Guild Wars 2

There’s stun breakers and stability, but they can’t cope against CC spam. If the enemy focuses their stuns on you, there’s nothing you can do. Stun break, it’ll take ages to be usable again compared with CCs, so they’ll just use them again. Block, they’ll just use them again after you stop blocking. Stability stacks just go away like dust in the wind against overstacked control.

Any form of defense will only buy you some time. Either you do the same and spam control like blinds and stuns, or run away.

A tool that should be used to interrupt and disable enemies temporarily, and to strategically nullify key enemy actions, ends up as a tool to single out enemies to kill without the possibility of defense.

Other games with a semblance of actual balance have measures against it. For example, in any decent fighting game if the enemy juggles your character in the air for too long the damage per hit on your disabled character will exponentially decrease until it’s minimal, and your character will automatically break juggle and fall if it stays in the air too long. Many action games will have a temporary immunity after a strong hit or knockdown to prevent getting killed too fast without being able to do anything about it. And many MMOs have a stacking resistance to control that ads up if control is spammed too much instead being used tactically.

Shylock.4653:

MithranArkanere.8957:

That makes 425 wins to legendary regardless of loses. That would mean that if you get at least 7 wins per day over the 56 days the league is up, you would still get to legendary, even if you lose other 7 times per day.

Leagues are not a reward track. Not everyone is entitled to progress.

But someone who wins more than loses should progress. Right now that may not happen. A win ratio over 50% can still get you stuck.

You can’t quote numeric examples as the main point.

As I said, those are just examples.

Numbers can be tweaked, mechanics can change.

The main point is that wins should still accumulate and still count for something even if you don’t get winning or losing streaks, to prevent people from getting stagnated at a certain point.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Scoreboard

I would also like to see a few changes rather than removal.

At least these 3:

• Revives give full score every time. Meaning a team that gets downed all the time will get more score than a team that never gets any downed teammates. Because of this, in a Deathmatch (Courtyard) arena, if no one gets defeated and the match ends 0-0, the team who got more of their players downed wins. Which is beyond absurd.
  • Revives should give less score, and scaled based on the downed penalty of the target:
    • 0 penalty : 3 points
    • 1 penalty: 2 points
    • 2 penalty : 1 point.
    • 3 penalty: ally will get defeated instantly so n/a.
  • Downing also should give points, less the more downed penalty the target has:
    • 0 penalty : 5 points
    • 1 penalty: 3 points
    • 2 penalty : 1 point.
    • 3 penalty: 0 points. Enemy will get defeated instantly so they’ll give at least 5 points anyways.

In an extreme case in which during an entire match all we see is just 1 guy downed, who gets quickly revived, the team who downed someone in the other team wins by 5 personal score vs 3 from the revive.

• Kills give score to all players involved. Because of this, 4 players ganging up on 1 gives more score than 1 defeating another, even though winning 1vs1 usually has more merit than 4v1. That should not be.
  • Only one player should get score from a downing, the one who dealt the last hit.
  • Only one player should get score from kills, the one who dealt the last hit or use a finished.
    • The rest will get ‘assists’. 1 point from assists, rounded down, for ever 20% of health taken from the enemy before they were downed. So if you dealt 80% of their health of damage, someoneelse 20% and a third person finishes, the third gets 5 for kill, the second 1 for assist, and you 4 for assist.
    • This also applies to NPC kills. Personal score would be awarded based on % of damage dealt to the scoring NPC, instead being given equally to all participants.
      
      Ganging up to outnumber enemies should not be rewarded that much as it already gives a combat advantage by itself, and so it should not provide more score to a team. So 4 players on 1 should not give a team 4 times the score a single player earns defeating someone else alone.

• There should be assist points from support:
  • Players gaining score under defensive boons and other lasting support effects, will give assists score to the score to the supporting players while they are under those effects, if the supporting character didn’t get any score themselves from the same source.
  • Instant support effects like party stun breakers or instant healings would work the same way, but over a short time after being delivered. 3-5s or so should do it.
  • As support effects are so easy to come by, it’ll be just 1 point, which is more than you’ll get anyways.

If a guy stays healthier thanks to you, and they get score for your team, if you didn’t get on that action you should still get sumthin’ sumthin’ from that even if you didn’t intervene directly on the it as you intervened indirectly through your effects on your ally. But if you were already there and already got your points from doing stuff, then you already got your reward.

Metal makes everything better.

With that premise, I’d like to introduce a new concept to ease a bit the problem of lack of advance when having bad luck with matching and being stuck in alternate 50% win/lose ratios:

Metal Pips

What would metal pips be? Like the pips in Amber division, metal pips would be pips that are not lost upon defeat.

And how would you get these? Each division would have a number of wins that would grant your account a metal pip all the way to the left of the division, regardless of the current tier.

To put it simply, every number of wins would grant each division a pip that can’t be lost, until legendary is reached. Meaning that whether you are also losing or not, if you win enough times, you still pass to the next division, until you hit legendary.

For example:

• Amber would work just like now, and every pip will be metal one that can’t be lost.
• Emerald would get a metal pip every 2 wins.
• Sapphire would get a metal pip every 3 wins.
• Ruby would get metal pips after every 4 wins.
• Diamond would get a metal pip every 5 wins.

