Guild Wars 2

I think a quite relevant reddit post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1usdvw/unanswered_ls_questions/cel8hpa

I love all the speculation about the Living Story finale, tons of great theories…
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1upxg8/so_arenanet_just_sent_us_this_teaser_for_next/
so a part of me thinks that it’s awesome to have many open questions. On the other hand, will we get indepth answers at some point in the future?

Nike.2631:

I’m just trying to imagine the caterwauling that would spring up instantly when someone realizes that my putting a Regeneration boon on them is depleting the effectiveness of their on-demand self-heal. Just thinking of it makes my ears hurt . No amount of math or logic would stop people from shrieking that they are being de-buffed by another character that’s on their own team . I don’t know that I’d even blame them as ultimately I am usurping their agency in their own survival, even if doing so helps them survive.

I think you misunderstood my suggestion. The idea was that the self-heal only depletes for the exact amount healing which you receive from the regen-boon (and only if you’re damaged). The result would make no difference – healing yourself with regen (depleted selfheal) would heal the same amount as healing yourself without regen (unchanged selfheal).

Regen would have the benefit that you don’t have to stop doing damage while you heal, so in this case the one who provides the regen-boon would give the one to be healed more DPS.

Yoh.8469:

Healing Power I think should have a greater effect on outgoing heals rather then self heals, but it’s still only part of what needs to be done to make support actually viable.

Well I agree that healing power is quite a poor option compared to all the offensive options we have. I feel though that a rework of Regeneration is more needed than a rebalancing of it.

Yoh.8469:

Regeneration should just straight up scale better with Healing Power. Lower the base amount of Regeneration, and vastly increase the scaling. If your going to pour into Healing Power, you should get a lot of bang for your buck.

So that you’d become invincible? If you have good healing on yourself AND a good self-heal, what will kill you then? There are a lot of possibilities to keep Regen running most of the time / permanent.

I’d say if you have good regen on you, deplete your selfheal. Both combined is just too powerful imho.

a bit offtopic, a thought of healing in the game and making support more important:

The idea is to greatly buff regeneration, making it much stronger, but at a price:
Each regen-tick on you that heals you depletes the value of your next self heal for the same amount. Your self-heal power would regenerate when no regen-boon is on you, but only slowly.

Alternatively seperate “Regeneration boon” into

• the old Regeneration
• a new boon: Power Regeneration

Only Power Regen would deplete your next self-heal.

Nike.2631:

On Vanquishing:

I wonder if we couldn’t get some sort of nice Vanquish Mode by setting them inside Dungeon maps rather that open world zones.

In addition to keeping the size of space to be cleared more manageable, it also gives solo players a chance to actually see and explore some of this terrain that might otherwise be going to waste for that player. Leverage existing assets for use by another segment of the player-base.

Basically remove or downscale/replace the boss encounters with single-player appropriate challenges and give people the chance to really explore these spaces without the worry that the instance owner is about to leave and the whole thing will shut down and boot you out. It even allows some of the features built into the Dungeon maps to be better used than they are now: I believe some of them have mini jump puzzles in them that don’t actually do anything. Make those puzzles part of the Vanquish mode with a veteran critter or a chest (or both ) at their conclusion.

Rewards could be unique to each map as suggested for vanquisihing outdoors, and you could potentially grant a small number of dungeon tokens – not anything like a full 5 man run, but enough to help the player feel like they’re involved and making progress. Maybe around 5-10 tokens depending on the estimated amount of time the vanquish run will take. Or even incorporate a time trial: finishing get you 5 tokens. Finishing really fast gets you 10 .

first I thought this is bad because you won’t take out the people from the open world, but I really think that your arguments are totally valid. I love that idea actually. Soloplayers have no reason to visit those maps, even though the maps are wonderfully designed.

A lot of possibilities:

• open all paths at once with less enemies in each path
• hide a few chests but guarded by stronger enemies
• scavenger-hunt (Priory mission)
• optional: guard a historian (Vigil mission)
• sneaking sections (Order of Whispers stealths you and you need not come near to patrolling enemies)
• hardmode / challenge for soloplayers totally possible now
• even time trials

awesome idea (as mostly) Nike!!

It’s only… I don’t think that Anet designs content for soloplayers only. I wish they did, but I think they set their priority on group-content.

Yoh.8469:

Yeah, WvW is the only tricky part.
For normal skills it’s shouldn’t be too difficult, just have a WvW set of objectives for the skill in addition to PvE ones. Complete one or the other and you unlock the skill.

