Guild Wars 2

Here’s my suggestion:

1. Give each Stat a different color
   - Power = Red
   - Condition Damage = Purple
   - Health = Green
   - Healing Power = Blue
   - Toughness = Brown
   - Critical Chance = Yellow
   - Critical Damage = Orange
2. Make Skill tooltip damage/healing values indicate Base value + Stat contribution with the proper coloring.
   Example:
   Damage (9x): 900 (90+810)
   In this case, 810 would be colored Red if it scales from Power, Purple if it scales from Malice (Condition Damage), or Blue if it scales from Healing Power (Compassion).

Colorblind Mode could indicate the scaling in brackets in front:
Damage (9x): 900 (90+810) [Power]

Anything fits the lore if the devs want it to.
I mean it.

And then somehow the banned player was wrongfully banned, and didn’t deserve any of that, and now you can’t take back what he suffered from the wrongful ban.

In that case, he should then have the ability to make everyone who mocked him suffer the same.
Fair?

Your idea would only work if the bans were handled flawlessly – they aren’t.

Perhaps you have the wrong perspective.
It’s a punishment if the game rewards are tuned assuming continuous “prevention of the malus”.
What if ANet tunes rewards assuming you will only do the necessary events half of the time?
This means if players take the effort in protecting the cities, they would do better than they do now.

Anyway, I think the point is made – the dynamic events don’t hold any real meaning, at the moment, apart from those that prevent entrance into Dungeons.

Here’s what I would add as rewards for caring about the world:
- Some events unlock additional Ore, Harvest and Lumber Nodes in a certain area of the map
- Some events grant MF to those that participate
- Some events unlock daily/weekly/monthly Hearts

Here’s the Dervish, for you, Orpheal

1. Dervishes broaden their knowledge, studying the raw aspects behind the deities, rather than the deities that embody them, in turn drawing attention from all the races of Tyria.
   Instead of Avatar of Balthazar, you have Aspect of War, Aspect of Fire, etc.
   See? I just came up with a sollution to the “not all races are into gods”.
   Just like Paragons evolved into Guardians, so can Dervish improve themselves, perhaps even acquire a different name.
2. Dervish Enchantments from GW1 can be named Shrouds in GW2
   All Shrouds have Initial effect, duration, and End effect; sometimes possibly also an Active effect for the duration.
3. F1 key is “Piety” (placeholder name), wich causes your next Attack Skill to teardown a Shroud to produce bonus effects, while also triggering the Shroud’s End Effect.
4. Dervishes wear Medium Armor, Scythes, Greatswords, Sword MH & OH; Axe MH & OH, Spear, Trident

The 3 old professions have great mechanics.

Paragon have all the Shout, Chant and Echo weaving, and yet I can imagine that being added to the Guardian Arsenal instead of a new profession being created.

Dervish has the enchantment sacrificing.
And no, it has little to do with Mesmer – Dervish sacrifices 1 enchantment to both trigger the enchantment’s end effect, while also empowering 1 of his attacks.

Indeed, I want nothing like auto-targetting.

I want to be the one picking who I use my skills against, not having it picked for me.

Plus, I said I want to be able to use skills on a target without actually acquiring that target.

Would really improve gameplay – at least for me – if I was able to perform skills accounting for what’s under my mouse cursor, without having to click.

If a skill is targetted, checks if a valid target is under my mouse cursor.
If a skill is ground-targetted, works like fast ground-targetting.

Essentially, I would like to be able to:
- Have no Target yet use skill on whoever I want
- Target A but use skill on B without losing target
- Not need to click with mouse

Marko, I’ll repeat:
When you are downleveled, and level up, you become weaker because your relative gear level becomes lower.
Even if your stats are properly adjusted by downleveling, it doesn’t compensate the fact that your gear now is 1 level further away from your own level, makes it weaker than before, and you’ll deal less damage.
So just by leveling, you got weaker.
You’ll notice it in the crit chance %, the damage, etc.