This would make the maximum possible wins on each tier go like this:

• Amber: 15 wins in this division is a guaranteed division pass.
• Emerald: 40 wins in this division, and you pass.
• Sapphire: 75 wins.
• Ruby: 120 wins.
• Diamond: 175 wins.

That makes 425 wins to legendary regardless of loses. That would mean that if you get at least 7 wins per day over the 56 days the league is up, you would still get to legendary, even if you lose other 7 times per day.

As the metal pips will be given to he left of the progress, the current tier may not be affected until the metal pips reach it, though, so you can still go back to the start of the tier, but the wins still accumulate, and eventually reach that tier.

As you can see, regardless of how you tune the numbers this would give anything for free as even with this you’ll need to rack up lots of wins to pass. Too much? Increase the wins per division. Too little? Decrease them. It’ll merely act as a cushion or a ‘pawl’ that prevents going back too much if you are also winning, so accumulating wins isn’t made pointless due to alternating wins and loses.

So what do you think? Metal makes everything better or not?

• Piercing Light must have a shared cooldown of at least 5s, no more than 15, preferably 10s.
• The more a profession can heal, the leas it should be able to damage. This is not something possible to add without ‘tradeoff’ traits, like one that reduces healing in exchange of damage or vice-versa. Tradeoffs work greatly as a balancing method. Without them you only have things that go up, and people just pick the ones that go up the most.
• Areas that prevent or affect trespassers must be able to do so only once every 2 seconds. This also includes other professions, and stacking them.

Just buy orders? And what about those impossible sale orders, like the mystic forge stones that were temporarily tradeable?

I think there should be a way to have temporary blocks that go away when you log out of after a few days, and those blocks would be the ones that would work to prevent someone from getting in your team.

For example, after you right click and block, instead just ‘accept’ and ‘cancel’ the confirmation message would also have a third button saying “Temporary Block”.

Those blocked temporary will be removed from your list of blocked people after some time or after you log out.

This way, if the one blocked gets good or stops being an pricks, they can get a second chance, but you won’t see them in your team for the remainder of the current session.

The problem isn’t the skill as much as the game mechanics. Nothing done by a player with their profession’s skills should be able to take more than 1/3 of anyone’s health in less than 1s. They’ll need to use something like siege or map mechanics for that.

If there was such limitation, then anyone focusing too much on damage would be basically wasting their resources, like hammering a nail with an excavator-mounted hydraulic jackhammer. Yes, you can do it, but it’s a waste, because you’ll be bringing more power than you will actually use.

Because ArenaNet made an extremely important and blatantly obvious mistake: They decided to make thief weapon skills have no recharges altogether.

Since they stick with that ‘no recharge’ nonsense, their skills can never be properly adjusted, as recharge is an extremely important fine-tuning factor. All the things that would be fixed with something like a 1-5second recharge (yes, that short) can’t be fixed at all.

Instead, they do other changes, like changes in damage, mechanics or initiative costs, which often result in skills becoming either too good, or too bad.

Duke Nukem.6783:

[…]
exclusiveness and rareness should last FOREVER, re releasing old items is the main reason this game has not had good player retention, its impossible for me to be motivated when all i have acheived is now on sale again for some new player

NO.

The ‘last iPhone’ is never the last iPhone.

Most home appliances were exclusive to the rich until they became available for all. TVs, computers, washing machines… first exclusive to rich, then available to all to some degree.

Hell, even luxury items like clothes and sports car can be also bought on the cheap over time.

Exclusivity can only be over time, and most people should agree with that, except people with the sickening personality of Martin Shkreli. Remember that Wu-Tang clan CD he now uses as a coaster. That’s absolute exclusivity in a nutshell for you.

NO.

When it’s something you simply buy, not something you earn like a reward achievement, exclusivity can only be over time. After enough time, that exclusivity has to decrease or drop altogether.

The only exclusivity that can be absolute is rewards from gameplay like Liadri’s mini, Golden fractal relics or exclusive Raid rewards.

After 5 years, they should be made available to buy for something like 200 to 400 gems each directly from the wardrobe based on their demand. The cheapest would be the ones less people bought, the most expensive would be the ones more people bought.

You just click the icon in the wardrobe, pay the gem price, get the skin. Ding.

Why 5 years? So people get to enjoy exclusivity for that time. 5 years is more than enough to show off a pretty skin. After that, it’s time to switch to the next model if you want to show off something, let the rest of the kids enjoy them too without having to grind keys or spend fortunes in freaking RNG key or depend on people selling them in the trading post.

I’d rather have them bring back Monthlies. But not as monthiles, but as quarterlies.

Instead the old pointless monthliess that people could do in one day and were just grind, the Quarterlies would have a cap up to 5K (for a max 20K between daily and quarterly) and require things like:

• Complete every fractal levels.
• Complete every dungeon explorable path.
• Defeat 3 different raid bosses.
• Defeat every world boss.
• Complete 25 jumping puzzles.
• Win a ranked or unranked match on each PvP map.
• Win 25 ranked or unranked matches with 3 different professions.
• Capture each type of WvW objective, and score at least 10 points for your world from each type.
• Defend each type of objective, and score at least 5 points for your world from each type.

