Guild Wars 2

This situation puts players against player and keeps popping is ugly head more often than anyone with a modicum of decency would prefer.

One player may want the map reward, the rest just wants to open the loot bags that drop from risen. One player wants some item form the vendor on success, another wants some drop for a collection from failure. And this usually ends with a majority of shortsighted unscrupulous bullies who only see the short term rewards and do not realize the long term harmful consequences of their behavior, harassing the minority, which is usually a few players wanting to play the content as intended, which is attempting success of vents.

This has been happening for too long, it keeps happening even after a few changes that attempted to address the issue but where incomplete, and it needs to stop.

A pass was made to change some of these controversial events, but there’s still quite some of these left around. Mostly in Orr.

This can be fixed with measures like increasing cooldowns: If an event succeeds, the next starts instantly, or in no less than 5 minutes. If the event fails, the next one will take 20 minutes to start.

This change must come with a change to all those pre-legendary collection items that require anything to fail to get the item.

Also, there’s some events that produce a more ‘desirable’ event when failed, like the one at the pyrite peninsula that makes 1 champion event when failed which means a champion bag, but 3 measly veterans when succeeded sharing one event. In that particular example, what should happen instead is this:

• Failure: 1 event with just 1 veteran golem.
• Success: 3 events, 1 with a champion, 2 with 1 veteran each.

That way the champion bag goes on success, and success also means 3 chances at more map rewards rather than the same. So even if a player is alone and can’t defeat the champion, they can at least fight the other 2 veterans and still get bonus map reward twice.

Others produce events with waves of enemies on failure, but nothing on success. It should always be the other way around.

Of course, there could be always the “this is why can’t have nice things” punishment change, that simply removes drops from enemies spawned by the event. But that will usually met backlash. It should have been like that from the start having all rewards from vents as loot bags and caches and other drops at the end of the event on success, but it wasn’t, so now people got used to going around spamming staff 1 with a guardian rather than succeeding events or even focusing on the objectives of the event. So it’s hard to undo that damage without making these kind of players feel things are being taken away from them.

Maybe raid masteries should go into their own category.

That would mean getting increased only with exp from raiding, though.

Rather than having swimwear as an outfit, I’d prefer having swimwear customization, but right now we only have this:

• Diving Goggles
• A small beach in Southsun.

These force you into underwear, because we are poor and we don’t have swimsuits.

So underwear is our default swimwear, and swimwear customization would allow us to customize our underwear replacing it with swimsuits, and dye it.

But for swimwear customization to make sense, more places need to be added to put you in swimwear mode, because there’s too few right now. Just diving goggles and a beach.

For example:

• Hot springs (like Zelechor Hot Springs), healing springs (like the oasis in the wastes) and other pools of water in places with no prominent combat, where you can /sit and get a little boon effect for a long time, like healing over time and vigor.
• Lion’s Arch seaside beach bar and other relaxation areas in cities where people could go in swimwear, like swimming pools, the Grove’s ponds, saunas and hot springs and the like.
• Crab Toss.
• Southsun Survival.
• New beach activities or adventures scattered all over the world on sea and river shores.

But I don’t think swimwear should be ever used for outfits.

Well, it should have been like this from the start.

But “it should have been like this from the start” updates aren’t always well received. It usually depends on how the transition is done.

Remember when they removed MF from gear? Then people could at least pick the new stats for their gear.

Rather than getting a few relics backs, I would have preferred to exchange all these surplus +5 and +7 versatiles I got for +5 and +7 agony ones I can use to craft me some +9s.

Also, the enrichments need more variety, like WvW Rank, WvW Reward, PvP reward, map bonus rewards, exp from events, and map currency.

Deployable cannons would have to have quite reduced health compared to stationary ones.

With the same health, that’s a definite “no”.

Traps do not seem to work like ‘traps’ at all except for them getting hidden. Most people do not even bother to use them as traps. Too often they use them more like necromancer marks. Laying them right in the middle of battle under the enemy instead setting them, then trying to get the enemy to step in.

Traps could use some changes to return to their toots as tactical tools and deterrents. Something you actually want to avoid, not something you glace over.

