Guild Wars 2

On the 5 or 6 people I made buy this game at launch, only two are still playing… the others stopped after like 4 to 10 hours. All came from other MMOs and I can tell that they were not interested by GW2 because they were not told to do anything and didn’t realise what levelling gave to them… you can call them 6 year old children or mentally impaired people if it makes you feel better but the truth lies somewhere else. If you are not informed beforehand it this game can be scary….

Also don’t forget that not every player speaks, reads or write English easily… this is a huge problem in game since megaservers but it was already before when you seek help. I personally had huge trouble to understand the first Guild Wars almost ten years ago and now it’s ok for me to play the majority of MMOs but I needed help of a lot of external english sources … and hopefully I had enough time and passion for that, but most people won’t put any efforts in understanding a game that doesn’t help them to understand.

Proposal Overview
Guild influence and commendations tokens tranfer

Goal of Proposal
Easing the end of life of a guild and creating some sort of cooperation between guild

Proposal Functionality
When a guild is dying sometimes people would like to join another one but the risk is to lose all the benefits of the first one. Also a lot of player have a regular small guild and belong in the mean time to big guild (mostly for WvW purpose). It could be a nice feature to give an option to guild leaders to transfer some or all their influence and commendations to another guild. It should be a secured way and should always be initiated by the giving guild.

Associated Risks
One bad thing that could appear is guild where the guild leader is “stealing” every effort from other guild members towards bigger friend guilds without agreement of all the members. But this belong more to the guild organization, I don’t know if this has to be addressed by the devs.

Just to add my feeling about tutorials, I played Aion some years ago. The game provided some video tutorials in game. Honestly, the first time you create a toon, you get 4 or 5 videos to watch and most of the time my reaction was “Meh… I don’t really get what they are talking about” (often due to bad translation) or "Come on it’s pretty obvious !! ". Then some others popped during the game but I never felt it was at the right moment. Then for each alt I opened the vids only to get rid of the alert icon and skip them.

What I think is making a tutorial in game must be really time consuming and I’m not sure if they are so useful. At least in the form I know.

I wish Mortar would auto fire skill 1 over my target when I’m not controlling it, like a super AOE-turret. Then either the CD of the skill should be higher or the fire rate should be of 5 seconds instead of 2.

Another suggestion is to be able to either blast it or put it back in the bag and reducing the CD by the remaining time multiplied by the remaining health of the mortar.

While I found the game quite challenging at the beginning I think I never felt lost or anything in the game. But that mainly comes from the fact that I was really well informed about it since the early development (former GW1 player).
Nevertheless I succeeded in making 5 people around me buy the game and they were really lost by how the game behave. Out of those 5, 3 never reached level 30 and stopped playing.

Among the things that were not clear for them there was the “trinity” issue, the traits in general, the lack of quest and where to go and the game mechanics ( no real rotation of skills and active dodge). On top of that they also didn’t understand the boon system and got really annoyed by the condition limit.
One could say I’m a bad friend not explaining them but I tried to take time to explain but they didn’t like having to ask someone to understand the game and being forced to get outer sources. I would argue that every MMO game needs that ( they all came from WoW mainly and when they talk about how they started the game more than 5 years ago, they need outer sources) but in the meantime going to other not-foundation-breaking games, players tend to understand quite fast new gameplays because they just adapt to small differences. For GW2 you need to rethink the way you launch yourself in a MMO and most people don’t like it if they are not guided.

For that reason, even though the changes won’t change my experience of the game, I think they may be good to keep players attracted to the game. I even thought contacting those 3 people to convince them to give another try.
If Anet decided on those changes for China release and ported them to our version of the game, I’m quite confident that it is due to data they have showing that many account bought at release never reached max level.

On the trait level I think Grandmaster should be unlocked at 70 or 75 to make people start to play with build and upon reaching 80 be more focused on getting a gear for the playstyle they chose. All my non-80 toons post feature pack1 (minus one … see below) have been EOTM’d for the last ten levels since I was bored to wait for being able to actually play them the way I wanted.

Concerning trait unlocks I deleted one alt on April 15th update and leveling (still ongoing) it made me love that profession which I didn’t like before…so globally trait unlocks are great! It slows the starting experience as expected and made me more aware of the profession mechanics and weapon skills. On top of that I like the feeling of hunting traits in places I went only once at launch. It’s also cool to see thanks to megaserver that there are tons of people in what I believed empty maps to fill the requirements of traits unlocks.