No X thing Y times. Instead, do A,B,C,D,E,F,etc…

Here are some ideas for you:

• Glider Rig. A 300-500 gem Gemstore item that can be used to unlock glider versions for in-game back items. All you have to do is use it on a back item like an upgrade or salvage kit, and if it’s an item with a corresponding glider and you don’t have the glider unlocked, the unlocker gets replaced by the corresponding glider unlocker without affecting the original item (otherwise it fails and it isn’t consumed). Costs lets when purchased in bulk, saving up to 400 gems when buying 10. Here are some of the gliders it could unlock:
  • Molten Jetpack: Leaves behind 3 very noticeable fiery trails. The trails are stronger when using lean techniques.
  • Tempered, Static, Dynamic and Synergetic. The blades extend and emit ‘hard light’ from each of their blades to form wings not unlike like Falcon’s from Marvel. They leave 2 subtle colored trails from their nozzles when using lean techniques, matching the color of the back: Orange, red, blue, green.
  • Sunless, Holographic and Holographic Shattered wings. The glider version is larger, uses the bat wings rig and doesn’t flap.
  • Kites. The kites would get attached to the back of the character.
  • Toxic Spore. As a glider, the seed attaches to the back, the feathers extend, and they spin like a gyrocopter. They spin faster when leaning forward and slower when leaning back.
  • Books: Right now all books excepting Mad King’s Memories use the same “forgotten seal” skin. They will be given each their own skin. As gliders, the books will open, and the pages will extend and form wings. The pages will have colors and effects based on the book. For example, Yakkington’s book will have green grass pages and will leave a trail of red iris flowers, while the Book of Secrets will have purple pages and leave a crystal trail, Koss would have golden and sandy pages and leave a sandy trail, mad king’s memoires an orange and green smokey trail, and the completed memoires a green and orange fiery trail.
  • Super Adventure Backs: The back will extend two blocky pixelish holographic wings and leave a pixelated trail matching the color of the back.

• Glider version of existing gemstore content. Like with the white and black wings, the glider version of these would be unlocked by talking with Scouts in HoT while having the item equipped or in your inventory:
  • Enchanted broom/Riding broom
  • Magic Carpet
  • Glittering Wings
  • Dreamweaver wings
  • Butterfly Wings.

• Gliders unlocked from in-game skins without the need of the Glider Rig. The glider unlocks when the skin is unlocked:
  • Legendary Fractal back
  • Legendary PvP back
  • Legendary WvW back
  • Legendary divine back: Get the back skins of all 6 gods: Balthazar, Kormir (from WvW), Dwayna, Grenth, Lyssa and Melandru. That unlocks the legendary collection for the Legendary Divine Backpack: The Six.

New gliders:

• Gyro Glider & Back combo.
  • As a back it’s a gyro with its rotor folded, both blades pointing down like the wings of a wasp.
  • As a glider it uses the same rig as the Toxic Spore, attached to the back with spinning blades.
• Asura Hoverboard back & glider combo
  • As a back the board is in a skateboard holster
  • As a glider makes the character ride on opt of it, using an animation similar to how charr ride the enchanted broom.
• Infininarium back & glider combo.
  • As a back is a backpack similar to the quaggan backspacks, just hanging from the back.
  • As a glider is a small size infininarium replica floating over the character, holding them with its arms.
• Insect wings
  • Wings similar to wasps, fireflies and other insects. Can be dyed with 2 channels, one for the costa and veins of the wing, and one channel for the membrane. For example, these colors would be achieved with midnight fire and imperial gold.
• Imperial Phoenix and Rainbow Phoenix wings.
  • Inspired by the GWO animal companions.
• Giant Fan.
  • Jut as it sounds. The caged blades of a giant electric fan used as a paramotor, just without the parachute.
• Bubble
  • A bubble with a single dye channel. While gliding the character has an animation similar to Water Overload.
• Rocket boots.
  • They replace the character’s feet skin instead on the back, allowing players to bring their own backs. They use the Sorrow’s Embrace boot skin, matching the character’s armor class. They leave a fiery trail.
• Mystical Dragon glider:
  • Based on the the mystical dragon mini. The dragon quickly circles around the character to slow their fall like when they do that nice spiral movement.

You are not seeing the correct solution to the problem.

The problem is that thieves can use stealth as both a defensive tool and an offensive tool with the same effectiveness.

The actual solution to any problem derived of usage of stealth is a change to the stealth mechanic that will make it less useful for defense the more it’s used offensively, and vice-versa.

For example, by linking the duration of the Revealed effect to the damage done when being revealed. Less damage would have a shorter revealed than now, greater damage would have a longer revealed than now. So the more damage you are doing, the less you can depend on Stealth for defense and vice-versa.

I think we could have a combination of all systems.

• Transmutation charges still work like now.
• Players can also spend 5 charges instead 1 to make a skin ‘Free to Apply’ like the HoM and AP skin rewards.
• In the Outfits panel, players would be able to select ‘Custom Outfit’ slots to set custom oufits. They select a slot, click a ‘edit’ button that appears when selected, and they are sent to a wardrobe panel where they can pick the skins. Once they have the appearance they want, they pay 1 transmutation charge for each skin changed that is not Free to Apply. And the outfit is set. The outfit will only require boots, legs and chest, the rest of the parts would be optional.
• Dyeing the custom outfit has no charge, but changing parts of it would take 1 charge for each part changed that is not Free to Apply.
• Characters will get 1 outfit slot upon reaching level 80, and another one for each Dragon defeated. There would be alternate ways to unlock the dragon rewards in WvW and PvP too.
• In the gemstore, players would also be able to buy account-wide slots that give 1 outfit slot to each character.
• F2P characters will not get the level 80 slot. Only the one from defeating Zhaitan, and any they may buy in the gemstore.
• Outfits would be saved separately for each character.

