Guild Wars 2

Tengu are nice, but maybe just implement Land Largos?

Price of Failure
Pirates of Farshores
Polymock over Fractals
Prince of Flame
Power of Faith
Provenance of Fire
Perverted ol’ Farts
Paths of (the) Forgotten
Penance of (the) Fallen
Pharaoh of Fear
Pyromancers on Fire

Arden.7480:

Also Jory’s voice is weird- it’s mysterious, but not like Caithe’s.

She started out characterized as a detective, and it’s an obvious attempt to affect a sort of noirish, Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, sort of thing. It’s unavoidably a little cartoonish, which might be off-putting.

While I don’t mind people speaking informally, it does sometimes (only sometimes) sound a bit too Earth 2010s in style. The first time I see Taimi say “OMG! This superwep is totes imba, bae. LOL.” I will need to take a long break from the game.

Fancypants.9705:

OP – its funny how the first word used is already wrong. Different races have a few different skills… lol

So do professions… but I think OP meant outside of combat. Of course, race matters much more than profession for the early parts of the story, so still wrong.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Can’t use the ‘enter Guild Hall’ button?

I think the issue was being able to get anywhere other than the Guild Hall or a level 80 area. You can’t return to your old location once you exit via conventional means. But jumping to the Heart of the Mists and then to Lion’s Arch should do the trick.

mtpelion.4562:

Patches should be crafted with Leather OR Cloth.

This would allow them to reach equilibrium with each other (i.e. Leather prices would decline a bit and Cloth prices would rise a bit until they are about equal, excluding any additional demand differences).

Having patches require both materials simply exacerbated the demand issue that the reduced supply of leather caused while depressing the cloth market (since the bottleneck on crafting is the leather supply).

This is probably the simplest and most elegant solution. They should make each recipe for one patch, not 5.

Guild Wars 2: Shattered Faith

If it involves Balthazar and Elona then either “Burning Sands” or “Holy War”. Or combine them for Burning Cr… no, nevermind.

Panda.1967:

Elementalist: Attunements
Tempest: Attunement Overloads

Warrior: Bursts
Berserker: Enrage and Primal Bursts

Guardian: Virtues
Dragonhunter: Improved Virtues

All three of those are direct upgrades to the core mechanics.

Of course, they could have been implemented as alternate takes on core mechanics that had pros and cons. DH virtues could lose the passive effects in favor of more powerful active effects on lower cooldowns. Tempest attunements could be on a shared cooldown. Berserk could replace the old burst altogether, constantly lose adrenaline at an increasing rate but last indefinitely until it runs out (or is used for a primal burst), and self-inflict unremovable debuffs once it does run out to represent burnout. Daredevils could trade PP for the extra dodge. Chronos and Reapers would just get alternate profession skills of similar power. Druids would be limited to one pet, and would need to use their heals to keep it upright. Engineers and Revs can’t really easily change their core mechanics, but they would get alternate skills and traits to create new builds and fill new roles.

But, they chose not to do that so that the expansion would provide a clear power boost. Like so many other things about GW2, it wasn’t the concept that was unsound as much as the implementation.

It would be nice if they had a settings option for opt-in rez. Meaning, if you enable that setting, after you are defeated you don’t provide a rez icon or prompt to other players until a small countdown passes and then you press a button to enable rezzing (e.g. F button). It would give players another courteous option besides WPing in fights.

Adding build templates as a Mastery (maybe putting armor/trinket swaps as a separate tier from trait/skill swaps) in the next expansion would certainly be an added inducement to make the plunge. Hint, hint, anet.

I think the two main possibilities are:
1) Going back to the Far Shiverpeaks and wrapping up the Braham/Jormag storyline, or
2) Going to Ascalon, and seeing how Rytlock’s adventures in the Mists relate to what is going on with the gods. That also incidentally brings us close enough to the Crystal Desert to have some teaser content from the expansion.

Or we could just merge them somehow. Doesn’t Jormag uniquely (among Dragons) have access to the Mists? Maybe it will retreat there to avoid being ganked in its weakened state, and then the gods and dragons storylines will intersect. Hell, maybe Jormag allied with Menzies, causing the balance to shift, and it will be cashing in on that favor now.

