Guild Wars 2

It’ll be easy to fix if an issue occurs, don’t worry, don’t panic
If something happen, just open a ticket and look for an existing bug topic on the forum.
Before you notice it, already thousands of people would have answered the topic like hysterical girls at a 1D show

If you want to deal massive amount of damage NOW, go for Zerk.
Conditions are meant to deal damage over time. Get over it, stop focusing on Burning.

The elite specialization should only unlock the new class mechanics and associated traits
New weapon and new spells should go “baseline” for accounts with HoT.

You’re currently saying to waste a whole trait line slot for the sole purpose of taking a spell or a weapon.

The only “camp” I know is people waiting for Tequatl half an hour before the spawn of the event.

The empty head of Sieran with the top carved as a flower pot?

Stop disneying characters.
If Trahearne go Mordrem Guard, the only outcome SHOULD be death.
No “cure”, no “redemption”. Mary Sue are not good for story telling.

To move away from zerker meta, they need to make different meta working for different bosses. But making an other meta the way to go will not solve the issue.
Boss A : Meta Zerk
Boss B : Meta Sinister
Boss C : Meta Soldier
Boss D : Meta Zealot
Boss E : Meta Cleric

Then people who want to go “meta” will make 2 or 3 gear set and mix/match them
People who just want to play how they want will make 1 gear set and try to work around them

FYI: It’s not because something is Meta that all others things are useless. It just means that they’re less efficient.
If the gap is short enough, it’ll not be an issue to not play “Meta”.

Blood Magic provide team support without sacrificing all DPS.
Of course depending of what you choose.
Blood Bond, Vampiric Presence and Vampiric Ritual. provide the “max DPS” with support (heal + protection)
It’s a good trait line that’s not overpowered.
I like to take it for hard fight but switch to Spite when all matters is fast DPS.

Everything’s normal then. Nothing more to say.

If Trahearne ends up becoming a Mordrem…
… he should became a boss that’ll be put to death.

He should became the Mordrem Deathbringer, owning a corrupted greatsword made from a thorn of Mordremoth. Tormenting the souls of the vanquished to power himself, summoning toxic blossoms, deadly thorned vines, and golems of bones and vines intertwined, bringing fear in the heart of its former soldiers.

No cure,
No miracle,
No redemption,
Only… Death!

Sizer.3987:

Vitality also counters physical damage.

Exactly. Who said a counter should only work on one thing?

They already have 5 species that they don’t succeed at developing their stories.
Seriously, we’re flooded with Sylvari-focused lore from Living Story, many Human-focus content too. A touch of Asura with Waypoints, Norns nothing, Charrs nothing.
Rytlock is a Charr, that’s true, but he’s not its whole specie.

Vitality IS a direct counter.

I do not remember that a food give 500 to 800 toughness.
And the counter to condition damage is vitality, that exists.

Erasmus.1624:

To me, the sign of a good player is one that knows how to combo fields based on the situation and that includes water fields. It requires practice and I would consider it skillful to use combos in a way that benefits a class and the team.

Blasting fields takes two cooldowns. One for the skill, one for the player that needs to blast and I believe the reward is not only fair currently but very important to balance and changing it would cause even more balance problems.

Your definition of “skill” ignores that there is mechanical skill involved when players execute combos. I would argue it is bad design to have a high skillcap class that doesn’t get an adequate compensation for what they’ve practiced over and over to do in quick succession for it to work. While one person may pick up either class and have things click/work for them it is pretty undeniable that the amount of practice needed to master these classes is a bit more than your average class.

(I removed the parts where you just say that everyone else is a crybaby who doesn’t know how to play)

If other fields than fire/water are despised, it limits the professions able to shine by their ability to provide combo availability. If you value the skill needed, you should not limit it to two professions and let other professions synergise by team work on fields/finishers. Using more than two fields type would improve the global skill by adding a need to use the proper field at the proper time.