This way charges keep having some use, you don’t have to pay to constantly change between a few appearances you like, and the more slots you have, the more appearances you can have without having to spend more charges, which encourages getting more, and if you really like to which a certain appearance a lot, like, for example, between many hats and glasses, you can spend extra charges to make them free to swap.

Agemnon.4608:

[…]

Why can’t we have pink Kodan?

Because all Kodan are Polar bears, that means black skin, colorless fur. The only notably different kodan are the Voices, that have patters painted all over. But those are so rare that we can’t have an entire race of them.

Tengu have all the cards for a new playable race.

They have a rich history, a capital city, advanced culture, the possibility of internal dissenting factions like Quetzal, Sensali or Avicara, unique traits, and the greatest potential for customization.

The runner up would be largos. That are shrouded in mystery but show lots of possibilities.
But their dorsal fins limit them greatly. Unless those are actually a cultural back item, or playable largos lose them in their starting instance after a great battle or for being exiled for refusing an assassination or something like that, their fins would get in the way of back items and gliders, making their models incompatible with being a playable race.
But make those a cultural back/glider, we could give each race their own, purchased with some gold at their cities, and their main hindrance is gone.

Then you have Kodan and Dwarves. The other two ‘major’ races.

Kodan do not have one great city, but many small ones, and have been displaced for their homes, making them lose their starting area. But that pales next to them all being polar bears. Inspired by the armored polar bears from the Golden Compass, they all look like polar bears. And that reduces their possibilities of customization to nearly 0.

Dwarves have an even greater problem. They got turned to stone completely, clothes and all. Ogden hasn’t changed his clothes in over 250 years. It’s not like with sylvari shaped plant clothes that they can remove. With dwarves the clothes are part of them now.

Any tribal race is out of the question. Like Grawl or Ogres.

Then you could have other rare possibilities, like Razah gathering other creatures made from the Mists like him in a city in the Mists. Or the survivors of Rata Novus ending up a inhospitable place after a failed teleportation, and having to resort to turning themselves into a race of golem-like creatures (Taimi could unergo that process too to get a new body). Or djinss from Elona, or even Palawa’s mummified undead.

But considering any new race would mean two more complete sets of voicework, new races are very unlikely, and Tengu the only one with enough tickets to become one.

shadow.6174:

[…]

Hmm, would you mind and could you tell why it was intended to be that way? I understand about hiding the model while in first view but why it can’t be visible during the vista cinematics? Maybe like just showing back during the cinematics?

(I’m not asking for deep details, although they would be interesting, but a basic reason is enough).

“First person” isn’t really an actually first person view. There’s no first person models.

It’s more like “inside-head camera”. Since your head would be in the way, while in ‘first person’ your model is no longer rendered in your client.

So when you use a vista, as your model isn’t being rendered on your side, and since the client won’t get you out of first person before playing the cinematic, your character won’t appear during the cinematic.

If you ever see your character in a cinematic while in first person it’ll be because the cinematic takes you out of first person, or because the cinematic hides the character and uses a ‘double’ of your character instead.

Volunteering must give a win like in hotjoin.

And if people keep leaving there has to be consequences, like being sent back to their previous match when they rejoin, or they get dishonor and can’t rejoin with too much dishonor. Not as much as with structured games, but leaving repeatedly should not go unpunished.

And uneven matches must get priority to get extra players.

Also, team rebalance needs a rework. Instead just sending some random player to the other team, the system should get each player and their score, and make two evenly matched teams that will have as close as possible average scores, and total scores. For example:

Red has 400.

• Player 1 earned 200
• P2 : 150
• P3 : 50.
• P4 : 0.

Blue has 100.

• PA : 100
• PB : 50

Then the result of rebalance would be something like

Red 250

• P1 : 200
• P3 : 50
• P4 0

Blue 250

• P2 : 150
• PA 100
• PB : 50

Vinceman.4572:

MithranArkanere.8957:

Not if you went grab the singularity while someone else went ahead to the platform. The cinematic may start right after you get teleported.

The question is: Why would you take it? It’s not necessary at all.

Why won’t you? That’s why it’s there for.

Dream Shake.8741:

[…]

You can go to the Berserker actual spawn location before the cutscene, there is enough time.

[…]

Not if you went grab the singularity while someone else went ahead to the platform. The cinematic may start right after you get teleported.

Also, it doesn’t look good when the spawn locations of the molten duo do not match where their cinematic doubles land.

Sometimes they even play their cinematic again, or spawn out of thin air instead being already there when the cinematic ends.

I’d rather see the cinematic updated to work like new ones that play in the world whether players skip or not, and try to have the duo spawns match where they doubles land at end of the cinematic, replacing their doubles as seamlessly as possible.

After all, most of the time the main reason I want to skip that is to move myself to where I want to be before the fight starts so the Berserker is less likely to jump about.

Tentonhammr.7849:

MithranArkanere.8957:

I insist that what we need is not more bulk purchases, but a spinner, so we can pick the amount we want to buy all at once.

Bring back purchases of 5 at a time, you still need to click many times. Add a spinner, you input “30”, and buy 30 at once.