2 gold is plenty of reward for the effort involved. The other stuff is icing on the cake.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Except that they didn’t “build something for the 1%”. The original design was that no one got anything for XP after reaching max specializations (pre-HoT) or max-masteries (at HoT launch). Due to complaints, they offered the very least reward possible: spirit shards, which people get from all sorts of sources already.

Initially, people got skill points for “level ups” past 80, just as with GW1. Aside from being able to get skills based on XP grind alone rather than completing specific content, skill points also served the same role as spirit shards do now.

So, people did recieve rewards for a very long time. Then they didn’t. Then they did, but not always.

Right now, there isn’t a lot of use for XP once you complete your Masteries (or any use, if you’re stuck behind the raid lock and doing HoT/LS3 content, or just out of Mastery Points for a while).

It would be nice if each Mastery was associated with a thematically appropriate reward track, structured like PvP and WvW reward tracks, and advancing using XP. That way, once you unlock the final tier of the Mastery, you could continue to put XP into that Mastery and receive something more interesting than a Spirit Shard (although, each track should probably disburse some Spirit Shards as well).

It depends on how you feel about having easy access to an unlimited number of ascended trinkets, including some that are very nearly Legendaries.

Sojourner.4621:

The immediate concern is that it also negates the idea of a heavily re-spawning farm area like this to begin with. It would be difficult to balance.

I think the notion of such an area is half the problem. If the mobs come to the players in an endless stream to be slaughtered, you just created a tower defense game, so of course people are going to play it.

A different option would be to add a minimum lifespan for critters before they give XP or items, and improve drop rates in line with bonus XP. If you’re just melting mobs as soon as they spawn, then you get nothing, or close to it.

Another would be to randomize spawns so that a point that is mostly trash mobs still occasionally spawns an elite instead that requires some attention.

Feanor.2358:

Who said life is fair?

This is a pretty classic scenario. Pleading to the masses won’t change their behaviour. On some basic level, playing a game is finding and using the exploits, the things that are most efficient. This doesn’t only concern damage dealing. The reward/effort ratio is also a measure of efficiency. So people will keep doing it. And I’m not saying that to justify my own decisions. I have never afk farmed and I never will, because I see it as a waste of time. I’d rather have fun in the game and earn less virtual goods than have no fun at all and earn more. However, that’s just my subjective stance and I cannot enforce it on everyone. And neither can you. So brace yourselves, winter is coming to Bitterfrost Frontier. I must admit I’m curious to see how will ANet handle this thematically.

I’m guessing setting the mobs guarding berries to drop no loot or XP (since their point is to harass, not reward) is out of the question.

I mean, if we were going for sensible options, they would have fixed the one formula that causes the 375% leather/cloth disparity in armor crafting before fixing things with a farm and then nerfing it because people were farming. So obviously they will instead resort to some sort of overly complex, high-dev-cost fix that breaks the intended gameplay along with the farming.

Hmmm… totally random theory. “They” is the Charr. Say, the Foefire is rooted in Balthazar’s magic (eternal zeal for fighting enemies, divine fire, it’s sort of his motif), and Rytlock in trying to break the curse somehow drained Balthazar’s power instead, not only causing the events of LS3, but also allowing Menzies’ faction to win the conflict in FoW. So the last episode will be in Ascalon, with a ticked off deity looking for revenge against the Charr, as a last act on Tyria prior to retaking FoW.

For more active suggestions, they could allow blocks to be passed if toughness-adjusted damage was above a certain threshold.

They could also give players more control over aggro by giving bosses specific anger mechanics (e.g., gets angry when burned, gets angry when its AA is evaded, etc.), shown as a “condition” on the boss. Triggering whatever ticks it off would throw limited-duration stacks of “Ire” on players, which would be treated just like any other special boss condition. The boss would focus on whoever has the highest Ire rating, so the whole thing would be very clear to everyone.

They could have more attacks where a couple of characters can “take one for the team”, rather than just affecting an area (say, tossing multiple non-piercing projectiles, or a cone attack that is actually modeled as multiple hitscan projectiles).

They could update certain skills or traits so that they allow a player to briefly absorb a percentage of direct damage inflicted on nearby allies (the same way as is already done for condi with many skills)

They could use swarms of unkillable, weak adds to inflict sustained DD.

