Guild Wars 2

chemiclord.3978:

I mean, how happy do you think players would be if half their group were to spontaneously die during a Tequatl event due to things they couldn’t even see?

I wouldn’t spawn any Spirits in the Tequatl battle, hehe… sounds too brutal and is too close to griefing. Basically it’s “just” spawning new mobs in some places of the world. Spirit Dancers have to explore the world and look for those new encounters. In short: it can be implemented very gradually and over time each zone gets more and more of those challenges. I like the suggestion above about the new conditions, which drain your engergy bar etc… could be exclusive skills of the demons in Spirit Mode.

I really enjoy the discussion about hard mode, since it’s challenging content for players at lv.80 apart from our lv.80 zones. Griefing should in no way be possible, so it’s a quite difficult task for our devs. Even if it is a very small amount of griefing… it still is.

But maybe there’s a way around it…

A spontaneous idea here: Spirit Dancer Mode (Hard Mode 2.1)

You learn the ways of the Spirit Dancers. The ways to see the other side. Once you learned this style, you can enter the spirit realm. From now on you can see what has been invisible from you before, but be aware. All that you can see now, can hurt you now as well.

In short: you toggle the Spirit Dancer Mode and from then on hidden demons, evil spirits and other evils appear in the world. Sometimes they are the ancestors of living creatures and join them in battle. They only aggro Spirit Dancers and heroes have to fight both: demons and normal creatures.

It sounds quite boring to do all done content again. All hearts, all waypoints… again? No. In Spirit Dancer Mode you can find new secrets. Once an empty cave is now a home of a long dead witch who sends out waves of it’s minions to Spirit-only events.

I’m really not sure if this could be griefed, what do you think?

Guhracie.3419:

snip

Merry Christmas to you!

No hurt feelings, all the best to you too

Kulvar.1239:

Lion’s arch have too many bonuses

Other capitals seems dead. A rework of the other capitals in order to facilitate crafting by bringing closer workshop, auction house and bank is a first step to make them attractive.

A suggestion from my side + horizontal progression

I love Ebonhawk, not because there is crafting available or the opportunity to enter a dungeon, but because of the relatively richness of things to do. I can climb houses, get to beautiful viewpoints and find hidden books about Ebonhawkes lore. Most of all because the city is truely living, a lot of really fun events going on… it’s just awesome.

Now how can we make a city feel more alive + include the horizontal progression conzept? Make your character (accountwide) progress in a cities reputation. I’m not going to talk about the non-grindy way of progressing but rather the rewards, something you get which doesn’t make your character stronger but let’s you have a bigger variety of things to do in cities.

The more reputation you have in a city, the more doors can be opened by you. But what can we find inside the houses?

• one house might be the starting point of a jumping puzzle. From inside you get to the roof from where your puzzle starts.
• The jumping puzzle may lead you to a chest, but that’s not it. There are certain spots where you can extend the jumping puzzle – build new steps/platforms to unlock more parts of that jumping puzzle. The parts you need for it can be found in other people’s houses.
• You find an event-npc. Now you can trigger a fun event for you and other players around.

example-events:
-) a checkpoint race (similar like the torch event in Divinity’s reach)
-) three children play hide and seek with you. Stand in a zone for 10 seconds while the children hide – then you can tag them when found. Timelimit: 2 minutes.
-) dance with Furcoat. Furcoat is a npc who invites players to a dance. You enter a stage (groupfriendly activity) and have to stand on the right locations while the floor burns to a certain rhythm. When you’re hit, you are knocked to the ground and are out, until the last one is standing and survives.

In short: the concept is about unlocking new activities in a city by progressing in a city-reputation. New cultural skins are unlocked for citizens loved by the folk.

Merry Christmas to you all!!

@Guhracie: sorry, it wasn’t my intent to come around as rude, just an honest question with a good answer, thank you. Wording could have been better by me.

Zone-progression has come up in this thread a few times and I really like it. People would return to “old” zones and give those a revival. Some thoughts about that:

• The Living story did one thing very well: make players play together in the same zone, building a sense of community. If every zone would get a revival by zone-progression, it could lead to player fragmentation and servers would feel quite empty.
  Because of this I’d give each zone a big bonus for a week in order to make it more attractive than other zones at the time. Progression on a specific zone shouldn’t be reset though, so that you don’t have the feeling that you’ve worked for nothing.