I think this would also be a bad idea to include certain objectives to WvW to unlock skills. WvW is not about exploring but rather about coordinated teamplay with your server. You would just hurt your boys when wandering off-side and killing champs, vets etc. They could implement such challenges in the Obsidian Jumping Puzzle… but I doubt that would be too fun for everyone involved.

As I said, I think the best solution would be to unlock every skill for WvW as long as you’re in there. High level players (which are probably the most) want you to use your skills when you need them in the zerg / camps. Too many of the players are already unhappy to see upscaled players – this really hurts your and their experience imho.

Yoh.8469:

A Skill Tracker
When you want to unlock a new skill, you double click it and it will be added to your skill tracker in the upper right hand corner of the screen like Dailies. (up to 3 at a time)
In order to unlock it you have to perform the list of objectives mentioned, just as you would a daily.

For example: Unlocking ‘Lightning Reflexes’ would require you to dodge attacks a certain number of times, and kill say Air Elementals some 20-30 times, and maybe even complete a jumping puzzle.

Higher tiers require more activities, and more challenging objectives.
After you unlock the skill you also get a little bit of EXP.

What great about this system is that it habituates people into doing daily and monthly activities, as well as reuses existing systems.

I really love that idea, people should be familiar with daylies so it shouldn’t be too hard to grasp.

One thing I particularly love: Skills aren’t gated by prerequisite skills or a number of skillpoints but challenges spread in the world. You might not have access (due to low level) to a specific locations, so you should probably do the easier ones first.

What a pity that we already have all our skills unlocked with a quite boring unlock-system instead of your suggestion: doing a huge variety of things in order to unlock each skill. It would have been awesome imho.

(Yes, it would be a bad system if you only play WvW, because in that szenario you want all skills from the beginning. I would have unlocked all skills for WvW (just as it works in sPvP) because you’re already scaled up to 80 also. Once you go back to PvE you’d have to continue unlocking skills via exploration & activities.)

Aveneo.2068:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I also don’t like the idea of more hearts. Anet tries to get rid of them (see: high level zones) because they are just static quests.

To my knowledge they were actually added so that people would be able to go to these known ‘quests’ in order to explore the world and stumble across dynamic events along the way.

Not having them in Orr has nothing to do with wild claims that ANet is trying to ‘get rid of them’ so kindly stop spreading misinformation as this is simply not true.

take a look at this statement:

Lewis: If Elona or Cantha are released, would we expect more vista’s, skill points and hearts or would they be more like Southsun or Bazaar?

Hearts would be the least likely thing we’d add. The renown system we felt did a nice job to guide players through our world at lower and mid levels

Colin: There could be, but hearts would be the least likely thing we’d add. The renown system we felt did a nice job to guide players through our world at lower and mid levels, but we feel at higher levels we really can embrace the events system. I think you’ll see is a larger sense of innovation and growth in what dynamic events can do for a zone. That doesn’t mean vistas and skill points are out the window as it’s highly likely you’ll see those come back with new zones as well.

http://www.guildwars2hub.com/features/interviews/colin-johanson-interview-looking-ahead-part-2

Harbard.5738:

Cycling events are a great idea to deliver horizontal progression
I really like all those suggestions of expeditions and random DE chains. i’d run them even if there was no progression or rewards at all. The challenge I suppose is making them unpredictable enough. But anything, especially DEs, that change daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally, whatever, is just great stuff.

Why group events suck though
I just wish there were no more group-only events, because they stay dead unless a zerg or something runs the whole chain in 10 mins and flips it and then it stays dead for hours, maybe days again. All solo events should scale to prevent all the facerolling, but no events should be group-only. It kills the spontaneity that’s the best part of DEs: You’re just exploring and bump into one guy doing some event, and another guy joins you and stuff scales and you end up on the other corner of the zone with 10-15 people and everyone had fun, as opposed to “begged in chat for an hour to get enough people to run a temple and was glad I was done with that crap”.

I wholeheartedly agree, I haven’t thought of this before but it’s 100% true. I also claim that champions should scale down to 1 player (not so much health) since it takes forever to bring them down when you’re alone.

It’s still equally as difficult when the champ would have 1/4 of it’s health since attacks are just as strong and you would have to know how to avoid those. Doing this for 20+ minutes though is just not fun.

Personally I’d reward people for exploration with a very simple change:

• enemies who haven’t been killed in a while give bonus xp
• let these mobs drop much more interesting stuff when having gathered enough bonus-xp.
• give them a chance to drop parts of a progression system (like pieces of an artifact from the mob-family they are).

