Guild Wars 2

At the moment, if you’re level 80 and go back to an early game area, the experience isn’t that different than that in more traditional MMOs. You’re never really at risk and can steam-roll content.
This needs to change; challenge should remain consistent no matter your level. Indeed, this is what I thought the system was going to be like when ArenaNet announced they were going to be using level scaling.
But as it stands, any open world content below level 80 becomes significantly easier when played with a level 80 character; even more so if that character is fully equipped with exotic gear.

As a sweetener, loot should be slightly improved to reflect the increased difficulty, as should event karma rewards. I would also suggest that map completion rewards should also be scaled to your level.

Adopting these changes would further encourage people to spread out around the world and as opposed to the revamped world events, would encourage them to stay in these areas for longer than 5 minutes.

Yeah, it dies far too quickly. Hell, I’ve even solo’d it on a Thief.

Yup, don’t know why this isn’t in the game from the get-go seeing as how we had a similar system in GW1 already with the hat & outfit vendors.

Nice and elegant.
I’d also like it that if you clicked on the Lion head while the red exclamation was there, it’d take you straight to your list of pickups rather than the gem store front page.

That’s a really neat suggestion.
Hell, a “Favourites” page would be nice, much like the “Recent Purchases” list on the Gem Store page.
+1’d.

In open-world PvE, Ranger is fun and easy, all the way through the levels.
This is an important thing to consider.
A lot of the classes don’t really shine until they’ve got access to all of their traits.
Examples being Thief, Elementalist, Mesmer and Engineer.
When you get to 80 and get some decent gear, those classes are just as, if not more enjoyable as any other. But the experience getting there can be frustrating and boring.

The real issue is the grind from 60 to 80. Here you start encountering more Orrian content, which while better now than it was, is still not as fun as other content.
All the classes mentioned above, I’ve crafted from 60 to 80 as I couldn’t face levelling them in the same boring areas again. The only one I haven’t is Elementalist, as I find it quite tedious and not really fitting for my playstyle. But again, this might change at 80. I’ve no way to know before then.
Eighty levels was a really bad idea if you ask me. It stretches out the levelling process for far too long, and only a minority of content has been balanced for top level.

The intention was to get people travelling around the world more.
While it has certainly worked, once an event has finished that massive influx of players has no reason to stay in said map.
They need to look at doing something to make people stay, such as buffing loot rewards for jumping puzzles.
I would say that they should also buff normal mob drops and the drops of the various non-event champions, but this may cause a botting problem.

Maybe they need to look at the rewards you get for mapping, so that they’re scaled rather than set.
I’m sure that there are plenty of level 80s out there who can’t be bothered to map low-level areas as the rewards aren’t relevant to their characters.
Scale those rewards, and you’ll have a lot more people exploring.
Hell, guaranteed 2 exotics for map completion? Awesome.

Of course, this also ties in to my other suggestion: that downscaling should be a lot more harsh. Being level 80 should not give the huge advantage it does now. It should only offer a minor power boost rather than than indestructibility it does now.

Yup, Rock Dogs would be good.
Keep ’em coming.

Firstly, I’d like to suggest some creatures that could easily become Ranger pets; the pet-selection interface already auto-sizes according to how many pets you’ve unlocked, and all of these suggestions already have their own special skills that could easily be "F2"ed.

Plated Behemoth
Skale
Skelk
Pinipal

Oh and Raptors are already pets. ArenaNet just don’t know it yet

Next, I’d like to suggest that instead of being timed, elementals should behave like GW1 pets, in that if the glyph for an elemental is on your skillbar, the elemental should be permanently up. If it dies, then the glyph should go on cooldown before another elemental can be summoned.

And finally, can I just repeat the request that ranger pets don’t lose their names when swapped out?
Pretty please?

No Runiir, it doesn’t.
Most of the time, there’s not even a hole for the tail; it just clips through the armour.
The same can be said for helmets and ears/horns.
On top of that, instead of scaling the textures of the armour to properly suit a Charr physique, they simply stretch the texture.
The only time you can guarantee that the armour has been designed with Charr in mind is when you’re wearing Charr cultural armour.

Just a quick little suggestion; how about letting us dye our characters on the character select screen?
They can only use dyes they’ve unlocked, sure, but it would be a nice addition, and we’d get to see a larger preview than the paper doll window.

