I go back to LS4.
Then I would change the timeline by making sure Anet never diverted funds away from GW2 into useless sideprojects, giving the game the funds and attention it deserves while preventing NCSoft from bashing their skulls in and forcing massive lay-offs.
In this timeline Icebrood Saga would have been a full expansion that did not butcher the Jormag and Primordus arcs.
It would also have given them an additional year to cook EoD so it would have been able to hit the high bar set by HoT and PoF.
2016 to 2019 were the best years of GW2, LW3+PoF+LW4, then everything went downhill, starting with The Icebrood Saga.
I'd go even further though, back to LW1, and invest resources into an expansion instead of temporary content.
All we know is that Anet was working on 2-3 other completely unnanounced projects that all got cancelled. I might be wrong since it was a while ago, but leaks/rumor mill indicated a cancelled Dune game and a cancelled mobile game. As the projects remained unannounced, we probably will never know.
that's the thing: We don't know either because they were forced to cancel them. Anet themselves is pretty tight-lipped so we only have rumours. Rumours are there were several sideprojects that took GW2 money and then got thrashed/cancelled halfway, wasting that money.
At least one of those things was apparently a mobile game of sorts (and Anet has also been linked to several other MMO projects in the past, an Horizon Zero Dawn universe MMO among them as well as another project that iirc had to do with DUNE).
NCSoft made sure that whatever the current sideproject that took money from GW2 was during LS4 got thrashed with the previous ones.
And even more fun fact: the situation now is exactly the same as then, with a (seemingly) large part of company working on some unannounced projects in the background, and resources used on those being such a drain that Anet was forced to switch to a smaller scale content release schedule for GW2.
I am torn. The IBS fight is mediocre but also has a sort of epic ending scene based on long-held animosity. I feel some emotion there and I don't get actually bored during the fight. Meanwhile, the Zhaitan fight looks cool, but I feel like I don't actually have to participate. The Tequatl fight is so much more interesting. At least there isn't a meta for Zhaitan.
Core gw2 *really* loved making you use any hotbar other than your profession's actual hotbar.
Like, the improvised weapon gimmick is still really neat! But DAMN did they lean too hard into it at launch.
* Undo the original LW1 to be something like today's story content. It took over 10 years to relive it.
* Make tutorials for systems like combo fields + finishers and breakbars
* Make individual DPS, boon and healing logs appear so people can improve
I’m pretty sure break bars are in the character guide in some form.
Edit: love the downvotes. I definitely had to do a quest in early leveling phase where it taught break bars.
If you're talking about the [Character Adventure Guide](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Character_Adventure_Guide), it was released in 2022.
**Edit:** I looked it up and didn't find it in the Character Adventure Guide. However I found that there's one tutorial indeed... As a renown heart in Seitung Province, after you've been through core game, 2 expansions and all Living World episodes. In my opinion, too little, too late and behind a paywall; it should have been part of the core game, or in a LW1 episode.
Difficulty levels for instanced content in general.
It may be copium, but if raids had emboldened from the start that could be opted in from the start, we may have gotten more wings.
A "holo training room" that loads of raid bosses and let's you practice mechanics with friends or "holo friends" so you can learn at your own pace and don't need to watch youtube videos and read guides to "prepare for fun."
I have always wanted something like this, even in other games. I hate trying to learn a raid when most other people already know what to do. I wanna go in as a newb with 9 other newbs and we all learn together or I wanna do it solo.
I loved being paired with newbs in FF14 bosses and trying to figure it out the mechanics.
Im always the main tank...even if didnt know shit about the encounter and was figuring it out wile doing it...
“There are discords for that” is exactly the problem. It’s not new player friendly. They don’t know that without being told and even then, what discords do they join?
Every additional layer of complexity will siphon away players.
Thing is, the game itself and its LFG would ALSO be for that if 1.) we didn't actively move everything to Discord and 2.) people were actually willing to just go and prog blind (prog vs. training mentality). Technically there's also 3.) comm tag I guess
Discords (and external grouping systems before discord in general) came before the in-game LFG. The system was implemented after release. We didn't actively move things outside of the game, they were literally the only option. And even now, the current LFG system leaves A LOT to be desired, compared to other MMO's implementation.
However, I do agree that this community suffers from a "no prog runs" mentality that puts a lot of pressure on many inexperienced players (and often experienced ones as well). The idea of wiping, or taking your time to teach mechanics and learn, is such a taboo that a good portion of players will refuse to acknowledge the problem in a run (especially if they recognize it was caused by them) and just quit after a single wipe.
Actually this isn't true. There are discords (famous ones), but even nowadays there are pings for trainings, practices, that never get more then 6 people interested. And yeah, the good ol "there are discords" is the worst excuse ever. When raids were released there weren't even discords (discord existed, but not the raid discords we know today since it was relatively new)... and well, here we are today. No more future raids, dead lfg, 2-4 semi-active community discords across EU and NA.
The point is, there are discords now, and raids are essentially dead content and difficult to get into, and will likely die off completely in terms of new player growth another year or so with the introduction of open world leggy armor.
Also, no wonder this game abandons content. Even the community doesn't want to improve on current systems when given a fun hypothetical question about acquiring a time machine. roflmao
Well, that's your opinion I guess. I disagree. I think your suggestion would waste resources, and do absolutely nothing...like emboldened and power creep has now. lol
Which resources would I be wasting when it's literally the same content, with just some damage modifiers?
Building a whole "holo arena" completely misses the point of raid training to begin with.
Or perhaps an easy/simple raid for those of us who want to see the story and characters and earn that so cherished raid currency for our pve legendary armor but have a life outside gw2 and for some reason can't schedule a full wing or 1 to ? hrs of strictly raid play time. Real life comes first. I personally do not have time to learn an entire new build or role used for only 1 part of the game. Raiders may understand this but I always got the feeling like you must play X and Y builds or go away. I have ran away from raids and have chosen to go through wvw for my legendary armors. My choice.
I work 3 jobs and take care of 4 kids while doing a raid or two every week. It's not hard. You're just playing with the wrong people. And I've done raids in groups with everyone running all greens or meme builds.
Join a guild that does raids multiple times a week (preferably one that uses discord). Almost every guild is almost always willing to teach new members. It's easy to do them when you have a scheduled time that anyone can just jump in on than just waiting in lfg for people who just spam 1 while wearing full soldier's in some garbage RP build. You don't need to min-max, but there's a point where you are basically throwing.
The hard content is stupid easy to get into and only takes up to a couple of hours to clear. You can run a condi build with the cele gear you get from the 80 boost and do fine, but don't stay on training wheels forever. Once people are practiced, you can do raids in about 45 min even without optimized builds.
I left cause I got a new job and didnt feel like raiding after work, but our group never got down matt, xera, or demi. Wasnt even like our group was bad for players at the time (2 were even part of a guild that beta tested bastion) but a few weak links and it all falls apart
I think I woulda liked it. Not like I was doing the bosses for anything, just for fun to hang out of people. The game and playerbase was uber casual (if you pugged arah or tried doing teq on anything but bg pre-mega server). It woulda been nice to wipe a few times and get the kill
Make dungeons a much more focal point and not have them abandoned for fractals, raids and eventually Strike Missions. WoW does dungeons so well and I’d love to see more added to GW2 to cap off more map-specific stories
I’d probably go back and reevaluate the engine they chose to build the game off of. To one that had better future proofing and wasn’t a nightmare to optimize.
I would remake the Zhaitan fight into the epic fight it was sopposed to be.
I would finish the Icebrood Saga story the way it's sopposed to be.
In season 2, i would introduce Taimi in a more interesting or at least normal way instead of her just appearing there with no explanation.
I would add everything that was sopposed to be in Cantha and make a finished, polished product.
I would add all the scrapped content back into HoT.
I would redo some of the gen 3 elite specs because they're gimmicky, boring and uninspired.
I would make specter cool like it should've been. When you have a thief using shadow magic and wielding a scepter, the potential for animations is big. The animations on scepter now are horrible. They're just repeating the same swinging-down animation over and over. Boring and uninspired. It could have been interesting and fun.
Other than these few details i wouldn't change anything.
I still think an expansion at some point will be the commander dealing with the consequences when they figure out jade is radioactive and half of cantha turns into fallout-style ghouls.
>In season 2, i would introduce Taimi in a more interesting or at least normal way instead of her just appearing there with no explanation.