In order to make people enjoy roaming around in the world looking for new events, the zone needs to have enough exciting things to find, enough things to do. Binding this to bonus-xp makes the whole thing dynamic, because farming-spots will change a lot.

personal story for a horizontal progression system? And how do you progress once you’ve completed the personal story? Repeatable quests?

I also don’t like the idea of more hearts. Anet tries to get rid of them (see: high level zones) because they are just static quests.

ColinJohanson.2394:

So a question for this, how would we message well to newer players how a system like this would work? One of the challenges of events is simply: they may not be running when you’re in an area. Is it ok to make people stand around waiting for an event to happen so they can get a specific thing from that event? How would they know what to do if the event wasn’t currently active, what form of messaging could help them understand the state of the world – while still being immersive and not requiring them to use a 3rd party app to progress?

I think that events should be the key to horizontal progression, since they are the main content of the game. Not repeating hearts or doing static quests.

Maybe you could implement Expeditions.

• NPCs in cities would have short timers where they gather people (1-4min). They would then open a small portal to the borders of a zone where a meta-event might start soon. You then follow these npcs through the portal, to the event-location, and start the eventchain together. (like WvW breakout events)
• these NPCs would be doing this constantly. Once NPC a is through the portal, the portal disappears and a new NPC arrives with a new portal. You never know where the next portal takes you. As tons of event-chains in the game start constantly, there should be no downtime. New players could just go to the NPC (a big orange event-marker on the map, like the breakout events in WvW) and wait for a short time, to participate in any of the event-chains in the game.
• you could make this a daily: help NPC xy on his expedition.
• a few of the really big boss-event chains are added to these expeditions as well, so you don’t have to rely on boss-timers anymore.
• People in the same area as the NPC are scaled up to the zone-level

@Horizontal Progression:
There could be NPCs like this in each home city, who only create portals to events in that land. E.g. Divinity’s Reach —> Kryta. (Boss-events could be an exception / the boss-portal could look different).

Now you gather reputation for Kryta when you help the portal-NPCs in Divinity’s Reach.

BUT I also think that exploration isn’t rewarding as it could be.

Veterans in the open world are sometimes quite well hidden, and I’d create a system which encourages me to hunt down as many different verterans of a zone as possible.

• you could give each veteran a name and some progression tied to killing all veterans. Veterans aren’t dynamic like evens, so they should be there once you arrive. Or let them guard something which drives your progression forward, this way it would even be there when the veteran has been killed recently.

You could also hide certain artifacts in the world which would make exploring feel much more rewarding. For those who don’t care about the reward tied to it, these artifacts could be worth 1g at a vendor.

FourthVariety.5463:

GW2 has plenty of gameplay reasoning why you can attack all the time pushing skills. GW2 has few to none gameplay reasons why you can push buttons to keep alive. Sub Classes are a new way to provide more. Gameplay deepens because instead of exploring 30s attack chains, you can now look into 30s of defense play with button presses other than wasd + roll.

In general I like your thoughts about this, but…
1.) GW2 has tons of other defensive abilities which are more important than dodge and wasd imho, because you can’t use dodge unlimited + wasd doesn’t makes you evade certain attacks. You have quite a few reflection skills, you have invisibility, there are ways to block attacks and a lot of interruption too. It’s not as trivial as you make it look like. There are just more than 1 way to deal with certain situations, which is a good thing, because theoretically no specific profession is required to do something.

You could ress a downed ally by guardian bubble / reflection wall. You could ress him with thief invisibility or you could even ress 3 allies with elementalist mass-ress. Ranger could make his pet ress an ally, or the healing-elite spirit.

The problem here is imho, that a lot of those skills aren’t balanced well enough / they have little use for something else. Some of the skills also don’t seem to work properly. Imho Skills like the Rangers Heal-spirit should be much more versatile, should work more like a bundle. Use it and you have a few new options like mass-ress, huge cleaves who knock back enemies while having strong retaliation and protection on. What I’m trying to say: make certain skills more attractive by giving them more utility instead of being useful for 1 thing only.

2.) Now what I would like to see from you are specific examples. How would you implement subprofessions which take the focus off pure damage dealing builds? And how would you do this to make WvW still possible? When you have 30+ players in one spot using defensive skills, it’s already quite effective – even if it doesn’t look so when you’re playing with 2-4 buddies.

scerevisiae.1972:

I would love to see GW1-style sub-classes return, even if it were a limited form, eg: you can choose skills from a subclass’ weapon skills if your own class can use that weapon.