If fire/water fields where considered useless and dark/poison fields must have, people would complain that necromancers fields are covered by elementalists. It’s bad design in both case.

It’s a good thing if you can complain that someone put the wrong field at the wrong time, it means that they’re tactical and not mindless bonuses.
But when people complain that a field is so unwanted that players should simply avoid to use skills with them, or reroll, it harms the skillplay and teamplay. It also means that the spell effects are so poor that they don’t outbalance the field presence.

Why are they so poor? Either because they’re weak, or because they’re useless.
If they’re weak, they need a little boost to be on par with others.
If they’re useless, either it’s because they’re effectively useless or because the gameplay make them useless, something need to be change to make them interesting.

Currently, some effects rely on PLAYERS actions, others on FOES actions.
Auras, daze, chill, weakness, blindness, retaliation, and confusion rely on FOES actions.
Might rely on PLAYERS actions.

At least for confusion, it now inflict damages over time even if foes do not attacks.
Retaliation and Auras are useless if foes don’t attacks you (or very little if they’re slow).

Control effects may be cancels by foes with Defiance, foes where they would be useful.
And they’re pretty useless on trash mobs.
In this case, it may be that the control conditions need to be reworked or their effects changed to fit with boss without broken them to slugs.
As a theoretical example, weakness could make a boss deal 2% less damages, stacking by intensity up to 10 stack (20% less damages).

Turning Auras into active effect could be cool and more tactical, letting people use it on the target they want and on with they could get the more of the effect.
And not only for combos, but also for the incoming Tempest Auramancer.

The game is two years old, and with the incoming Heart of Thorn and the recent profession balance, I think that the next balance needed is combo effects.

Elementalist fields are Fire, Lightning, Ice and Water
Mesmer field is Ethereal
Necromancer fields are Dark and Poison
Guardian field is Light
Thief field is Smoke
With other professions able to use some of them too.

What we see is that most people want Fire for might, and Water for heal.
Other fields get are unwanted, and there are people who spit on other professions for covering their precious fire/water fields with their own.

How to solve this issue?

Nerf, for example, Fire blast into providing 3x Might for 5s instead of 20s ?
It could broke the combo feature into the depth of uselessness because trying to combo would be too costly for their benefits, making combo an “things that happens sometimes”.

Improve other combo to be on par with the others?
But then, comboing could became an end in itself, making professions just “flavor” for a gameplay focused on comboing out the victory, a so bland gameplay.

Make combo finisher trigger all the fields types available ?
Then, it would not matter if a field cover an other, but stacking the same fields would provide no benefit.
But being able to combo on every field type available would be overpower in many cases…

That’s a difficult question that need to be addressed.
What do you think about this? Any suggestion to improve it?

If condition is the smartest choice, can you explain why Zerk is meta ?

I would be happy to see a new patch log about Scepter.
Would be like this to me :

Fire #1- Flamestrike
Cast time reduced to 0.75s
After cast time reduced to 0.2s
Less clunky

Water #1 – Ice Shards
20% chance to be a projectile finisher
The third shard apply 3s vulnerability x1
They litterally are projectiles.

Water #2 – Shatterstone
New animation : Ice spikes spurting out of the ground and exploding after 2s
On spurting, apply 2s torment x2.
On exploding, inflict damages.
Do not apply vulnerability anymore
Scepter is supposed to be the condi weapon, but water have no damaging condition.

Water #3 – Water Trident
Leave a water field (180 radius, 3s)
Clean one condition after 3s (when water field evaporate)
It would make people less reliant on staves for water fields and condi cleanse. The short radius and cleanse delay still make staves better.

Air #2 – Lightning Strike
Apply 2s Confusion x1
Scepter is supposed to be the condi weapon, but air have no damaging condition.

Xillllix.3485:

Didn’t see what they’ve done to meteor but I’ll bet it’s another nerf.

They said that the meteors will be more spread on the whole area. Before, they tended to land more in the middle.