I agree with you that the costs for the various Endurance activities could vary with Profession.
I think they should vary with Weapon as well.
Each profession and weapon could have its own bonus/penalty to the cost/effect of each Endurance action.
Here’s how it could go:

1. Parry:
   - Shield = -10% Endurance Cost
   - Gun = -10% damage Parried (per Gun)
   - Rifle = -20% damage Parried
   - Harpoon Gun = -20% damage Parried
   - Short Bow = -15% damage Parried
   - Long Bow = -20% damage Parried
   - Staff = -15% damage Parried
   - Trident = -15% damage Parried
   - Scepter = -10% damage Parried
   - Focus = -5% damage Parried
   - Warhorn = -5% damage Parried
   - Thief/Ranger/Engineer = -5% damage Parried
   - Elementalist/Necromancer/Mesmer = -10% damage Parried
2. Dodge:
   - Warrior/Guardian = +10% Endurance Cost; -X Distance Traveled
   - Thief/Ranger/Engineer = +5% Endurance Cost
   - Elementalist/Necromancer/Mesmer = -X Distance Traveled
3. Sprint:
   - Warrior/Guardian = +10% Initial Cost; +2% Cost per Second
   - Thief/Ranger/Engineer = +5% Initial Cost; +1% Cost per Second
   - Elementalist/Necromancer/Mesmer = -5% Movement Speed Bonus

Lane.3410:

Sadly, the monetary reward for completing a DE often isn’t enough to cover the cost of porting to get there let alone the cost of returning to where you were.

This is one of the main gripes I have with GW2.

And then ANet complains that players cycle the same DEs over and over – why go out of your way when it’s cost-ineffective?

evolverzilla, the OP simply made 2 suggestions
- free for everyone without have to go through 2 silly loading screens
- remove the free way

The logic is simple:
If ANet allows you to travel for free, why do it through such a lame, boring way?
Just let players freely teleport to capitals.

What?
Dervish is a medium armored profession
Dervish isn’t a profession focused on healing at all

maddoctor.2738:

Nurvus.2891:

No matter how you twist it, you should never, ever, feel weaker once you level up.
Even if for some reason you decided to stay in Queensdale from level 1 to 30 and didn’t update your level 4 gear, you should still feel stronger than a level 4 with level 4 gear, or at least just as strong, but with more skills and traits.

But you never feel weaker once you level up. Each level adds skills and traits, not to mention gear. If you play as a level 20 in Queensdale you get level 20 drops, even if you kill level 1 mobs, same if you are level 30, you can level in Queensdale 1-80 and by the time you finish you will have full level 80 gear. OK not full level 80 because I think the max you can get from level 1 mobs is level 70 I think? But you certainly DO become more powerful the more you level up.

You seem to have skipped most of what I wrote.

The instant you level, you become weaker until you upgrade your gear.

Regarding the 3 Profession, I’ve made a suggestion for each of them in my Expansion Concepts thread – you can find the link in my signature.

About your suggestions:

• Dervish – Too similar to Guardian, and in my opinion doesn’t capture the feel of GW1’s Dervish at all.
  My suggestion was:
  - The Dervish’s Enchantments would all be instant and named Shrouds in GW2
  They work like they did in GW1, having initial and end effects, sometimes active effects too.
  - Every combination of weapons has 3 Attacks and 2 Shrouds
  - Additional shrouds might be available in utility, healing and elite skills.
  - The F1 mechanic causes your next Attack to “consume” 1 Shroud (consumes in reverse order like in GW1)
• Paragon – I was told (didn’t check) that the Paragon practice was absorbed into Guardian in the Lore that leads into GW2
  Following that, I suggested that the Guardian is given Lightning-themed skills, the Shouts, Chants and Echos, as well as 1handed and 2handed Spears usable on Land.
• Ritualist – Your Boons idea could work, but what about the rest of the gameplay?
  I personally suggested F1 to be a Possess mechanic, causing you to gain bonuses based on your Active Spirits, but I think your F1-F4 idea is better, since mine would force players to use Spirits, and I think variety is a good think.
  I also suggested that, like in GW1, Ritualist has:
  - Ashes – works as a Skill Bundle that has an effect when dropped
  - Skills that interact with Spirits – pulling spirits to you, having additional effects if a spirit is nearby, etc
  - Spirits would be stationary (bound by them chains like Anima from FFX).
  Perhaps better than both your idea and my original idea, would be to make Ashes change the F1 skill from Possess to a group of 4 skills in F1-F4, instead of changing your 1-5 skills like the usual bundles.

I never said anything about damage.
Contribution includes Boons, Conditions, Healing, damage, etc – everything counts.

Actually, icedragon, I’m against making the game more about kiting than it already is.

There needs to be more stuff you can do with Endurance.
If light armor characters are getting caught too often, then they might need a look on their escape/control skills, perhaps a few more ways to gain Vigor or raw Endurance, but you can’t speak in general.

I’ve suggested Parry, Tumble, Sprint and more changes to Endurance in the thread Endurance v2.0 in my signature.
Check it out.

BabelFikitten234:

I’d like to see something like this implemented, GW2 has some pretty good parts to it but skill diversity (which ultimately leads to a lack of the holy trinity of MMORPG roles) is not one of them which in turn feeds into some pretty trashy traits and skill mechanics (because they don’t synergize properly).