I think you are misunderstanding, GW1 had dual-classes, we’re talking about a sub-class, e.g. thief —> assassin

A sub-class only the specific profession can choose.

I don’t know if I should quote my statements above subclasses here again. Mainly I see subclasses in our current system already. Trait in the beastmaster traitline and take pet-specific traits and skills makes you a beastmaster. We already have subclasses.

The thing that’s missing imho is a visual representation of that. So each trait of each group of traits would have a certain cosmetic-point-value. If you’ve traited/specced 50 points in favour of beastmastery/pets, you’d unlock various cosmetic traits to make your beastmaster look like a beastmaster (bigger axes, bigger pets, new soundfiles,…)

A suggestion to fix racial skills (make them viable) and tie it to horizontal progression:

What if racial skills are for everyone, but can only be learned from a representative of that race? Now it would be a challenge to learn these (the specific race has the racials unlocked from the start) and you would have to use that skill in a task in order to unlock it…

…but finally the skills could become as powerful as the other utility skills + players had a huge variety of new skills to play with. It takes a bit of time to unlock all these skills, but they will be worth it. It goes without say that the skills need a serious redesign to be viable.

Orpheal.8263:

You can use racial skills also only, when you play the correct race.
So whats the stupid problem now with sub class skills, that you can use now only, when you play the correct sub class?

That’s the point: Who uses racial skills? They are designed to be weaker than the other skills because Anet doesn’t want to make any race required to be the best in what you do.

The same could be applied to subclasses. If subclass xy would be the best in doing dps, then it would feel as a requirement to choose this profession. Now because this would be wrong – what would we get? Generic skills like racial skills, which feel redundant.

I personally think racial skills are a failed design because no one want’s to / can use them in a serious build.

Quick question: how many skillpoints does your main have?

Why am I asking this: I’m questioning the implementation of skillpoints. My main has about 125 skillpoints and there are not a lot sinks to see skillpoints as a valuable ressource imho.

I’d love to have skill-unlocks tied to specific gameplay rather than to generic gameplay, maybe accompanied with a bit of lore.

the more I think of it, the more I doubt that new skills will ever be tied to lore. We already got new skills, just use up 25 skill points from the 100+ you’ve gathered already and that’s it.

They haven’t done it for these few, why should they do it for a larger number?

At release I thought it would be a splendid idea to unlock skillpoints with each levelup, even after lv.80 – but now I think it’s too easy to amass those because there is no real sink of them. Yes, you might need them for prestige items like Legendaries, but a lot of players don’t enjoy this journey because they see little progress + you might need a lot of money which you can’t simply get from playing the game only when enjoying certain playstyles.

An example would be WvW: I can’t say that I’m making money when playing WvW. I’m just collecting mats while I have no idea for what I should use them now since there might be a use of it later. Jumping puzzles don’t feel very rewarding for me either, nor does exploring zones. Both of these activities I love most though. I could run with one of the champion trains, but I’ve tried it and it just feels like boring zergfest to me. Zergs in WvW feel different because you have equal opponents often enough. But hitting on a champ who can’t do anything (damage… not really) is bland, and being proud of having these champion trains in your game… I don’t get it.

What I’m trying to say: I don’t feel that there is horizontal progression in some core aspects of the game yet. I don’t feel that I have accomplished anything when getting gold for an event. The season 1 reward in WvW was something I was progressing, but the reward was abyssimal and I doubt I’d do anything to complete it, ever again.

Skillpoints are too generic imho. No distinction between automatic ones via level up or beaten “challenges” (fast food challenges).

DarcShriek.5829:

Totally uninterested in player housing. I am interested in new lands to conquer. I am not interested in progression that means I need silk curtains rather than linen curtains. I am here to save the world. If I want to decorate a home, I’ll play the sims. It does a much better job of home creation than GW2 ever could.

I doubt that player housing in GW2 would mainly be about choosing your curtains. Chris already mentioned tasks, events and challenges coming out of this – some content where other players are involved, if I heard him right.

I’d love to be able to filter devs in the dev-tracker. Gaile Grey has tons of posts which might be really helpful to the people who need it, but for me it’s just spam.

I’d love to see home cities with lots of dynamic events (just like Ebonhawke) + add 2-3 jumping puzzles too…

kitten ed, I’m still dreaming about my nemesis… arghh what a great idea

Ghotistyx.6942:

Flipping a tower every 3 or so minutes would net you maybe 3 dragonite for your trouble if you were lucky, but finally taking that tower Red Team has been holding since reset would give you towards 30 or so guaranteed.