What I would do :
- redistribute trait points between lvl 30 and 70
-remove all map completion but Gendaran Fields and let one adept trait per line unlocked so that choosing a line for stats always gives you a trait to place
-remove story chapter and let one master trait unlocked per line for the same reason (Story is the only thing new players follow without hesitations)
-Highlight on the map were traits can be unlocked. The lens is cool but there are too many traits so new players don’t know where to start. Without the wiki sorting by level I would never have enjoyed this.
-For specific traits I don’t know if it is still the case but Arah gate should award the trait for defense aswell (killing the priest should be the thing) since it created a feeling of being forced to fail events.

yeah I know they do… but I don’t see the point of being realistic in suggestion

edit after re checking : 1 stack of defiance every 2 sec and half… not as OP as null field (5 boons in 5 secs ^^)

Personally I like defiance just because it is so funny when you play defiant stripper in a group with vocal. You really can choose the skill you want to interrupt with your friends. Never mandatory, almost always possible.

The game not forcing to do so is a good thing I think. The interrupt-this-or-die stance is not something I liked in other MMO (read WoW) because having scripted fights made them boring on the long term ( hence the need of new raids/dungeon every 6 months). Here you can either choose to dodge abilities or to interrupt or to soak damage or to mix everything. It’s up to you to decide what you want to do and if you are good at doing it you can succeed whatever your choice…

If I would change one thing to defiance it would only be to make it stripable by boon removal…. it would really make necro shine more in dungeon and make mesmer stronger in that role. Boon stripping is mostly useless in PvE so adding this could make it a bit more useful.

Iason Evan.3806:

You are totally right. My bad. I feel like it had been said somewhere that they were indeed implementing templates. My apologies.

You may be right and have read it… and that is always a problem, people read between lines and take that for granted before spreading the news through the community.

It’s like for SAB, somebody said "it won’t make sense to have SAB returning during a LW seasons so we don’t know what will happen to it NOW " and suddently all the community is like " NO SAB EVER !!! " " Reimburse my infinite token" "Let’s occupy Rata Sum naow! "

For sure there is some communication issue from Anet but there is also an issue within the community between players themselves…

Iason Evan.3806:

We were told months ago that Skill Templates were coming. If Skill Splits don’t happen, then Templates make total sense as we players need different builds for different formats.

What’s up with Templates? How is progression going on those? With seemingly only 2 Feature Patches per year, does that mean we will have to wait another 6 months for Templates when we were told 6 months ago they were happening?

Funny how people can’t read ….

Original post form a dev :

Evan Lesh.3295:

We absolutely want to make build templates. They could work similar to GW1, but there are more components to a build now. Using the old string-code method may prove to be unwieldy.

Things that must be in a template:

• Weapons
• Sigils
• Rune
• Amulet
• Skills
• Traits

What could be in a template:

• Skins
• Dyes
• Outfit
• Finisher

Things to consider:

• Sharing (chat links? codes? urls?)
• Viewing (seeing some else’s vs. seeing your own)
• Saving (notepad vs. local vs. account vs. web)
• Building (one spot in UI vs. multiple spots)
• Websites (third-party sites should work with in-game)
• APIs (Could expose an API to third-parties)
• PvP vs PvE vs WvW (each mode requires different configuration options)

How would you like to see any/all of these work?

So 2 months ago (40 work days during summer !!! ) someone write " we want to add templates but help us to decide what should be in" and you read “we have done build templates, they are coming”….

It’s cool to have feedbacks directly from the top of the company. Anyway there are still some things from this message that are not clear for me.

Mike O Brien.4613:

I know some are concerned about whether ArenaNet is communicating with you and listening and responding to your feedback. As you saw with yesterday’s announcement, we do.

The commander thing was a nice move sure but I have the impression that it was only possible because the feature was advertised before at Gamescom. I mean, in the normal schedule, we should have heard about the details yesterday and it would have been too late for feedbacks to revert the situation, and the change would only have happen for the next feature patch in 6 months. You have shown in the past that this company value feedbacks from players but lately I have the impression that players feel less engaged in giving feedbacks since feddback topics are not “animated” by any dev.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve.

I’m not sure this has to be player driven but having input of the devs on their global view of different parts of the game would be nice for sure. Before release there were those blog posts which were describing game mechanics and the philosophy behind but since then …. As an example, for a year or so the dungeon forum is in a really bad state. Always the same sterile debates about stacking/berserk/skipping/…. sadly no devs ever came to share their philosophy and goals for that part of the game. The thing is that it is not really a dev’s job to do so, as you explained

Mike O Brien.4613:

Our developers post on these forums on a voluntary basis, and in addition to developers, we have a community team who can clarify and be the bridge between players and developers.