• Events are the main content of the game, but a.) rewards are very generic and b.) medals seem kind of pointless. You get a better reward, but you can’t feel the difference between a gold medal reward and a silver medal or bronze medal reward. A horizontal progression system could be to collect medals in a zone which contributes to your zone progression. Since the medals we have are a bit easy to achieve, I’d add a new platin medal which is quite a bit more difficult to obtain. It’s NOT about dps or damage you’ve done in general, but about completing certain objectives. When you should simply defend a seraph base, for platin you should defend 3 markers for a minimum of time without going to down state.

Yes, this would mean a rework of each existing event, but you could do it gradually by releasing only one new zone with zone progression at a time. This would also focus players to a single zone. It’s permanent content though and you could still work on progress in zone X when zone Y arrives.

EDIT: Mithril Medal: You have to activate the Mithril Mode at one NPC which scales your character back to -2 levels of that zone. Now you’r just like a player while leveling up, so no griefing… just another alt. For a Mithril Medal at an event you’ll have to be in that mode and accomplish certain objectives without going down once, and staying over 50% health. Hard Mode GW2 style.

lakdav.3694:

Please include the many posts about the engineer hobo-sacks as well. Just a minor thing, but a thing nonetheless.

and what do these rants have to do with horizontal progression?

I wonder what’s the biggest obstacle for creating new events in the game. Sometimes when reading dev-quotes I get the feeling that voice-overs are.

Would you guys be happy with more events, even though there were no voice-overs?

a suggestion how faction reputation could be implemented:

• you get a codex from the faction leader
• in this codes you gradually unlock lore-pages, artwork and small stories about the faction by completing faction related collections.

example:
find and insert 15 specific centaur-weapons (non-tradeable trophy-items you get as a guaranteed event reward (gold medal) for a unique centaur-related event; you’ll only get one at any of these events in the game).
—> unlocks in the codex: A lore entry about centaur battles + a centaurslayer-weapon
—> unlocks in the world: When you wield that weapon / have it in your inventory, some new events will trigger in centaur-related zones. These have +300% higher droprates of faction-related questitems.

In order to keep players together, have a considerable bonus magicfind to a certain faction per week.

PS: make it harder (more objectives for these events) to get a gold medal.

Septemptus.7164:

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

Imho factions reputation could be interesting, when done in a non-grindy way. Instead of doing the same events for the faction over and over again, maybe it could work when finding a certain number of unique events for that faction hidden all around the world and do each of those once.

If you do like 20-30 different events in the world or maybe small chains of events (2-3) you can use them to get fraction exp aside from normal ways like doing hearts, maps, whatever you place in here.
Those events would rotate once a week and can be done only once a week, but they would only give some extra fraction xp, aside from normal stuff.

Bear in mind that supporting fractions should be gained retroactively for every heart (etc) done already per any character so people who went for map completions wont get in bad positions.

Please make fractions reputation and make it a way to obtain cultural armors.

Well my whole point of doing a variety of content once to unlock higher tiers of reputation was to get rid of doing the same events over and over. And why that timegating, something players obviously hate a lot?

Hearts were an afterthought to the game to guide players who come from “?-MMOS” to GW2 through the maps. I don’t like how this is turned into main-content. They should rather improve the event-system imho instead of having players do that static content again.

I’d love if reputation works 100% without time-gating. You also should be able to pause your progression for as long as you want and continue when you feel like it. If you’d have a reputation monthly – to do 30 events per month – and you have 25, those 25 shouldn’t be deleted once the new month begins.

Immensus.9732:

i dont see what kind of progression you could have from that is more like not boring grinding which is very good still

Well you have a slowly growing collection of treasure-maps and gradual rewards coming with it. Progression is horizontal, because you don’t get more powerful when completing one of the 25 maps.

If you define horizontal progression as gear progression without stats, you could simply unlock new skins instead of minis for completing each family. A centaur-champion slayer unlocks centaur-themed armor.

Elthuzar.9478:

I cannot think of one thing in this game that cannot be considered a grind to someone, somewhere.

To me grind is doing the same thing over and over again. This is boring. Finding new events, experiencing new stories in the world, isn’t grind to me.

The achievement is kind of optional since you don’t get anything but AP from it imho. It happens while you play. I’d call it grind though, if there was a piece of armor attached as reward.