That would be great, until the first round of support tickets hit the desk for the people who accidently bought 55 instead of 5, or 200 instead of 20, and Anet removes it. Then we’re all reminded of why we can’t have nice things. :/

That’s what confirmation messages are for.

You press Accept, it’s on you.

We can’t have thousands of players destroying their fingers because a few won’t read a textbox message.

I insist that what we need is not more bulk purchases, but a spinner, so we can pick the amount we want to buy all at once.

Bring back purchases of 5 at a time, you still need to click many times. Add a spinner, you input “30”, and buy 30 at once.

Malediktus.9250:

I hope you dont nerf the value of resonating slivers. It would reduce the incentive to do guild missions if I could just buy them for cheap.

Also will there be a compensation for people who got Scribe 400 before the rework? Like “Master Scribe” title or something similar?

That would not be fair for those who were not insane bot-like farmers or had hosts of guild members gathering the materials for them. If most of the material were given by one player, but another one was the scribe, would it be fair to give the title to the one that basically pressed lots of buttons and waited for bars to fill, using the materials that took time and efforts for others to gather?

The only fair thing to do would be something like resetting all scribes back to 0, and refunding materials in mail or directly to the bank. But that may pump too many of those materials into the market.

Let’s see… most of what I can think is about things not done rather than things done. Why making things one way or another… and about what may come in the future.

• Why have giants lost their tusk and instead have one eye like cyclopses? What’s the process behind such drastic changes in design?
• Mordrem menders and molten protectors are good examples of ‘key’ enemies that have higher priority for players to eliminate, as their can turn the tide of the fight. Any chance we’ll see more than than? And we’ll we ever see their allies actually trying to defend them by actively holding players off while the support try to move behind the enemy lines to a safer position?
• We see very little use of boons by creatures. Mostly dredge are the only ones who do it consistently. That makes boon removal mostly pointless in most of PvE. What was the reasoning behind that?
• Which other enemies did you consider for Magus Falls? Simians maybe? If you did we could have had actual simian minis for the year of the monkey.
• Any plans on extending the repertoire of enemies of any type? Giants, plants and destroyers are rather lacking in variety.
  • We’ll be ever see any of the ‘lost’ creatures from GW1 such as hydras, dryders and gargoyles (not the animated flaming statues from King Thorn’s burned castle, but the actual GW1 gargoyles)
• Scarlet enemies where great and fun to fight, but now we can only see small groups of them in a few instanced areas. We’ll be ever see scarlets armies coming back in open world content? Maybe something like they taking over the Labyrinthine Cliffs, and working together for each of their personal interests? Molten rebuilding their facility underground with an entrance at the base of the cliff, toxic rebuilding a nightmare tower in the water, aetherblades rebuilding their lair in cavers with an entrace on the upper levels of the cliff, and steam creatures remaking a marionette where the Zephir Sanctum used to be? Players would work together to help the merchants restore the Bazaar and fend off the Scarlet’s Remnants.
• Any chance we’ll see enemies using more player skills and player-like builds? That’s one of the greatest factors making GW1 so good. I’d love to see at least higher rank enemies like veterans having player skills and profession mechanics. Like a bandit leader actually stealing like players do, rather than using a fake steal mock-up.
  • The PvP ‘profession masters’ are also ‘faking’ player mechanics. The ranger often misses its pet, and there’s no revenant. There’s also nothing like a ‘manager’ you can talk with to enter an instanced version of the training ground or change their builds.
  • Why isn’t the Shadow Behemoth summoning the occasional shadowy clone of a player?
• Any chance on revisiting old content, specially higher end level 80 content like Southsun and Orr, reworking enemies by doing things like giving breakbars to risen abominations and risen knights, or making hylek and destroyers lose their immunities to poison and fire while their defiance bar is broken?
  • HoT enemies have quite some contextual lines that add lore by making creatures look like they interact with their allies, and a mechanic that indicates players what enemies are doing. Any chance we’ll see other enemy factions like inquest and flame legion also do that?
• Any chance we’ll ever get a Bestiary mastery that unlocks a series of collections and a book-like UI with entries for each type of creature and sub-entries for each creature of that type so we can read enemy lore, stats, possible drops and look at the models while out of combat? If yes, any chance we could link that to polymock, so we can use try and ‘captch them all’ and use ‘captured’ enemies to play in the activity/adventure?
• Any chance we’ll see more variety in plants other than treants, adding a few groups of plant enemies in spots of some maps where there’s currently very little density of enemies or no enemies at all, adding lesser plant creatures reminiscent of the many walking plants seen in GW1 such as walking thorns, seed pods, ibogas, jaracandas, dragon bushes, etc…?
• Why weren’t 3 plant-like sylvari pets made? How come they could meet anything but a plant creature in the dream? Shouldn’t there be at least 2 more plant-like pets such as a thorn spider, a bush stalker, a grass moa or a pinecone drake?
• Any chance we’ll ever see Crystal dessert two-eyed tusked giants herding minotaurs fighting for territory against friendly ogres who will give you rewards in exchange for their tusks?
• Have you ever considered letting guilds customize the appearance of NPCs of structures they control?
• Have you ever considered adding the Avicara tengu to anywhere in the Shiverpeaks?