It doesn’t always relate the current world event Ethics.
For example, if you exit Divinity’s Reach, it will not immediately report ’The swamp lies dormant" until you get within a certain range of the event staging area.
My proposal is to have that message displayed wherever you are in the map whilst having a separate tracker for events nearer to you.

People are always trying to one-up people here without thinking through their wisecracks.

What would be more sensible would be to separate the normal event and world event trackers. That way, while exploring a map, the world event tracker would be omnipresent and informing you of world event status, while the normal event tracker would only report the events in your immediate vicinity.

It’s a real problem, because no matter what people say, your build is utterly dependent on your gear, and gearing in GW2 takes a LOT longer than it did in GW1.
Let alone which, if you want to be flexible, you’re going to end up with 3 or more complete sets of gear in order to properly spec. In ecto alone, that’s going to cost you 180+ if you’re crafting.
This is prohibitively expensive, and downright unachievable for alts now that they’ve added ascended gear with even longer acquisition times.

Player to player trading will never happen.
ArenaNet want to be able to control the flow of money between players and take some money out of the system in the process.

It may not have a chance of happening, but at least it helps highlight logically how exploitative their current rule implementation is.

I’ve jokingly considered griefing people looking for bounties by feeding them false sightings. I haven’t done so mind you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if others are actually doing this.

Brendar.3548:

This was brought up at the Q&A last Friday in Seattle. ANet’s reply was basically “We know we’ve kitten off the community, and are working on finding a solution that will small guilds be able to participate in the guild missions, for their own guild.”

Is there a transcript anywhere online?
I’d be interested in reading a summary.

Thanks majestc, I’ll give that a shot.

So for a laugh, I fired up GW1 last night.
Yes, it’s clunky.
Yes, the combat is nowhere near as fluid as GW2’s.
Oh dear gods, how I missed being able to jump and climb over the scenery.

Yet immediately, I was struck by how my build wasn’t tied to my gear.
I could quite happily change my entire build without having to buy new equipment in order to be effective. My gear didn’t determine my core attributes.

First off, I’m wondering what made ArenaNet move away from this wonderful state of affairs.
Secondly, I’d like to plead that they change GW2’s gear system back to something more like the GW1 one. This is the only way to ensure balance without encouraging grind.

It moves away from encouraging unhealthy playstyles where players are funnelled into repeating particular content in order to ensure that they have the “Best in Slot” gear.

At the moment, it’s an abusive system, using cheap tricks to keep the user-base playing.

Since the February patch, I’ve been frequently getting an odd crash during large events.
The audio engine seems to crap out, being replaced by what sounds like a pulsing test tone.
It sometimes allows me to finish what I’m doing, playing normally and finishing the event before restart, and sometimes just crashes to desktop shortly after starting.
It can be very frustrating, as it happens during large world events, meaning I may lose out out the loot!
It’s not a system audio problem, as Mumble continues to work while the throb is pulsing.

It is also affecting a friend of mine.

I’m using an ASUS P8Z68 motherboard with onboard RealTek audio, all drivers up to date.
I’m using an Astro A40 Audio System, including headset and Mixamp, connected via USB and TOSLink.
OS is Win7 64bit, all up to date.

Anyone else experiencing the same thing?

Yeah, Eviscerate in particular does feel incredibly underpowered now, and I can’t help but think that yet again, it was a knee-jerk fix rather than letting it play out and seeing how players adapted to it.
There’s a lot of this, where ArenaNet seem to react in an over-the-top panic to certain community complaints, and yet brush others under the carpet and pretend they don’t exist. Nothing ArenaNet does appears to be in moderation; currently it’s all extremes.

If you want an alive world, affected by player agency and with the strongest ability to generate stories in gaming, Skyrim pales in comparison to Dwarf Fortress.
MMOs could learn a lot from DF, but the current culture among triple-A MMO developers is only really interested in producing closed systems that are heavily scripted and easily controlled by the developer.
Sure, these games can be fun, but they’ll never be revolutionary until they realise that the players are the content and that they should allow the players more control over the world and its systems.

It’s too dry and impenetrable for most of the userbase, but the biggest player-controlled system in Guild Wars 2 is the trading post. It ebbs and flows based on player interactions, with surges occurring when new economic variables are introduced.
Unfortunately, it makes for incredibly dull stories.