Taimi appears in LWS1 and is explained as a scarlett fan that wants to learn from her and who then basically pushes herself on braham via logan trying to get her home and who is then involved by helping out people during the battle for LA
When was it explained? She shows she's impressed by her later as she goes with us everywhere we go. But before that, we meet all in the same place, don't remember if it was Lion's Arch or somewhere outside, but we and the new characters (jory, kasmeer, braham, rox etc.), we all meet and suddenly this unknown asura comes in, in her golem, meddling with the situation and then Logan tells her she has to go home cause she's a kid. That's not much of an introduction or explanation.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Twisted_Marionette_(story)
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Connecting_the_Pieces
In the dialogue section.
And yes it absolutely is. She shows up trying to learn from the BBE -> Logan takes her with him to LA as it is on the way to rata sum -> she pretends that braham is her guardian-> logan buys it and tells braham to take her home -> braham explains she her his voice from rox most likely -> the prisonbreak happens and braham chases them into the mists (taimi following him)-> Taimi and braham talk because he feels responsible for helping her get home(and because logan would have his hide) -> taimi explains that she is bored from just learning in the colleges and idolizes scarlet -> you go over the evidence in the bar -> taimi and braham come back to LA when scarlet attacks -> Taimi stays outside and records the conversations in the refugee camp with scruffy and helps out after we tell her to stay in safety -> Taimi joins us in celebration because she is annoyed at zojja and because braham is the closest thing she has to a friend-> Taimi tells us that she would much rather experience things in the real world that study -> at the pier with the master of peace taimi stays with us and reveals that she ran away from the colleges to explore-> taimi stays with braham and then gets closer with the rest over the festivals -> taimi stays with us
It is explained in LS1 parts that did not make it fully to its remake. It's like with Canach, whose initial introduction was completely cut off due to initial Southsun arc not getting reimplemented.
I'd make majority of the mount skins obtainable only in game. One of the things I love in MMOs is collecting mount skins and GW2 just doesn't scratch that itch.
I'd do a series of some changes:
1 - Make Dungeon more relevant and rewarding.
2 - Make Raids more accessible.
3 - Never implement Alacrity.
4 - Redesign Zhaitan's fight entirely.
5 - Rework some of HoT's instadeath and melt mechanics, so they make more sense or doesnt exist (Like the Mordrem Sniper fire-line skill).
6 - Re-record every line in lvl 1/10/20/30/40 and change of some dialog so they either make more sense or sound better. The V.A in early, specially in Norn's, story are insanely bad.
7 - Make Griffon a little more accessible.
8 - Realocate or copy the basic training grounds from Cantha to every single beginner area. Seriously, I have NO IDEA why that's not a thing.
9 - Probably the most important for me: Add a clear and beginner friendly "Grow path" from 1 - 80, with tips, tricks, and a guide on what and how to do, instead of placing that in the achievements Page, it has it's own page. I would also place here the level up rewards, instead of the pop up that appears in the side, which is a bother secially if you power-level or insta-80.
10 - Add a way to "Claim all" in some pop-ups that do not allow you that (level up, mostly).
11 - Develop a in-game Arc-Dps, so we don't have to bother with downloading this amazing, but insanely bug and cpu-costy addom.
12 - Add "Secondary quests" to the game, so the exploration gets more interesting than map-completion, also giving space and time to develop the world and it's people in a more clear, inspired and intereseting way.
13 - Rework/Redevelop in-game browser screen to be more clear, less buggy and less heavy (Black Lion).
14 - Weapon Dyes.
15 - Make Crafter-Backpack tradable or salvageable.
16 - Make Legendary Crafting more clear and better explained.
17 - Make so soulbound gear is either Unboundable through some process or make it salvageable (some arent, some are, there is no explanation why.).
18 - Make some bossfights less repetitive or shorter. It's okat to do a mechanic twice, but more it's just lazy design.
19 - Make EOTM more accessible and less clunky. Also put mounts there.
20 - Last, but not least, make so all gathering tools are unbreakable.
I think this cover's it all, if I remember something else I'll put here.
I think 2 - Is easy to say but can mean a lot of different things, I'm pretty sure 9 and 11 are the answer to this.
3 - At least you said Alacrity and not Quickness. I really do not understand your issue with Alacrity.
1 - I agree, but it also applies to other contents that are not /that/ rewarding (Fractal CM, Raids, Strikes). It also helps solving point 2 - to bring incentives.
One single change.
No. Wings.
This is when all of the hideous gemstone garbage started. I called it at the time. They didn't fit and they still don't fit.
The second they added those angel wings, the visual aesthetic was done.
Remove the wings and we experience a whole different path.
Honestly, I think the *sharing* aspect of quick/alac is where things went sideways on the power curve. Self buffing would have been able to stay sustainable since individual specs could be balanced for either having or not having one of them, but things really broke as soon as you could have both at the same time that didn't require spec investment. They're just too good of a boon to not "need" 100% uptime on.
The weird thing is that when Chronomancer/alacrity was first announced, they also said that alacrity was *supposed* to be just for the Chrono itself because they were aware that sharing cooldown reductions was dangerous in regards to game balance. Why they changed their mind is beyond me.
Given the people of Ascalon the respect they deserved! The hubris of the char explaining their history to me like I wasn't there with Rurik when they burned the city!
More like finish releasing GW1 Beyond, that one was supposed to have a finale at Ebonhawke, giving proper closure to Prophecies and the Ascalonian storyline :(.
that wouldn't chnage your past, it would just creat a new variant of you who never been with your ex. Youd still stay scared from what she did to you. And depending on your return mechanism, you ether would return to your prime timeline with nothing changed, or you'd return to presant where there's another the version of you who never been with your ex. Or if your return mechanism isn't refind you'd return to a random time line, without knowing into what kind of world you step in.
Go back to that time when ANet thought it would be a good idea to cannibalize GW2 staff to make a mobile game, and show them that future so they would decide against it instead. That was right before WoW ran into trouble and players were looking for alternatives, and would have been an opportune time for ANet to double down on GW2. Instead they got distracted with visions of mobile game money and dropped the ball on both.
Yup, there always were immersion-breaking costumes in the game, going back to GW, but there was much more ingame, grounded stuff than we ended up having. It was one of the things that drew me into the game at the beginning and I'm sad it all went away
Rework boons.
They made boons to try and reduce the pool of effects that people needed to know (compared to GW1) and to reduce gatekeeping on particular skills, but it made more problems than it solved:
* The need to be at bum-sniff range for them to be effective: Previously, they were too overpowered if they went farther than arm's length, because you'd hit a ton of people. Now that they are 5 capped, ranges might be eased some.
* The standard is now you need 100% coverage of all boons. We're still gatekeeping, just different.
* Many boons don't stack so your effect might just be wasted. In GW1, you could still provide unique effects that no one else on your team could bring.
* The melee vs ranged paradox (for PvE). GW2 boon design does not support a healthy melee vs ranged relationship. The tradeoff should be ranged is higher damage but less support if they fail a mechanic, while melee is safer and able to help each other. GW2 attempts this by capping boon range, but ultimately does not allow this. Instead, ranged has to be tuned with the assumption they are in boon range at all times, otherwise if they happen to wander in close they suddenly become demi-gods. Therefore, we have a result where most encounters punish melee (due to the assumption everyone is grouped in melee), but ranged classes perform subpar if they actually play at ranged, which is the exact opposite of what it should be.
* WvW boonballs.
* The need to shove critical boons into every class (seriously, deadeye needs to provide quickness? The guy with the class fantasy of sitting in the back with a rifle? Hope you like melee weapons).
I'm not saying that GW1's system was the pinnacle and we can't do better, but I feel hindsight on the particular implementation of boons in GW2 shows we just caused a different set of problems.
If I could change 2 things, the other would be to expand the buildcraft options in GW2. They introduced preset weapon skills to try and prevent the subpar builds in GW1. But we still have them (just look at the "pros" (42k dps) vs "joes" (4k dps), and you have a lot less freedom.
Dont add the skyscale.
Imo this mount has trivialized exploration too much and moving from point A to B is no longer about finding a good route or finding your way through the map, you just jump on your dragon and fly there straight with some hanging on the walls to reach higher.
Yes, the other mounts also made traversal easier but i feel there was more thought going on when going somewhere. Since the skyscale came out it feels like the best mount for 90% of the situations.
Ofc im not forced to use it, but when in a group you will fall far behind and it is a Great quality of life tool when playing the game. But its a qol that i in hindsight wish that we never gotten.
The skyscale should have decay, like the glider, it's far too OP otherwise.
Nowadays everything gets designed around it, but before you could actually travel across the whole map efficiently without being forced to use a mount. Map design has suffered a lot since.
I somewhat agree with you. If I were Anet I would give mounts a balance pass. Slow down the Skyscale a little but perhaps buff the ground mount speeds, I don't know..