For Earthen Proxy tied to auras…

It would make them a bit more tactical to have an effect at the end of the auras, not immediately when applied.
It let the player a few seconds to position itself near allies/foes trying to make the most of it.
And for PvP, it lets other players prepare themselves.
It’ll also benefits from auras applied by allies (through combo for example) and may be easier to code if it works for auras ending on the elementalist instead of auras put by elementalist with the trait.

When an aura on you fade, it explodes (radius ~180, 5sec cooldown).
Fire : AoE, few damages
Frost : AoE, remove a condition
Magnetic : AoE, Push ~180
Shock : AoE, Blind 2s
Light : AoE, Vigor 2s
Chaos : AoE, Torment 3s

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Seems like an awesome change to me. Key farming was never intended, keys are supposed to be a major contribution to their gem store sales, but were being significantly undermined by key farming.

What “undermined” key selling from gem stores is that it’s excruciatingly random…
If they start selling ticket scrap instead, they would sold them a lot more…

Karl McLain.5604:

Being that a player might want to receive increased damage from pistols, but not necessarily inherit the RNG bounce attacks from the secondary trait, this secondary trait was cut.

Usually, I dislike RNG, but in this case I wanted the RNG bounce over the damage increase
It was fun and, with some other traits, was used to make a cool gunslinger.
It was like Matrix. Dodge roll and bullets everywhere.

Jaken.6801:

Of course we could argue that the spirit power is deluded, as it is channeled by several norn at once, while we as a player are supposedly the only reveant channeling these legends (which is hopefully somehow explained how we get them actually. Which is I guess another thing that is just glanced over)

No you’ll not be THE ONE. There’ll be thousands of revenants channeling the same echoes of legends from the Mists.

PvP Rank is for people dedication and knowledge about PvP.
MMR is for balancing people skill among the fight.

MMR could be class bound, not PvP Rank.

Gameplay thing is gameplay.

It could be added as a future specialisation.

Unlock weapon swap BUT the attunement swap work differently.
The attunement you just leave is put in a 60s cooldown.
You can’t change your attunement for the next 30s.

Just a little thing to think about: MetaBattle is for the “best”.
Burns builds are not the “best” according to MetaBattle, but it don’t means it’s useless nor impossible…

Scepter/Dagger
Fire Signet + Glyph of Storms + Cleansing Fire + Glyph of Elementals
Sinister items + Balthazar runes + Sigil of Smoldering
Burning Precision + Arcane Precision + Evasive Arcana

You’ll deal a huge amount of burning with that.

HOUSING !!!!
I want to make my characters’ homes <3
Using wood, ores, and clothes to make desk, bed, chest, …

Rytlock don’t care of people who want to become Revenants. He’s not a teacher and will have his own goals to work at.

The Revenant in its lore and design is the Ritualist from the first Guild Wars.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ritualist

• Ritualists channel other-worldly energies that summon allies from the void and employ mystic binding rituals that bend those allies to the Ritualist’s will.
• They hood their eyes to better commune with spirits that grant great power and protection to Ritualists and their comrades.
• Where the Ranger lives as one with the spirit world, the Ritualist can and will be its master.
• Ritualists focused on channeling spirits from the Mists.
• Ritualists are masters of spirits, able to call upon them in battle for aid.

It’s more logical for futur Revenants to be former Ritualists getting an “upgrade” in their profession from the bits of knowledge Rytlock would have had time to communicate.

Better than the idea that farmers or carpenters suddenly becomes heroes because they found a “Learn easy magic to be a hero effortlessly” book on the floor…

In a game where the number of people is not set the hard way (except for dungeons), scaling is important.

That’s nonsense. Kryta is lacking racism because of its history and the fact that most of human kingdoms collapsed. Descent doesn’t matter. It’s said in many place that it don’t, nor than nobility.