I must admit it is one of the biggest issue lately. I mean where are the CMs? I won’t say they are bad at doing their job because before release they were really good at relaying information, creating some hype, debunking false theories… and they were only three!! Now you have hired more people but strangely enough they all disappeared from the forum (and if I remember well it was the exact reason for having an official forum : not spreding too much the community team on too many fansites). Sorry to say that but I think it was a bad move to ask them to change the way they were working.
If I remember well they were always around for interviews before, focusing it around what is allowed to be talked about or not. I mean of course asking the WvW lead designer what will happen with SAB was the best way to get a fiasco. With CMs (who are professional ) helping to prepare the interview of devs with the fansites (who both are not professional of communication) it is easier to send better messages to th community.

So yes there may be an issue with the communication but what is weird is that communication was one of the strongest point of the company not so long ago…. and with the same people!!! Innovation is a god thing but if you have something working well, use it…. I’m sure this will end well because you have good people to do that

to be honest until yesterday I was secretly hoping for the name to have changed (even the attack of subject alpha) just as they would have said “hey guys don’t mess too much with the .dat file”

BrunoBRS.5178:

if she “didn’t want to make the same mistake twice”, all she’d have to do is make the name official. i’m pretty sure not even the wiki states that mordy’s name was known by characters in-game.

that’s assuming it was her mistake (which it really isn’t, i expect the whole team to have gone through the text multiple times and not noticing it), and assuming that was the reason. lots of assumptions.

My post was to be taken with some irony… I strongly hope it is not what happened … and yes I don’t want to blame Angel specifically for this, they are a whole team of dev and QA ( and also some external testers probably). I just find it sad when you try to be invested in the story to see such huge things happen (that and 2 chapters after discovering that the big thing behind Scarlet’s moves was to awaken a dragon…to which we already gave a name…)

Though I agree magic doesn’t seem to be destructible I don’t really see why if the dragon is dead it should absolutely go in another creature who would incarnate “Zhaitan” as a concept. Sure Teq seems to have found a lot of magic to get stronger but I don’t think that magic by itself wanted to find a wannabe elder dragon.

On a side note on the video I was wondering, if the spheres are the dragons, it should mean they are only six for the whole planet. How come they were all sleeping on the same continent? They are the magic of a whole world and yet they are concentrated in a very tight area of that world! Up to now I wanted to believe that because of the loss of contact we had no idea that Cantha was fighting its own Elder dragons because the number of them didn’t seem finite.
Moreover it means that if one day we are going out of Tyria, say Elona, it won’t be to fight a super vilain even stronger than the previous one (I mean Palawa Joko against one and soon 2 elder dragon ?…seems easy )

Well last week there was a continuity issue because the english wiki article about secondborn had no reference for the date. That drove Angel to the conclusion it must have been fan speculation and she “changed” it.
This week we have the reverse issue since the name is everywhere in the wiki, still without reference (from what I understood this was a huge drama on the wiki) …I assume she didn’t want to make the same mistake twice…..

I don’t know if we are stronger or not than Scarlett but I don’t think we experienced exactly what she saw. Maybe the machine keeps some echo of her vision and we actually see what she saw but rather as an external spectator because during the cinematic we clearly hear the voice of Scarlett and the one of the Pale Tree.
There is no reason for the Pale Tree to speak(in a teacher way) to non sylvari PC . I’m still puzzled by her dialogue in the Grove where she clearly states that her knowledge is too small to really know the Dragons… if she was really the center piece of the whole world I hope she wouldn’t say such things.

There are even less reasons to hear Scarlett now she’s dead. Vorpp said she only could see what she brought in the machine so maybe we have a whole vision of the world as seen by Scarlett. Like somebody creating a theory and suddently analyzing everything in that frame only making the theory stronger (you know like saying the Pale tree is a dragon champion and only finding proofs of it). The machine would then only hold a copy of her mind at the moment Mordremoth made contact with her.

Stooperdale.3560:

With all the thorn monsters aiding Aerin, he surely has to be involved with the Jungle Dragon. My reading of it would be that the Jungle Dragon can talk to and coerce plants, including the Sylvari. The dream protects against this and maybe nightmare does too. Neither Aerin nor Scarlet fall into nightmare, and that seems significant to me. If the Nightmare Court are going to become the servants of the dragon then why didn’t these other servants join their ranks?

A lot of other questions follow on from this. If it is the dream that protects the Sylvari then can other creatures be protected by the dream as well? Can another parent tree be protected in the same way as the Pale Tree, and if not are the offsping all going to be vulnerable to the dragon? Malyck’s tree is likely to be dangerous as well as Malyck himself.

Have we been told in game whether all Sylvari are immune to dragon corruption, including the nightmare court, including the soundless?