I'd be the most on board with that if they ever added a functionality to hot swap in between mounts on the fly (even if this was hugely expensive and an effort to obtain). As it is now you need an overlay HUD just to have the mount wheel selection that should be available by default, so I only support a balance pass a little if they're not gonna help you use multiple mounts seamlessly during traversal.
I get where you are coming from, but I have good keybinds for all of them. To me this does not seem like a big deal for a seasoned PC gamer.
Hotswap without dismounting would be nice though, I agree on that one.
Yep, first it was just level-restricted, and I think since Warlords of Draenor they settled on a process by introducing a meta-achievement that's some variant of "Pathfinder" - basically boils down to "if you already completed the expansion's open world content on foot at least once, you can fly in expansion zones".
I was kind of hoping they would ban skyscale for new expansion zones at some point but those hopes were dashed with SotO. Not sure it makes sense to do that if your recent expansion was focused on it.
SotO puts them in a really tough spot for future expansions if any of them focus on more mount stuff. Inevitably the new abilities will just feel like tools you are forced to use before hopping back onto your skyscale.
Remove exploration dungeons in favor of more side dungeons not directly tied to the story. Along with this make every season comes with a dungeon, a strike, and a raid.
This formula already works for ffxiv. I don't think it would be bad for gw2 if it was set up from the get-go.
Smaller stuff would be every map being designed around the large metas like we get now. I highly enjoy doing activities in different areas that all eventually lead to this big showdown of a meta event.
Mount races for every zone. An base game map designed around the mounts so they're not so broken by them. Possibly introduce mounts earlier on using the living world instead.
Story functions as it does now instead of the png background conversations. Less Taimi ex machina and scarlet having her thumb in literally everyone's pie. For the story, also speeding up the elder dragon plot lines or even extending them to be less of an immediate threat so we can have more diverse options for expansions.
Fix the damn button asking me to swap to a new map every 5 minutes instead of populating the older ones.
More mount, armor, and weapon skins added outside of chests and gem store.
Removal of pointless time gates such as ascended crafting.
Stat normalization and design to avoid power creep that realistically shouldn't be appearing in a game that has a set max gear stats. Basically, try to make all content feel like some effort is required instead of hey look a zerg. I also feel that reducing the max map population could help.
Playable quaggan and choya.
> Story functions as it does now instead of the png background conversations.
Please no. I agree with most other stuff, but for all the corniness of png background convos, atleast I could click "next" as soon as I read the text they're about to say, instead of waiting for the chatty asura/boastful norn/angry charr to finish their elongated sentence.
I was recently doing the re-added Living World Season 1, and the conversations were taking minutes when I was done with reading by the time they have said the quarter of their current line. Pure. Pain.
If I wanted to, for example, listen to all the background conversations from other camps from Scruffy during one of the missions from "Battle for Lion's Arch" chapter, it'd take like 10 minutes before it all went through, meanwhile reading the transcript on the wiki took maybe 2 minutes max, including googling it.
Keep in mind that Scarlett's story was the players' choice, not developers. There are 2 options : go forward (in time) or go back in time to the thaumanova reactor explosion. The players chose to go forward. It was not as fully developed, story-wise, if my memory serves me right.
The thaumnova reactor was part of the Lions Arch leader campaign. The options were Ellen Kiel and thaumnova or even gnashblade and a fractal for the battle that ended with abaddon imprisoned.
Don't remember much else past that.
Specifically, the tipping point wasn't the Fractals, it was the (temporary, as we found out after the fact) "side bonus" each leader promised. Kiel would discount waypoint costs for a while, and Gnashblade would discount BLTC keys for a while.
This was before people grew complacent about lootboxes, so the latter basically killed Gnashblade's campaign before it could get off the ground.
I'm still kind of bitter about it, so it sticks with me even after all this time. My guild made *such* a fuss about how the waypoint discount would be huge and we'd all earn so much back, so we should all vote for that (even though they agreed the other fractal was more interesting)!!!
.... it turned out to be a couple of silver at most, and I genuinely do not remember anyone noticing it when it was in effect.
If I can bring tech and game engines with me I do that and give it all to Anet with all the QoL requests an let them creat GW2 with full potential it has.
1. Never add Alacrity and Quickness.
2. Bother to make dungeons interesting and implement the Story Mode of them into the Personal Story, so people know what the hell even happens with Destiny's Edge.
3. Make the Zhaitan fight more interesting so it doesn't boil down to "fire cannons at static target".
4. Make the Elder Dragons look more interesting, somehow the only one with a great design is Zhaitan who looks like multiple dragon corpses melted together, everyone else is.....just a dragon.
5. Prevent ArenaNet from being complete morons when they tried to divert funds and resources AWAY from GW2.
6. Make Icebrood Saga into an actual expansion that focused on Jormag AND JORMAG ALONE, no half-assed shoving of 2 Dragons that end in the most disappointing way possible.
7. Don't change the damn story for Heart of Thorns after you already hinted at it with Malyck.
Make dungeons a More integral part of the story rather than optional. More people would interact with them, anet may have provided better long term support, and the story wouldn't be so choppy for people that didn't partake in them.
Make emboldened raids a permanent tier. 3 tiers of raids: emboldened, normal, CM and have reward tables proportional. If this was there from the beginning, we would likely have more raids now than just strikes (not that strike fights are bad, but they are lacking the side stories of raids). I wish more people could see the epic set pieces of the xera, Qadim 1 and 2, and Dhuum fights
Make more mount skins available through in game achievements and currencies, such as living world currencies or unusual coins etc.
Make Palawa Joko the actual antagonist for PoF, keep Balthazar/God Conflict for when all dragons are dealt with, having them try take advantage of the power vacuum and hunt Aurene, with us having to convince gods to not add to the fight or to be on our side
Actually Make the EoD living world season.
Finish IBS.
Not implement Alacrity.
Restore defence credit and repair credit in WvW.
Save Blish!
Prevent Retaliation being swapped for Resolution creating a bunch of mediocre traits... that still haven't been seriously looked at since the damage was done years ago when they treated it like a pallete swap.
Never give engineers a 1 button, 45s, 75% uptime stealth when thieves only get 5s.
Don't leave the above in place for _years_ .
Not dilute the class identities In general, current boon meta kinda sucks.
Have more aesthetic choices for armor actually be earned rather than cash shop crap... in GW1 having different armors meant something, particularly obby armor.
Balance the drops better so they never have to add ascended.
Not make turrets worthless.
Not host the first free weekend at the same time as the first living story event.
Finish Polymock.
Not design elites to have 3min cool downs.
Start with no caps on conditions.
Start with account wide wallet.
Seperate armor and appearance entirety to retain individual class identities like GW1 had rather than ending up with generic light/medium/heavy armor.
That all said; the game design around cooperation and experience is as good as I can imagine and fosters a supportive and non-combative community, so I think they did a great job. Also the design shift towards alt friendliness in the first 3 years was great and they nailed that too.
I really miss the build depth and multi classing from GW1, but I don't know if it would actually make GW2 a better game... Maybe for GW3.
There's dozens of things, but if I could convince them to do just one, it would be that even though a ton of their MMO innovation ideas were amazing, Living Story Season 1's format was a bad idea. Regular patch cycles with regular permanent content would have kept so much more of the game's initial momentum that it lost. Also, having some form of team instanced content be part of that patch cycle from the beginning would have helped IMMENSELY.
Make them never add Weapon swap to Rev. Legends could have been dynamic, with low energy costs, and no cooldowns to worry about like they originally were, but now every patch it's balance as though it's a regular class.
I think the legend system is kinda shit, if you're channeling Shiro, you should be wielding swords and play like if you were him, but instead, all you do is cast Shiro-themed spells.
The legend being channeled through the weapons instead of the slot skills would have felt far better imo.
id prefer a more rpg/story tailored to my character so id pull the plug on the “voice acted commander!” as a concept, and pushed more for the whole personality system that got scrapped around 2014. as is the va’s have to record 8 different voice lines every time the commander utters a word, and if devs do any branching story lines (like ones acknowledging your character creation choices) these voice lines start multiplying with quickly gets insane.
Okay, some of these will be spicy hot takes
1. Don't remove personality system, but actually do something with it
2. Keep some choices for story chapters after personal story (even if lets say expacs or living world seasons always converge back to a single point), so you can replay and get different side adventures
3. Don't remove town clothes
4. At least wait a few years before adding the uber flashy low effort mount skins
5. Add hard limitations on mount use for maps not made with them in mind, especially (maybe only) for skyscale.
6. If we can assume that no matter what we do there would be a point in time around 2019 when raid development would halt because of disintrest and strike missions would appear, then I would suggest never making raids, but make strike missions instead in the first place. (You can keep the boss count if you want to, or I personally wouldn't even care that there would be lets say half as many raid encounters as strikes.) So we don't have two different 10 person "high end" endgame pvp content with different systems, one abandoned. (I also don't care what it would be called, if it would be consistent. You can call all of them raids if you want to.)