We need more things that the players can influence in MMOs. I’m not sure ArenaNet even want to go that way.
But if they do, they could do worse than looking at WvW and revamping it with more permanent goals, some decent political and diplomatic features and dynamic, unscripted quests that evolve around player presence.
One thing they could start with here is different borderlands maps for every server, with finite resources to allow proper failstates.

They should also work on allowing some of those things that are currently considered exploits.
For example, if you are clever enough to get to an area where you can attack an NPC enemy yet they can’t reach you, you’re not rewarded for your efforts. The game simply makes the NPC invulnerable (or as near as darnit). This rips the player out of immersion. The game is immediately telling them that it doesn’t reward clever play, but rather punishes it.
The same goes for teleport moves. Why can’t players teleport over gaps? It’s silly, and it screams “Balance”.
The defense against teleportation invasion in WvW shouldn’t be a game system being crippled; it should be a group of players being observant and preventing it from happening in the first place.
At the moment, once you’ve capture a tower or keep in WvW, there is no reason to stay behind and defend it. This strikes me as ridiculous. If unattended defences were easier to capture, this would provide more reason to protect them actively.

There’s far too much nannying in games these days with developers believing they know best.
Let’s open it up a little and see what comes out.

This would help with build experimentation too. Builds have become far too inflexible, and the cost to re-trait is partially responsible.

Edit:
Also, changing this would not be unprecedented. The same thing happened in GW1. It initially cost refund points to respec attributes, but they junked this concept and made it free when it proved a barrier to experimentation.

So here’s a fun little idea.
How about an achievement based on other players’ reactions to your character?

There’s right-click functionality on a character’s when you’ve highlighted them. How about a little up-vote option to say you like their current look?

Obviously don’t attach anything powerful to it as a reward, but titles would be cool.

“Fun” is digging too deep. Or magma.

I’m disappointed that increased attack speed is such a minor feature of GW2, when in GW1 it was a staple of any respectable warrior build. Frenzy is a shadow of its former self, what with the prohibitive cooldown.
So a nice warrior elite that would give a substantial IAS would be great.

Can I ask the moderators to make sticky threads for dueling and mounts so that all of these repeat posts get directed to one place?
It’s incredibly tedious to see the same thing posted over and over again.

So this is a plea to roll trait behaviour behaviour back to how it was initially in beta.
I honestly don’t think ArenaNet could have possibly gathered enough data in order to make this change a viable one, and what we’re seeing now is the result.

Class diversity is incredibly low at the moment, due to desirable traits being locked behind major investment. Players are pouring all of their trait points into particular lines, leaving others out of favour.
This is also compounded by how slow and expensive it is to gather enough armour sets to allow true class experimentation.

The change was made because ArenaNet perceived that certain trait combinations were incredibly powerful when all major traits could be chosen at any degree of mastery.
But I honestly don’t think the limited time available in beta was enough to allow the playerbase to come up with effective counters.

Who’s with me?

Care to expand on why you think that Cloud?
Do you not agree that a player-base who are more knowledgeable about class behaviours would be a good thing for the game?

So as a player of many alts (one of each profession), I really enjoy playing my characters at 80.
What I don’t like however is the levelling process.
Unlike GW1 Prophecies, you can’t properly learn your class until you have access to all 70 trait points in GW2. Certain functionalities are effectively locked of until you have enough trait points.

So how about you guys at ArenaNet steal an idea from other MMOs out there and implement an offline levelling system?

The idea is that every 2 days, you get a free level to spend on any one of your characters above level 30.

This helps people get to the level cap faster and encourages playing with other classes.
As players get more and easier access to other classes, they learn how to play them.
If they learn how to play them, they’re less likely to decry certain classes as being overpowered.

This is the problem you have created for yourselves in making levelling of a character too long.
Players are less likely to experiment with other classes as it takes too long to get to the fun stuff. The fun stuff really does start at 80, no matter what the nay-sayers say.

If you’d kept the level 20 cap and decreased the amount of time it took to level, you’d find balance messages posted in the community to be a lot more useful.