Currently we have a lot of hearts in the game, the heart vendors sell low level armor sets, spread among the hearts of that specific zone. How could you make this relevant for high level players?! I’m 80 almost since release, why should I care for green lv.35 gear?

Well, what if:

• there is a new armor-recipe for a cool new armorset (the recipe from the gem-store OR for 500.000 karma)
• it requires a piece of a low armor-set (e.g. a lv.35 green helmet from one of the heart vendors)
• 5 zone token (you get 1 from completing 4 unique events in a zone)
• and additional 100.000 karma

…instead of having this new armor in the gem-store for 800gems.

The Lost Witch.7601:

One question:
What happens to a champion as you capture it? (The one that remains in the open world/or doesn’t remain?)

It remains, since you could call it griefing to “take away” champions from other players.

Crazy idea no3:

Dr. Heinemanns critter box: Dr. Heinemann is a NPC who sells critter boxes. Each critter box has 8 empty slots for 8 random critters (the small neutral mini-animals all around the world).

• find those 9 critters and put them into the box
• bring the full box to Dr. Heinemann and exchange it for either 2g or a random mini from Mini-Set 3 (which you can only get from this activity) (chance to get a rare mini).

You also get a bestiary from Dr. Heinemann once you’ve traded with him 3 times. From now on each found and traded critter will get an unlock in the bestiary. A full bestiary yields the title “Crittermaster” and a special Mini.

another crazy idea, I call it “guards and treasure maps”

First of all we know that there are a lot of veterans in the game, some of them in not very obvious locations. Killing one veteran would give you 1/5 piece of a random treasure-map from any random area in the game.

• it can take a while to get all 5 parts of a map since you could get the same piece again from another veteran.
• combine the 5 parts to a treasuremap which shows the location of 3 champions in a zone.
• only one of those guards a skin (one of the skins from the champion loot bags). Find the correct one and kill him to get the skin guaranteed. Kill the wrong and you’ll get the skin from one of the other 2.

Why this way?

1.) You can’t run around with a farm-train since everyone would have different 3 champions on his map. The skin only drops if you have the treasuremap in your inventory. The map becomes worthless once you get the skin.

2.) You’re rewarded for exploring the map since there are much more veterans in very different locations. A more longterm-project than directly waypointing to each champion and be done with the farming after a month. You’d get those map-pieces while playing the game… something you collect until you get the puzzles complete.

Example:

Player A kills veterans in WvW. After a month he accumulated 4/5 Queensdale map-pieces, 2/5 Wayfarer Foothills map-pieces, 3/5 Southsun Cove map-pieces,… etc. His friend player B killed the same veterans, also in WvW, and got totally different map-pieces. He completed Wayfarer Foothills just minutes ago. Now 3 champions appear on his WF-map. One of these guards a skin. He takes Player A along, but since only he has champion XY on a completed WF-map, only he can loot the skin.

It was a lot of work, but it’s not too random since he coud watch the progression via. the map-pieces. The more veterans he kills, the earlier he gets his next skin.

Important note: the map-pieces need to have an own UI, so that the bags won’t get full of these. Something like the wallet I suppose.

Time for some crazy ideas. Here’s the first one. It’s called head hunter challenges. Content for 1-2 players.

1.) You buy a signet of capture from a karma vendor
2.) You cast it on a champion in the open world.
3.) Now you return to a Norn fighting arena.
4.) The claimed champion is waiting in the arena to fight you. The arena is instanced but other players can spectate, just like Queens Gauntlet but without the dome. Just an invisible wall.
5.) You can bring along one player to help you.
6.) increased rewards: 5-8 dragonite ore and 3 champion lootbags and 1 skillpoint. Once a day you have +500% MF on that special skin the champ is dropping.

here’s where the horizontal progression comes in:

• there is an achievement for killing every champion in the game. You have a checklist (!!) (including location) where killed enemies got crossed out.
• once you’ve defeated all champions in a family, you unlock a mega-champion of that family as extra challenge.
• rewards would be minis for each killed family, a 22slot bag for each family.

So here horizontal progression is about progressing in difficult challenges, finishing a checklist and getting partial rewards for completing certain categories (killing each champ of a family (e.g. centaurs). This could accompany a reputation-system as well.