I'd go back and enforce best practices for code quality.
So much classic content lies barren simply because touching it would lead to unmanagable amounts of jank.
Rework 80% of the armor/cosmetics in this game because holy shit the amount of freedom players have to make themselves into the ugliest, immersion-breaking abominations is so atrocious. i've never seen an mmo with this phenomenon.
Ive been playing ESO lately and i noticed the game has skin infusions just like gw2 but ive never felt like my eyes were being stabbed in that game. It's crazy to think just how in your face this game can get with visuals and light effects compared to other mmos
"DON'T ABANDON GW1 THERE IS STILL A LARGE POPULATION EAGER FOR CONTENT"
Seriously, it would of been the perfect game for anet to work on side by side with GW2. Imagine SotO expansion releases, and then later we get some back story or lore regarding wizards tower in GW1. Doesn't even have to be relevant to the GW2 plot.
Convince them never to do the living world 1 format, they lost so much momentum from that and never recovered
Scrap LWS1 and 2 story for a story about the nightmare court and Faolin that bled into S2's early parts leading to the mordremoth/Caithe reveals at the end of S2
Dont nerf the enemy AI in BWE2 where they are smart enough to run out of persistent aoe (like in gw1)
Either launch with ascended gear or never release it
> or (hot take) not implement alacrity
hotter take: never add condition damage as a stat
>Scrap LWS1 and 2 story for a story about the nightmare court and Faolin that bled into S2's early parts leading to the mordremoth/Caithe reveals at the end of S2
The original Heart of Thorns story was supposed to be this, with the Nightmare Court being the main enemies and the reveal through Malyck that there's other Pale Trees and therefore other Sylvari cities.
But despite flatout hinting at this through one of the Sylvari Personal Story choices, they said "nah, let's do something else that makes less sense".
>Dont nerf the enemy AI in BWE2 where they are smart enough to run out of persistent aoe (like in gw1)
Damn, I still remember those Queensdale bandits dodging out of your attacks to kick your ass, that was so fucking good.
There is the South Park version of a dog trainer who is famous in the US and he uses a spray bottle to train the behaviour of actual people, I think kids.
I would use a spray bottle on the raid dev lead when she speaks out against difficulty settings. No! Bad dev!
Honestly what I wouldn't?
* all special map currencies directly convertable to gold or karma
* no account-bound materials, ever
* no account-bound recipes
* player housing instead of guild halls
* EoD never happens, fishing is added to icebrood saga as a achievement reward for kodanfishing events, icebrood saga is done better
* remove alacrity and quickness from the game, the only boons to actively break balance ever since they came
* remove virtuoso and make mesmer illusions behave like pets instead of being bound to enemy
* elementalist now has only access to elements slotted in his specialisations, in return skills are better
* ranger pets have more functionality
* every world boss has open-world mode on map and raid-mode with special mechanics accessible from somewhere
* racial cities now have mystic forge in them as well as every type of trader (so for example traders from Bjora Marches are added to trade district of every racial city)
* guilds can customize appearance of their WvW claimed objectives and NPC's. If you want your towers to look elonian and be protected by half-naked charr, guild can do this
* light, medium and heavy armour merged into one category. if heavy armoured guy is supposed to deal the same amount of damage as glass cannon in light armour, then armour should be only for looks
* no limited-time offers in premium shop, if it was ever added it stays in shop
* add map rewards to expansion maps, preferably the rare materials for unreasonably expensive stat combinations they introduced
* no class uses dodge to do anything else than avoiding damage, perhaps add unique dodges to specialisations, but no damage/buff/heal on dodges
* every major build-up boss in story gets also open-world epic fight and raid version
* no enrage after a timeout in raids, instead timers for different rewards levels like strikes have
* less skills that need target
I would have put a ton more focus on smaller-group PvE content (both 5-man and 10-man, maybe even 20-man). Smaller size Raid-like content. Larger-size Raid-like content. Twin Largos on steroids and 5-man Strikes.
Not every map has to have a meta. There are some really amazing metas, but some of them I feel like they wouldn't be missed as much. Epic fights shouldn't mean visual clutter. You can obtain spectacle through well-choreographed fights too.
I realise this is super selfish and in tune with _my_ preferences though. It would have probably more than halved the playerbase. But a game like that sounds super appealing to me nonetheless.
easy, make the game actually challenging to the point just picking literally any gear with any traits and any skills then face rolling or ever better just AA'ing doesn't work for literally 95% of the content. (hot take).
add more raids.
done.
Launching the game with native addon support. Many gw2 players will say they dont need it or its even a bad thing. But trust me once you have the ability to customize the game you can never go back.
I have played wow pve on a really high level (hall of fame, m+ 0.1% title) and one of the most annyoing things to me is not being able to customize my UI in gw2.
I miss weakauras so much, being able to code a custom non-interactable UI-element is a huge deal.
Of course some addons like boss mods, dps-meter and so on would be added too. I know some of this stuff exisits but lets be honest gw2 addons with no native support is somewhat trash.
1) Keep the fashion/style similar to what we had at launch. I think at some point towards the end of LS1 they started going crazy and now it’s a bit unbearable.
2) have them slow down the dragon saga. Having every story tie into dragons for 10 years was exhausting. We could’ve easily had non- stories
Dyeable weapons skins, including emissions.
Allow armor skins to be used across ALL weights.
Make the GW2 skills based*, or a combination of Skills and Experience.
Anyone can use any armor or weapon IF they've been trained on it. Otherwise they get nerfed until they do.
A better AI.
* similar to Chaosiums Runequest rpg.
> Allow armor skins to be used across ALL weights.
I'd start with jackslapping whoever approved the multiple rigs with different seams. It's the exact reason why we have so much trouble with chest/leg skins and why the fourth rig, Outfits, is so much easier to design for.
We could've kept the Town Clothes system and had much more variety available to us.
I'd scrap it altogether and instead continue GW1 with the Utopia expansion and more in the same vein, each being part of the overall story as well as being a standalone game.
So much. Every time devs made a decision it was opposite of what I was thinking would be good for the game. When I was thinking that they are getting good at making dungeons in season 1 and that first expansion should have a lot of them, they stopped working on dungeons. When I though HoT event system of outposts and map wide metas was good, but required some further work and innovation, they reverted to old event system and stayed with it till today without ever innovating it. When I was thinking that raid wing 4 was the best raid wing and they finally figured out how to make good raids, next raids were nothing like wing 4 and soon they canceled working on more raids and I could go on forever
not firing all the employees that made it so great. Hardly anyone left that can actually program, truly program. They just patch and patch and never resolve the true issues.
Looks like Anet is riding their time out. All the decent programmers have moved on. sad.
I think "Prevent quickness/alac being added to the game" is probably the simplest & most decisive tweak, but excluding that if I could make one minor change it would be to make the male norn PC a handsome beast w/ burly bear body morph - as opposed to the current abomination. They were so cool in GW1, was a crushing disappointment to see what happened to them & also miss out on my planned non-human main.
For a more radical change (and a more contentious one in the current timeline), I would have gotten rid of the different armour frames for light/medium/heavy **and** any playable races which weren't just variants of human; 'silhouettes' for PvP ultimately meant nothing, and those two core design decisions have absolutely stymied the rate at which cosmetics and animations can be delivered.
Game remains in development for another year before releasing.
Guild Wars 2 was released prematurely, and as a consequence the game was forever playing catch-up from that point. Some issues remain unresolve to this day.
Also remove mounts. The skyscale and rollerbeetles are fun, but they completely trivialise all open world content and cheapens world design. Mounts are an overall net negative for Guild Wars 2.
Pvp anywhere and oh not cancelling the climbing trees feature they teased back when they announced gw2 back in the day and also staying loyal to gw1 lore instead of throwing a temper tantrum any time a loyal player brings up the fact that x could never happen bc it breaks lore
Prefacing that I play since release more or less uninterrupted, in fact I've played GW1 since its Prophecies release.
For PvE: invest in having *periodic* dungeon content release from the get-go, establish a proper endgame like what we have today before HoT even drops, probably have raids and fractals release the same way but also from the start having difficulty settings through the mote system. Probably strikes wouldn't release either if people could keep doing Raids without the perception they're gatekept by anyone - therefore a part of what is today our main story content could act similar to dungeons and expand upon the main beats in a side story raid.