Titanium Argentum.1427:

[…]
8.- Suggestion – Montures
In the hypothetical case we see montures in Guild Wars 2, what are the limitations of the engine to make them?
[…]

There’s already mounts. GW2 has two kinds of mounts.

The first one is called ‘Travel’ items. They are toys just for show. These can show the character riding something.

Then you have contextual mounts with a particular use and a different skill set, like Siege Golems, the hounds from the fire keep, the charr bikes from the WvW upgrade, or the mecha siege devourers. These are transformations and do not show the character, but they are considered ‘mount’ by GW standards, as you ‘mount’ them to ride them.

Evan Lesh.3295:

[…]

I fully expect higher-skilled players to swap more, but that is a much smaller portion of the player-base.

An important question i: Would all high-skilled players be OK with profession locking if we could ensure no stacking?

For this you would need to adjust daily achievements.

Even with 4 possible professions, they tend to stack the same professions too much. Which results in longer matching times for those using the daily professions, whether they are interested in the daily or not.

Because of this, first you would need to develop account-based dailies that are not the same for all accounts. For example, the current profession dailies would be replaced by two profession dailies that are generated based on the account’s stats:

• Daily confident choice: requires a random profession between the 4 most player by the account.
• Daily road less traveled: requires a random profession between the 4 least played by the account.

Something like that should scatter the professions enough to reduce queuing that now causes things like 4 engineers at the same time in a random team, while still allowing 3 dailies for the AP with the professions a player likes more.

Then, if professions are locked, ratings should consider them.

It’ll be even better if there was a system allowing players to take turns picking professions.

A coin toss, and players start picking characters taking turns. They’ll be presented the characters the enemies pick, and a grid with their characters. Players can either pick a character or ‘pass’ giving the turn to a teammate. When one player picks a character of a profession, that profession gets disabled for the rest of their team.

But what if a player only has characters of a profession that has been already picked?

Then there would be temporary characters like those created for the Beta, that they would be given for the match, with a full set of armor using the standard model skin, and a full set of weapons of that profession, so they can make their build on the fly.

Warriors have plenty of condition removal, but the fact that they can be re-applied instantly makes that pointless.

I still think we need to change condition removal, boon removal and stun breakers to give very short unrenmovable immunities.

Remember the gray condition icons seen on creatures with a breakbar? That same visual could be used for this.

You remove Regeneration from the enemy, get get anti-Regeneration for 2 seconds, that looks like regeneration but graysacale instead yellow. You remove Burning from an ally, they get anti-Burning for 2 seconds.

You break stun, even if you don’t have stability you get a “Stunbreak” effect that makes you immune to hard CC for 1 second or half a second.

With something like this removal would be meaningful. They put blindness on you and you have a condition removal? If you have good reflexes you stop your attack and use a condition removal instead. Ding. Get anti-Blind for 2 seconds. 2 entire seconds of hitting the enemy without being blinded.

Jewelers can upgrade lesser gemstones into orbs, but that also goes though your stores materials in no time.

If at least the mystic forge had a panel with recipes, we could mystic forge masterwork gemstones without going insane and ending up suffering every single repetitive motion disorder.

If jumping puzzles had a series of “portal dampening fields” that disables use of portals from outside them to inside, but still allowing them within each field so portals can still be used to help friends but can’t be used to skip the JP, or if JPs had a series of checkpoints that give you an effect that is lost after opening the chest and increases rewards the more you got, jumping puzzle chests could also get improved rewards, including much higher chances of orbs and crests, since a full reward would no longer be something you can skip or leave a character by the chest and open it every day.

I also think rare crests should be usable in jewelry, so we can craft jewelery with those stats, much like the sigils and insignia that can be salvaged.

Phy.2913:

[…]
There are enough alternatives. If you can’t do ANY adventure, then it’s a L2P issue.

We can go to the leaderboards, see how no one is getting gold in any of them, and see how it’s a design issue.

If you test something and get “2:17” as the max time anyone could get, and you go and round it down to 2:00 to make the numbers nice and round, you are ignoring the data to make something look pretty in the UI because prime numbers look ugly on screen, and expect people somehow be able to do something, what you’ll get is only a few cheaters using some ‘third party program’ being able to do it, and a waste of design time and space that only frustrates players as they expect it to be possible, when it isn’t.

Then no one is able to complete it.

And when the time is too tight, people just do it once and ignore it forever.

That should NOT be the case.

The requirements that give AP and mastery poitns should be lower, then there should be an extra mile for leaderboards and bonus exp and rewards. Reasons to replay them without affecting those that may not find them as fun.

That’s why bronz, silve and gold requirements need to be adjusted, and Platinum reward should be introduced.

ProtoGunner.4953:

[…]

That’s not true, you get around 30-50 ores per 2h run, depending how lucky you are with the 10x nodes. I farmed myself easily 100 nodes with 3 runs. That’s about 360 ores in 24h for worst case.

No. I don’t. I’m getting 0-1 ore per pod, most of the time 0, and that’s when I see any, and my left hand’s little finger hurts already enough from keeping Ctrl pressed and not seeing any ever. And the map closes right after the end, so there’s no time to go look for more, you are limited to the ones you find on your way.

The design of the map forces people to choose between helping in events and go look for pods and complete the map.

The ore from the pods should be a random bonus, noxious pods should give at least one ore, the main ore reward should be guaranteed based on personal participation and come from doing events, and the map should stay open at least 40 minutes after the boss fight. Then we’d start getting closer to being reasonable.