Why is there so much Krytan things and nobles ?
There are people thinking that Lion’s Ark is part of the Krytan Kingdom…

Ascalonian minister => Minister of an Ascalonian area
“no land, no vote” => Most of Ascalon was lost to Charrs, no need for as much ministers as for Kryta

Conditions stacking is capped. A lot of conditions are wasted when you have more conditions applied than the stack cap allow.

Hume.2876:

hazenvirus.8154:

Lol, I am just imagining the new LFG posts. Must have zerker, sinister, nomad, apothecary. Link gear or kick.

+1. This. You need to look at this change from a gameplay perspective – not a ‘satisfy some random requirement’ perspective. Does the game actually play better if you need to use nomad to clear part of a dungeon? Is switching armor in between fights compelling game play? Hell no.

As said…

Kulvar.1239:

It’s a common mistake.
Not a need of different gears to “complete”, but a need of different gears to “fastest-ly complete”.

The idea is :

Meta fast clean => need of multiple gear to switch
Everyone => play the way they like (condi, tanky, support, control, …) and try to take the best out of these instead of going meta.

In my case, I want it the other way.
The ability to hide my tagname to other players unless they target me. Would allow “hide ambush” in WvW and PvP. Also useful to hide behind a crate while roleplaying.

It’s a common mistake.
Not a need of different gears to “complete”, but a need of different gears to “fastest-ly complete”.

Exemple !
First boss is normal, promoting zerk gear.
Second boss have a mechanism where someone with high survivability can activate mechanism to fasten the fight.
Third boss have a special weaknesses against conditions
Fourth boss steal healing from players, for a tactical fight
Fifth boss release regular radiation waves, making Regeneration, Protection, and Retaliation very useful.

If they include an housing system with tiles and placable furnishing, a memorial furnish could exists for that purpose.

We can nerf the “one build and gear for everything” Meta by splitting it so there have different Meta : a whole different Meta for each part of the content. AKA “one build and gear for each type of dungeon/boss/event/pvp/wvw”.

Then people will stop caring of the Meta because of the “pain” to stick at it.

hazenvirus.8154:

Based on what you are saying you want to require a certain amount of defensive stat to survive in the poison cloud… This changes nothing though. Players shift to taking just enough defense to survive and then kill everything as fast as possible.

You missed the “choice” part… People vote for the toxic cloud intensity according to their party type at the beginning (offensive, balanced, defensive).

hazenvirus.8154:

Ranael.6423:

Tbh the real equal thing (not balanced, equal) would be a scaling based on team statistics.
So the more power the team has (power*crit* feroctiy for each char added together) the more HP the boss has, and the more defense the team has the stronger the attacks of the boss.

In the end you get an encounter that is equally long for every setup and then the gear choice of each of the members doesn’t matter anymore.

So basically we don’t need gear with stats anymore with this approach. ANet might as well just remove stats from gear and balance them internally.

Actually not at all ! It would make the balance of gear matter.

On a side, if bosses have a strict balancing policy, party with four Zerk, and a Soldier will make the Soldier super extra uselessly tanky and it’s damages worth nothing because of the extremly extended lifepool of the boss in “anti-Zerk” mode.
And the Zerk will have way less difficulties to survive seeing the boss will hit weaker and extra life will be useless.
It’ll promote the lack of diversity in a party.

Second case: boss is weaker when he can’t be in “anti-X” mode.
Then, mixed gear type in a group make the boss weaker, allowing everyone to team up.
Full zerker party will face a sooooo high life pool that it make the extra damages not worth the time it take to kill the boss.
On an opposite side, full tanky boss will hit so few that it’ll make fight looooooooong.
But then, everyone will go Celestial, and we would end in the same trouble as currently with Zerk.

hazenvirus.8154:

No gear set can do better damage or be equal to zerk except against husks, and objects (teq,kitten,…), asking for soldier gear to out perform zerk in damage makes no sense. It should always be able to provide the best damage compared to other gear types because it sacrifices all defensive stats…. If all the new fights based damage on HP then everyone would stack as much HP as possible with a specific combination of damage stats and that would be the new meta.