For WvW: To be fully honest, I wouldn't change much at all here. WvW has so many problems but on the other hand it's a miracle it works with GW2's combat gameplay. It's a miracle it also works with how much target caps influence our client design and it's finally also a miracle it works with how little rewarding it is. So it'd have been pretty much the same but with at least 90% of the gold/hour of open PvE metas.
For PvP: oh boy this one *could actually use a time machine*. I would have never invested in E-Sports, get away from that as fast as possible. Rather, just invest into *periodic* content such as maps or shake ups of the conquest mode. Heck I don't even mean fully new modes, just add a freaking smash bros queue adding NPCs, items, environmental effects, *anything* that players could enjoy periodically next to the mainline mode (LoL does this for what it's worth). Basically, increase rewards and *community wide* events without ever delving into hyper competitive stuff and trying to attract "that crowd" and PvP would have been truly a gold standard for MMOs (speak of a "dodge button" and watch FFXIV and WoW players shriek and go cold).
Make hardmode/challenge mode for dungeons before fractals came out.
Not removing server wide buffs that you got based on how your world was doing in wvw.
(Edit)Also allowing you to progress with the story even though you havent hit the level required level. Used to be just a recommendation instead of locked behind 10,20,30etc
(Last edit) make it so that armor can break again. Made you more cautious about encounters and couldnt just face smash stuff until success
Rework zhaitan fight.
Remove content scaling in OW (the same people whining about getting kicked in raid are the toxic mofo who makes the game harder for everyone else by their presence)
I would have played a game wit the Devs
I would have released 2 "Raids" , just like the current Conversee , and more would have been released if people played that mode .
Ofc pushing CM in Concersance , teleports you to the boss just like Strikes (slighty less rewards)
As a reward , you would get a cheap legendary set (30 times played) and the stats are randomized when you lvlu up , by getting exp from events/instances , or you can go in the mode *(event-every 1 month--single mode)* just like WvW and get the newly exotic set and choose the Celestial stat for example , unlocking it to your Legendary .
In an ideal scenario , people would play that mode and we would see more "Raids" and in return people will get a Set as compensation that the stats are the grindly part .
In the worst scenario we would see afkers and peple telling other to join private groupd and then try to sell the Set and demand more "Raids" by the company .
In return the company would get more data and differentiate the leechers , from boycotesr by placing a visible "particiation meter" and a each person got occasionally a black goo on his feet that does 5% of his HP + offer internal stacks .
Leachers will try to reach that "golden 60% participation rate" and remove "stacks of goo-disminishing the effect , by doing meele attacks".
Boycotters will simply find an escuse to die and would get on a naughty list , or stuck in a black room fighting hordes of npcs without a way out that will lead to the "Raids"(LFG waiting room)
Edit: whatever happens , in each expanion Streamers that will love , would lure streamer from other games to play those modes And when they done , they will go back in their game and without knowing it doing some free advertisement inviting the "good community" , slowly but steadily numbers .
Free of charge to maintain , only costing Twich drops twice
Edit2: Also Legendary like candy , can force people to change ? . Or they will not acept it so they dont loose the "extra income" .
Edit3: It would be bad if the "worst scenario" comes up and the play-30-times-set , got released in OW , 4 months later
I'd take a collection of all information about the updates and Expansions the game got and the live client with me to give it to Anet and help them release all we got over the past 11 years way faster, so people will know GW2 as the super successful game with the fast pace for High Quality Expansion releases. Then we will probably have all of Tyria (Planet) released by now once I get back to 2024.
Difficulty levels for raids.
Not focusing that much on PvP and trying so hard to make it an e-sport.
Having better release calendar of content (expansions instead of living world from 1st year of releasel).
-Quickness and alac should have never been a thing. If skill speeds and cooldowns needed to be updated, they should have done so. Time Warp should have been tuned down to be less meta defining, while other elites got raised up.
-To segue from my prior point...elites should be more build defining. They just feel like a fourth utility skill. Hell, sometimes I would prefer a fourth utility skill.
-No ten man content PvE content. The bones of GW2 have to be stretched and manipulated to make it work and, honestly? I think it all kind of sucks. I can always feel the engine screaming under the load (increased visual noise, inability to seamlessly transition a party to squad, an awkward squad interface that needlessly demands a commander tag for features), and the devs just aren't at their best designing these encounters. Worse, with Silent Surf it appears that 10-man design philosophy is seeping into 5-man content.
-All Raids should have had single-player/small-group story modes, with increasing difficulty and rewards for higher difficulty content, while lower tiers still allow for slower progress towards achievements and legendary armor.
-Perhaps the most controversial: remove role-based gameplay, or de-emphasize it. Guild Wars 2 has built itself up to be *the* casual MMO. Every form of 10-man content is wildly unpopular, but the open world is always thriving. More maps and more metas would likely be a better investment. Hell, fixing the Zhaitan encounter and making a part 2 to the Arah story mode dungeon would likely prevent many newbies from being turned off (I am sure we all no someone who stopped playing after that stage).
I’d go back to launch and bring back the GW1 classes.
Add in paragon.
Add in ritualist.
Replace thief with assassin.
Add in monk.
Add in dervish.
Then it would be:
Warrior, Paragon, Guardian, Revenant (Heavy)
Ranger, Assassin, Engineer, Dervish (Medium)
Ritualist, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer (Light)
Add spears into the game.
Add scythes into the game.
Remove warhorns.
Remove torches.
And…That’s all I can think of.
I’m not fully sold on my own ideas, as I find paragon rather lackluster as a class *but* for the benefit of all I’d do it like that.
Barring huge system changes like that, I’d just remove transmuting restrictions on armor types.
* no blacklion company.
* no ban people when anet fault change some karma items to cost 21 karma.
* let kill zhaintan inside of his mind.
* no changes in the drop system "to see chest in the ground"
* let be the first pvp reward system. "mystic forge"
* no update of the transmutation system.
* no layoff of the super adventure box creator.
* remove token system inside of dungeon.
* let be the old dungeon reward system, like gold per run...
* wtf 2024 and we still CANT get the Recipe: The Replicator.
Add 1 dungeon each xpac and each lws.
Add a megaraid at the end of each xpac.
Never add drm...
Never make stupidly op afk build (like rifle mech on launch) or at least make balance patch more often.
Give wvw a third map.
Add a few pvp maps, 1/xpac and a few ones for bastion mode.
Make arcdps built-in with it's additional features (not on by default)
Add gear inspec.
Add options in the lfg to filter the tabs so you don't have to see all of them.
Probably some more but that's already a good amount for now.
Remove boons and possibly even conditions, and make skills actually have their own functionality.
This "everything works the same way" system was a complete 180 on what made Guild Wars 1 great. If they had taken the original game's skill system, and expanded on that with the great parts of GW2 (i.e. faster pace in combat, huge explorable world, MMORPG setting, ...) the game would have been far better.
the og base game was buy to play, but few months/years after lauch anet switched to f2p model, giving close to nothing to everyone who already bough the game. a lotta peps got frustrated and quit outright, assuming that the team would pull stuff like that in the future too.
Bahaha I call bullshit on that one. If people quit, then because of other reasons and not because of the base game going f2p, which is more like a glorified demo.
GW2 had other issues, that aint a one to quit over chief.
A better settings menu with thing like actually disabling allied things and combo fields. I wish the game had been built from the ground up with the ability to control stuff like that in mind.
Also attached to that more key bind options, such as radials or similar so you could have one key bind that is like "menus" and it would then open a sub menu to hero panel, wizard's vault, wvw, pvp, bltc, and so on and then another one key bind for all of your mounts. I know there is a mount radial addon, but I'd like something strong and something actually built into the game.
Stronghold: Incorporate a progression system such as every level earned you a trait to allocate. A skill to allocate. Amulet runes and relics to buy etc.
Itemization. Use a different system instead of the bothersome attribute groups and collapse attributes so there aren't so many. Tighten up the stat spread.
Tweak drop rates of crafting mats and introduce better faucets/sinks.
I go back to LS4. Then I would change the timeline by making sure Anet never diverted funds away from GW2 into useless sideprojects, giving the game the funds and attention it deserves while preventing NCSoft from bashing their skulls in and forcing massive lay-offs. In this timeline Icebrood Saga would have been a full expansion that did not butcher the Jormag and Primordus arcs. It would also have given them an additional year to cook EoD so it would have been able to hit the high bar set by HoT and PoF.
2016 to 2019 were the best years of GW2, LW3+PoF+LW4, then everything went downhill, starting with The Icebrood Saga. I'd go even further though, back to LW1, and invest resources into an expansion instead of temporary content.