Phy.2913:

Sister.9612:

There is only one thing to say – Shame on you ArenaNet for locking mastery points behind mini games!
Why would anyone like to play a game that locks you out from being able to enjoy all the new mastery abilities?

There are 129 mastery points available in HOT, you need 114 for all the HOT mastery tracks.

- “Hey, this is broken and can’t be done”
- “You don’t need to do it, so there’s no need to fix it”.

I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. It’s broken, it needs to be fixed like many other adventures. That’s how it is.

They need to introduce Platinum rewards, and greatly decrease the requirements for gold, silver and bronze to adjust them to reality.

Bronze should be given for minimum completion. Getting to the end of a race even if the timer runs out, shooting every target even after the time runs out, surviving against enemies until the timer runs out, etc.

Silver and gold would be recalculated based on the current leaderboards. Those considered easy by looking at the leaderboards would remain the same, those considered hard reduced. Those considered impossible would be greatly decreased to make them possible.

Then there would be a fourth reward, Platinum, for those that go way past gold. Getting platinum gives no AP or Mastery points, but would give greater rewards weekly. For example, depending on the map at the adventure’s risk, the first 100 players on each leaderboard would get in the mail next week: +250-1000 of the map’s currency for the first one, 125-500 for the next 9, 50-250 for the next 90.

That way we maintain rewards for effort, but those having trouble because of bugs and latency issues won’t be left out of getting their mastery points and achievements because of something out of their control.

One thing is trivializing the content, and another is making it reasonable.

If the balance between sources of the ore and costs of items that use it as a currency are not reasonable, getting each item feels like freaking taking down a wall of Azbantium

If I spend 2 hours in VB, I can buy one thing in the shops.

If I spend 24 hours in Dragon’s Stand, I can’t buy half a thing.

That is insane.

It doesn’t make absolutely any sense only that after 2 hours of events, and only having time to open a few pods because they rarely ever spawn, machetes are rarely awarded and the map closes in no time, and even if you do open pods, they rarely ever give any ore at all. And no ore is awarded directly from the meta-event.

Then you go to the vendors and see the insane costs compared with what you can earn.

The numbers are so insane that it’s way more effective to complete the story repeatedly with new characters that depending on the event. So people don’t do the event, and without people the event becomes even harder to do, and things only get worse.

So there’s only 4 possibilities:

• They were worried of some farming scheme being possible, and made the numbers deliberately low just in case, so no one got way too many at the start.
• Someone added an extra 0 in the costs by mistake.
• Someone copypasted drop tables from somewhere else and forgot to adjust the values to something reasonable, leaving just different items.
• There’s someone with a grudge against ANet working against them from within, purposely making changes to troll players and seed discontent.

What I want is allowing to split appearance and stats altogether, by having ‘custom outfit’ slots.

You go to the outfits tab, select a custom outfit slot instead a pre-made outfit, and while it is selected, any changes you do in the wardrobe would be done to the selected custom outfit slot instead to your equipped gear. Accept the changes, pay the transmutation charges, and whenever you equip that custom outfit slot you’ll get that appearance.

Characters would be able to get 1 custom outfit slot by completing personal story, another from an unlocker earned by completing a PvP track, and another from WvW purchased with hero badges and notarized proofs of heroics.

Then there would be account-wide slot unlockers from the gemstore that give one slot to all characters of the account.

And outfit headgear should be split from the outfit, allowing us to combine them.

Hats must come back!

We need two new report options:

• Disruptive behavior. For those who do things like harassing others to lose on purpose, grief, feed kills to the enemy, leeching, being afk…
• Suspicious behavior. For those that do things that seem impossible if you consider every single skill, trait, effect, piece of equipment and upgrades. Possibly exploiting bugs or using third party tools that give them some advantage.

Malediktus.9250:

What is a map point? Invisible check points on maps?

I’m guessing the game records the position of your current character at regular intervals.

We know they record quite some metrics to know what players are doing, and where they are doing it.

You don’t need to separate balance if you put measures in place for it.

For example, there should be proper DPS caps for direct damage and conditions to avoid anyone being taken down in less than 2 or 3 second by one single enemy, and not going down in less than 1 second no matter what.

If you make those proper caps consider creature rank, they can be made to be much less strict for attacks against a creature of a higher rank such as elites or champions, while working with players to prevent excesses and gimmicky cheese builds, and preventing normal enemies from going down too fast, so more players can hit them and earn participation in events.

Without that, what we have is insanity in PvP and madness in PvE. With players going around spamming stuff mindlessly being more successful.

The problem isn’t Revenant being able to spam stability, or any other profession being able to maintain any boon or condition.

It’s the character not being immune to the boon or condition for 1-3 seconds after it has been removed.

After removing a boon or condition there has to be a brief window before it can be re-applied, or mindless, skill-less spam will override tactics and skillful play.

Remember how control conditions get grayed on champions? Something similar should happen after removal.

Someone has Stability, you use a boon removal and strip it, they get “Stability Removed” as a gray anti-boon for 1 to 2 seconds. And removal becomes meaningful, and stability gets a guaranteed counter, and it won’t matter how much someone uses stability if the enemy knows when to remove it efficiently.

You forgot to change the “Ascended” line.