Elthuzar.9478:

To add to the NPC faction idea. What if your achievements for slaying monsters granted abilities and bonuses when fighting those creatures, in a similar way to WvW ranks. For example:

• Kill 500 Centaurs to gain a rank in Centaur slayer

I don’t get it why people want more grind when they could have a system which isn’t about doing the same things over and over again.

GW2 is a game about exploration, the design is that you move on (enemies who have been alive a while give bonus xp). I’d do it more like this:

1 centaur-related event = +1 point
an other centaur-related event you haven’t done = +5 points
a third new one = +10 points
a fourth new one = +15 points

when you repeat one event, you get 0 points for it. Find a fifth one = +20 points. …

This way you will be encouraged to go out and find events you haven’t done before. Only players who find 90% of all the centaur-related events will get to the highest tier of reputation.

For the last tiers there could also be very hard player-started events which only trigger for top tier players. Like this: “the Seraph commanders think about a final attack from their highest rank elite soldiers into the heart of the centaur-fortress”.

Deified.7520:

Another idea I had last night was how you acquire items. You don’t only have to rely on drops from monster and RNG.

Gw2 is a universe full of lore and a beautiful world. Use it! Make finding and build items an adventure instead of something they just drop.

I love that idea, but think of it: not even Legendaries got any adventure, any lore or any interesting quests attached, just boring mats-gathering. It seems that there is little dev-time available for such kind of things

Kulvar.1239:

I come here with a top 5 things that shouldn’t be added to the game.

+ Mounts
Asura’s waypoints is faster and enough. It will prevent overloading issues and NPC obstruction too. Also, it feel more appreciable to me to see my character go afoot in his journey, dodging and fighting ennemies instead of running like a steamroller across countries without looking at the landscape. We’re adventurers and the world is so rich and beautiful ! And it can be enrich

Personally I’d love mounts. Waypoints take away the sense of having a HUGE world in front of you imho. The reason why they added waypoints (? correct me if I’m wrong) is the fact that you should be able to play with your friends whenever you log on.

My solution to this would have been: A player should be able to summon his friend/s at any time to any place (once an hour).
And 1 waypoint per zone (at the entrance of that zone).

A mount is an awesome prestige object with a lot of potential for horizontal progression. I’m against flying mounts, but groundmounts are just a part of a fantasy world imho.

Imho factions reputation could be interesting, when done in a non-grindy way. Instead of doing the same events for the faction over and over again, maybe it could work when finding a certain number of unique events for that faction hidden all around the world and do each of those once.

cesmode.4257:

reforging.

-snip-

I think Blizzard is removing this mechanic from the game, or already has, since they have a better system in place. But this wasn’t a terribly bad system either. It gave you a bit more flexibility on gear.

what’s the system in place? Didn’t they remove it because the game had a too high emphasis on stats? Personally I don’t want GW2 to become all about statistics (when you don’t feel small changes in gameplay). Here a quote from Blizzard:

Reforging was supposed to be something that let players customize their gear to change their playstyle a little bit. It ended up just being extra work (and math) that had to be done if you wanted the most optimal gear.

If GW2 could adapt something from WoW, I’d say it’s their new ideas about stats:
Stats where you feel the difference in combat.
-) movement speed (on boots)
-) cleave (increased aoe damage; on weapons)
-) sturdiness (no durability loss)

nikitnq.7143:

Weapon dyeing please.

Maybe make it that weapon “dye slots” need to be crafted and the weapon “upgraded” with said slots.

I love what they did with SAB, a different color for harder challenges.

spoj.9672:

I think the suggestion on this thread would be something worth considering aswell:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Dungeon-Boss-Arena/first

Basically its an arena where you can select dungeon or fractal bosses to fight as a group or solo simply for practise or fun. You could also introduce gambits to the arena. There wouldnt be any currency or loot rewards to prevent farming. There could however be achievements tied to it and maybe even the prestigious mini lupicus (untradeable) for people who are able to solo lupi in a certain time.

I like the idea of arenas, hence my previous suggestion of such with npcs roaming around the map who act as bosses in that arena when found + acts as 1v1 duel place also.

What would be nice in these arenas: the possibility for other players to watch (like Queens Gauntlet), but with an invisible barrier instead of the dome.

VOLKON.1290:

After going through a battery of conditions you could unlock the new weapon for your character, which would in turn start a new set of conditions towards unlocking the next weapon. Ultimately, once you’ve unlocked all weapons and met a set of criteria following that, you could earn a new title (“Grandmaster of Weapons” or something…) and possibly a new set of armor skins for that character. Maybe even a minipet or the like.