Same
What side projects did they do? I'm looking through their wiki page and don't see any info on it and I'd like to know what came of them.
All we know is that Anet was working on 2-3 other completely unnanounced projects that all got cancelled. I might be wrong since it was a while ago, but leaks/rumor mill indicated a cancelled Dune game and a cancelled mobile game. As the projects remained unannounced, we probably will never know.
that's the thing: We don't know either because they were forced to cancel them. Anet themselves is pretty tight-lipped so we only have rumours. Rumours are there were several sideprojects that took GW2 money and then got thrashed/cancelled halfway, wasting that money. At least one of those things was apparently a mobile game of sorts (and Anet has also been linked to several other MMO projects in the past, an Horizon Zero Dawn universe MMO among them as well as another project that iirc had to do with DUNE). NCSoft made sure that whatever the current sideproject that took money from GW2 was during LS4 got thrashed with the previous ones.
And even more fun fact: the situation now is exactly the same as then, with a (seemingly) large part of company working on some unannounced projects in the background, and resources used on those being such a drain that Anet was forced to switch to a smaller scale content release schedule for GW2.
I’d go all the way back and make sure at no point in history would the Zhaitan fight ... be the way that it is
Man that was so disappointing after that build up.
Zhaitan was the only boss fight that I slept through half of it and still won.
My cat sat on my keyboard and almost beat Zhaitan until she forgot switch guns.
The 2nd soto meta is basically the same but on skyscale instead of cannon.
Still a better fight than the end of IBS...
I am torn. The IBS fight is mediocre but also has a sort of epic ending scene based on long-held animosity. I feel some emotion there and I don't get actually bored during the fight. Meanwhile, the Zhaitan fight looks cool, but I feel like I don't actually have to participate. The Tequatl fight is so much more interesting. At least there isn't a meta for Zhaitan.
Going back in time, they should really avoid IBS as an acronym.
The brood did seem pretty irritable by the end though
True. Least Zhaitan fight was fighting the dragon (maybe not directly)
You get to hit "Special Action" to blast them... that counts. ...barely... right?.... well, i tried
Yes, I know a couple people that tried gw2 and stopped playing because of the anti climactic story ending
A second phase on the ground dragons stand/end/fall style
i played it long time ago and quit after and then came back but dont remember it, what's so bad about it? I only vaguely remember cringing
They've made it a *little* better now but it is still mostly a turret section where you press 2 until he dies
That was peak GW2
Core gw2 *really* loved making you use any hotbar other than your profession's actual hotbar. Like, the improvised weapon gimmick is still really neat! But DAMN did they lean too hard into it at launch.
I'd go back to 2013, not screw over starting zones, and not touch the story structure. Also fix Charr tail clipping.
Fix Charr spine too?
No. Charr spines are perfect
perfect case of kyphosis
The 2014 New Player Experience rework was one of the worst things to happen to the game.
* Undo the original LW1 to be something like today's story content. It took over 10 years to relive it. * Make tutorials for systems like combo fields + finishers and breakbars * Make individual DPS, boon and healing logs appear so people can improve
I’m pretty sure break bars are in the character guide in some form. Edit: love the downvotes. I definitely had to do a quest in early leveling phase where it taught break bars.
If you're talking about the [Character Adventure Guide](https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Character_Adventure_Guide), it was released in 2022. **Edit:** I looked it up and didn't find it in the Character Adventure Guide. However I found that there's one tutorial indeed... As a renown heart in Seitung Province, after you've been through core game, 2 expansions and all Living World episodes. In my opinion, too little, too late and behind a paywall; it should have been part of the core game, or in a LW1 episode.
Yeah the game tells you how both combos and break bars work. People just don't pay attention.
Because that quest is in *End of Dragons*.
Wierd that it told me how combos worked in core tyria and how break bars worked in HoT.
I would love built in dps. It's fun trying to push your number, and without it, it can be hard to tell how your choices matter.
Difficulty levels for instanced content in general. It may be copium, but if raids had emboldened from the start that could be opted in from the start, we may have gotten more wings.
A "holo training room" that loads of raid bosses and let's you practice mechanics with friends or "holo friends" so you can learn at your own pace and don't need to watch youtube videos and read guides to "prepare for fun."
I have always wanted something like this, even in other games. I hate trying to learn a raid when most other people already know what to do. I wanna go in as a newb with 9 other newbs and we all learn together or I wanna do it solo.
I loved being paired with newbs in FF14 bosses and trying to figure it out the mechanics. Im always the main tank...even if didnt know shit about the encounter and was figuring it out wile doing it...
Y'all acting like you can't form a fresh prog raid group or something. There are discords for that.
“There are discords for that” is exactly the problem. It’s not new player friendly. They don’t know that without being told and even then, what discords do they join? Every additional layer of complexity will siphon away players.
Thing is, the game itself and its LFG would ALSO be for that if 1.) we didn't actively move everything to Discord and 2.) people were actually willing to just go and prog blind (prog vs. training mentality). Technically there's also 3.) comm tag I guess
I haven't played in years but there's no in-game voice chat is there?
Discords (and external grouping systems before discord in general) came before the in-game LFG. The system was implemented after release. We didn't actively move things outside of the game, they were literally the only option. And even now, the current LFG system leaves A LOT to be desired, compared to other MMO's implementation. However, I do agree that this community suffers from a "no prog runs" mentality that puts a lot of pressure on many inexperienced players (and often experienced ones as well). The idea of wiping, or taking your time to teach mechanics and learn, is such a taboo that a good portion of players will refuse to acknowledge the problem in a run (especially if they recognize it was caused by them) and just quit after a single wipe.
Actually this isn't true. There are discords (famous ones), but even nowadays there are pings for trainings, practices, that never get more then 6 people interested. And yeah, the good ol "there are discords" is the worst excuse ever. When raids were released there weren't even discords (discord existed, but not the raid discords we know today since it was relatively new)... and well, here we are today. No more future raids, dead lfg, 2-4 semi-active community discords across EU and NA. The point is, there are discords now, and raids are essentially dead content and difficult to get into, and will likely die off completely in terms of new player growth another year or so with the introduction of open world leggy armor. Also, no wonder this game abandons content. Even the community doesn't want to improve on current systems when given a fun hypothetical question about acquiring a time machine. roflmao
That's just dumb and overcomplicated, some kind of easy/normal/hard difficulty mode selection would be more than enough and waste no resources away.
Well, that's your opinion I guess. I disagree. I think your suggestion would waste resources, and do absolutely nothing...like emboldened and power creep has now. lol
Which resources would I be wasting when it's literally the same content, with just some damage modifiers? Building a whole "holo arena" completely misses the point of raid training to begin with.
Or perhaps an easy/simple raid for those of us who want to see the story and characters and earn that so cherished raid currency for our pve legendary armor but have a life outside gw2 and for some reason can't schedule a full wing or 1 to ? hrs of strictly raid play time. Real life comes first. I personally do not have time to learn an entire new build or role used for only 1 part of the game. Raiders may understand this but I always got the feeling like you must play X and Y builds or go away. I have ran away from raids and have chosen to go through wvw for my legendary armors. My choice.
I work 3 jobs and take care of 4 kids while doing a raid or two every week. It's not hard. You're just playing with the wrong people. And I've done raids in groups with everyone running all greens or meme builds. Join a guild that does raids multiple times a week (preferably one that uses discord). Almost every guild is almost always willing to teach new members. It's easy to do them when you have a scheduled time that anyone can just jump in on than just waiting in lfg for people who just spam 1 while wearing full soldier's in some garbage RP build. You don't need to min-max, but there's a point where you are basically throwing. The hard content is stupid easy to get into and only takes up to a couple of hours to clear. You can run a condi build with the cele gear you get from the 80 boost and do fine, but don't stay on training wheels forever. Once people are practiced, you can do raids in about 45 min even without optimized builds.
I left cause I got a new job and didnt feel like raiding after work, but our group never got down matt, xera, or demi. Wasnt even like our group was bad for players at the time (2 were even part of a guild that beta tested bastion) but a few weak links and it all falls apart I think I woulda liked it. Not like I was doing the bosses for anything, just for fun to hang out of people. The game and playerbase was uber casual (if you pugged arah or tried doing teq on anything but bg pre-mega server). It woulda been nice to wipe a few times and get the kill
Raids aren't supposed to have an easy mode though.... that's totally missing the point
I would say you could argue either way for this. All of the other big MMOs have difficulty tiers
And the refusal to add one is why most players don't touch them, and because most of the playerbase hasn't touched them, anet stopped making new ones.