They could modify some block skills so that, if an attack is blocked, the same attack is blocked for nearby allies if the toughness-adjusted damage that would have been taken is less than a certain threshold.

They could weaken dodges so that they only provide fast movement and make the hitbox very small, but don’t provide evade frames without traiting for it.

MeroeTheLamia.2384:

Force of nature villains are not an inherently bad idea, but the execution will make or break them much more easily than other types of villains. In the case of the dragons I’d say they were broken as they are some of the most boring pieces of lore ever introduced into the guild wars setting.

With force of nature villains, the antagonist or conflict that has narrative oomph is going to involve the people fighting against it — their conflicts or weaknesses, their triumphs, and so on. So, the real villain might be those people who threaten to get everyone else killed, whether due to panic, greed, ignorance, unwillingness to cooperate, desire to be in control, senseless desire for bureaucracy, etc.

xikira.3264:

Hello can we change the guild mission number requirment to be based on how many are in your squad? I have a very small guild we just recently started and only have about 2 to 4 on at one time. This makes it very hard to finish most guild missions since the number requirment for some is more than what we have. For example in wvw the sentry escort requires 3 people to be on each sentry. Usually you need three groups to escort the sentrys can we lower it to one or two per a sentry. Another example is the races that require you to finish the race 15 times. It is extremly hard to do for very tiny groups.
The way the guild missions are set up it makes it extremly hard for us to lvl up our hall. The guild missions are very hard to do for small guilds. It would be cool if yall made it easier for smaller guilds to finish the missions.

It might take a while, but the easy guild trek is soloable, FWIW.

Personally, I’d go the other way — always just use XP for repeatable PvE reward tracks, use collections with multiple levels of completion to unlock masteries.

E.g., you’d have 20 items in your collection scavenger hunt, at 5% complete you’d get the first achievement and tier 1, at 15% you’d get the next tier, and so on. The last could unlock a new themed PvE reward track, so it’s more of an optional thing than a requirement to access content.

Amaimon.7823:

I started the backpacks of the three orders a long time, and decided to finish them, now.
On one of the three, however, I need to get to the Dragonvine Whisper’s Strap.
Now, the problem is, on the wiki it says “this collection can only be completed on the same character you started it with” but after almost 2 years, I don’t remember which one it was.
And what if I deleted that character already, am I forever locked out of the collection?
I could really use some insight on this issue, please.

IIRC, the order packs are soulbound on acquire, oddly for a collection item. Just something to keep in mind.

Maybe it’s an insane suggestion, on breaking existing gear stat selections alone, but for the sake of symmetry they could just merge Power and Condi Damage. Might already doesn’t differentiate.

Offensively, you’d have a primary stat (Power), a secondary stat (Precision), and then, depending on whether you go spike or sustain, you’d go with Ferocity/DD or Expertise/Condi (though skills would have to be balanced to support the split as well).

Defensively, you’d have a primary stat (Vitality), a secondary stat (Toughness), and then, depending on preference, Healing Power or Concentration.

If nothing else, it would mitigate the impact of balance changes between power and condi, since it would mainly come down to the effects of expertise versus ferocity.

As far as PS goes, in order from best to worst: Asura, Human, Sylvari, Charr, Norn.

Lorewise, only human and Sylvari lore is followed up on in a big way after the early PS, and to some extent Asura just through Taimi’s dealings with Phlunt. Charr lore is interesting, but not well explored. Norn lore is mostly ignored, and mostly forgettable anyway.

No one who rules the divine realm of war is going to be sunshine and kittens. Your options are to get the better sides (honor, camaraderie, use of violence to defend) or the worse (hate, cruelty, deranged mass-slaughter). The domain of war isn’t going anywhere.

I hope a future LS map is located in a recovering Orr, just for my 2 cents.

Natto.5819:

Balthazar himself said that he had his powers taken. He wanted it back, so he went after Jormag and Primordus to take theirs. Yes he never says directly who took his powers, but one can safely assume that it would take a strong enemy to do so. For this, I’m leaning towards the Elder Dragons and their natural ability to inhale magical energies.

Not buying it. Balthazar was massively kittened about whoever took his power. Primordus, however, he treated more as a means to an end, not the end itself. Plus, well, it’s boring. And Primordus has been more or less been put on a bus, so unless Balthazar is going to gank him offscreen, I don’t see the story headed that way.