I prefer Nike’s suggestion of a certain NPC for each weapon who has some challenges for you instead of grinding your weapons to 400 in order to unlock the next thing. It should be more about quality/skill rather than quantity/grind imho.

Wouldn’t if feel more rewarding? Compare:

Just Something I Picked Up
‘Class Mentors’ have been added to the world. Each mentor belongs to one of the existing Professions but has their own unique take on what that means. They may be masters of lost arts, privy to secrets from foreign lands, or simply picked up ‘a little something’ along the way. Each mentor will offer players a series of tasks throughout their zone culminating in a new mini-dungeon. Characters of any class can answer the call… But for characters whose class matches that of the mentor, there are even greater benefits.

Completing the instance for your class mentor will immediately unlock a new weapon type for you to use and reveals three new utility skills (listed on a line between the 6-point utilities and the elite skills). These skills typically cost 15 skill points and often share tags with existing skills allowing you to blend them into and enhance existing builds or combine them to unleash entirely new creations!

Now I am the Master…
Once a mentor’s tasks are complete, they will also become a karma vendor offering 3 new weapons skins for the weapon type they teach and specifically themed to go with the skills they reveal. Show off your new moves in style!

Master Kaigen-Li (Elementalist)
While the lands of the Tengu remain shrouded behind secrecy and vast stony walls, there are still those who feel wisdom must be shared or it is not wisdom. Meet Master Kaigen-Li a Tengu elementalist who needs your help finding a scroll lost since the Rise of Orr…
Weapon Granted: Main-hand Sword
Skills Revealed: Conjure Night’s Sword, Riddle of Silence (cantrip), Signet of the Starry Heavens

to

for example unlocking all skills on all starter weapons, getting ‘n’ number of kills with each weapon, etc. After going through a battery of conditions you could unlock the new weapon for your character, which would in turn start a new set of conditions towards unlocking the next weapon.

I think the game should become more about tracking your personal performance than about achieving better/stonger gear.

Leaderboards make little sense to me in certain aspects:

• I don’t care who did the most damage in that boss-battle. Probably it was a Berserker Warrior (add a profession/geartype as you like) anyway.
• I don’t care who cleared dungeon XY the fastest. Probably they skipped most mobs and I don’t enjoy that kind of playstyle anyway.

What I would be more interested in: my personal performance and my progress of that. I’m still not interested in my DPS since this could be used for segregation. If that sparring-npc told me that this was my best performance by far since we sparred together, this would mean something to me though.

Even the most unskilled players could see their improvement and feel rewarded that way.

We kind of have this system already with the new fractals instabilities. You can see your personal (group) progress by the challenges you’ve conquered, but you can’t really say: “I’m better than you” because the fractals are still random and there is no DPS meter and time-runs make no sense for different fractals of a certain instability.

Now I’d like to see something like that (like the Queens Gauntlet) for players who don’t enjoy organized groupplay (aka dungeons).

what I would like to see with all the progression systems in the game: make it easier to actually see your progression.

Personally I find it quite hard to see which mats I’m still missing for my Legendary. The Achievement-UI rework was a nice first step (follow specific achievements), more would be welcome.

Fror.2163:

Introduce guaranteed rare (or better) at the end of a dungeon path if you have met some or all criteria

I’d go against more RNG, rather more token as reward. I like the idea of having a list of bullet points of things to do, so that skipping half of the content becomes a bad idea. I have no idea what this has to do with horizontal progression though.

Septemptus.7164:

4. THINGS THAT MONEY CAN’T BUY – legendaries and all that
Everyone will tell there are things that money can’t buy but relaying on RNG is the worst possible way.
I pointed it already so I will write it shortly.
We need stuff that aside from new skins added to the game will be only obtainable by doing certain things.
First of those would be new legendaries. Those needs to require a lot of effort but the effort you have to do by your own. You need to get rid of T6 mats, lodestones and all those items or make certain (maybe time gated) ways to get them with 100% accuracy.
So we could know that doing something for example 150 days will get us legendary item but it won’t be random. It will be something certain. You can add some RNG to it that could reduce basically the time, but you have to get certain results.
I think that you should get it tied with dungeons, challenges, titles, maybe achievements, karma and all those bound currencies and items.
The idea is that when you have a legendary item, you earned it time wise and challenge wise and it shows that you are at least decent if not awesome.
(not like current legendaries that can be bought or you can both mats for them because getting them by yourself is a RNG pain).
This can also be used for other items/skills etc.