My guess is that they enlisted the ‘help’ of a few ‘pro’ PvP players to test stuff they can’t test such as higher end PvP matches, and those players completely misled them, and even though they found many of not all of the worse broken builds, instead reporting them so they can be addressed, they kept them for themselves, and as soon as things were released, boom.

The dolyak poop hit the airship propeller.

It wouldn’t be the first time people pretending to ‘help’ are actually helping only themselves.

The problem is not the amount available.

It’s the uncontrolled output.

Usually, games either have very limited skill sets with very structured values that makes it easy to balance, or additional measures put in place to prevent excessive amounts of stuff.

For example, in a fighting game, ‘air juggles’ break after too many hits in the air, letting the enemy fall regardless of the next attack connecting or not. Without that, it’ll be possible to keep an enemy locked in the air, which would be unfair and boring.

In many action games, specially single player ones, there’s a short invulnerability or immunity to additional CC effects to prevent enemies from playing pinball with your character.

In many online multiplayer games, too many stuns result in stun resistance, and accumulating this resistance may result in breaking the stun. This is used more in games with lots of different skills, where it may not be possible to make sure a build does not have too many stuns.

GW2 does not have a very limited skill set. So mere changes to skills or changes like the one done to stability won’t fix it.

Because their balance team think they can balance the game with skill and trait changes.

Here’s news for them: They can’t.

You take the ‘key skill’ in a problematic build and nerf it, and what you got isn’t balance. It’s several ruined builds that were using the skill and were fine, a build that doesn’t work too well but still works well, and if it doesn’t, those abusing that build merely find another broken thing.

They need to add changes to core mechanics and add measures to prevent excesses. Removing boons and conditions is pointless if they can be reapplied. And you won’t fix that by changing the skills that apply or remove them. Fiddle all you want with numbers, and nothing will change. But what if you make the target immune to the removed effect for 1-3 seconds or so? Boom. It can’t be reapplied. You got yourself a window of opportunity to do stuff before the spammity-spam can reapply the effect again.

Over 50 years of gaming have taught us things like these. If you ignore them you are only are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Nerfing won’t really fix anything.

We need a fundamental change to many core aspects of the game. From attributes to combat mechanics, to measures put in place to prevent extreme cases.

As long as the system allows for broken things happening, broken things will happen. Someone sooner or later will find out some gimmick or combination of builds that works way to well, and exploit it until it gets fixed.

We’ll be dancing that eternal futile dance until the source of the problem changes.

It is possible.

All you have to do is what all the other dishonorable worthless cheaters are doing:

• Abuse the broken builds and the flawed matching system to gain an unfair advantage.

Since cheating isn’t being punished, you have a choice there: Keep your integrity or win.

I’d rather keep my integrity.

This is not a bug. This is a bad behavior that should be addressed.

Now that the game has re-targetting, there’s no excuse.

When an enemy goes into stealth, tracking skills should stop tracking. If you don’t want them to go to waste, you should retarget or manually aim the skill. Thanks to retargeting, this is now possible.

Often broken builds that work too well appear. Until they are addressed, there’s always people defending them saying that they ‘require skill’. Some people actually believe that, while others know how broken they are, yet they lie through their teeth about it, in futile hopes developers will fall for their blatant lies even though the game’s metrics clearly show the problem, and players who test those builds can see by themselves how broken they are.

We all know the current behavior of Diamond Skin is one of the key problems with the latest tempest builds. There isn’t some mystic mystery here. We all can try those builds and see how they work way too well.

We all know it’s going to be addressed. It’s only a matter of time. Search your feelings; you know it to be true!

So why don’t we focus on ways to fix the problem instead wasting your time in trying to convince people there’s no such problem?

Anyways, there’s already plenty of threads about it. For example:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Idea-for-Diamond-Skin-Rework

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/As-an-ele-main-Diamond-Skin-OP

My take on it is making it work the other way around. Right now it’s too much ‘all or nothing’. Without changing its behavior, just the numbers like increasing recharge or increasing the health threshold or reducing the immunity, it will either stay problematic or become useless. So it should be changed into something that works the more it is needed, balancing itself. For example:

• Reduce effects and duration of conditions on proportion to health lost.

With this, at 100% health you’ll take 100% condition duration, and they will have their full effect on you. At 50% HP, conditions will last 50% less and those already on you that can have degrees of effect (like damaging conditions, slow or snares) will have less effect. At 0% HP (after being downed) you become immune to condition effects as if you had Berserker Stance and Resistance, so enemies can’t use immobilize on you to prevent you from running away with vapor form.

This way it still has a Grandmaster grade effect, but it’ll work more the more in risk you are, instead being too much at the start but useless when they manage to take your health down a bit.

No. That site being removed would just prompt another similar site being used.

Metabattle is a great tool to point out broken builds.

The problem is how those problem builds are addressed, with mere skill and trait changes. You pick a broken build, determine some key skill that allows the build to be too much, and nerf it.
What did you get? You just ruined all other builds that were not broken that were using that part of the build, and the the exploiters merely switch to the next broken build.

That is a losing battle. That won’t work. You need to look at the very rules of the game, and create core mechanics that kick in before extreme cases to prevent them.

Someone finds some build with an insane DPS? System kicks in and caps the DPS. Someone finds a build that can have too many buffing effects up permanently? System kicks in, when the effects end or are removed there’s a brief respite before they can be re-applied. And so on.