• Traps should take a small time between their placement and when they are ‘armed’ and can trigger. The combined duration between activation time and arming time should never be less than 3 seconds. For example, it could be 1.5 and 1.5. Or 1 and 2.
• Once triggered, traps that pulse should leave a small window of time to react and evade out of it before it springs and starts pulsing. Something like 0.75s. Single effect traps like thief traps should remain instant.
• Traps should go on cooldown when triggered, and refresh instantly when expired without triggering. While a trap is set, it could get a sequence skill to ‘recover’ the trap. That removes the trap AoE, but refreshes the cooldown so it can be placed again faster than if it has triggered. These recover skills could have other effects when traps are traited. For example, recovering a Viper’s Nest could remove any stacks of poison on the user, and if poison was removed, the next Viper’s Nest placed during the next 60 seconds would deal 1 extra stack of poison.
• Traps should not be invisible to members of a team if anyone on that team saw the trap being set. If you see someone set a trap, your allies should know there’s a trap set there without you having to tell them by chat or voice. AoE reveal skills could also reveal traps.
• Enemies cloaked by stealth or hide in plain sight or similar effects should not trigger them. But if they lose the cloak right on top of the trap, they should trigger the trap right then without having to leave and re-enter the triggering area.
• Evading over a trap should not trigger them either, but as I said before, it’ll be possible to evade out of some of them right before they spring, so it would still be possible to force them to spring and get out of them, just requiring a bit more skills.
• The triggering pulse should always stay unblockable as a general rule for traps, but not any pulses after the first one, that’ll be in a case per case basis.
• The same trap should not be stackable with itself. It two players lay the same trap on the same location, only the strongest effects from each would take place on the overlapping areas, making more effective to spread traps than stacking them.
• The previous changes would make traps a more tactical tool, but they will also weaken them a bit, so to compensate the previous changes that make them a bit easier to avoid and less stackable, traps should be more powerful and dangerous when they do hit. If a ranger and a dragonhunter where to stack all of their traps in one place, not getting out of there, getting invulnerability or blocking after the trap springs would often result in instant downing without damage-decreasign effects, sending a pet to trigger such a stack of traps would often result in sacrificing the pet too, if it isn’t one of the high toughness and vitality pets.

Rangers should also get an elite trap to complete their set. Something like this would do:

• Heavy Log Trap:
• Lay a trap that releases a heavy wood log at the enemy when triggered. The log will swing 4 times, then drop. Hitting up to 5 enemies each time.
• Swings: Each swing of the log pushes enemies in the direction the log is moving (very short distance, 180 units or so), deals moderate direct damage and 4 stacks of torment.
• Drop: The drop deals considerable direct damage, weakness and if any of the enemies it hits is downed and has less than 20% downed health, they are instantly defeated.

Thieves should also get healing and elite traps. It could be something like this:

• Leech trap:
• Heals a bit when placed. When it triggers, steals health from the targets based on your remaining health. The lower your health, the more health is steals.

• Larcenous trap
• Longest recharge of all traps. 90-120s at least.
• When triggered, the Steal skill is recharged and any traits that affect Steal will also affect the one enemy who triggered it. This enemy and up to 4 other enemies caught in the area take damage and suffer 4s of slow. For each enemy slowed, the thief gains 3s of quickness, up to 8s.

I think those dream changes would make traps more fun and tactical instead being just dps AoEs.

Yes, they should.

I can’t count how many times someone gets the kill even though they were defeated and teleported back to base, the NPC didn’t have DPS conditions on, everyone else was accounted for in the map, and I was the only one who could have dealt the last hit, took more than 90% of the creature’s health, yet the enemy somehow still got the kill.

If they can’t fix who gets the kill, at least make it so whoever Finishes the creature first gets the kill.

runeblade.7514:

[…]This was how the bunker amulet worked before it was removed. The problem is, no one liked it.

Nope, there has never been mechanics dynamically balancing your damage.

Ithilwen.1529:

[…]

I’m yet to encounter a ‘superior team’.

There’s only players are inexperienced, players that are experienced, and players exploiting some bug or flaw in balance.

Against the inexperienced it’s suually a win unless my team mates practically lose on porpose. Against the experienced it goes 50/50. And the exploiters have to be pretty incompetent to lose.

It’s simple, the more damage you can do, the less you can’t take, and vice-versa.

The current ‘bunker’ builds can do way more damage than any bunker build should be able to do.

If you are going to go bunker, you are going to need your teammates to do most of the killing.

You can’t have a cake and eat it too.

And that’s how you actually fix bunkers.