Oh, and from observation, to expand on an idea touched on above:
Players familiar with a class will always say it’s underpowered.
Players unfamiliar with a class will always say it’s overpowered.
Players familiar with all classes are more likely to see the overall balance.

That’s interesting Blackwolfe, but unless ArenaNet make it easy for people to report bots, people simply won’t do it. Taking a screenshot then mailing it is too much work for most people out there.
Always design game features around the central tenet that your players will ALWAYS take the path of least resistance.

Thought: how about turning the RNG elixirs into kits, so you can choose the effect you want?

And I hate that Elixir X isn’t even a unique elite, rather the random elite of another class. Talk about lazy development!

I love condition builds for small group and solo play, but yeah, they have problems.

The big one is that conditions don’t work on inanimate objects, so you have to rely on your power. In these circumstances, I think your condition damage should be added as a flat damage bonus.

I won’t comment on ease of removal, as re-application can be very quick, and in the case of multi-condition builds such as my sword/torch/cat ranger, powerful conditions can be “covered” by spammy ones.

Flamethrower Engineer should be awesome, but it’s spectacular how often the flame jet actually misses.

Confusion needs seriously looking at in PvE. It’s great in WuvWuv, although over time that may change as people learn how to counter it. The main problem in PvE is that mobs simply don’t attack fast enough for it to prove useful.
I think it needs changing so that its damage isn’t reliant on stacks, but rather on your condition damage stat, like burning and bleeding. The stacks should affect how many skills are subject to confusion. So every skill activation would remove one stack count.

Where it gets really smelly is in group situations where stacks are limited to 25 and it’s not clear whose condition damage stat is actually determining damage per tick.
This is a really hard problem to address and currently results in condition builds offering less and less the more players are partaking in an event. I’m trying to think of a balanced way of addressing this and bringing it in-line with the raw damage output achievable by Zerkers, but it’s going to take some thinking.

Oh, handy tips too:
Rampager’s gear gives the best precision of any gear and medium condition damage. This makes it great for shatter mesmers.

Superior Runes of the Undead are stupidly cheap yet utterly brilliant for condition builds.

Don’t focus on one condition; try to get as many going on target as possible.

Ah, sorry SniffyCube.
In that case, all I can say is that you should report people using that word. I know I would.

The trouble is, “Own” is not just a pejorative word. It has legitimate, every-day uses outside of smack-talk.
Now bollocks on the other hand, I’m stunned and somewhat amused that this gets through the filter.

I’ve said so before and I’ll say so again.
Leave the loot tables as they are now for world events.
Buff loot tables for jumping puzzles and general open world play.
Make auto-levelling a LOT more harsh, so that playing in a low level area with a level 80 character is as difficult as playing in a high level area.

This will get people spreading out over the world even more while increasing the challenge to be something other than “Hit 1 for rares”.

They need to make level scaling harsher so that playing in a level 1-25 area at level 80 is like playing in a level 80 area.
They also need to make other open world activities just as rewarding, such as jumping puzzles and normal open world exploratory play.
If they do these things, it’ll spread the love a bit and really make sure people are spreading out around the world.

Also, the game needs something like the boss-specific green weapons from GW1. This again helps people explore.

I don’t think it would serve no purpose exactly.
I was a semi-pro Return to Castle Wolfenstein player, and FF Stopwatch was the only way to play competitively. It made you that much more aware of your surroundings and the positions of your team-mates.
Playing without FF removed an edge.

The only time they could possibly make FF work and not have it be a constant source of grief would be in a small team PvP format where you know your team-mates.

No, I understand it would be a temporary thing, but as I mentioned in the previous post, it’s simply a method of augmenting dailies rather than replacing them wholesale.

At request, I’m giving an idea I had a thread of it’s own:

I think a really nice thing that would make Legendaries even more special without unbalancing the game would be to add a drop-down menu to the weapon out of combat that allows you to choose the desired stat combination.

That’s the core of the idea.

Additionally, if ArenaNet were feeling generous, they could extend this idea to sigils, but I’d understand if they didn’t implement that. After all, every Legendary has a superior sigil as part of its crafting requirements, so it only makes sense that the sigil on a Legendary weapon is the one used to craft it.

Finally, there’s hints that they may be eventually releasing Legendary armour (ye gods, I daren’t even contemplate the grind required!). Imagine having one armour set to rule them all, where you could change the stats to suit the situation as long as you were out of combat.