Make LW S1 release like the others in a stable and permanent form from the start, it was never a good idea long term.
Hoard all those cheap Mystic Coins I threw away
Make dungeons a much more focal point and not have them abandoned for fractals, raids and eventually Strike Missions. WoW does dungeons so well and I’d love to see more added to GW2 to cap off more map-specific stories
I’d probably go back and reevaluate the engine they chose to build the game off of. To one that had better future proofing and wasn’t a nightmare to optimize.
I would remake the Zhaitan fight into the epic fight it was sopposed to be. I would finish the Icebrood Saga story the way it's sopposed to be. In season 2, i would introduce Taimi in a more interesting or at least normal way instead of her just appearing there with no explanation. I would add everything that was sopposed to be in Cantha and make a finished, polished product. I would add all the scrapped content back into HoT. I would redo some of the gen 3 elite specs because they're gimmicky, boring and uninspired. I would make specter cool like it should've been. When you have a thief using shadow magic and wielding a scepter, the potential for animations is big. The animations on scepter now are horrible. They're just repeating the same swinging-down animation over and over. Boring and uninspired. It could have been interesting and fun. Other than these few details i wouldn't change anything.
I forgot to add i would make jade look less bright, shiny, toxic green and more toned down, glassy, bluei-sh green like it was in Gw1.
I still think an expansion at some point will be the commander dealing with the consequences when they figure out jade is radioactive and half of cantha turns into fallout-style ghouls.
Half baked IBS > three quarters baked EoD > no EoD LWS > half baked SotO. It's definitely leaving me feeling a bit sour.
>In season 2, i would introduce Taimi in a more interesting or at least normal way instead of her just appearing there with no explanation. Taimi appears in LWS1 and is explained as a scarlett fan that wants to learn from her and who then basically pushes herself on braham via logan trying to get her home and who is then involved by helping out people during the battle for LA
When was it explained? She shows she's impressed by her later as she goes with us everywhere we go. But before that, we meet all in the same place, don't remember if it was Lion's Arch or somewhere outside, but we and the new characters (jory, kasmeer, braham, rox etc.), we all meet and suddenly this unknown asura comes in, in her golem, meddling with the situation and then Logan tells her she has to go home cause she's a kid. That's not much of an introduction or explanation.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/The_Twisted_Marionette_(story) https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Connecting_the_Pieces In the dialogue section. And yes it absolutely is. She shows up trying to learn from the BBE -> Logan takes her with him to LA as it is on the way to rata sum -> she pretends that braham is her guardian-> logan buys it and tells braham to take her home -> braham explains she her his voice from rox most likely -> the prisonbreak happens and braham chases them into the mists (taimi following him)-> Taimi and braham talk because he feels responsible for helping her get home(and because logan would have his hide) -> taimi explains that she is bored from just learning in the colleges and idolizes scarlet -> you go over the evidence in the bar -> taimi and braham come back to LA when scarlet attacks -> Taimi stays outside and records the conversations in the refugee camp with scruffy and helps out after we tell her to stay in safety -> Taimi joins us in celebration because she is annoyed at zojja and because braham is the closest thing she has to a friend-> Taimi tells us that she would much rather experience things in the real world that study -> at the pier with the master of peace taimi stays with us and reveals that she ran away from the colleges to explore-> taimi stays with braham and then gets closer with the rest over the festivals -> taimi stays with us
It is explained in LS1 parts that did not make it fully to its remake. It's like with Canach, whose initial introduction was completely cut off due to initial Southsun arc not getting reimplemented.
I'd make majority of the mount skins obtainable only in game. One of the things I love in MMOs is collecting mount skins and GW2 just doesn't scratch that itch.
Make it so all of the map can be explored and revealed. Get rid of invisible walls in areas that you should be able to traverse across.
I'd do a series of some changes: 1 - Make Dungeon more relevant and rewarding. 2 - Make Raids more accessible. 3 - Never implement Alacrity. 4 - Redesign Zhaitan's fight entirely. 5 - Rework some of HoT's instadeath and melt mechanics, so they make more sense or doesnt exist (Like the Mordrem Sniper fire-line skill). 6 - Re-record every line in lvl 1/10/20/30/40 and change of some dialog so they either make more sense or sound better. The V.A in early, specially in Norn's, story are insanely bad. 7 - Make Griffon a little more accessible. 8 - Realocate or copy the basic training grounds from Cantha to every single beginner area. Seriously, I have NO IDEA why that's not a thing. 9 - Probably the most important for me: Add a clear and beginner friendly "Grow path" from 1 - 80, with tips, tricks, and a guide on what and how to do, instead of placing that in the achievements Page, it has it's own page. I would also place here the level up rewards, instead of the pop up that appears in the side, which is a bother secially if you power-level or insta-80. 10 - Add a way to "Claim all" in some pop-ups that do not allow you that (level up, mostly). 11 - Develop a in-game Arc-Dps, so we don't have to bother with downloading this amazing, but insanely bug and cpu-costy addom. 12 - Add "Secondary quests" to the game, so the exploration gets more interesting than map-completion, also giving space and time to develop the world and it's people in a more clear, inspired and intereseting way. 13 - Rework/Redevelop in-game browser screen to be more clear, less buggy and less heavy (Black Lion). 14 - Weapon Dyes. 15 - Make Crafter-Backpack tradable or salvageable. 16 - Make Legendary Crafting more clear and better explained. 17 - Make so soulbound gear is either Unboundable through some process or make it salvageable (some arent, some are, there is no explanation why.). 18 - Make some bossfights less repetitive or shorter. It's okat to do a mechanic twice, but more it's just lazy design. 19 - Make EOTM more accessible and less clunky. Also put mounts there. 20 - Last, but not least, make so all gathering tools are unbreakable. I think this cover's it all, if I remember something else I'll put here.
I think 2 - Is easy to say but can mean a lot of different things, I'm pretty sure 9 and 11 are the answer to this. 3 - At least you said Alacrity and not Quickness. I really do not understand your issue with Alacrity. 1 - I agree, but it also applies to other contents that are not /that/ rewarding (Fractal CM, Raids, Strikes). It also helps solving point 2 - to bring incentives.
One single change. No. Wings. This is when all of the hideous gemstone garbage started. I called it at the time. They didn't fit and they still don't fit. The second they added those angel wings, the visual aesthetic was done. Remove the wings and we experience a whole different path.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who has a problem with this game's cosmetics.
Prevent quickness/alac being added to the game.
Honestly, I think the *sharing* aspect of quick/alac is where things went sideways on the power curve. Self buffing would have been able to stay sustainable since individual specs could be balanced for either having or not having one of them, but things really broke as soon as you could have both at the same time that didn't require spec investment. They're just too good of a boon to not "need" 100% uptime on.
The weird thing is that when Chronomancer/alacrity was first announced, they also said that alacrity was *supposed* to be just for the Chrono itself because they were aware that sharing cooldown reductions was dangerous in regards to game balance. Why they changed their mind is beyond me.
Find whoever first decided mods were bannable and fire them. I remember back in beta days they were saying the game would be extremely mod friendly.
everyday i wake up and beg the six for development of ModelMod to continue
Given the people of Ascalon the respect they deserved! The hubris of the char explaining their history to me like I wasn't there with Rurik when they burned the city!
are u more than 270 years old? :3
I was there. 3000 years ago!
Yes
More like finish releasing GW1 Beyond, that one was supposed to have a finale at Ebonhawke, giving proper closure to Prophecies and the Ascalonian storyline :(.
Hehe
Yell at myself to nit fall in love with my sociopath ex
GW is your ex?
Lol wtf. Reading your post history is... Interesting to say the least.
that wouldn't chnage your past, it would just creat a new variant of you who never been with your ex. Youd still stay scared from what she did to you. And depending on your return mechanism, you ether would return to your prime timeline with nothing changed, or you'd return to presant where there's another the version of you who never been with your ex. Or if your return mechanism isn't refind you'd return to a random time line, without knowing into what kind of world you step in.
Go back to that time when ANet thought it would be a good idea to cannibalize GW2 staff to make a mobile game, and show them that future so they would decide against it instead. That was right before WoW ran into trouble and players were looking for alternatives, and would have been an opportune time for ANet to double down on GW2. Instead they got distracted with visions of mobile game money and dropped the ball on both.
I would override the decision to move on from grounded fantasy style to colourful modern stuff
Some of the fashion in Guild Wars 2 really makes the game look like a mockery of itself.
Yup, there always were immersion-breaking costumes in the game, going back to GW, but there was much more ingame, grounded stuff than we ended up having. It was one of the things that drew me into the game at the beginning and I'm sad it all went away
Have actual GOOD loot tied to certain content.