Well the traits can be improved if they are made to scale properly.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

If a second player runs up and hits the champion once while you’re fighting it, does that mean you’ve been griefed?

Actually, if a bunch of players show up and scale up the boss fight, but barely participate, does that mean you’ve been griefed?
I think it does, even if involuntarily.
The risk of dying to one-hit attacks if high, in this game, and with it comes repair and waypoint costs, wich some players try to avoid by the plague even if it means playing overly safe.

Still, I think the main issue here is the Time vs Risk vs Reward throughout the game.

When there are too many players, even if the enemy scales up, it usually goes down faster, granted they participate.
On the other hand, when there are too few players, the difficulty doesn’t scale down below the recommended amount of players, wich is understandable, since we don’t want bosses to feel like regular veterans.

The solution, in my opinion, is to also scale the reward up with both the:

• Number of players below the recommended
  If the recommended for a challenge is 5, it should scale the reward up as the number of players goes down from 4 towards 1.
• Personal Contribution
  To answer your question, if a player does 99% of the work, and someone joins in to give the boss a hit, it wouldn’t suddenly scale down drops from 1 to 2 players.
  From 2 players, it’s expected 50%-50% performance.
  If both players have 50-50 performance, they should each get drops as if there were 2 players.
  However, if player A does 90% and player B does 10%, then A did 180% of the expected and B did 20%, so A gets 180% of the drops for 2 players, and B gets 20%.
  Something like this would work wonders.
  This would not influence the Event rewards, as those only require a minimum contribution, wich is fine.
• Time invested
  Increase reward as time goes on, to compensate the effort and patience, since a long boss fight is often due to being undergeared, etc.

Currently, it’s way too effective to play glass cannon builds because they make fights that much faster, and faster fights means faster income.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

1) Your traits, skill selection, and gear will be much better if you’re over-levelled (at L32 youhave access to elite skills, but a player that’s <L30 wont’)
2) Can you provide an exact position for where you had L25 creatures attacking you in a L22 sector? Were they part of an event? When a lot of players are around, it will increase the level of creatures in the event.

One of the issues I see with Downleveling, is that the feel of improvement is ruined.
Indirectly, it also affects the gratification of obtaining better equipment, because you never get to feel awesome, since 1 more level and the gear is “outdated”.

Back to the feel of improvement, what I mean is, if you are level 4 with level 4 gear, in a level 4 area, and level up, your real level will be 5, while your gear level will still be 4.
Since your level can’t go above 4 in that area, this translates into becoming weaker instead of stronger, because your gear will now be equivalent to roughly level 3,2 (-20%).

This is particularly punitive in dungeons, specially explorer modes, when you are doing them with a character below level 80.

No matter how you twist it, you should never, ever, feel weaker once you level up.
Even if for some reason you decided to stay in Queensdale from level 1 to 30 and didn’t update your level 4 gear, you should still feel stronger than a level 4 with level 4 gear, or at least just as strong, but with more skills and traits.

Perhaps I’ve got the wrong idea of how downleveling works, but it is what I’ve felt throughout my gameplay experience.

If your intent is to make players feel stronger through gear quality and build (trait, stat & skill synergy), my question to you is: Why burden players with leveling (and downleveling) whatsoever?

It would be so much better to simply have no levels, and the experience you gain serves to give skill points to unlock skills (and skill variants as I’ve suggested in a thread in my signature), wich you must hunt like in Guild Wars 1, wich I’ve always felt was the most awesome end game progression of any game.

It would also allow you to fine tune damage numbers, give certain areas slightly lower or higher difficulty through enemy skills and slightly better statistics, rather than an enforced level superiority, wich also comes with an unfriendly glancing blow mechanic, giving off the impression you don’t want players to explore.

Balderstrom, your initial statements don’t really sound like an argument at all.
The point of Parry is to provide an alternative to Dodge where you don’t move.
I suggest a bunch of different – possible – pros and cons, but the overall idea is to just be able to spend Endurance in more ways than just rolling about like Sonic the Hedgehog.

The game has too much kiting. Dodge only makes it worse.
Sometimes you don’t want to move – you just want to avoid the blow.

If you say the game already has Block so there’s no need for Parry, I say the game already has teleports, leaps and charges and there’s no need for Dodge.

Block can be used while moving (for the most part), while Parry is meant to be stationary.

If Parry has 100% effect as you cast it, and then loses 10% every quarter second or so, it will reward proper timing and skill.