I really like your whole comment, this part would be especially cool if players / guilds had also incentive to hold a keep for a certain time. Imagine guild missions in WvW where you have to hold a camp for 10 minutes (tier 1) a tower for 30 minutes (tier 2) and a keep for 1 hour (tier 3). I read this suggestion on some blog last week and I loved it.

Drakenvold.9761:

there were talks of a Nemesis a while ago in a blog post,but was never fully done,im sure one of the tech wizz kids can post the Anet blogpost about the nemesis feature here

yep here you go:

Anet Blogpost

We’ve had long meetings, with our most colorful thinking caps on, to discuss how we will pay off all your patience during these early months of teaser content, and we’ve come up with some thrilling storylines that we feel will keep you intrigued and get you even more deeply involved in the ongoing progress of the Living Story. Aside from the Living Story main characters, we’ll also be surprising you with interesting villains, one of whom will become your personal nemesis. Again, no spoilers allowed, so I can’t tell you more than that, but you’ll recognize this sassy character when you see…um, him/her/it. <grin>

source: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/living-story-evolution/

I guess they were talking about Scarlet

The same here, but coupled with another problem:

I have no idea which character has explored which map.

I wouldn’t put a Nemesis and a companion in the same category

It’s a different thing if you always have a npc around (too many characters on screen, lag, easier instead of more challenging, AI issues,…) compared to occationally fight one in the open world.

A nemesis would be an event for every player who is around. It could be a challenge to create the most powerful Nemesis you can – and to defeat him. Hell, you could even write dialogue lines for him which other players can read in their chat. Time for the player to create content.

Zeldain.5710:

That’s a different and rare type of situation. Normal progression in WoW for basic gear might be 7 times, certainly not 71 times.

What’s the difference? The Tequatl drop is one of the most rare items in the game. The mount as well. It can’t be compared to normal progression.

Normal progression in GW2: dungeon token and karma-gear from temples. How often do you have to run a dungeon if you want a specific piece of loot from that dungeon?

Google BIS-gear for WoW and take a look at the droprates. It has nothing to do with normal progression. The same in GW2, although I agree that drops need a rework because in games like WoW you basically see the drops of the players around you, so of course you see rare loot dropping more often. In GW2 you only see your own drops.

I really hope Anet reads this Nemesis idea. The possibilities seem endless… O_O

• people would actually want to play dungeons with other players to see their nemesis
• you could go crazy with creating it: a heavy armor profession who wields a fiery greatsword, uses red guardian walls every 7 seconds, has 3 pets you’ve unlocked with your ranger, can rocketjump while spreading nullfields everywhere… whoaaaa
• player created dynamic events
• could be as strong as the player wants him to be

Imagine how many Trahearnes there would be. Greatsword wielding Necromancer… want have… ^^

Conski Deshan.2057:

The Gem stores impact should be absolutely minimal in Progression, go nuts with the skins and unlimited gathering tools but if you can buy the progression/ “end game” then what incentive does anyone have to work for it?

agreed 100%. I think the decision to make Legendaries tradeable was the worst decision in the history of Guild Wars. You never know if someone who wields a Legendary has earned it or just bought it for real money.

@Rin’s Nemesis suggestion:

Whoa this sound really interesting. I think GW2’s dynamic event system (outside and in dungeons too) would be perfect for this. You could also add progression to this…

• your nemesis can only use skills you have unlocked for any character of yours
• he can be cross-profession (Warrior/Ele)
• your nemesis can gain new powerful skills (you don’t have to balance this too much, since it is PvE only)
• you can have a armory-like feature for your nemesis where you can show him/his gear/his skills and traits to other players.

MAAAN, so many ideas incoming…
You can do things with your nemesis which you can’t do for your character, because it’s PvE only. AWESOME.

Think of all the reactions you would get from other players:
“Wow, was this your nemesis? He was pretty stong”
“whoa, that guy was evil reincarnate”
“omg that was hillarious”
“Hey, would you invite me to your party the next time you fight him?”

I’ve thought about another aspect of making a zone more interesting.

While I was running around in a zone while being downscaled I thought: now is it exciting to kill that mob over there? Can I get something useful for me (lv.80) out of it? The answer was no. I don’t have the feeling. So what can we do to adress this?