Well, such a thing would require certain limitations:

• It must have certain costs. As a consumable, it’ll cost at least badges of honor. And as it has been already stated, it’ll cost supply.
• It should not be possible to repair disabled siege.
• I would not go with disabling repairing while under attack altogether, but the number of people who can repair a single siege at the same time has to have a limit so a massive zerg can’t outrepair damage from defenses. I would go with no more than 5 people at the same time, and the repair from those 5 people should not be able to keep placeable siege up permanently under attack of 2-3 superior arrow carts used by players with maxed masteries, only extend the time they will last. For location defenses such as cannons and oil, that could be a bit more.
• And, of course, using the repair hammers should require training a WvW skill, and be affected by either the Repair or Build Masteries in some way, or use a new trick & traps mastery along other consumables.

We have extra action buttons now thanks to raids, so it could be possible to use those extra buttons for actions like this, so hammers could be trained with a WvW skill instead being a consumable, but since we have the portable provisioner now, making it a consumable would make it more clear how many badges of honor you are spending on repairs, and make it count for the Big Spender daily. So I would stick with the consumable.

I would like something like this, but with the switching based on game mode rather than FPS, so it’s done on loading screens and doesn’t disturb gameplay.

When loading a WvW map, I want more performance, but when playing in dungeon instances and story, I can do with better graphics.

Nodes should be bound to accounts like JP and exploration chests, not characters or maps.

Otherwise people will always engage in gimmicks like these, and those who find those gimmicks too boring or strenuous will feel punished for refusing to do the same.

Rewards need to improve, but it should be on the content. Not from of exploiting design flaws.

And it should be all nodes, not just chests. Gathering nodes too. Each one should give more of the stuff, but take longer to reset and be usable just once a day for common ones and once a week for rare ones.

Switching map instances and characters should not be better than actually exploring the world and doing more events.

But what about those who bought characters just for that? For that, Birthday presents should be improved too, with some consumable that improves gathering and overall rewards the more you consume, up to a cap, like with luck and AP rewards. Right now the the more characters you own the more you can gather. So it’ll be the same, but from each node you gather instead based on all your characters’s ages, not by letting them sitting some place to gather or open a chest instead actually playing with them.

The Legacy armor box has 2 light armor sets and 1 medium armor set, but there’s still missing armor pieces:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Category:Unobtainable_armor_sets

• Heavy Scale is still completely unobtainable, except for the chest piece that can be obtained in Personal Story by heavy armor characters.
• Marauder is missing glove and boots.
• Studded is missing its shoulders and mask.

These sets could be added to the legacy box, or the missing pieces could be added as possible rewards for the Greatest Fear Personal Story chapters that do not have extra rewards, so they can be fully completed in story.

The basic Guild Armors:

• Guild Defender
• Guild Watchman
• Guild Archmage.
  Cannot be obtained either, except for the chest.

The guild armorer only sells the chest pieces, but these basic guild sets have 6 pieces. The rest were never added to the guild armorer and were only available through PvP, so they are now unobtainable.

Since many people is getting more Glory Shards than they can spend, the Guild Armor sets could be made purchasable with them in a new tab in the Glory Shard vendor, on top of adding them also to the Guild Armorer for Commendations, and to the WvW skin vendor for Badges of Honor, giving people choices to complete the guild sets again.

ElenaDragon.8401:

MithranArkanere.8957:

The PvP lobby is to ‘close’ to LA to get crafting stations. You can just walk through the gate to get to the ones at LA.

It’s not hard to get to other crafting stations, but the WvW one was the only one that allowed you to keep your “place” in the outside world. Going to Lion’s Arch means you lose it.

Hence why we should have two things in exchange: Crafters in the Guild Hall, and the option to return to whence you came in the Royal Terrace and Captain’s Airship.

Removing it from WvW it’s a good idea. There’s gear vendors if you need some quick getup (it still needs back items in those vendors, though), and we don’t really need people wasting time crafting, we want them scoring.

The PvP lobby is to ‘close’ to LA to get crafting stations. You can just walk through the gate to get to the ones at LA.

But Guild Halls could use the stuff, they are too empty right now.

The guild hall is currently ‘missing’ at least all other 8 crafters, Black Lion Trading agent, Bank NPC (although scribe and the guild vault have access to bank), and NPCs that can only be found in the Guild Initiative HQ like the Commendation and Favor traders.