What is Kiting or Strafing other than just pressing 1 or 2 directional buttons + mouse, while pressing skills?
It’s no more challenging than paying attention to the fight and making the decision between Dodging, or standing still and use Parry, depending on the situation.

I think Parry could change cost and effectiveness depending on your weapons:
- Shield = Costs 10% less Endurance
- Gun = Prevents 10% less damage per Gun
- Rifle, Long Bow, Short Bow, Harpoon Gun = Prevents 20% less damage

Remember, all of the suggestions in this thread are ways to make use of Endurance.

I’m available for hire, and would even present a full project if I thought they’d even consider hiring an outsider without great credentials.

Anyway if you notice, most of my suggestions kind of aim to stick to some of the great concepts in GW1.

Axesome.1025:

How would you parry with a bow?

Idea : Blocks next attack if you have a shield (parry).

You would put the Bow between you and the enemy attack…

My suggestion is to give a stationary alternative to Dodge, that is available to anyone regardless of weapon.

Perhaps the cost and the effect can vary with weapon types.
Perhaps Parrying with a Bow is 20% less effective.

Quite a few options to explore.

Hmm, that’s a nice idea.
Safe Fall, I suppose.
I added its functionality to Tumble.

Those Traits, imo, are filler traits that shouldn’t exist at all, or at least they shouldn’t compete with other important traits for a Slot.
I’ve previously suggested Traits should have 3 levels: Minor, Major and Superior, with Minor being the currently nearly useless or extremely gimmicky ones.

Domino, I’ll be honest.
I wouldn’t mind if the game didn’t show any numbers at all, and instead the damage/effects scaled in intensity with the intensity of the damage being dealt, perhaps enemies groaning when they get crit, and vice-versa.

Essentially, I really am against anything that turns the game into a “numeric superiority monitoring exercise”.

However, I think ANet should make all skills and their tooltips as clear as possible:
- Indicate the coefficient of Power/Condition Damage
- Indicate the current damage/duration correctly, taking all modifiers, including Sigils and Traits, into account.
- Possibly indicate the Crit damage amount as well, taking into account all the crit damage modifiers.
- Possibly even the average damage, taking crit chance and crit damage into account.

A game that indicates a decent amount of information in Skill Tooltips, is League of Legends.
It gives different colors to different stats.
So if it scales from Attack Damage, the numbers are Brown, Green if from Ability Power, Red from Health, Blue from special sources, etc.

Another point that I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is that even if the Tool is designed with good intentions, one must account for the possibility of it ruining the community.

In World of Warcraft, for example, the damage meters are so important that players depend on it to make an assessment, and the community has fallen into an elitist nonsense.

The small variety of working, useful builds for each profession+weapon combo evidences the issues with the stats.
Some stat combos, like Power+CritChance+CritDmg, increase your damage exponentially.
Others, like CritChance+ConditionDmg+Toughness, not so much.

I would appreciate some constructive feedback on this important matter.

RoShamBo.2618:

Good stuff guys, I like the sound of these ideas. They are adding something extra and raising the skill cap and resource management a bit too.

The judicious use of a sprint or parry could be the difference between victory or death!

That’s what I’m trying to promote: having various options with wich to reward/penalize players for their good/bad choices.

We need to have more different stuff to do with the already existing builds.

I miss dervish the most.
The sacrificing of enchantments was awesome.

TheDaiBish.9735:

Personally, I think there are quite a few systems they could have used and adapted instead from levelling:

• Guild Wars’ Profession Attributes – Right from the beginning, players have the majority of their attribute points, with mini-quests in the world to dedicate points to their main attribute. For example, bench-pressing a Norn would dedicate one point into the Warrior’s Strength attribute.

• Guild Wars’ Blue Mage-ing – A.K.A Elite Skill Capturing. I’m personally hoping they bring this back if they add new Traits and Skills.

• Runes of Magic Skill Ranks – Instead of XP going towards levels, the player can spend XP to boost their skills, with each skill maybe having a different boost the higher the rank, whether it be straight up damage, reduced activation, increased duration ect up to a max limit.

• Path of Exile Support Gems – Support gems give skills passive effects that boost them. For example, Fireball has upgrades that either increase the size of the splash, or reduce the size of the splash, increasing damage. Maybe a system where you can unlock upgrades at certain skill ranks / through research, or upgrade slots in skills to slot skill upgrades.