Defensive stats shouldn’t reward you with more damage, they are there to help you survive. If you can survive without the passive cushion then run zerker, but if you want to play a tank you shouldn’t expect to do as much damage as zerker, you should expect to have some more sustainability.

Having different mechanics in a fight for dealing damage to a boss like protecting a turret is fine and it exists in some fights like Claw of Jormag with the golems, but zerker should still be dealing the most damage to the mobs you are protecting it from, unless they take the husk route, but in that case zerker still outperforms other power builds.

Conditions are there for damaging too.
Also, it’s not a question of “life became damage”.
It’s more a way to let people promote defense over offense without making the game easier/boring.

Imagine a dungeon where you can choose to activate a damaging cloud to surround the area. Zerk would die too fast of the acidest level, but defensive build could resist it and use it to bring foes down.

Zerk group => toxic rank I
=> kill all of the foes by themselves with few damages from the sparse cloud

Mix group => toxic rank II
=> kill the foes with the help of the toxic cloud while taking care of their life

Soldier/Healer group => toxic rank III
=> let the acid cloud kill most of the foes with some help while dealing with surviving to it and the foes.

spoj.9672:

Exactly which means the problem isnt berserker. Its the difficulty level. Fractal bosses at scale 50 are much better balanced for 5 man groups.

Not exactly. It’s more because mastered zerk build is faster than mastered soldier build.

To break the “one build type” meta, it need mobs, boss, events, world boss where some statistics provide a faster way to complete the goal (kill the boss for example).

If we could find a way on PvE content to make conditions, vitality, or compassion accelerating the fight instead of slowing it down and by making theses mechanics shift to promote a different value each time, we would “break the zerk meta”.

- Turrets killing the boss that players can heal/protect to make them kill the boss (or during events)
- A trigger that make players inflict their HP amount as damages to the boss
- Promoting the Retaliation buff

Abbehemoth.2471:

500 units at .75? How is this even a question? What you are proposing is a one/few time sell that would need to be expensive as hell to cover the future revenue loss from not selling repeated sales of the product..
The bolded part is my argument.
Unlimited 5$ sells of inventory expansion > a 15$ permantent unlock for all present and future characters.. This is what I have been trying to convey in the thread..

As sad as it can be to say that… Guild Wars 2 will not exists for centuries, nor that players stay for decades.

There’s many factors that make a “all characters” bag slot not a bad idea.
- New players will still have to buy them.
- Old players will still be willing to buy gem store items instead of bag slots.
- Arena.net will not stop to add new products to the gem store for players.
- More people could be willing to buy an “all characters” bag slot than people willing to buy several times a current bag slot.
- People could go to other MMO and will not pay things in GW2 anymore.
- Arena.net could make GW3 and everything bought will be lost anyway.

Nike.2631:

The way you nerf ’Zerker is reduce the base healing of self-healing skills about 15% (with a corresponding increase in Heal power scaling) and suddenly most players no longer have the skill to survive existing encounters and have to gear for more sustain (any of the Toughness/Vitality/heal power family).

Will just make Celestial the new meta.

If you want to break the “one gear type” meta, you need to make encounters who are more efficiently done by the lack of one stat.

Then the meta would be to have all armor types and many weapons.
And for the players who want fun, they would have to take care against some mobs and help their friends against others, promoting mixed group over “one stat build” group.
Things never black or white, people may have alternative weapons or builds for specific boss without looking for the “best optimized of the death build against boss XXX”.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS :
The monster/boss must be doable by zerker (or any non optimized group), but it must not exist a single stat prefix for too much of them to be doable efficiently.

These must be done for :
- Dungeons (fractals or not)
- World Boss
- Trash mobs (because they’re part of the PvE too!)

Heal stealer
=> steal heal from player
Healing became dangerous for the party and vitality/toughness help surviving with fewer heal.