I think that Nightmare is described as being part of the Dream so if the Dream is the protection one could also guess the Nightmare is.

As for the vine attacking, they could also be here to defend the fleeing Master ?

maha.7902:

Mac.3872:

My advice.

Wear whichever armour you want.

There is only a tiny part of the community who actually care about which armour the other guy is wearing in PvE.

The other people in the dungeon might start to care when the run takes twice as long.

-Grandmaster Mind Brain.

If it is twice as long as some of your records it is still bearable

Actually I missed that part, good news !

Unfortunately they haven’t add tormenting/anti toxin recipe

If you want to be perfectly optimal go for full berserker.

Nevertheless it may be hard to start with this setup since there is little space for errors. If you really want to be as fast as possible then train with this setup but be aware that full berserker training is easier with full berserker group. If you plan on pugging without looking for gear requirements then the setup you suggested will ease your life because most encounters will be longer than expected (don’t be afraid not 4 times longer !).

Now if you play with friends, do the team build together. Either you will run a full berserker team to kill things as fast as possible or you can also choose setup with one member dedicated to support/heal, conditions are fine also as long as only one party member runs such a build so that he can apply all of them.

Though it seems strange to have no offensive stats on a gear, there is no rule (that I know at least) that forces any players to have a single attribute gear set. I mean this kind of new mix can be nice when you mix stats.
As an example if you craft/buy a berserker set but find yourself to die a bit to often you will want to exchange one or two piece of gear to have a bit more resistance. Since it has defesive only stats maybe you can get more survivability by changin one or two piece where you would need 5 clerics ones.
Also this new combination is the first to have Toughness as primary stat and vitality as second so it may be another way to adjust stats.

Is it not a bit to soon to say that Aerin bad moves means Mordremoth activity? I mean Canach did bad thing without (apparently) being influenced by a dragon…
What I think is Aerin did what he did through avidity of power because apparently that is where it started between Master of Peace and him.
I don’t know how Master of Peace’s voice sounds in other language but in french it sounds quite suspicious. Maybe a voice is no proof of anything but his lines are also quite strange. To me He is going to be someone we are going to fight.
What I think is after getting power from Glint remnants and also maybe from a place where an Elder Dragon was fought (and maybe injured) Zephyrites are also sseking power from a stirring dragon. Knowing the power they have and seek, Aerin asked for sharing a bit but upon Master of Peace refusal he turned upset and wanted to get it by force and hence attacked the Master.

The more I read about this debate the more I have the impression that it falls under the category “self esteem issue”.
Some people want to be considered as pro, clean things as fast as best groups and draw huge dps but without making the effort of playing like this.

It is fine to “play how I want” even if it is not THE meta build as long as you play in good coordination with the team. That is if you’re pugging in a group and don’t talk you are expected to play what some call the “elist build” (even though some play it but are soooo bad).

Almost everything works in the game (yeah even condi necro in dungeon can contribute to dps, or mantra mesmer being assigned to a “healer” role) but nothing is equally fast. If you want to be as fast as the best team then play as well as the bests do. If you don’t play like them then deal with it and accept to not be among the best players, there is nothing to be ashamed by this. Yes they will be richer and get their precursor sooner but you won’t have spent as much effort as they do so it is normal in the end to get less than them.
Find the fun where you want but don’t spoil the fun of other because it is not you’re gameplay… or get your fingers out and work hard to achieve what they can.

PS: I have almost no toon equiped with berserker, the average dungeon runs I do are like 20/30 minutes but my guildies and I don’t care, it is not what we want from the game but I enjoy watching videos of [DnT] or [rT] clearing bosses and dungeons so fast… I just think " woaw that’s fun, they’re good" but I don’t care not doing it.

maxinion.8396:

gahhhhhh

Feeling better for the week end? ^^

Sorry to spoil the joy but I’m afraid you’ll have to redo it next week and the week after ….. but I share your relief

I like the idea, especially all the work you did to describe all of different mission.

The only thing you could add is some specific reward (like heroes armor skins were droping) that would drop randomly. I was thinking maybe some gizmo for decorating home instance in the said city that aknowledge for your help to the city.

Ken DeBoer.9268:

2 – The real problem of it all…. the AI. Heck, if a boss “senses” that there are a bunch of FGS wielding people in a corner, it should say to itself “Self, I’m going to the meat grinder if I round that corner, maybe I should use my awesome aoe and splash it on them”. I wasn’t around for beta, but I heard that the monsters would actually dodge you in a more active combat. If they just implemented that on bosses that would be great.