• FFX Sphere Grid – One of my fave progression systems in a game of all time. Mobs drop random spheres, which are used to purchase upgrades on the characters Sphere Grid. Character also gains levels, which are then spent advancing across the grid. Each one would have 5 different paths depending on the Profession (keeping in line with Traits), containing minor stat boosts that suit that path (i.e. Tactics would have -0.1 cooldown to Shouts and Banners, Fire Magic would have +0.1% crit chance against Burning targets), as well as skill upgrades (i.e Critical hits with this skill apply Fire Hex for 5 seconds. Hitting Fire Hex with a Blast Finisher deals AoE damage and Burning for 1 sec). This would essentially be a passive progression system that, given enough time, can be filled out entirely, and would have a straight levelling curve (i.e. every level after level 10 needs 50,000 XP to gain a level.)

We are talking about different forms of progression, no?

100%, man.

Love Sphere Grid as well, though I think it’d be messy to adapt to Guild Wars 2.

Anyway, taking on your points, here’s how I would change GW2’s character progression system:

• Guild Wars’ Profession Attributes & God of War
  - There would be no levels
  - No exponential stat growth.
  - Experience would fill up a pool like in God of War, from wich you can spend to unlock various features, in wichever order you prefer.
  Example:
  - Default – Spiritual Growth (Passive) – You automatically gain 1 Skill Point every X experience.
  - Unlockable – Spiritual Guidance (Passive, Costs Y Experience) – Spiritual Growth also grants 1 of 70 Attribute Points every X experience.
  - Unlockable – Weapon Swap (Cost W experience)
  - Default – F1 Skill
  - Unlockable (for some professions) – F2 Skill (Cost W experience)
  - Unlockable (for some professions) – F3 Skill (Cost W experience)
  - Unlockable (for some professions) – F4 Skill (Cost W experience)
  - Unlockable – Utility Slot #1 (Cost Z experience)
  - Unlockable – Utility Slot #2 (Cost Z*2 experience)
  - Unlockable – Utility Slot #3 (Cost Z*3 experience)
  - Unlockable – Elite Slot (Cost Z*5 experience)

• Guild Wars’ Blue Mage-ing & Skill Runes
  I’d mix Guild Wars’ Skill Hunting with Diablo 3’s Skill Runes.
  Essentially, each and every skill, be it weapon, healing, utility or elite, would have 3-5 “Advanced Versions” – small improvements, wich would slightly adjust the skill to different playstyles.
  To use an Advanced version of a skill, you’d need to:
  - defeat 1 to 3 specific monsters in the world
  - unlock the default version of all skills
  - spend X Skill Points to unlock the Advanced version of that skill
  You’d be able to freely swap Advanced Versions of skills while out of combat, like you do with Major Traits.

Here’s a fun fact:
- Almost nothing in GW1 was made to waste your time.
Exception: Death Penalty.
- Almost everything in GW2 is made to waste your time.
This includes Downed.

@DreamOfACure
Of the various points the OP mentioned, all you talk about is balance.

But you aren’t being objective.

• GW2 isn’t more balanced than GW1.
  The mechanics ANet implemented in GW2 give them LESS means to balance the game than GW1 had.
  They had Energy + Recharge Time. With the combination of those 2, they could fine tune each skill.
  Now they only have either Initiative for Thieves, or Recharge for the rest. This means their skill balancing is more limited.
• You don’t have a bigger amount of balanced builds in GW2.
  ANet only manages to make 1-2 competitive per profession.

1. In GW1, you had skill hunting, a true, fun form of progression. Why did ANet throw that away?
2. In GW1, the benefits of higher item rarity were lower attribute requirements, and higher likelyhood to come with better properties.
3. In GW1, the thrill of getting loot was to customize your character and acquire specific properties to aid you in your build.
   Example: +20% Enchant Duration, your weapon deals Fire Damage, +15% damage when above 50% Health, etc.
4. In GW1, you could extract and replace item properties through the use of expert/superior/perfect salvage kits.
5. In GW2, everything is made a grind. If you want the same skin on 3 sets of gear (for 3 different builds), you must farm the skin 3 times.
   In GW1 you could just replace the properties and voila, fits the chosen build.

I made a whole suggestion about this in the Ranger forum.
Take a look:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-System-Beast-Mode-Hunter-Mode

I think your idea isn’t bad, but it’s a little extreme.

In my opinion, each Trait should be available in 2, or maybe 3 Trees.

However, the Trait Line bonuses would need to be redesigned to be attractive even in end game.

Currently the only Trait Line bonuses that scale with your gear are Condition Duration, Crit Damage , F1 Recharge Time and Boon Duration.

The other bonuses would need to be replaced with something that scales too.
A flat +X Power or +X Toughness is bad design.

Essentially, each Trait line should offer a unique combination of Traits, and a unique assortment of bonuses.
This should make you weight the benefit of Traits vs Bonuses.

I think the answer is to have the circles distinguished by more than just color.