Life stealer
=> steal a percentage of life from players
Vitality is a bad thing, the more you have vitality, the longer the fight

Condition absorber
=> absorb specific conditions to boost itself
Specific condition should be avoided. (ex: Fire elemental absorb burning to get Fury)

Spike Shield
=> reflect a percentage of direct damages
Zerk will need an incredible amount of heal/boons because they will kill themselves from their too high damage output (or will have to wait between their burst for their heal spell)

Reflector
=> projectile or conditions have a chance to be transfered back to the character
Distance OR conditions are dangerous to use

Attrition Aura
=> Apply conditions to players every few seconds
Promote condition removal/heal/vitality to make the fight easier.

Controller
=> The boss sometimes use control before a big attack
Promote the use of stun break to avoid the attack, or the boss to be stun too to cut the cast, or healing if the attack is not deadly immediatly (conditions?).

Terrorist
=> The boss will die alone, you can just help him dying faster, but your main goal is survive
Promote defense over offense.

If the cap is not reach : no stacking issue

As soon as you reach the cap, condition duration don’t matter anymore. Longer duration help stacking more, but when the cap is reach, you can’t stack more, then only damages matter.

When the cap is reach, it means that enough conditions are applied to reach the cap.
When you do a condition build, you try to optimize your ability to stack conditions too, they’re able to refill constantly the stack.
Other build type can “accidentaly” apply conditions too, but they’re weaker.

An example of how condition slots can be locked uselessly :

- Berserk Necromancer
- 6 points in Spite (power + condition duration)
- 4 points in Curses (precision + condition damages)
- 4 points in Soul Reaping (ferocity + class bonus)
- Curses trait : Master of Corruption (Corruption recharge 20% faster)
- Utilities : Corruption – “Blood is Power” (Apply 2x Bleed 30s + grant 10x Might 12s)

Precision, Power, Ferocity, and a trait improving a spell to get 300 power from Might 12s every 24s.

So…
When using it, it apply a 2x 39s Bleeding.
With a CD of 24s, it lock 4 bleed slots for 15s and 2 bleed slots for 9s.
With the 200 condition damage he got from Curses trait line, it make a bleeding tick dealing 53 damages, and 68 damages when the 10 Might buff are up.
The Might buff are there for 12s.

Damages done are :
(4 bleed x 12s x 68) + (4 bleed x 3s x 53) + (2x bleed x 9s x 53)
= 4854 damages

Now, what about a Condi Necro just AFK with the scepter auto-attack ?
With full condition from gear and trait line, a bleed tick damage is 127.

Now it’s a little more complex.

4 bleeds are locked during the first 15s, then 2 bleeds are locked during 9s.
2 Bleeds applied every 3s by the scepter (with enough duration to stack themselves).

Damage not done because of the locked slot are :
4 bleed x 15s x 127 + 2 bleed x 9s x 127
= 9906

Damage loss are 5052 (51%), because of one spell used every 24s. And it’s only for 2 bleeds !

But sources of “accidental” bleeds are many !
- auto-attack who inflict bleeding (warrior sword, thief pistol…)
- minor trait who apply bleeding on critical hit
- spell inflicting bleed aside of an other effect

Currently the max DPS loss is :
25 × 84 = 2100 (bleed) +166 (poison) + 414 (burn)
Total : 2680 DPS
I didn’t add confusion and torment because of the few classes able to apply them and there special way of dealing damages.

Sure, it’ll not solve the condition cap issue, but it’ll at least prevent the negation of having some conditions builds mixed with other type builds.

Baby step by baby step is all we can hope currently, still better than the nothingness we’re used to.

They could also lighten the condition system by preventing characters lvl 80 to apply bleed/poison/burning conditions on bosses if they don’t have at least 900 condition damage from gear+trait line.

Just a full exotic condi gear with condi runes and 0 condition damage from trait line is enough to match the prerequisite.