Natto.5819:

Another option could be Balthazar’s brother Menzies somehow took his powers, but I don’t think Anet would make the story that complicated.

Given that Grenth already proves that gods can be deposed by usurpers, and given that the fight between Menzies and Balthazar over control of the domain of War was the basis behind core GW1 endgame content and also played a role in Nightfall, I don’t see exactly how it’s complicated. The Balthazar/Lazarus Scooby Doo plot was unnecessarily complicated. Balthazar being usurped by Menzies is just taking an obvious followup on an existing plot thread in the greater GW1/GW2 story.

Chadramar.8156:

Still the vanilla story at least try to do the Elder Dragon theme justice and IMO it worked, despite its flaws, but people complained that it was impersonal and unheroic. So they made Mordremoth talk (which dragons weren’t said to do) and turned it into an utterly pitiful generic bossfight, which wrecked any chance of seeing the dragons as the world-shattering threat they’re supposed to be.

The vanilla story did a good job of world building in the early stages, and conveying the sense, through the later personal story and the Orrian maps, of progress in a moderately large-scale, long-haul military conflict. It was always clear that, while your character was doing important things, they weren’t single-handedly carrying an effort involving thousands of soldiers and tons of equipment.

HoT just completely fails in this regard. The personal story is pretty much entirely a sidequest (rescue 3/5ths of DE and Trahearne), with some side-sidequests (help the frogs, deal with Glint’s egg and the Exalted, discover Rata Novus) that just happens to dump you in the lap of the Big Bad at a time when a tiny group can fight him.

That might be tolerable if the maps at least portrayed an advancing war effort, but Verdant Brink was mostly defensive in nature, likewise Auric Basin (which was mainly about the Exalted, who don’t really join the Pact or anything), and Tangled Depths was a map-wide sidequest about dealing with the Chak, who don’t have anything to do with anything. Silverwastes has more relevance to the fight against Mordremoth than most of HoT. So you get to Dragon’s Stand without any real sense of how an effective force was actually assembled there, or for that matter having much in the way of heavy-hitting superweapons other than just running up to the boss and smacking it in the face. The Pact brought more firepower to fight Tequatl than they did to Mordremoth.

One idea for rebalancing would be to rework vulnerability so that, instead of boosting direct and condi damage by a fixed %, it reduces Armor by a flat amount for each stack. The amount of armor reduction could be scaled by condi damage stat. It would have the benefit of blunting the nerf on condis, since they will become more effective at supplying vuln stacks. However, the DPS boost would go entirely to power builds.

It could further be reworked to reinforce coordinated direct damage spiking, by balancing the armor reduction so that the effective damage increase can go higher than 25%, but at the cost of cutting vuln duration. Since each marginal unit of armor lost provides a larger damage increase, coordinated bursts of big vuln stacks and DD will be more effective.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Marjory said she sensed death from him, right?

Did she? I thought she said something along the lines of being interested in the fact that he came back from the dead. Not that he did, as it turns out.

The big difference between GW1 and GW2 design is that (excluding dungeons, fractals, raids, and PvP), the number of PCs involved in an encounter can be 1 or 100, with haphazard organization at best. GW1 parties were normally a fixed size and operating (ideally) as a unified team.

As much as I would like to see enemies in instanced content act more like players (I particularly liked that Nightmare Court had a downed state), open world is sort of a lost cause.

Tiny Doom.4380:

What it is is expensive.

Recording the same line 10 times by 10 different VAs for each race/gender is expensive. But having each of those 10 VAs record one of 10 different lines doesn’t seem like it would be that much more expensive.

Amaimon.7823:

And I don’t even know if we will fight all the gods, maybe Balthazar is the only one going rogue, maybe he’s just the first, maybe he was convinced by Lyssa who was already crazed before Balthazar was. We just don’t know.

We can’t even be sure that we’re going to fight Balthazar. He’s certainly an antagonist for the PC, but he probably isn’t a Big Bad so much as he is going after the Big Bads in a selfish fashion that recklessly jeopardizes many lives. He doesn’t seem much farther over the moral event horizon than Canach or Braham, actually, especially if Braham continues to pursue his vendetta knowing what Taimi discovered.