Friendly circles should be smooth.
Hostile circles should be jagged – VERY jagged.

This way they can both be white.

There’s no need for that plasmacutter.
All Anet has to do is properly flag skills such that each skill counts as 1 activation.

Chains are considered separate skills, ofcourse, so if you auto-attack, you get hit by Confusion once per chain.

But just because your attack deals 1.000 damage 10 times, instead of 10.000 in one go, you shouldn’t be penalized 10x harder.

jportell.2197:

confusion just redirects damage that you would do to the target back onto you when you use the skill…

No, it doesn’t return anything.

It deals a fixed amount of damage.

Confusion deals the same damage per skill activation whether the activation deals 10.000 or 1000.

It simply penalizes several skills that internally count as multiple activations.

A Warrior activating Kill Shot suffers X damage from Confusion.
An Elementalist activating Tornado suffers dozens of times X damage.

It’s a stupid behavior.

1. Whistling Shot (3/4 s activation) basic attack that grants your pet Quickness (2s).
2. Hydra Shot (1/2 s activation, ground targetting) Fires a shots that burns enemies in a small area and causes your pet’s next attack to also burn enemies in a small area.
   Burn Duration: 2 s
   Radius: 120
   Combo Finisher: Projectile (100%).
3. Dragon’s Roar (1/2 activation, ground targetted) Shoots a bolt at the area that explodes 2 seconds later, interrupting and dealing massive damage to enemies, setting the ground on fire for 5 seconds, burning enemies in it every second.
   Combo Field: Fire
   Radius: 200
   Burn: 1 s
4. Needle Shot (1/4 activation) Fires a piercing shot that roots targets you hit from the back, cripples all targets, and causes your pet to roar and apply vulnerability to nearby targets.
   Roar Radius: 200
   Vulnerability Duration: 6 s
   Cripple Duration: 4 s
   Root Duration: 2 s
5. Great Shot (1 s activation) fires a powerful bolt that launches your target, and knocks aside all targets in its path, while knocking you back from the recoil.
   Launch Distance: 300
   Knockback Distance: 150

I’ve made a suggestion on the Rangers forum regarding a pet mode (Beast Mode) & petless mode (Hunter Mode).

It should be noted that the difficulty in playing with or without a pet should be similar in order for it to be fair to have both options perform as well.

Here’s the link to my suggestion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Pet-System-Beast-Mode-Hunter-Mode/first#post1130630

Adam, did you magically disregard the fact the level 9 thief does not have access to Elite + 2 Utility Slots, and lacks plenty of Minor and Major Traits?

If you tried Lv9 ranger vs Lv80 exotic thief, you might yield similar results.

That being said, the problem with Rangers, in my opinion, is the poor AI of pets, their poor survival, and the unresponsiveness of the F2 skill.

Thanks alot for the replies.
I really liked your idea, FourTwo.7613. Added it to the OP (with due credits).

Happy new year, everyone.

Below I will present a suggestion on how I think the Pet system could be improved to make the Ranger feel more unique and fun.

First, this does not mean I wish Ranger to be more unique or better than other professions.
Feel free to make your own thread on how to improve other professions, but don’t bring jealousy into this thread.

Second, I know alot of players see the Ranger as a pet profession.
However, I think GW’s Ranger had more options and depth, and GW2’s Ranger should inherit some of that.

In Guild Wars 1, you had plenty of skills dedicated to pets, usually in the form of shouts, affecting the pet’s next action.
You could fill your Action Bar with skills that enhance your pet, or both you and your pet.
However, you could also choose to not use a pet at all.

My suggestion is the following:

1. Make Pet Special Skill (F2) more responsive, like a Shout. The Pet should stop everything and immediately perform that action.
2. Make Pets able to attack and use Skills while moving.
3. (by FourTwo.7613) Make your Return (F3) command also give your pet evasion for a short duration (1 second).
4. Give Rangers the option to choose to not have a pet, but make it fair for all rangers, whatever their choice is. The way I see this can be done, is by introducing 2 Modes:
   Beast Mode
   Passive Effect – All Weapon Skills grant your pet a bonus/boon.
   Advanced – The bonuses may vary with the pet’s family (Bear, Spider, etc).
   Note: Currently, only 1 skill per Weapon gives your pet a bonus, such as Crippling Shot (Short Bow); Hunter’s Shot (Long Bow); Pounce (Long Sword); etc.
   F1 – commands the active pet to attack the current target.
   F2 – activates the pet-specific skill of the active pet.
   F3 – commands your pet back to you.
   F4 (without pet) – calls the highlighted animal to become the active pet.
   F4 (with pet) – calls the alternate animal to become the active pet.
   (new) F5 (with pet) – Stow pet.
   (new) F5 (without pet) – Changes to Hunter Mode.
   If you are in combat, can only be used 30 seconds after you Stow Pet.
   —-
   Hunter Mode
   Passive Effect – All Weapon skills have an additional effect (instead of giving your pet a bonus).
   Advanced – the additional effect may vary with the highlighted Animal’s family (Bear, Spider, etc).
   (new) F2 – activates a Special Skill that is based on your highlighted Animal
   (new) F4 – Switch Special Skill to the one based on your alternate Animal
   (new) F5 – Changes to Beast Mode.
   If you are in combat, prevents you from calling a Pet for 30 seconds.