What I never understand is why they don’t made a quick fix so that when you try to apply an extra stack of condition, instead of discarding the last one, discarding the weakest by checking which one is linked to the player with the fewer condition damages.

The cap would still exists, but condition builds would actually help because their conditions would have priority over, exemple, the bleed applied by a minor passive trait on critical trigger of a zerk/soldier character.

They already track condition damage real time to compute the damages done.

Then it’s “play at what you want”

And sorry for rogues, I mean thieves.
But there’s a berserk trend. Killing faster and no condition caping is appealing even outside dungeons. But as I said, it’s a trend, not an universal rule and requirement. Even if Berserker was not a trend, the “survival” part could diversificate the possibilities.

I’ve done all fractals (at low level), but there’s other dungeons, world bosses, dynamic events, and a whole incoming expansion.

Is it me or Revenant will be the "all-profession-in-one" profession?

- Selecting what profession you want to be for the next fight (legend + weapon)
- No "too polyvalent weakening" because of the choice done (take that Engineer!)
- Only one character to level up (take that rerolls!)

Everyone is talking about making a revenant around me...
Remind me the overpowered WoW Death Knight at Lich King, and Monk at Mist of Pandaria...
*is sad now*

Good evening!

I’m here to start a discussion about what we can do to expand the game without trying to change it (or not too much), by using the current mechanism with imagination.

Please remember an important thing : it’s about diversification, not replacement or full change of what’ll come in the futur to fit a unique fighting paradigm. It’s more about making flavorful fight. If they became the usual fight, it would be a failure.

I’ll open with some ideas

Survival

Currently, surviving is something we do aside of beating our opponents.
What matter is dealing damages without dying in the process, because the only thing granting us victory is to kill before it kill us.
Then, monsters are designed to be slaughters before they kill us if we manage well enough our spells and dodge.
Damage is the first concern to end a fight, and the more damage are done, the faster the fight end. With conditions too easily reaching their cap, we got the “berzerker only” trend we all know.
Of course, a dead player will not damage at all, and surviving is not completely useless.

Now, imagine a foe/boss you can damage, but eventually reduced or at key moments only, its life is depleting anyway, automatically or if the correct action is done.
Then, what matter the most is surviving it while damaging it is just a bonus.

A declination would be that it’s not as vulnerable as when we complete a specific task.
Being able to complete the task is now as much important as damaging, pushing survival interest up. Then you can go full focus on damage, but for those who want to play otherwise, they would have something they can try to do their part without the need to conform to the “berzerk trend”.

And bam! We’re exactly on the original statement of Arena.net “play how you want”.
Damage would still be a core mechanism, but it could be given alternatives.

Sneakiness

We have rogues and mesmers with invisibility, teleporting skills, and not a single encounter provide emphasis on sneakiness. Being able to trick some trash mob guard to knock him from behind and avoiding the fight if successful.
Or at least, disabling him momentarily to gently slaughter his friend nearby before taking care of him too.

Jumping

Jumping puzzle dispersed in the whole world, and I can’t remember any encounter where people have to reach places to fight or evade deadly strikes. Could provide some interesting alternatives to “dodge it or die”, an other way to dodge things. Could unlock specific buff or help.

In a boss fight, someone could choose to go jumping over the fight to provide help from above by activating help or deactivating traps. Aiming a cannon at the boss to explode it’s shield, removing boss AoE faster (extinguisher for fire AoE), spraying power buff… Or making a mistake and poping adds :°

Run Forest

Cripple, Chilled, Swiftness, teleporting skills, but for when a fight where someone can kite some mobs or must run with an object to prevent the boss to reach it?
The mobs can be linked to the surviving part, their life depleting automatically, making them not worth damaging them.
The object could be pass from player to player like barrel/crab mini-games if a player feel that he will not be able to flee the boss any longer.

It’s now midnight for me, I’ll end here for now
What do you thing of these ideas? Do you have others to share? Improvement to these ideas are good to share too!

Thanks for reading!