Hey. Is there any chance you were testing changes to the map to use the cool participation+ Hero’s choice reward method using in Hot maps, moving part of the rewards to the system, and some of the changes slipped to live?

Because that would be great news, bugs and all, if that means we’ll eventually have the Hero’s Choice system in other maps.

Imagine participating in enough events in Ogre Wars, and instead getting just the same boring couple of rares as always, getting a Hero’s Choice chest that lets you choose between the usual two rares, a stack of 15…50 T3 leather, a rare material like a silver doubloon, a core or a crest; or an stacking trophy that you can exchange for an account-bound exotic Sam after you’ve gathered enough of them. All good choices, you can’t get everything so no excess rewards are produced, but you can aim for what you want.

That’s the beauty of the Hero’s Choice chests. One of the best things you’ve come up with over the years. Second only to limited stock vendors.

I have nothing against untradeable BLTC skins, as long as they can be purchased directly with either gems or real currency.

If its only source is going to be a Kompu Gacha box, a method so unethical it ended up banned in Japan, then they should be tradeable.

Level is used to determine more than stats.

The higher the level of the enemy, the higher the chances to get glancing blows, and the higher their resistance to your conditions, until they become immune to them. This is rather steep. If you see an enemy’s level as purple, you’ll barely be able to damage them, and they’ll definitely one-shot you. And they will likely drop nothing even if you manage to defeat them.

So levels are not a good way to increase difficulty through stats.

You’d have to use the tool GW2 has for this: Scaling.

Scaling does increase the levels of enemies in events, but little. It increases more their health, toughness and overall stats.

Mechanical regions and lore regions are different.

For achievements, “Maguuma Jungle” actually refers to a series of areas that were mostly known as “Tarnished Coast” in GW2, plus Brisban Wildlands which corresponds to the easter areas of Maguuma. Sparkfly fen is somewhere that doesn’t seem to have a particular name and has ruins from both Kryta and Orr, and Mount Malestrom is part of Steamspur Mountains, as you can read inside the detailed description of each achievement.

The areas that would be considered ‘Maguuma’ in lore are most of Brisban, the Maguuma Wastes and the Heart of Maguuma.

On of the problems gear drops have in GW2 is not making changes to old content based on new designs.

They changed drops to scale to player, so people stopped having so many useless drops since they would not equip that, and those materials didn’t havemuch use after leveling up crafting.

But since lower level materials were not very useful, they added uses for them.

But when they did that, they didn’t partially undo the scaling change for most of the game, only in starting areas. And now people get useless drops again as they don’t need any more freaking mithril, but most level 76-80 gear drops salvage into that.

One of the many cumulative solutions to that we could use would be increasing the chances of lower level drops for basic, fine and masterwork gear.

Other examples of changes that would allow players to aim towards those materials instead having to rely on RNG could be:

• Adding gathering nodes for the remaining basic materials. For example, they could be tied to events, available to those who participate in those events. Raid an enemy nightmare court camp, after fighting a boss or some waves of enemies at the end of the event chain, a coth node appears that can be used once a day.
• Updating boss meta-events in core content to the participation system, and giving Hero Choice chests with enough participation in all events of the chain, replacing the bonus daily reward we currently get, which is often 1-2 rare gear and 0-2 champion bags. These hero choice chests would give the champion bags plus a choice between the 1-2 random rare gear drops they would get before, a stack of 15-50 of a basic material, 3-10 of a fine material, or 1 of a rare material like a fragments, a core or a lodestone, depending on the level of the event.
• Taking more advantage of vendors with limited daily stocks. Those are great to let everyone have access to something without allowing anyone to get too much of something that way. With limited stock vendors, it would be possible to do things like letting players buy small stacks of a material in certain karma vendors that are mostly useless nowadeays, or trade some materials for others daily. For example, the Labyrinthine Clifss could be brought permanently as part of a Season 1 return, and it could feature a set of vendors available after a meta-event against the remnants of scarlet’s forces, that exchange some materials for others. The market has too much mithril? People can exchange it there for some leather daily. Market evens out itself.

Stand The Wall.6987:

[…]
My bad, I shouldve specified that I was talking about WvW and PvP. I updated the top of the OP.

Still applies.