In short, even in Hunter Mode, your highlighted animal affects your Special Skill (F2) and bonuses.

Thanks for reading and try to avoid being hyperbolic in your hypotetical scenarios.

If you could accumulate 2 months it would be perfectly fine.

What do dailies and monthlies aim to reward? Dedication, or lack of social interaction?
I like to think it’s the former. If such, my suggestion is a valid one.

I just deleted the off-topic bit of my post.
Unfortunately, I can’t remove it from your quote.

Asking me to remove something that you quote doesn’t really make much sense.

Now on the topic, some posts can be a little aggressive – sometimes we don’t even realize it.

Your first post in the “Removing the Prisoners’ Dilemma for MF” thread was such, in my opinion.

I have also made some inappropriate posts, most of them not even moderated, and some constructive posts were deleted.

Sometimes I put a thread back on track (was being derailed) only to see it locked a few minutes later.

And the sad part is that Moderators NEVER unlock a thread.
It’s hard to go back on your word, I suppose.

Not everyone is able to play every day.

I think it would be perfectly acceptable if you could accumulate up to 7 days worth of Daily objectives, and do them all in 1 day.

How would this work?
Currently you have the following Daily objectives:

1. Daily Kills
   3 tiers ranging from 10 to 60 kills
2. Daily Kill Variety
   4 tiers ranging from 5 to 15 different varieties
3. Daily Gatherer
   3 tiers ranging from 3 to 20 resources gathered
4. Daily Events
   3 tiers ranging from 1 to 5 dynamic events played

If you fail to complete the Daily (in order to obtain the reward), it will cross over to the next day, adding 3 tiers (60 kills) to Daily Kills; 4 tiers (15 different varieties) to Daily Kill Variety; 3 tiers (20 resources) to Daily Gatherer; and 3 tiers (5 dynamic events) to Daily Events

So if you don’t complete dailies for 6 days, on the 7th day you will have 21 Daily Kill, 28 Daily Kill Variety, 21 Daily Gatherer and 21 Daily Event tiers, and you are able to complete them all in one go, resulting in 7x daily rewards.

Compelling players to login every single day is bad for various reasons:
- Feels like a chore
- Those who can’t feel left out

I also do not understand the moderator thought process at all.

They censor threads of importance under the pretense that it is being looked at or to avoid this or that, or that there is another thread of the same nature – but we see threads of utter nonsense in the suggestions forum – threads that do not suggest anything, and simply complain – and no moderator touches it.

Another interesting aspect of Moderation is that at the beginning, we could see Moderator names, and PM them directly.
Now, we can’t. Funny, huh?

I am totally for proper, active moderation.
But it needs to be unbiased and with a single goal: keeping proper discussions alive, rather than killing them.

A good moderator merges threads, rather than locking duplicates.
A good moderator deletes or locks meaningless threads, rather than letting them bury important threads.

First of all, the thing with transmuted Legendaries not keeping the Legendary tag is a bug.

Secondly, your “second” sollution is awesome, not for Legendaries, but for ALL weapons.

You should be able to do that with all weapons of the game.
Weapon + vial of blood of the appropriate tier = Berserker version of that same weapon

It’s perfect!

The same should go for Armor.
Items changed this way should keep their upgrades.

Capn Evan.4586:

How about Target Combos? (placeholder name) – Whenever you use a Target Combo attack, you will add a mark on that target for a few seconds. If someone else uses a Target Combo attack, it will count as a combo. Basically, the first Target Combo attack adds a mark, and the next removes it and adds an extra effect.

Awesome ideas btw.

I must say, however, that your specific suggestion looks like a nice idea for skill concept.
It’s essentially like Akali’s Q or Leona’s passive, from League of Legends.