Another “problem” is that RNG feels just bad for most of the players. Some even hate it. How can we make RNG our friend?

What if…

• Each mob-family (Centaurs, Ascalonian ghosts,…) from a zone has a chance to drop something very cool looking. Centaurs could drop a chestpiece which is only a belt which may be the only way to have a bare-chested character.
• There is mob-family specific luck (can be salvaged from mob-specific drops) which increases the droprate of that one specific item above. (Of course there can be whole armorsets, so it’s open for further development)
• Normal mobs would have a really low droprate BUT the droprate can be increased up to a certain point:
• Mobs who have gained bonus-xp by being alive for a while will drop these mob-specific drops regularly. By farming those mobs (you have to move in order to farm them) you can collect mob-specific luck and increase the droprate of mob-specific rewards.

Your progression of mob-specific droprates could be included on trading cards.

To go even further and make it more interesting:

• The unique drop from a mob isn’t the item itself but a treasure map to the location on the map. http://i.imgur.com/udIGku6.jpg
• It may only be a part of that treasure map and you have to have all 4 parts to complete the treasure map
• Now you can compare the treasure map with your world map and find the location this way, or you have to explore the zone until you find the location by accident…
• If you arrive at the location a new event spawns. Most of the time it would be a veteran who needs to be defeated in order to get the mob-specific drop guaranteed.
• The hook: at 10% the veteran tries something shady. He might run away and you have to chase him down to not lose him (he despawns after 1min running), he might spawn a whole group of mobs to take you down. You don’t know what happens. It’s random and dangerous.

I think it’s this idea of an adventure awaiting, that would make me kill that random mob over there. The idea that only mobs who have gained bonus-xp can increase the chance of success would make me hunting down those mobs – but only if I could see the progress via an mob-specific UI.

I think probably the most important thing about this idea would be to make any drop here non-tradeable. Keep the trading post out of this if you want players to explore the world.

killcannon.2576:

Hyperbole huh? Nah…just facts, sorry. There is no way in hell you could talk a WoW player into running something 71 times waiting for a drop.

Even back during Vanilla I only had to run speed Strat like 10 times to get the rare mount to drop for me.

Droprate Strat-Mount: 0,7% (760 out of 105334)
http://www.wowhead.com/item=13335/deathchargers-reins

no comment

@comparisons to games like WoW (when people claim they could have a whole set of equivalent gear in the same time + rare mounts etc):

http://www.wowhead.com/npc=60400

heroic item droprates: from 0.6% (54 out of 8603) to 1.4% (118 out of 8603)
And you’d need enough people to do the raid with you + all the trash before. Aren’t raids once a week only?

your hyperbole is remarkable
(nah, it’s not, just tiresome)

JTGuevara.9018:

, but the thing is how would this work in fractals like swampland or dredge facility? Solo-ing on youtube for bragging rights? That will make dungeons competitive which I think is good, plus it adds a new dimension for dungeons other than “get loot & get out”.

Well they could start with classic dungeons, I have no idea how they’d do it in these fractals since these are quite a step up from classic dungeons in the sense that they require teamwork sometimes. (which is a good thing)

They would have to redesign the dungeons so that soloplayers could do it as well, yes this would be a challenge for the devs. Even more so if they’d come up with a nice fun replacement so that the content is still at least equally as fun as the 5man version.

instead of creating followers for dungeons (which I believe is not possible since you need intelligent AI for certain encounters other than npcs who are quite stupid) I’d suggest following:

Improve the scaling mechanics and make versions of each dungeon / encounter for 1-4 players. Now I would be able to enter the dungeon with my friend only and have a slightly different experience. Yes, some bosses might feel totally different (easier), but wasn’t this the idea behind scaling in GW2 from the beginning: Monsters get new skills, the more players there are.

BUT don’t forget people who enjoy soloing 5man content. There needs to be an option for not being scaled down to 1 player. It should show in your UI, so that people who managed to solo an instance will get the prestige when showing it on youtube. Why not reward those guys with titles too?

I think a lot more people would try to solo an instance non-scaled, if they learn to play it in a easier version – scaled for 1man.

To give incentive to play with a full group – rewards (tokens) should be best when playing with 5 players. Since bosses have less skills for 1-4 players it’s only logical to be rewarded with less token.

… to evolve my idea about vanquishing a little bit in the reward section:

What if…

• Vanquishing is repeatable
• Once you’ve done all 4 tasks (see suggestion above) you unlock a vendor-page at that npc where you can spend vanquishing coins (you get some coins for completing all 4 tasks)
• the hook: you can only purchase 1 thing, then the vanquishing tasks reset and the vendor becomes disabled until you do the vanquishing of that zone again
• prestige objects need at least 3 runs, most of the objects are purchaseable for 1 run though.