Technically you have to do a lot of content already to earn your Legendary. The Gift of Battle makes you play WvW, the Gift of Exploration makes you do World Completion,…

BUT all this was mutilated by the decision to make the Legendaries tradeable.

Nike.2631:

THE NEW MASTERS
“I haven’t seen that trick before!” — famous last words

The fighting spirit of Tyria has lead to countless styles and techniques, handed down through the centuries, mixing and flowing across the years like 10,000 streams of courage. Its time for you to drink of these waters. Welcome as Guildwars 2 reveals the next level of horizontal gameplay in this permanent Living World release.

Just Something I Picked Up
‘Class Mentors’ have been added to the world.

I can’t say how much I love this suggestion, lore relations is something I really miss in GW2. It’s not perfect (because skills still rely on skillpoints instead of exploration) but kitten close. I hope they do something like this when implementing new weapons.

Let writers do the writing, personally I don’t care if there are no voice-overs when you have a lore-rich environment instead.

I’ve thought of a new system for horizontal progression that uses options/skills we already have in the game and combines it into a collecting activity.

• we already have environmenal weapons which aren’t as powerful as other profession skills
• those weapons are spread all over the world
• we have kits (think engineer)

now I’d combine that to something greater:

• There is a new elite/utility-skill: “environmental weapon”
• This skill can imitate any of the environmental weapons you’ve unlocked.
• once you’ve reached lv.80 you can unlock environmenal weapons by finding them
• This skill works just like an engineer bundle: you activate the skill and the first five skills turn into environmental weapon skills.
• You can swap in and out of that weapon just like with any other weapon

The skill can copy any of the environmental weapons you’ve unlocked, the weapon won’t disappear after usage but just goes on CD.

Collect them all! Balance shouldn’t be an issue because environmental weapons aren’t designed to be more powerful anyway.

You’ll get specific new unlocks for breaking certain barriers. E.g. once you’ve unlocked 10 environmental weapons, you get a CD decrease on your environmental skill. (or a special new environmental weapon).

Marcus Greythorne.6843 has some very good ideas, I won’t quote them but they are worth a read through his multiple posts

Thank you for the kind words, Ronah!

Conski Deshan.2057:

-snip-

I’d go a very different route personally. Grinding stuff or things that only a small minority can achieve just so that not everyone has the item just doesn’t sound fun to me.

There are a lot of different skins in the game at the moment, most of the prestige ones hidden behind the black lion chest gating. My suggestion here:

• weaponskin-token rewards for certain long non-time gated meta-archievements in the game. People had to do a lot of things for the meta when the corresponding LS was live, so that non-time gated meta should be much harder, but still not too grindy.

• don’t forget to add Laurel sinks – prestige skins for a high amount of laurels.

on a further note I’m supporting the suggestion to change dailies to a weekly so that you can miss a day or two and still manage to complete the 7 laurels per week.

evolution from Queens Gauntlet to horizontally progress in a Gladiator-like arena in the open world:

a small idea how to keep those fun PvE-bosses around after the living story chapter is gone:

• each zone in the game gets one arena (which can also be used for 1vs.1 PvP duels)
• every day 5 random bosses spawn on any of the 25 maps and wander around.
• if you find one, you can talk to him and challenge him: he responds: "sure, we meet in the arena
• now you walk to the arena and queue up (in case duels are going on) the boss is now available to fight for you for 15 minutes.
• he counts as a champion here too, so you get a champion lootbag for a win. + each boss has a single unique skin, rare drop-chance.
• the battle is not instanced, but only for you. Others can watch and cheer for you.
• after the time-limit you won’t fall to your death. You only get kicked out of the arena and lose precious time since the boss is only around for 15 minutes. If someone else want’s to duel at that time, the boss-time gets paused until you’re back in the arena with him.

you can only challenge higher tier bosses if you have defeated the tier below. You should be a worthy contender.

on a further note:

as these arenas can be used for 1v1 duels and these are not instanced, other people can watch. This opens up new possibilities:

*tournaments: 8 players can queue up for a tournament (still 1v1 battles)

• king of the ring: 10 players in the arena, only one leaves the ring alive …

PS:
each arena fits the zone, BUT no orange or red floor
arenas are in pits without glasswalls or woodbars. Instead there is an invisible border outside players can’t cross. This way you can watch the battle without something in the way.