Let’s be fair if mobs get an AI making them go out of AOE then give them a way to interrupt people activating healing skills as well. Then along with bringing some immobilized to keep them in aoe you will also have to bring a lot of stability and sync healing skills for everyone in the party

Lian Olsam.9541:

I dont think so, it’s just your opinion, i’ve already tryed a composition i suggest and it works better then full zerk… much time is needed but u can do that…

Then why is it better ?
If you get more fun from playing so why would you stop. The same way goes if players get more fun from being faster why should they stop?

Are you aware of those full zerker teams that actually run through the dungeon without dying? And do you really think playing clerics avoid death ?

With this system all people training to play zerk would then be kicked from party at first death and people would complain even more about community toxicity.

haviz.1340:

That’s what anet gets for abolishing gear stats standardization from gw1 and introducing gear stats diversity. Neverending story.

Not true : in GW1 you had those runes of superior attributes (+3 attribute, -75 HP). I remember guys runing them while being front line and die every mob packs. Some others were better and hence performed really well with those runes… same logic in GW2 but more diverse and with different scales.

Miroe.2054:

Ranael.6423:

you should balance it with a buff for people losing damage for survivability.

Thats what Im already trying to do here. The Idea is, that at the moment there is an imbalance and this is trying to make defensive builds more viable.

Defensive build are viable in the sense you can run a dungeon with them. There is no need to up them or to nerf zerk. In my guild we never look in others’ pants and we play the build/armor we have fun with and we go through almost everything like this. Sure for some harder things we organize a bit more but for the “basic” dungeon we don’t need 5 hours… Yesterday we made a full catacomb run and we just forgot about Ele’s FGS because everyone was trying a new build/character. Even with that every paths was the usual 15 minutes (ok we cheated, Detha did not bug ! )

The only imbalance is in people needs that is being super fast while don’t go for all DPS. Tomorrow zerkers will ask for a buff giving them more HP if they hit hard enough to compensate their lack of survivability.

Some cornered animals also die from heart attacks … so your buff should be 50% what you propose and 50% instant death of the boss

If you want to strike at people losing all survivability towards damage by forcing them to make fights longer than 1 minute then you should balance it with a buff for people losing damage for survivability.
In that idea if a fight last more than 2 minutes and a half then players fighting the boss should lose 10 % armor every minute to force them not to tank damages and killing boss by exhaustion.

(this is not a serious suggestion, just to say that if every setup are meant to go through dungeons then there is no reason to strike one specifically and not the others)

dutchiez.7502:

They should give silver mobs some loot that would make them worth it to kill (like dropping 50c-1silver each would make a big difference) and they should give bosses like Kholer, Cave Troll and Ooze King unique drops with a very low drop chance in addition to standard boss loot, to make them more appealing to kill. Even if you don’t get the super rare drop you still get rewarded as you would for any other boss but you have the small chance of getting something super valuable.

While having special skins on each bosses is a nice idea (though hard to implement in term of art I guess) I remember a post saying that adding mooney on trash could end up by having silver mob farming group. Maybe it is not that bad but in this time devs were afraid of this economy wise. I don’t have any clue on their stance on that now.

Archon.6480:

Vanquishing and speed runs were both in GW1. Loved them both. Great idea!

The only difference is that Vanquish never existed in dungeon context (was there a reason for that ?) and speed runs were more a game within the game (as solo farm was for example) and was never rewarded in any way. Here it would add some sort of competition for players and between teams. Maybe they want to avoid that but I have the impression that it could create some new challenge to drag people in dungeon.
Also as dungeon completion is right now it is set up so that every team of player who know what to do can finish it whatever their stuff or build (to a certain extent). The proposed events would “force” people towards certain team composition to optimize the runs … which is good for some people but can be seen as too elitist for others …

(not saying the idea is bad of course …. just trying to figure out the flaws :p )

Not necessarily. Look how Grothmar hills seemed “normal” before Kralkatorik emerged from it. It was still living dragon body but not corrupted at all. I don’t think the body is the corruption, they seem to choose what they corrupt and how actively.

dutchiez.7502:

They would have to set a different timer for each path and make sure it is doable, but not easy. 15 minutes for AC p1 would be way too much since the world record atm is 4:xx and a casual run would take no longer than 8-10 mins, depending on spider queen rng I guess. So something like 6 min for that path for gold reward, 8 min for silver and 10+ for bronze would be a good standard. Rewards should be balanced ofcourse, maybe 1g for bronze, 2g for silver and 3g for gold.

Having the reward daily and forcing a reset if you mess up would be great, it would finally add some element of risk to PvE.

Also just want to add that people on LFG do not do speedclears, they just put it in their LFG to sound good or something, they are pugs after all and will never get the times a true speedclear would get.