I have discovered the one flaw in this suggestion with the help of a player in game.
While the damage per second would remain roughly the same, there would be a loss of burst.
Example (currently):
If you add a stack of 200 over 2 to a stack of 800 over 8, you’ll do 400 over 2 while the 2 stacks overlap, and then the remaining 600 over 6.
Example (suggested):
You’d do 200+800 over 2*0.2 + 8*0.8 seconds = 1000 over 6.8, wich would have similar damage per second, but lower burst.
So in the first 2 seconds, you’d do 312.5 damage, instead of 400, since the damage is spread across the full duration rather than concentrated in the start.

Yup.
I also think creatures should be skinnable – only those that make sense, ofcourse.
And there should be veteran versions of those that would be equivalent to rich nodes.

Instead of explaining how I feel, I could explain what would make the game no longer feel like a grind, without feeling any easier:

1. - Increase challenge and reward across the board, in a fun way.
   This encompasses, for example, making individual enemies as well as Events harder by tuning enemy difficulty up, while tuning enemy damage down.
   However, tuning enemy difficulty up should be done by adding healing and defensive skills, while actually lowering their damage a bit.
   This would make timing your attacks more important than spamming skills, as you risk entering an eternal struggle otherwise, or, in the case of events, allowing a second wave of enemies to arrive before defeating the first.
2. Make skins available all over the map.
   Taking some of the mentality behind change #1, instead of forcing players to run specific modes of content over and over to obtain skins, make skins available from all kinds of creatures all over the map, make them easier to drop from designated creatures during events in that portion of the map.
   Alternatively, events in certain maps would give tokens from the dungeon mode, up to X per day from events if a limit is necessary.
3. Random enemies roaming the world (not map, but world) that drop skins only that enemy can drop, adding much flavor to the game, and encouraging exploring the whole map.

There are more and more stuff that can be done that does not involve “adding content”.

Why design a world when players spend 90% of their time in 10% of the map?

Kaimick.5109:

jason.9217:

it is a grind, the “ooooh shiny” has worn off
I’m now playing Path of Exile and Neverwinter

So why are you posting here about it, if your over and done with this game why come back to say that?

He didn’t say he was done.
There are things called hope, interest, fandom, dedication.

But you didn’t need me to tell you that.
You didn’t need to make that post either.

This game is a grind.

It’s very important to distinguish the difference between:
- Not wanting to grind
- Wanting the game to become easier

The two above statements are completely distinct.
I don’t want the game to become easier.

Why is the game a grind?
Because ANet has made it so that transmuting destroys one of the items…
…and if you want to have 2 different builds, you need 2 different sets of gear…
…and if you want a particular skin for 3 sets, you must get the skin 3 times…
…and to obtain anything worthwhile, you must simply repeat an activity iver and over again – whether it is fractals, explorer modes, pvp, wvwvw – until you get lucky or get enough currency (tokens are currency too)…

To aggravate, bosses, champions and even some veterans are designed around moves that 1 or 2-shot players and ludicrous amounts of Health…
…and Champions and Veterans, despite taking somewhere between 5x and 100x longer to kill, and posing a much higher risk of getting defeated (repair costs & waypoint costs) drop loot somewhere between 2x and 3x as good…
…it goes on.

Let’s take a step back – not into nostalgia, but into properly designed challenges:
- Guild Wars 1 had skill hunting, wich automatically made every enemy potentially attractive to defeat, with or without reward; and also made players go everywhere in the game searching for specific skills, wich served as what I consider the best end-game progression ever designed – ANet threw that away.
- Guild Wars 1 allowed you to extract any property out of an item (leaving only the Skin behind) without destroying the item.
Before you claim that wouldn’t work with GW2’s economy, it isn’t working very well to begin with, and you used 1 charge of your “perfect salvage kit” for each component you wished to extract – ANet threw that away.
- Guild Wars 1 enemies all presented a different challenge, as they had a set of 3-8 skills consisting of PLAYER SKILLS, wich would also inspire players to make their own combos – ANet decided to make 90% of the enemies in GW2 all about 1-2 unrelated special skills + auto-attack.
- Guild Wars 1 didn’t have gear tiers, or item level requirements, or a huge level progression – it didn’t need to – ANet decided to introduce 80 levels, all the problems that come with it, and downleveling to fix that, while introducing its own issues (such as feeling weaker as you level up in an area, since your level goes up, your gear does not, and downleveling bring both down).

Essentially, ANet threw away alot of core mechanics that made GW1 awesome, and introduced alot of mechanics that I consider the bad parts of WoW.

In the Manifesto one of the developpers makes fun of other MMOs in the minute 1:32, saying: “I swung a sword, I swung a sword again, hey, I swung it again!”

Well guess what, it’s what we do in GW2!