There’s higher rank enemies in PvP and WvW. And it’s weird some NPCs do not have such ranks, but they should, like the guards in Legacy of Foefire, who should be noted as at least veteran, and the Forest NPCs, who are at least Elite in power.

Such scalings would still need to consider NPC rank, and wether the creature is a player or not.

So a cap scaling considering game mode and NPC rank would work across all game modes.

The cap should not be on the boons and conditions themselves.

They should be on the ones producing them, and the ones taking them, based on their creature rank.

That is, a single player should not be able to maintain too many conditions on many targets, and a single player should not suffer too many conditions from many enemies at the same time, but on creatures of higher rank like veterans, elites, champions, legendary and epic prop bosses, for those what they can maintain and what they can suffer should go higher.

You also have to take into account game mode. In PvE and WvW what a player can endure is higher than in PvP where they have more limited stats and upgrades.

Unless you scale them based on creature rank and game mode, any change done would just be either too much or too little depending on creature rank and game mode.

It’s a combination of some things adding up.

For example:

There’s a large difference between the highest earners and the lesser earners, and many of the highest sources of income are rather repetitive behaviors that many people consider extremely boring and are willing to do, and some of them are even so passive they can be done while doing other things.

Also, when dailies give 2 gold now, that gave more people a bit more gold to use, which means more people willing to pay higher prices in the trading post for stuff, which results in higher earnings for those sucking wealth from other players out of transactions without actually producing anything through flipping. Flipping has a few good results, but it concentrates too much gold in a few individuals, and single individuals having too much gold only escalates, allowing them to go for more and higher value items until they have so much coin getting gems with coin is trivial for them even at these prices.

Then we have the ridiculous costs of things with real money. And how there’s just one currency for cash transactions. If there was a cash-only currency and then the ‘free’ currency you get with achievements rewards, buying with coin, contests, tournaments and the like, the cash-only currency could have better prices, and more people would be willing to buy stuff directly instead exchanging coin for gems. But as things are now, an armor skin set that should not cost more than 1 or 2 € costs 10€, and a full set of weapon skins that should never cost more than 5€ would go way over 50, and that being lucky with the stupid BL chests, since you can’t buy them directly, which is insane. So not that many people is willing to pay for that, and end up going for the unchecked money making schemes instead.

With two currencies and reduces prices for the cash-only currency, and additional payment methods that require no credit card like pay by SMS, they would make TONS of cash from smaller transactions from people willing to pay 1-5€ every now and then.

Whoever is managing the BL store must come from a background where things work very differently, because they are shooting themselves on the foot in the long term with all these shenanigans, and numbers for direct purchases will only go down over time if they keep at it.

I would like titles like these:

• The Doctor
• The Master
• The Corsair
• The Visionary
• The Captain
• The General
• The Other
• The War Chief
• The Monk

Lucky.9421:

It would be good to find a way to make raids more accessible to players so more people can experience the content and story.

i.e. – Like an “explorable” mode or something.

What we need is a way to unlock stats and upgrades for level 80 exotic and ascended gear, then create templates, so players have an easier time switching between professions and builds, instead having to spend too much to ‘preparing to play’, and/or shuffling items between characters, if they need a build for one character with stats they got already with another character.

Unlocks are always better. No exceptions.

Oh. And I forgot. The Daze from piercing light must have a cooldown of at least 2 seconds. It must not trigger repeatedly on stacked traps.

Increasing activation time alone will not do.

What they need is to go on recharge after they trigger, along a reasonable increase in activation (never more than 1.5s) and a small reduction in recharge and moderate increase in damage for some of them, so a trap can’t be placed right after it triggers, but counts more when it does trigger.

Also, their trigger areas should not be invisible to an enemy team when placed while there’s enemies of that team looking. If you see an enemy placing a trap, you and your allies should be able to see where it is without having to use chat or voice chat to tell them.

AoE skills with reveals or that ‘shake’ the ground like Churning Earth, or at least some of them, should also reveal ther locations.

This way they will return to be what they are supposed to be: a defensive tool and a deterrent.

Ayrilana.1396:

Scaling isn’t so much the issue here. It’s that everyone is focusing on gathering the energy that they ignore the mobs.

Actually, it’s the other way around.

After the increase in number of energies, people who already got the achievements are are ignoring the energies on the ground, and that leaves lots of energy for the enemies to pick.

So when the overscaled enemies come, they can always have energies to pick, and they can simply stroll back to their base.