Oh, additionally, allow us to filter armour by “Weight”.
That is, Light, Medium or Heavy.
I knew I’d forgotten something.

Oh, same here; I’m currently sat at ~5,600 points, so I’ve not got far to go (well, apart from the inhuman WvW and sPvP ones that is). I’m not saying completing these achievements should replace the current dailies, rather that they augment them as an alternate way of doing them.
I think it’s hard to disagree with when outlined like that.

You still choose your 5 dailies to do, but hey, if you happen to hit an achievement track milestone while doing it, ‘gratz, that’ll count as one of your five dailies.

I had this thought on Saturday. It’s a little complicated thinking of all the ins and outs, but as I was finishing off one of my Slayer achievement tracks, I wondered why such an achievement wouldn’t count as part of the daily.

I think if you ding an achievement at all during your day’s play, it should count towards that day’s achievements.

So if you’ve never done one of the jumping puzzles and do it before you’ve completed your daily, that should count as a daily achievement. Same goes for boss encounters and treasure achievements.

Most of these achievements are one-offs anyway, so not exploitable.

It also fits nicely into the “Play your way” idea.

Thoughts?

I think a really nice thing that would make Legendaries even more special without unbalancing the game would be to add a drop-down menu to the weapon out of combat that allows you to choose the desired stat combination.
That would be a very cool feature.

The best reward to time-spent ratio is to now have an event timer open in a webpage and use it to zip between events with multiple level 80 alts.

I can understand ArenaNet’s thinking here; people need good rewards outside of Fractals and Dungeons and they also need to spread out into the open world more.

Unfortunately, it has resulted in players now only doing that which gives them the best reward quickest.

To help, jumping puzzles should give similar rewards, as should mini-dungeons and finally drop rate for regular open world play needs to be improved, so as to encourage people to stay in an area once they’ve visited it for the world boss event.

Also, they need to make level scaling even more harsh, so it’s more like playing at the level of the event than it is at the moment. Even with recent scaling fixes, it is still far too easy being a level 80 character in Queensdale / Wayfarer’s / Celadon / Metrica.

These are easy fixes that would dramatically improve the game.
Heck, I was expecting scaling to be flat before buying the game. Fighting in a level 1 area at level 80 should be as hard as fighting at level 80 in a level 80 area.

There’s a couple of NPCs in Queensdale who have some atrocious lines of dialogue; so bad it’s good.

One is Abbot Matthias’ “Beer Song”:
“I love beer!
Beer makes me happy!
Beer makes me sing!
Beer makes me love!
Ev-ry-thing!”

A friend described it as sounding like a song you’d make up if you were two years old.

And then there’s Crazy Bear Lady:
“I know people! DANGEROUS people!”

This level of corny dialogue continues the glorious tradition defined in Guild Wars 1 by Rurik’s:
“DAH! My good and excellent friends!”

What are your favourite lines of really bad dialogue?
Stuff so bad, so goofy, you can’t help but chuckle?

Edit: Off on a tangent, can someone at ArenaNet tell me why Crazy Bear Lady doesn’t use the same old lady model as Lady Grimassi?

But that supposes that they believe there’s actually a problem to begin with.
What if they honestly think everything is fine with this update and that this thread is a way to keep the vocal minority corralled?
In all likelihood, if they were to respond at all, they would go out of their way to avoid saying anything that could be construed as an admission of culpability.

The most likely response would simply be “Just to let you know, we are reading this thread and noting your concerns”.
This tells people that the thread is being read, yet allows the developer an “Out”, in that they are not offering an opinion one way or another. “Your Concerns” allows them to infer that the community’s perceptions are not necessarily ones the development team should be concerned with.

rootnode.9546:

And they still don’t react on it. I get the feeling that they are trolling us and are currently laughing at the thread. I certainly don’t get the feeling that they care and want to communicate.

I don’t think it’s that.
At this point in time, it would be almost impossible for them to respond to this thread without it blowing up in their faces. It’s a PR and marketing disaster just waiting to happen, so from that point of view, it probably seems that the most sensible thing to do is ignore it and hope it goes away.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets locked soon with the excuse that the discussion seems to have run its course and that nothing constructive is being discussed any more (even though it really is at the moment).