That’s true there is a big difference between speedclears and rush. Nevertheless I’m not sure if the rewards should be much more than simple completion because some people may still want to find groups for the actual “rush”. Or as in your example do you think eveyone should earn the bronze reward for speed or kill ? In that case very few people would try the killing event unless the reward is totally different (like previously suggested people wanting token would activate killing reward to gain more token even for rush) ?

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Miku Lawrence.6329:

It can’t be a straight equality between Speed run and Full clear for sure. Because time. Who will full clear if speed run gives just as much?

If the speed time for gold is really really low, close to world records (maybe adding a few minutes just for fluff) people might find it more advantageous to full clear.

Totally agree on that, if you decide for full clear you are sure to finish it unless people have to leave urgently. If you decide to go under a certain time, you are never sure to do it… not even speacking about lags, computer crashes which would affect more the SC than the full clear.

The idea is good but you will loose your sanity in the organisation

On the “surprise” rule the risk is to have complains about how unfair it was for one team to have such rule and not the other. On the other hand you could impose the same rule for each path but decide them at the latest time so that people won’t train too much. About those rule, what about having a 5 of a class or take 5 different class ? You could also ask to run COF 1 without any traits… I put COF 1 b/c such a rule is not really funny in complex path.
Problem in the structure of the game is that it is impossible to have a spectator in a dungeon… meaning it would be a nightmare to be sure people have done the things correctly.

proviticus.4183:

I agree 100%. I feel like I must have badly worded my post, since it seems some people thought I was being disagreeable. I only said that I think it would have to be carefully balanced, and what you and lilith are suggesting is how to balance that, which is more useful than me just saying it needs to be balanced.

My example of poor balance would be that everyone does speed clears, for example if they were set at 15 minutes like the OP said, which seems quite easy with some dungeons and paths. I would still want great rewards for great speed runs.

I totally agree that the balance has to be finely tuned … but on that field only devs have the needed metrics to do it well.

proviticus.4183:

I like it too. It has real potential as long as care is taken to balance the rewards for time spent. I.E. the reward for one of the clearing goals should be better than the reward for the speed clear, though, since speed clear also requires some skill, rewards couldn’t be just a function of expected time spent. Anyway, I’m not a dev and I don’t have to figure out how it would need to be balanced. I’m just saying it definitely would need to be balanced. Otherwise all those pugs will switch from “zerk 80s” to “zerk 80s speedclear”

Not sure SCs are THAT easy. It mainly depends on the thresholds exactly as Lilith said. And such rewards would be once a day like every dungeon reward meaning that if you fail at one point then you have to reset the dungeon if you only want gold reward….

But I also think the reward should be different not only in amount but also in variety (gold for speed, token for clear as an example).

Purple Miku.7032:

http://i.imgur.com/keSNBcG.png

I’ve thought that this should not only be implemented, but separate rewards based off of the same concept. Your suggestion is basically one in the same. =)

Didn’t know anything about Runescape til now… seems a really good system that offers a lot to different gamestyle.

Xar.6185:

This is something I’d like to see.

If your team can finish the dungeon within the time limit – bonus chest.
If your team kills every mob in the dungeon – bonus chest.
(the closest thing we could get to vanquishing from GW1)
If your team completes every event in the dungoen – bonus chest.
(When was the last time you saw a group do the ghost event under the stairs in AC?)

Most of all I’d like to see tiers of these things, like bronze, sliver & gold. I’d also like them to stack. As in, a team finishes within the time limit to earn a silver / gold chest but they also completed every event on the path to earn a gold chest for that. They just earned two bonus chests.

I don’t think everything should be cumulative or at least not everything Gold at the same time.

Then I forgot that sadly such suggestion could not be applied to Aetherpath since iirc you clear trash anyway. And rewarding time … wel they should fix ooze font first since the success of this can be random…

The more I read this forum and the more I’m afraid about the community splitting in 3 categories : the one who go fast in dungeons, the one who wants to play “as intended by the devs” and the third one being people who remain silent and can fit in both other groups.

I thought about a suggestion that could help (it has maybe already been suggested but the search function is weird on this forum). What about Bonus end-chests ?