Add new non-combat utility infusions (and perhaps more than 1 utiltiy slot per item)

ideas from a reddit thread:

• % chance to not damage armor on death (thanks pwnitc)
• % chance to slowly revive on death. (Similar to the Revive Orb. Might be very handy in difficult JP where no one’s around. Doesn’t work in WvW or Dungeons as long someone is in combat) (thanks pwnitc)
• a shout when engaging combat depending on your race/profession. (For XY!) (thanks pwnitc)
• +50% larger mini pet (thanks Anwn)
• + 500% tonic duration
• Special Idle animation

I would love to see the home instance as a showcase of your progression in the game, just like the Hall of Monuments in GW1. What has to be done though imho:

• give players a portal stone which ports you to the HI and back where you were again.
• Redesign some of the homeinstances. Imho the norn HI is underwhelming compared to the Human and Charr HI.
• add fun activities to the HI which you can do with your friends
• add fun events like the ones from Ebonhawke to the main cities – people should feel rewarded for visiting cities other than Lionsarch.

One idea which comes to my mind is related to a system we know from Flame and Frost:

• you can find certain items in the world (or parts of it, making it also a collectible game) which belong to someone. You can either sell those items for 1g each or try to find the owner. (there is a little hint like "this belongs to someone from the northern areas of Plains of Ashfurth). This would reward exploration of the world since those objects can spawn anywhere in the open world in any zone.

• once you’ve found the owner you’ll have to help him before he listens to you (do any event which is related to that person). This would bring players back to different zones and let’s them experience long forgotten events again.

• it’s not time gated. You can look for the npc connected to that item whenever you want. These items will get a seperate bank-space. This way you could work towards a complete item collection. (returning the item to the owner creates an image of that item with a little lore-one-liner which takes that bank-space now).

reward… well I guess there has to be a little incentive. Maybe you could give the player +600% magicfind during this one event. Or achievement points. A full collection could also be rewarded with AP and/or a title associated.

a build up from that:

have also some “veteran objects” spawning in various random locations in the world. You could sell those for 2g/piece or return those to the associated veteran. Doing the related event however scales you back to a lower level than intended… making this a hardmode event for you

Include Utility Minis which have to be found in the open word (through exploration – like collecting pieces of them and putting them together).

possible Utility Minis:

• collects your loot
• has a single bag – more bagspace
• eats all the junk-items you collect
• …

in general I think that all types of collections are needed in GW2 to give people more to do instead of focussing on armor only. It should be usable in combat though, since this is what gameplay is all about.

Merge Living Story with your home instance like this:

Characters from the LS which you’ve the metachievement of appear in your home instance.

Braham and Rox as Skill-challenge like encounter: you can spar with them, each time you beat them they get stronger & stronger. Beat them on difficulty: “elite” to turn them into vendors who sell you their weapon-skins for 100 laurels each. (difficulty elite: you have to be alone in the instance to participate). You also can earn one Skillpoint per day when defeating them.

Thanks “The lost witch”, you’re doing great summaries!!

why is it actually bad to gate through skill alone? Why are people leaving when content is skillgated? I just remember almost only positive feedback on the Liadri encounter.

I think what a lot of people who have never played GW1 don’t realize: a mmo can just be fine without vertical progression, IF there is something else to progress (like different skills in GW1).

GW2 at it’s current state wouldn’t work with no vertical progression. There need to be something that would take it’s place (a LOT of new skills for example), but there isn’t. A single healing-skill a month won’t do.

replacing an armorset with another isn’t progression.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

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

Even though my more specific questions and suggestions haven’t been replied to I want to say thank you for the opportunity, I enjoy this collaboration a lot and I’m looking forward to contribute about horizontal progression.

The thing that gets me most exited from your last post is the review of RNG in GW2. I think the current implementation just doesn’t feel very rewarding. Thanks for reading.