Before that people were picking everything, so there was none left for them.

Looks like went overboard with the extra energy.

These events have not been scaling very well, producing inordinate amounts of elites and champions with way more health than they should have at that level range, but before people picked all energy, so enemies could not pick any energy at all.

Now there’s energy to spare, but people ignore the energy once they have their own achievements, and just do their usual ‘smash buttons and expect everyone else to do all the work’ thing. Which results in those elites and champions picking the energy and running to their side.

Examples of ways to help with this could be:

• Reducing the number of extra player energies after the initial spawns.
• Giving the Consortium and the Priory a progress bar, like the bar the inquest has, so players see how it fills as they give energy.
• Adjusting the scaling so there aren’t too many champions and elites,
• Changing the golems you can stop with CC to be weaker vs CC like Rolling Devils and Bonebreakers, so their defiance bars do not scale too much and don’t become too hard to stop.

There’s some items with repeated skins that could get their own.

For example, the common fine, masterwork and rare leather armors all have the privatter skin, while heavy and cloth have the same for fine, then another for rare.

Why not using some of these armor skins to give fine, master and rare each their own?

They should add a Chest of Abundant Mystic Coins to the Chest of Loyalty choices, with 40 coins inside to follow the pattern:

• 1,2,3,4,20 Laurels.
• 2,4,6,8,40 Mystic Coins.

The other choices should also be improved:

• The Chest of Grand Experience should give 20 tomes instead 6. Tomes of Experience should get a Consume All for level 80 characters, to turn them into Spirit Shards without all the clickety click.
• The Chest of Ascended Crafting Materials should still have the random material, but among the possible random materials a smaller chance to get an Assault Knight Power Core should be added. And instead always a vision crystal as the second item, there should be a selection of materials to choose:
  • Bolt of Damask
  • Elonian Leather Square
  • Deldrimor Steel
  • Spiritwood Plank
  • Crystalline Ingot
  • Xunlai Electrum Ingot (added after it gets a use, like ascended trinket crafting)
  • 2 Vision Crystals
  • 3 Lesser Vision Crystals.
• The Chest of Legendary Crafting Materials should still give Mystic Clovers, but instead always Obsidian, it should let you choose the second:
  • 8 Obsidian Shards.
  • 1 Ball of Dark Energy
  • 1-2 of a material used in legendary armor crafting.

You know, an actual choice to be had in there.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You know, some posters always know better than the Devs themselves. That’s why they own and run multi-m/billion dollar game companies. I’m sure they just want to share their expertise in development and running such companies.

Not every developer knows everything about everything. They are not gods. They are people like you.

I’ve seen many knowledgeable customers actually lecture developers over the years. And sometimes they even listen and improve the game with such advanced feedback.

If that wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t see third party fixes to games riddled with bugs or for bad ports with poor performance fixing everything the developers didn’t fix.

Just in my Steam library I have quite some games that won’t run properly, or look like crap, or may stall or become unplayable or have parts of its content unfinishable or inaccessible unless such third party fixes and community patches are applied. And none of them are indie games. They are AAA games like TES:Oblivion and Just Cause 2.

Every profession should have their own methods to get out of danger.

Not every build should have a method to avoid damage at all. Specially those that can dish out more damage.

People focus too much on the current buiod, when they should look at why it works.

When you remove a boon, there’s nothing preventing it from being reapplied. And so when two elementalists get together, they can just mindlessly spam stuff around and keep lots of boons and effects up.

One way to prevent the problem without having to worry it ever happening again is changing how removals work.

When removing a boon, there should be a small window of time during which the boon can’t be reapplied right away.

Remember how control conditions turn gray when placed on an enemy with a defiance bar? That same graphic could be used for this. Remove Protection, Protection goes gray for 2 seconds instead disappearing, during that time protection can’t be re-applied and the grayed Protection has no effect. Protection spam no longer works to keep it constaly up.

Something similar could be done with condition removal.

Stun breakers should also give immunity to further stun for half a second, regardless of any stability the creature may have, to discourage control spam from being as effective as strategic use of it and make stun breakers actually useful against it.

With those 3 changes, this kind of spam won’t ever be as effective. And builds will naturally stay away from wasting parts of their build in that kind of tactic, and aim more towards skill over passive stack & spam.