What’s interesting now would be the living story. Zones might change during living story chapters and some vanquishing areas with it.

Do you think this could feel too grindy?

timmyf.1490:

I don’t think the open world is challenging enough for vanquishing to be a thing. Previously in this thread, I suggested new instanced zones without waypoints that could include a vanquishing concept. I called them Wilderness Zones. Still think that’s a better plan.

I had also suggested that Order Missions might send you into those zones and included a few examples. I could dig up a link if anybody’s interested.

Personally I’d like to do Vanquishing in the zones we have, so that you see other players doing their things and maybe get sidetracked with other things to do. Wilderness zones would take you out of the old zones which would split the playerbase. I’m all for new zones, but these too should be full of plentyful activities and not for vanquishing only.

LOL you wrote about waypoint disabling while I was busy writing my posts ^^ great idea! :P I like the suggestion that players have to use their feet while doing vanquishing.

a small add to my vanquish idea: disable waypoints when vanquish mode is active

timmyf.1490:

As a counter-point, I’ve been crafting Damask and selling it at a substantial profit. This is the first time crafting has been profitable for me, so I’m happy.

People who play the tradingpost (flipping) will have access to much more mats —> the rich guys get even richer while the poor ones find no place where to farm cloth-mats effeciently.

I don’t know, maybe it’s a very bad idea, but what if mats could be purchaseable through karma also? So that people who play the game a lot have a chance to follow up to the guys who buy gems —> money / flip trading post (aka no gameplay involved)?

Chuggs.1682:

A third option would be to put a kill tally for each TYPE of mob in the zone that represents the total population, but then count all kills. So if there are 50 moas spread all over the map, as soon as you kill 50 moas you’ve got that part of the Vanquish done, even if what you actually did was kill the same 10 moas in one corner of the map five times each. As I write this, I think I actually like this solution the best. That way if you did a full comb-through of the map you’d probably get 80%+ of the way through the Vanquish, but then you could go back and clean up wherever you could find the right mobs.

Vanquish obviously works much more smoothly in an instanced dungeon, but I think the benefits (increased Zone participation and population) make it worth trying to work through the logistical difficulties.

Hmm vanquish in GW1 had certain characteristics:

• you had to do it in hard mode
• it could be done in a reasonable amount of time
• it had to be done in one go

Killing mobs in low level zones isn’t difficult at all, backscaling doesn’t work properly (in my opinion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Z788nLevI) so it just would feel tedious.

It also takes far too long to vanquish a whole zone in GW2, these zones are huge.

So how could we adress these points (because I really like your spirit of bringing players back to the maps)?

1.) What if…

• a npc can toggle vanquish mode on/off for you
• in this mode you are 2 levels below the current zone level (instead of same level or slightly above) OR you can only wear white gear (he offers 0815 white gear for karma – unique skin though)

now this npc can be unlocked when you’ve got map completion of that zone + lv.80. What I did here: make the game harder for you personally. It’s not griefing since you just represent a low level player, which happens to be around all the time in low level zones.

2.) now to the second point:

• the npc guy has 4 tasks for you. Each of those can be completed in one go easily:
• task 1: kill xy (number of) Ogres in that zone in 3 locations while in vanquish mode (these will be marked on the map when the mode is active)
• task 2: kill xy Centaurs in that zone in 5 locations (see: map)
• task 3: …
• task 4: …

These tasks can be completed whenever you like, you don’t have to do all 4 tasks on one day. You have to do one task in one go though – else it resets.

This would break up a huge but too easy task into smaller bits which would be relatively challenging compared to your suggestion.

Edit: and we DON’T want to kill Moas… we don’t. Just no

Vick.6805:

I refuse to believe that 2-shotting mobs is how the content was intended to be played.

I agree. The whole world should be viable content via downscaling imho.

draxynnic.3719:

That’s a reasonable goal. I’m busy this weekend, but can we think of ways in which people would be able to show off that they’ve specialised in a particular area without locking off build diversity? Say, having challenges in the world designed to be achieved by certain archetypes within a profession, that unlock new aesthetics – but keeping those aesthetics active requires having trait allocations within the bounds of the archetype? (For instance, keeping the aesthetic changes for a “poisoner”-type thief would require having a minimum number of traits invested in venoms, while activating the aesthetic changes for a stealth-based thief requires having a certain minimum investment in Shadow Arts).

