’d want to hide daily/monthly and living story, but meta event (when in the vicinity) is something I want shown.

There’s lots of other annoying screen fillers. When I’m casually roaming in PvE I quite dislike those damage numbers filling the screen. I’d like to see the following options:
- show/hide heals on self.
- damage on self: show all, only show crits, show nothing.
- damage dealt to enemies: show all, only show crits, show nothing.
- show/hide heals dealt to other players.
- show/hide xp gain from killing mobs.
- show/hide xp gain from gathering.

Many single player rpg’s have a more minimalistic GUI, and it does help increase immersion. GW2 should enable that aswell.

Chrispy.5641:

…snip…

My math is indeed slightly off.

An ascended amulet has 295 attribute points and + 5 from infusion slot, to a total of 300, whereas an exotic amulet has 283 attribute points (I had erroneously set this to 273).

This corresponds to ascended gear being +6% better than exotic gear. (283*1.06 = 300). This may increase with higher tier infusion slots.

I still find it to large, and ascended armor is coming, so every piece will have an ascended equivalent.

You must remember that if you increase all stats by say 1%, then the power increase is higher than 1%.

A simple example is two warriors, they only have normal attacks, and the weak one has 1000 health, and deals 10 damage every attack. The other has +10% stats, and therefore has 1100 health and deals 1100 damage. After 91 attacks the weaker warrior is dead, whereas the stronger warrior has 190 health, remaining.

190 health of 1100, is 17.27% remaining health, and a better way to determine power. So, you see a 10% stats increase would in this case lead to a 17.27% “power” increase.

They should definitely not add another gear tier. The problem is really that they have to many gear tiers. At lvl 80, no one wants to go for rare’s (except for skin), because they’d rather invest that money in their exotic armor.

A rough estimate would say that the price gap between two tiers should be somewhere around ten times the difference. Many would buy a temporary rare set for 1G per piece, if the exotics went for 10G per piece, because the total cost of the rare set, won’t have a significant impact on the “journey” to get an exotic set.

The lower tiers are more aimed at those who haven’t reached level 80 yet, and here there’s no need for such a huge price gap.

The way I see it, Rare is the type of gear you can pay upfront once you reach lvl 80 (without having to have saved the entire way). Exotic gear will take some time to acquire, but a casual player occasionaly playing on his lvl 80 char will get it eventually.

Ascended is for the “hardcore” players, that for some reason demands a game that encourages a ridicilous amount of farming. Some will be ok with an aesthetic upgrade, but the majority will actually want to see a power upgrade, and that is okay aslong as the power upgrade is small.

Exotic gear has +14.2% better stats than rare, and ascended gear has +10% better stats than exotic gear. Due to Ascended gear not being for casual players, this gap is to large (based on amulet with fine infusion, vs exotic with exotic upgrade, and rare with rare upgrade).

If ascended had about +5% better stats than exotic, then I would be alot more okay with the addition of ascended gear, and I wouldnt mind if it were 100 times more difficult to get than exotic (some pieces should be fairly easy though, like those you can get via laurels).

Want players spread out on all explorable zones?
Want to find guild members in the same explorable zone as you are in?
Want monthly achievements that discourages repetitive grind?

There is a simple solution that can address all these problems.

The key lies in the “complete 100 events” monthly achievement. This could be changed to complete 80 unique events within a certain region.

The regions are Ascalon, Kryta, Maguuma Jungle, Shiverpeak Mountains and Ruins of Orr.

By having to complete unique events within a region, a player will very likely visit all maps within a region to more easily find uncompleted events.

To make sure players are spread out over all regions, players should be assigned to different regions.

To bring guild members naturally together, players in the same guild should be assigned to the same region (based on guild represented during assignment of monthly achievement).

Other monthly achievements that may encourage the same are:
- Veteran kill variety within specific region.
- Gather x amount of unique crafting materials within region.

The monthly could contain more than one region specific achievement, and ensure that they both are in the same region.

The laurels are a limited resource, with a cap on how much you can gain. A problem with farmers, is that they always stick with the most profitable type of farming, and never does anything else. Completing the monthly does not have to compete with other types of farming behaviour, because none of those will bring in laurels.

Using monthly laurels for generic farming behaviour is a waste of the laurel resource, when it could be used as a means to encourage more diverse gameplay behaviour, and better spread of players across maps.

I don’t really like it. It can be exploited, and many votes does not necessarily represent a great commander, but may be more a measure of playtime.

The thing I’d like to see, is have commander icons that represent how large their warband is, with larger warbands having a more prominent icon on the map. Additionaly we should see the exact number of players in warband by hovering over icon.

This would atleast give a quick overview of players who are “acting commanders”, and filter out those “commanders” who appear to be more like solo roamers.

This should be an easy fix that adds benefits, and I see no big possible exploits/disadvantages with this. If this is still deemed insufficient after some time, then more drastic methods may be considered.

I believe a raised target cap on AoE skills is the way to go, but there are problems that needs to be adressed before this happens.

AoE is already useful in PvE, due to bigger fights typically containing a large number of trash mobs, and the fact that they don’t move away from AoE, and can easily be tricked into staying within your AoE spells. This is a huge difference from PvP/WvW, and it’s difficult to balance AoE so it works for both occasions.

Before increasing the target hit cap, they should address the problem of AoE in PvE. A solution is to more frequently use stronger mobs in larger fights. An intermediary between normal, and veteran rank might be ideal. In particular they should have abilities in line with veterans, but with a base health/damage somewhere between normal and veterans. They could name the rank: “Strong”.

Tom Gore.4035:

It might reduce stacking, but wouldn’t help in the most critical situations, which at the moment happen in chokepoints. The sieges would need to be redesigned, because if the AoE cap was removed, no one could ever enter through the gatehouse if there were ~10 defenders AoEing the entrance.

But, if it would lead in us getting siege towers and ladders, I’m all for it!

A smaller group of players should be able to defend against a significantly larger group of players at a choke point, if they know what to do. 10 defenders with high AoE damage would imply that there’s a decent bunch of other players there aswell, making them a fairly large group, and large enough such that that they should be able to hold off a zerg at a choke point.

The zerg will have to use special tactics to get through this chokepoint. One way that seems very potent to me, is have support stack a mesmer with protective boons, the mesmer will then create a portal outside gate, blink in past the chokepoint, and finish the portal. Now a stream of players can get safely through the portal, and push back the defenders.

This will require some tactic on the zerg’s behalf, rather than just mindless steamrolling. One of the cool things in warhammer were the keep chokepoints and player collision detection. A small group of players could defend a keep against a zerg, but not against a zerg that knew what to do.

Boss battles could be more interesting if they were less about defeating the ridicilous high healthed boss, and more about defeating a group of strong npc’s with a good group synergy. With Tequatl rising they seem to go this way. However, they should make the normal boss/champion fights more interesting as well.

An example of a more unique boss battle could be as follows:

Imagine a boss battle consisting of a champion flame legion charr wielding melee weapons. He is supported by three vulnerable fire shaman champions with a high ranged damage, but a low survivability. The boss himself has a very high survivability, amazing crowd control, but a very weak damage.

Players will want to take out the fire shaman guards, but the boss has a lot of tricks to ensure players back off his guards.
1. The boss will ru a variety of these in boss/champion battles would help make them more interesting.sh towards the guard with the lowest health, knock over any players around the guard, and apply a large area, long lasting cripple. The guard will then move away from this region, to distance itself from melee atackers.
2. The boss will move on to some of the players who had attacked the guard from range, and use some burst singe target damage, to attempt to down one or more players.

Step 1 and 2 are repeated for the new most threatened guard.