First, since dungeon rewards are not so good I don’t think this should be a replacement but rather an addition. Ok it would need some work from the devs and I’m not sure there is still a dungeon team with a design philosophy and long term visibility on that field but who knows…

The bonus end-chests should be awarded according to dungeon specific meta events and would contain rewards according to the completed events. I don’t know if it would be better to choose the event at the begining nor if they should be mutually exclusive. Those events could be timers meaning you would have to “rush” the dungeon (maybe different levels for different times like boss blitz) or extermination where you should avoid skipping trash and the more you kill the better the reward. One could also imagine other meta events involving the bonus event, defiance removal (?)…

Two things are important :
-the reward only comes if you finish the dungeon (for no “trash farm” activities)
-the different bonus chest shouldn’t contain the same reward to encourage communities to mix. One meta could reward gold, another token or dragonites …

LFG could be updated so that people can specify in the group what bonus they target and of course the completion of these meta could be part of an achievement.

Do you think it could be a nice idea ?

Fenrir.3609:

haviz.1340:

Isn’t LoSing stacking? You stack mobs in one place so you can nuke them easily.

You can LoS and stack, but they are not the same thing.

Stacking is just having characters or mobs stand on top of each other within each others hitboxes, that’s it really.

But theoritically isn’t it sufficient fur buff purposes to be in a 600 diameter circle? And that can be made with having people on different sides of the boss no ? Stacking on a single point is most of the time used for LOSing (or concentrate ennemy’s zones in some cases).

I don’t know if it fits with the initial intent of the topic but what I feel about stacking is that it is counter intuitive. Playing devil’s advocate here since I stack too but recently a friend joined us on the game and he was destabilized by stacking (and skipping too but that’s another story). Stacking melee while playing with a ranged weapon is not intuitive at all (and then discovering you should prefer melee weapon though you don’t like them is frustrating… that is the kind of emotions he went through over the last 2 weeks).

What about this.

Introducing popularity system.
People can now like other players chat dialogues and right clik on players and give star for awesome outfit.
Each player receiving a like in game or on the forum or a star is given 1 copper. For 10000 of these rewards you receive a precursor in your mail.
This system replaces any planned scavenger hunt and will be an incitation for people being nice with each other in-game and on the forum

Protoavis.9107:

Support builds would become more relevant if boons were actually affected in a significant way from a supportive stat, make all the default values of boons far weak in strength/duration and you’ll see the support role become more of a thing because you’d need to gear for it rather than just gear for DPS because all your support boons aren’t affected by your gear. Same argument could be made for control.

In theory I agree that might could scale with healing power instead of giving a flat increase in power, retaliation could also scale with it instead of power. The thing is that maybe from a coding POV it would be hard to do it (though I think it is the same principle as bleed stacks) and also it could be confusing for players since there would be arguments about who should finsh combos and people would get crazy if a berserker geared player put 25 stacks of “weak” might and not let people with healing power do it. In any case I don’t agree that the base value should be far weak since it would then be a huge nerf to teams without “healer” which is not the goal.

As for control I don’t think they should scale with healing power or boon duration because it would reinforce bunkers like crazy and in general controling an enemy has nothing to do with support. For helping control (in dungeon context) maybe there should be a way to remove additional stacks of defiant buff e.g if you apply to daze/interrupt/luanch within 3 seconds it would remove 3 stacks instead of two… but diversion would then be OP in that purpose (and this is already really strong for defiance stripping!).

SkiTz.4590:

What i’m trying to get at is, what exactly is the point of healing in PvE?
It’s not required to even bother to spec even a little bit of healing.

Well following such logic why is power even needed since everyone has a minimum which means that ultimately the boss will fall from damage….

And in fact it’s the key of the design, nothing is absolutely needed but players have to be good in what they decide to play. Be it to spend hours for a fight because they invest in defense more than offense. The thing is that people have to agree on how they play and why.
There is no king reason of playing one way or another. People are confused with Zerk Meta being the one thing to play but for what? Challenge ? ok that’s good but some people don’t want to play PVE with challenge in mind. Profit? Why not but some other players will never care about pixel money…..
Just accept people play how they want since they are allowed in that game (which for me makes it quite special) and that nothing is required, playing included

PS: by saying that I don’t claim that the game is totally perfect and that nothing should change.

Drakent.9605:

1) Regeneration is by far the weakest off all the healing ability in the game b/c is effected by the person own healing stats instead of the caster.

I think you are wrong, the regen I apply heals others based on my healing not theirs… but I could have dreamt.

Drakent.9605:

here another way I could be more clear for you dps junky do understand my point

I would like it where there could be 2 option to run a dungeon

Option A
lets get 5 dps and run the dungeon fast

Option B
Lets get 4 dps and 1 healer to run the dungeon smoother

well gets what! Option B is not available b/c the healing support is to weak to do its job

That is simply false : we run option B every day in my guild and it is actually smoother than running full dps, errors are more easily forgiven.

nightwulf.1986:

It’s interesting to hear people embrace the status quo so readily. Anet is more in support of people like the OP than everyone thinks. Maybe not exactly like what the OP wants but they recognize that right now the best support options that group play can offer in PVE is high DPS with untraited (minimally traited) support skills. They have said that they are going to make it so that players have more options to benefit a group than just killing things faster (in a multi-meta way, hopefully because isn’t that the goal?). Now, people in this thread have already shrugged off the notion of any changes to the game being made to that end. Keep in mind they said that they were changing the way crit damage worked and followed through on it, much to the chagrin of people who enjoyed the status quo.