Another way to punish boon spam could be giving one of the remaining conditions with no additional conditional effect the effect of spreading to the boon giver. For example, burning could have a bit less base damage, but get this bonus. So if you place boons on a burning ally, you get burning too. You give yourself boons while burning, you burn a bit longer.

The only problem I see is the lack of a personal progress for solo queuers.

Luck is too much of a factor for them. Get into too many bad matches at the start, and you begin sinking and getting with worse and worse players until you get only teamed with people who are practically losing on purpose.

And so, there needs to be a ‘MVP Award’ system that accumulates ‘points’, ‘merits’, ‘badges’ or however you want to call them, for things like getting more score for your team, preventing the enemy from getting score, and supporting your team. Personal scoring is in no way such a system, since it’s completely flawed and doesn’t really measure merits in fights, and often costs the win to the deserving team in case of a draw.

So, first personal score needs to be greatly improved. And I mean, GREATLY. And there’s a long way to go for that.

Once personal score is improved, it can finally be used to give players MVP awards. These MVP awards will be accumulated, and after getting enough of them (more the higher the division) the last pip becomes ‘reinforced’ and more loses are needed to lose it (less the higher the division).

That way, players that consistently carry teams in any capacity, being by scoring more, preventing the enemy from scoring, or giving support to the team to make them win, would go up faster than those that merely get carried. And those who lose because of their team and not because of their own fault, would go down slower than those who are the cause of a team’s loss.

That is the thing we need right now to improve leagues for solo queuers.

Well.. other than actual balance, of course. That’s needed for everyone, but that one has an even longer way to go to be a reality as long as we keep getting only skill, trait and gear changes instead dynamic balancing mechanics.

Yeah. I know you can bid the key. But not many people do.

It needs to be bond by default, and when entering underwater in starting areas with low level characters a movement tooltip with the keys should appear, so people not checking options can see it.

Underwater combat without swim down is HORRID. To go down, you have to actually look down and swim downwards, while with swim down you can freely move in all directions while keeping an eye on the target.

For now, I want mainly 4 things to improve underwater combat.

1. ALL healing, utility, elite and profession skills should work underwater. If the skill is ground-targeted, it’ll simply lock on target when underwater instead. If it summons a creature or a turret or anything like that, the creature will either still work underwater, or have an underwater counterpart, and transform into its counterpart when entering or leaving water. Traps would create nets like those nets krait use. The nets would be visible to the enemy, but visible to allies as if they had Stealth.
2. Swim down needs to be bound to a key by default.
3. Breathers should stop being gear. They should be mere skins. While underwater, the helm stats would still be used, but the appearance of the breather would be used. The recipes from fractals would be replaced by recipes for new Breather skins made out of existing skins. For example, the Soldier recipes would produce items that unlock Sorrow’s Embrace armor helmet skins as breather skins instead ascended Soldier breathers. Other recipes for breathers like those bough with karma, and other breathers found as rewards as drops, bought with karma or during festivals would also be replaced by skins, using as many already existing skins as possible that could look like breathers, like the Gas Mask skin.
4. The traits selected underwater may need to be saved separately and switch when entering and leaving water, unless all weapons and skills are also allowed underwater, or all weapon traits affect also an underwater weapon.

Canach works for that creature disguised as countess Anise. If you want some plant person to be part of the team, it’ll have to be something else.

Preferably some kind of orphan. For example, a former mordrem guard who came back to their senses after Mordremoth took over their tree and controlled all of them, but slowly come back to their senses once Mordremoth is dead. But their tree has been damaged irreparably, making all of them orphans.

Like Malyck. He’d do nicely.

The only competition you’ll ever find in the cooperative modes of the game are things like the Adventure leaderboards, which no one really cares bout, because PvE is about cooperation, not competition.

Josh Davis.6015:

[…]

No.

I mean they stay stuck on after leaving spectator mode, anywhere in the game, until the game is reset.

Apparently there’s some combination of actions that will make names of all creatures get stuck as Always shown regardless of the options settings for NPCs, enemies and allies.

This doesn’t affect the setting for objects, only creatures.

I can’t get it to work every time, but at least I know this involves free camera, and leaving a map while still in free camera and spectating.

Only closing the game and re-entering will fix it. Changing maps or going back into spectator mode and leaving it while inside the arena won’t.

Dragon’s Watch is likely to win.