That way, we might be able to get the best of both worlds – we don’t get any mechanical restrictions from such a “soft subclass system”, but people who specialise in a given archetype can gain cosmetic benefits over time that demonstrate their usage of and skill with that archetype.

well people loved skill hunting in GW1. What if…

• you have the cosmetic-trait system I suggested above
• each of the Major c-traits are bound to specific veterans all over the world. Kill those to unlock that new cosmetic trait.

or even deeper:

• The profession trainer gives you tasks to become a true xy (xy = subclass e.g. Beastmaster)
• task 1: unlock rank 2 of zone xy (Beastmasters may have Jungle-zones) to purchase a Signet of Capture (this can only be used in that zone)
• task 2: capture certain traits from veterans in different zones (again: Beastmasters find beastmaster-c-traits in Jungle-zones)

lol, sorry, timmyf had the same idea before me… I didn’t want to “steal” that O_O

Subclass cosmetical trait line

What if you add 10 more points to each trait-line which are cosmetical only? You can’t use your trait points for it though, but c-trait points (cosmetical trait points).

Example:
Beast Master trait line (Ranger): 30 traitpoints (3 Major and 3 Minor traits) + 10 c-traitpoints (1 Minor and 1 Major c-trait).

Each c-trait slot (Major and Minor) has c-traits just like the normal traits, but those are only cosmetical.

Beast Master c-traits:

• Minor: you now are able to equip Beastmaster-gear-skins.
• Major I: your felines have a new fur-pattern
• Major II: your beastmaster’s gloves get claws (cosmetical only of course)
• Major III: your axes look 10% larger
• Major IV: your pet is 10% larger
• Major V: your drakes use new sound effects
• …

Orpheal.8263:

an advanced form of your profession like an Infiltrator, that is an superior advanced form of a Thief who is specialized in infiltrating places, gathering informations, stealth, trapping and assassinations with deathly venoms.A Rogue is just superior in stealing, over an Infiltrator, therefore the Infiltrator is superior in stealth, of that of a Rogue and the Saboteur is just medium in both perhaps, but therefore has the unique feature of manipulating enemies and makes alot more use of unique environmental weapons.

you’re talking about vertical profession. If an Infiltrator has longer stealth (which already is difficult to balance) it would totally ruin balancing. Also your subclasses seem to make the core profession non-viable. Each subclass does something better than the profession without.

What I like in your suggestion above:
different looks depending on your choice of playstyle. Give each skill family (like conjures, poisons,…) values for each skill and trait. (e.g. poison skill x: 10 points, poison trait y: 10 points). If your current build has more than 50 points in poisons, you unlock the ability to dye your gear in a new poisonous-dye or wear a certain piece of skin.

Imagine: a Ranger who has chosen enough traits and skills which strengthen the pet unlocks a new colourscheme/fur pattern for pets and an armorset designed with a lot of fur and stuffed animal-skulls etc.

Orpheal.8263:

You don’t get born and start to be directly a for example pope. Being the pope is a long chain of decisions in your life, your personal “career ladder”), that defines your role in your life andwhat you can become over time, because every profession has more specalized developed forms.

And this is where you forget that we’re in a game with alts and people who love to play different professions /characters. Currently suggestions how to unlock a subclass are all about having to play from 1-80 again, grind this and grind that. People already can’t stand that WvW profession is characterbound, how do you think they would react on subclasses?

Orpheal.8263:

Naturally Sub Classes would mean more Skills, but we haven’t seen so far alot more new skills getting implemented, because of t being too hard to balance.
Whe just haven’t seen getting every patch new skills, because ANet was over the past year just way too much focused on other content .

This can only be wrong, Anet stated multiple times that they have seperate teams who work on specific content. They have a small team which works on Skills & Balancing those (3 people if I remember correctly, Jon Peters and 2 others).

@Orpheal: I cannot see the advantages having a sub class system over giving us the new weapons / skills without being locked in a subclass yet. Why should a new weapon be gated behind a subclass which would limit my options?

3 Subclasses per profession would also mean more skills. Obviously it’s quite difficult to even implement one skill… judging on the implementation of new skills in 2013. If I remember correctly Anet has 3 people who work on skills. They try to find a balance for longer than a year now. It seems unrealistic to me to give each subclass enough skills to feel unique enough. This isn’t Rift where developers don’t care about quality of skills but quantity. My opinion.