So, keep in mind, there may be a highly beneficial alternative to stacking dps stats in the future. Just when that is? No clue. But I can assure you that when that happens, people will adapt to that too. Maybe some other form of play will be over the top, maybe not. There was another thread on balancing more often that plays into this subject, but I’ll leave that there. So, instead of shooting down ideas for alternatives to stacking dps to engage content and be highly successful, I’d advise that you start dreaming up meaningful alternatives so that we aren’t given completely passive gameplay.

Don’t remember in which interview/article they wrote that but if you read carefully this thread you’ll see it is not full of happy people not wanting anything to change.
What most people wrote is that they are against the idea of someone being a healer for a party meaning filling HP bars while the 4 others make only damages. More than that people don’t want a full dedicated healer being mandatory in the group.

For now what peole said here is that the healing system is not broken as suggested in the title but should the dev change it nothing says it will be bad. Feature update changed things that were not necessarily broken without making mass of player leave the game, the same could happen to healing.

Err…. which group should I belong to then ? Because I think that healing can be useful in some situations as discovery of a new dungeon, helping new people but I don’t think it is underpowered.

Investing in healing power can be useful. I play quite often “healer” with my mesmer just to change gameplay in dungeon and I’m happy with what I’m supposed to do which is buying time to my teammates so that their healing skill is up. The best healer is and has to remain the player himself.

I usually run something like 900 healpow (weapon+armor+trait) which add 20% to shatter heal, 80% to regen, 13% to personnal heal and 7% to mantra heal… plus signet/runes heals. In fact the scaling decrease with the effectiveness of the heal, you boost small heal and almost don’t affect big heals which can be arguably considered as fair.
If any change should be made to healpow I would say that retaliation and/or might should scale with it (e.g might could be a +25…35 power from 0 to 1500 healpow) but I’m unsure of the result and how much “damage” teams would be affected.

The only thing you complain about is that you can’t keep a whole noob team alive alone. While I’m not sure if it is because a some sort of God complex or that you really want to help people going further in the game(I assume the second is the right one) I don’t think it would serve the game to have babysitter build. It is better for player to improve their gameplay to be able to clear a dungeon. It’s ok to buy them some time by making their HP pools go down slower but ultimately they have to know that their healing is their responsability.

To be honest OP I don’t really understand your complaint. On one hand you say healing is broken and then you say your healing build is fine and sometimes needed.
However you seem to want to get the same dps as a pure damage build with healing gear… which is non sense.

As said by many in your build + gear you adjust a cursor between three variables : damage (pure damage or condi damage) , support (offensive one or defensive) and control (defiance stripping in pve and non damaging condi).

The game is made so that by essence you always have a bit of those (you are your main healer by skill 6, many skills add vuln/blind/weakness, and by having 916 base power you will do some damages). Then it is up to you to twist this basis and emphasize something else. As you said you can put 5 pure healers in a dungeon and get through it but you then have to let other things aside (condi length for control and power for damage).

What people say (and this is mostly true) is that if you want to go fast then you should choose 5 zerks/sins. Ultimately people prefer to do 5 paths in the evening and earn 5 times a dungeon chest rather than once.

You said the game was design so that everyone can play whatever he wants and as people demonstrated it’s feasible with 5 pure DPS and as you said it is also with 5 healers. Hence there is nothing broken by itself since everyone can do it

Now it is obvious that both settings won’t perform the same. 5 zerks don’t have too much place for mistakes, they have to dodge every big abilities and use there healing ability wisely (not talking about healing signet here :/). 5 healers have more space for errors as there life bar can be replenish easily and then what they loose is the time factor.
In between those extreme settings you have plenty of people running mixed stats that perform in an average time with some errors allowed.

To finish support is not only healing and aggresive support by using fire combos don’t require too much of healing stat and help DPS. You could also add some boon dur to enhance this aggressive support with minimal loss of damage but most of people do it by traits (1/3 of tha max boon duration obtainable) and are satisfied so or they know they can add a new stack so frequently that they don’t bother with boon dur. So I don’t think anything is broken build-wise but only that the reward versus time is not equal in different setup as reward versus risk/skill is (more or less),