I didn’t vote for that one though. It’s too easy, and limits the team too much to dragons, and there’s other things out there like demons, margonites, mursaat, elonian undead, ascalonian ghosts…

And Eternity’s Guard sounds too military, and has a ring to it too similar to Destiny’s Edge.

And so it had to be The Unbroken by process of elimination.

This seems like a bug.

Such items should be per player objects, not shared.

You can see per-player objects in many events and renown hearts, so each player can pick them individually.

Otherwise this would put players against players, and that goes against the very soul of the game.

Since there’s no invulnerability on the spawn points, and there’s no obstacles properly preventing reaching at least some of the platforms, unethical players have been exploiting this to get on those platforms and kill players while they are still loading.

Palimow.6342:

Do you not salvage all your blues and greens? I get a lot of cloth and leather. More than I can use. Never had an issue at all.

They scale with the character level past starting areas. In most of the game a level 80 character will get mostly level 76-80 items, which salvage mostly into Mithril

And the very spirit of the game clashes with gimmicks such as leaving characters at low levels to open Packaged Goods like champion bags, PvP loot bags and HoT caches to get lower level items to salvage like many people have resorted to.

Basic leather and cloth needs better methods of acquisition. Specific limited methods that allow an account to get reasonable amounts over time.

Map bonus rewards with leather and cloth listed have failed to do this. Drops, gear and salvageable hides are too unreliable and makes their acqusition too boring for too many people. Any other existing method like mystic forgin karma gear or keeping bags to open at low levels is basically a gimmick that is not only soul-crushingly boring for way too many people, but it is also potentially harmful to your hands because of all the clicking within a short time it requires (now slightly reduces thanks to vendor quantity spinners).

And so, something must be done about it. And that something can’t be any of what has been done to adress this issue until know, because we know it doesn’t work.

So what should it be? Well, something that we know works. Like creating nodes for these materials, or replacing the bonus chests in meta-events across the world with Hero’s Choice chests that let you choose between several different guaranteed rewards such as 1-2 bags of rares, stacks of 15-50 of a material, 2-3 rare crests and the like.

Aza.2105:

pico.6402:

Confussion is punishing condi it’s as it is. It hit hard or KO only when Your not careful enough to not use skill or just cleanse it. And I think it’s making it pourpose.

Confusion only punishes people who mindlessly spam, that’s why it works so well in this game. Because many players do not pay attention to the condis on them. The faster you spam the faster you die with confusion on you.

Not it isn’t as much since the change that makes it tick damage wether you use skills or not.

Conditions should not be able to take someone down so fast. Not even confusion. They are by definition damage over time.

There should be a limit on the total number of stacks of each and all conditions a single character can maintain on a single enemy, so it doesn’t affect so much large scale battles and boss fights.

Which is a problem since personal score in no way measures performance. In fact, it often measures quite the opposite.

For example, in a Team Deathmatch match in Courtyard, one team may be able to survive everything the enemy does, and the other team get downed repeatedly, but revive, and the team that had survived the most will lose because revives give personal score, but downing doesn’t, and everyone involved in reviving gives full score instead the score from a revive being split between all involved.

Another example, one team may act as a mindless zerg and capture all in the same point all the time, while the other team splits and captures multiple points, and since each will get points from capture instead those points being divided or the first that entered the point and stood in it until the end getting them all, the mindless team gathers more personal score than the team who is able to split and rotate.

The only think closer to a counter against this type of behavior is warding effects.

But there’s a problem with them. They don’t last enough. When a walling effect knows them down, they can quickly use an evading stun breaker.

Look like there has to be a way between dodges and evading skills.

But permanent evades are not the worse offenders, as even with constant Vaults there’s limited and avoidable damage.

Worse than permanent evades are permanent boons and stun spam that makes stun breakers pointless. Without that, any change to evades would hit thieves hard while leaving worse things untouched.

So along any changes done to evades, two more must be added:

• Removing a boon or condition must cause an effect that prevents them from being re-applied for 2s. You use a boon removal on someone with Protection, the protection icon goes grey for 2 seconds, and during that time the character can’t get benefit from protection and it’s immune to protection, then the grey icon disappears and protection can be applied again.
• Stun breakers must give at least 0.5s of immunity to CCs (preferably 0.75s), regardless of any stability they may provide or not.

Once that’s done, you can also give a 0.5 to 0.75s window during which further evades are not possible.