Given how much it has already made for weird situations with player and NPC barks, I’m hoping that the plot avoids the deicide route (or leaves it to the Big Bad, but that would still break a lot of things) and just let us beat some sense into him and then shut up about it. Or maybe let Braham and Balthazar beat some sense into each other.

Even after getting access to the Bloodstone, the disguise helped him win some cannon fodder in the White Mantle; if Lyssa was his ally, and indeed is Jennah or is backing Jennah, then she may have insisted on it to protect her own interests by dividing her enemies.

Beyond that, there’s the question of his divine image. Learning that their god was rendered powerless would jeopardize human faith. Learning the things their god was willing to do to regain power might be even worse. Acting as “Lazarus” solves both problems.

I don’t think that Elder Dragons as Big Bads really preclude evil gods and demons as Big Bads. It’s perfectly sensible as plot progression — the good gods pull out of Tyria to fight the evil gods/demons (or something worse?) elsewhere (the homeworld of humans or gods?), coincidentally during the Dragons’ rise. They lose, and Tyria becomes the new front in the war.

Ben K.6238:

The downed state also immobilizes you and allows you to be 1-shot from stealth, if we’re considering that part of normal gameplay.

It’s more of a PvE issue, where there are often lots of revivers around, and almost nothing uses finishers.

Ngeluz.4860:

His statement of saying “There is no honor in war” could be admitting to that defeat, maybe? Menzies cheated his way to victory.

Yep, maybe the consequences of defeat are causing him to question whether an honorable loss is really all that much better than a dishonorable victory, if the stakes are high enough?

There are lots of storylines revolving around characters losing their faith in gods, but not nearly as many about gods losing their faith in their own beliefs.

Is the absence of resurrection magic in GW2 canonical, or just gameplay? If it is canon, does it suggest that Dhuum has defeated Grenth or at least grown substantially in power?

The downed state makes healing a lot less relevant in many cases, since it gives everyone an equally powerful 50% heal. Maybe if healing power affected reviving (including self-reviving) it would be more useful.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Eggbutt.6213:

Pre-HoT you could get spirit shards for leveling up past 80. When half of the reward for doing events i s the XP, it feels like it’s going to waste. At least with the spirit shards it’s something.

You could never get Spirit Shards for leveling past L80 before. For approximately 6 months before the release of Heart of Thorns, one got nothing whatsoever for leveling past L80, and previous to that, one received Skill Points. Never Spirit Shards.

Gaining Spirit Shards for leveling (post-L80) was only added in July of 2016, nine months after the release of Heart of Thorns.

Prior to the rework of skill points into hero points, excess skill points performed the function of spirit shards, so it amounts to the same thing.

New weapons might work better as a mastery accessible via the environment somehow (some sort of Exotic Weapons Proficiency deal). It would mean that any class can use it, only one skin needs to be established, and it won’t impact PvP or WvW balance. They could implement profession-specific weapon skills or just use a common set.

I think his weakness was aerial assault — per the whole deal with Caladbolg, he seemed to draw strength from the land of Orr. Maybe forcing him to fight airborne deprived him of whatever was left of that power than hadn’t already been wrecked by Mordremoth’s (sorry, the Pale Tree’s) energies.

From his dialog, it sounded like he got most of what he wanted before we wrecked the machine, and bailed to the Mists before things went kablooey.

My feeling is it will be one of two things.

Less likely one is that we will revisit the Far Shiverpeaks and Braham’s storyline, and Balthazar will be involved there somehow. Or maybe Grenth was siphoning Jormag’s energy while Balthazar was draining Primordus. Intersection of gods storyline with Braham’s crusade, at any rate.

More likely one is that we will head south from Fields of Ruin, we will finally learn what happened to Rytlock in the Mists, and the map will feature Branded and a few of Joko’s creatures as a teaser for the expansion.

Walhalla.5473:

How Blathazar knew about this is a good question and since he wasn’t a god at that time I don’t have an answer.

Given that any plan hatched by Balthazar would likely involve charging in and blowing things up, the most plausible guess is that the entire plan was arranged by someone else with a penchant for subterfuge (e.g. “E” or Lyssa), and said party has a network of spies and agents (e.g., the Shining Blade), some of which keep tabs on the doings of the White Mantle.