Ordwen.3217:

Some Ideas of mine:
- Rework the reward system for defeating world bosses, you should get a better reward for beating a boss instead of two blues and a green which also drop from trash mobs.
-add a hard mode for dungeons with unique rewards
-add raids ( max 10 players, but it could be a problem with the actual class system “every class can do everything” u know what i mean )
-as mentioned before rework crafting 400-500
-continue the dragon story, before the dragons fall asleep ( maybe in the crystal desert or the northern shiverpeak mountains )

PS:I dont know if this was mentioned before , but when can we expect the precursor crafting update ? A lot of players would appreciate this.
( the recipe shouldn’t be a drop, u should buy it by a vendor )

90% of your points are offtopic

better loot for worldbosses when most of the players just spam 1 is not a good idea

may I suggest a way to equip account-bound items without the need of log in to another character:

…the right-click option on your character-window also shows all accountbound items which are usable in that slot, and you can switch to those without having to switch to another character first.

I’d love to see crafting stations in the spawn of the eternal battleground. It’s a bit weird to go to the Borderlands/Lionsarch when you have a queue in any of these maps.

What do you think?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method.

A review of current RNG metrics.

hi Chris, can you elaborate on this? Does this mean you are very aware of the fact that the last time Anet talked about “higher percentage chance”, this had little effect for the single person but rather for the whole playerbase?

Have you considered linking droprate to certain achievements? (e.g. if you have achievement xy, your droprate on that single mob increases considerably). What I mean: droprate for single mobs could be tied to achievement progression. The droprate of the Tequatl weapon could be around 10% when you’ve completed the Tequatl-related achievements.

The same way droprates for Lodestones (e.g. Charged Lodestones) and a lot of other items could be tied to these achievements:

• dodge 50 lightning elemental attacks
• defeat a veteran lightning elemental
• Kill a lightning elemental with 100% health left
• find 8 different locations of lightning elementals
• … (non-grindy achievement)…

I’m very much aware that this would make Lodestones much less rare, but imho they are far too rare. I’d turn them into untradeable.

FeveredDreamer.2693:

More generally the whole process of legenary creation is distinctly unlegendary and all around meh. Grind X McGillion items, get a precursor, voila you’re now really special.

I can’t agree more. Personally I’d turn Lodestones into untradeable mats and decrease the number of stones I need for a Legendary down to 3-10. Personally I’ve rarely seen Lodestones drop, and I hate that most of the people need to spend money on the trading post to purchase Lodestones.

Seriously, how much money do you WvWers (like me) out there make via playing WvW mostly? I can say that for me, even though we kill a lot of enemy players, it’s a VERY small number.

EgonVenkman.1907:

3. Ascended between Exotic/Legendary – This must be a joke statement by Anet. To get the item, you need crafting at 500. To get crafting to 500, you must burn through the same materials needed for the Legendary. It isn’t some sort of checkpoint on the path to legendary, but a hindrance and delay.

I agree. It would be nice if precursor-crafting would use ascended weapons as part of the material list imho. So that you basically upgrade your ascended weapon to a legendary one.

EgonVenkman.1907:

Progression thread, so here are my thoughts/feeling; ignored as they will be.

1. Ascended Existence- One of the biggest bait and switch tactics done by a gaming company. From the manifesto to Colin Johanson: "Everyone, including casual gamers,
by level 80 should have the best statistical loot in the game.” http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-27-guild-wars-2-preview?page=3
It shouldn’t even exist, but here it is with all the current devs towing the company line of “We really meant for it to be in at the beginning, scouts honor. It wasn’t a complete kneejerk reaction to lure/keep traditional mmo content locusts.”

It really gets tiresome hearing Colins quote from the Manifesto again and again. It’s just a bad argument coming up with this since the live game is different than any concept of the game before release. If something isn’t working (people obviously left the game) you need to fix it for the good of the game. If players don’t like the 100% horizontal way of the game, devs have to come up with new directions.

The power-increase from exotic to ascended is marginal (5% for the full set) and in no part of the current content mandatory.

Seriously, if they’d still design true to the Manifesto, this would mean that they haven’t learned anything in the last year.

Lol, I’ve lost the thread of the conversation, what is it you want us to talk about currently? Something about vertical progression? Do you have any specific question for us?

Izzy, do you feel that the entry to ascended crafting is simple enough for casual players? I’m a bit between casual and hardcore and find it quite difficult to get it which mats I need and what I already have.

Wouldn’t it be much more customer friendly if you guys work on an UI which shows on one screen which mats I need and how much of it I currently have in my bank? It would go a long way to a more directed playstyle imho.