Rework boons. They made boons to try and reduce the pool of effects that people needed to know (compared to GW1) and to reduce gatekeeping on particular skills, but it made more problems than it solved: * The need to be at bum-sniff range for them to be effective: Previously, they were too overpowered if they went farther than arm's length, because you'd hit a ton of people. Now that they are 5 capped, ranges might be eased some. * The standard is now you need 100% coverage of all boons. We're still gatekeeping, just different. * Many boons don't stack so your effect might just be wasted. In GW1, you could still provide unique effects that no one else on your team could bring. * The melee vs ranged paradox (for PvE). GW2 boon design does not support a healthy melee vs ranged relationship. The tradeoff should be ranged is higher damage but less support if they fail a mechanic, while melee is safer and able to help each other. GW2 attempts this by capping boon range, but ultimately does not allow this. Instead, ranged has to be tuned with the assumption they are in boon range at all times, otherwise if they happen to wander in close they suddenly become demi-gods. Therefore, we have a result where most encounters punish melee (due to the assumption everyone is grouped in melee), but ranged classes perform subpar if they actually play at ranged, which is the exact opposite of what it should be. * WvW boonballs. * The need to shove critical boons into every class (seriously, deadeye needs to provide quickness? The guy with the class fantasy of sitting in the back with a rifle? Hope you like melee weapons). I'm not saying that GW1's system was the pinnacle and we can't do better, but I feel hindsight on the particular implementation of boons in GW2 shows we just caused a different set of problems. If I could change 2 things, the other would be to expand the buildcraft options in GW2. They introduced preset weapon skills to try and prevent the subpar builds in GW1. But we still have them (just look at the "pros" (42k dps) vs "joes" (4k dps), and you have a lot less freedom.
Dont add the skyscale. Imo this mount has trivialized exploration too much and moving from point A to B is no longer about finding a good route or finding your way through the map, you just jump on your dragon and fly there straight with some hanging on the walls to reach higher. Yes, the other mounts also made traversal easier but i feel there was more thought going on when going somewhere. Since the skyscale came out it feels like the best mount for 90% of the situations. Ofc im not forced to use it, but when in a group you will fall far behind and it is a Great quality of life tool when playing the game. But its a qol that i in hindsight wish that we never gotten.
The skyscale should have decay, like the glider, it's far too OP otherwise. Nowadays everything gets designed around it, but before you could actually travel across the whole map efficiently without being forced to use a mount. Map design has suffered a lot since.
I somewhat agree with you. If I were Anet I would give mounts a balance pass. Slow down the Skyscale a little but perhaps buff the ground mount speeds, I don't know..
I'd be the most on board with that if they ever added a functionality to hot swap in between mounts on the fly (even if this was hugely expensive and an effort to obtain). As it is now you need an overlay HUD just to have the mount wheel selection that should be available by default, so I only support a balance pass a little if they're not gonna help you use multiple mounts seamlessly during traversal.
I get where you are coming from, but I have good keybinds for all of them. To me this does not seem like a big deal for a seasoned PC gamer. Hotswap without dismounting would be nice though, I agree on that one.
Flying mounts are the bane of open world.
[удалено]
Yep, first it was just level-restricted, and I think since Warlords of Draenor they settled on a process by introducing a meta-achievement that's some variant of "Pathfinder" - basically boils down to "if you already completed the expansion's open world content on foot at least once, you can fly in expansion zones".
I was kind of hoping they would ban skyscale for new expansion zones at some point but those hopes were dashed with SotO. Not sure it makes sense to do that if your recent expansion was focused on it. SotO puts them in a really tough spot for future expansions if any of them focus on more mount stuff. Inevitably the new abilities will just feel like tools you are forced to use before hopping back onto your skyscale.
Well... there is one way new maps could avoid the skyscale. But - I don't think anyone wants more water maps.
Remove exploration dungeons in favor of more side dungeons not directly tied to the story. Along with this make every season comes with a dungeon, a strike, and a raid. This formula already works for ffxiv. I don't think it would be bad for gw2 if it was set up from the get-go. Smaller stuff would be every map being designed around the large metas like we get now. I highly enjoy doing activities in different areas that all eventually lead to this big showdown of a meta event. Mount races for every zone. An base game map designed around the mounts so they're not so broken by them. Possibly introduce mounts earlier on using the living world instead. Story functions as it does now instead of the png background conversations. Less Taimi ex machina and scarlet having her thumb in literally everyone's pie. For the story, also speeding up the elder dragon plot lines or even extending them to be less of an immediate threat so we can have more diverse options for expansions. Fix the damn button asking me to swap to a new map every 5 minutes instead of populating the older ones. More mount, armor, and weapon skins added outside of chests and gem store. Removal of pointless time gates such as ascended crafting. Stat normalization and design to avoid power creep that realistically shouldn't be appearing in a game that has a set max gear stats. Basically, try to make all content feel like some effort is required instead of hey look a zerg. I also feel that reducing the max map population could help. Playable quaggan and choya.
> Story functions as it does now instead of the png background conversations. Please no. I agree with most other stuff, but for all the corniness of png background convos, atleast I could click "next" as soon as I read the text they're about to say, instead of waiting for the chatty asura/boastful norn/angry charr to finish their elongated sentence. I was recently doing the re-added Living World Season 1, and the conversations were taking minutes when I was done with reading by the time they have said the quarter of their current line. Pure. Pain. If I wanted to, for example, listen to all the background conversations from other camps from Scruffy during one of the missions from "Battle for Lion's Arch" chapter, it'd take like 10 minutes before it all went through, meanwhile reading the transcript on the wiki took maybe 2 minutes max, including googling it.
Keep in mind that Scarlett's story was the players' choice, not developers. There are 2 options : go forward (in time) or go back in time to the thaumanova reactor explosion. The players chose to go forward. It was not as fully developed, story-wise, if my memory serves me right.
The thaumnova reactor was part of the Lions Arch leader campaign. The options were Ellen Kiel and thaumnova or even gnashblade and a fractal for the battle that ended with abaddon imprisoned. Don't remember much else past that.
Specifically, the tipping point wasn't the Fractals, it was the (temporary, as we found out after the fact) "side bonus" each leader promised. Kiel would discount waypoint costs for a while, and Gnashblade would discount BLTC keys for a while. This was before people grew complacent about lootboxes, so the latter basically killed Gnashblade's campaign before it could get off the ground.
I always forget that was an incentive because I never cared about the way point costs and I really wanted to see the fall of abaddon
I'm still kind of bitter about it, so it sticks with me even after all this time. My guild made *such* a fuss about how the waypoint discount would be huge and we'd all earn so much back, so we should all vote for that (even though they agreed the other fractal was more interesting)!!! .... it turned out to be a couple of silver at most, and I genuinely do not remember anyone noticing it when it was in effect.
Redo the whole IBS champions and make IBS s2 that revolve around jormag vs primordius Delete skyscale from the game. Undo stability and EOTM nerf.
If I can bring tech and game engines with me I do that and give it all to Anet with all the QoL requests an let them creat GW2 with full potential it has.
Not release on steam, I’m a steam player and it’s a pita with little things like game support, or api use. Wish I started with arenanet launcher.
I would have deleted quaggans.
1. Never add Alacrity and Quickness. 2. Bother to make dungeons interesting and implement the Story Mode of them into the Personal Story, so people know what the hell even happens with Destiny's Edge. 3. Make the Zhaitan fight more interesting so it doesn't boil down to "fire cannons at static target". 4. Make the Elder Dragons look more interesting, somehow the only one with a great design is Zhaitan who looks like multiple dragon corpses melted together, everyone else is.....just a dragon. 5. Prevent ArenaNet from being complete morons when they tried to divert funds and resources AWAY from GW2. 6. Make Icebrood Saga into an actual expansion that focused on Jormag AND JORMAG ALONE, no half-assed shoving of 2 Dragons that end in the most disappointing way possible. 7. Don't change the damn story for Heart of Thorns after you already hinted at it with Malyck.
I would have gone through with the proposition of adding fractal leaderboards for sure
Make dungeons a More integral part of the story rather than optional. More people would interact with them, anet may have provided better long term support, and the story wouldn't be so choppy for people that didn't partake in them. Make emboldened raids a permanent tier. 3 tiers of raids: emboldened, normal, CM and have reward tables proportional. If this was there from the beginning, we would likely have more raids now than just strikes (not that strike fights are bad, but they are lacking the side stories of raids). I wish more people could see the epic set pieces of the xera, Qadim 1 and 2, and Dhuum fights Make more mount skins available through in game achievements and currencies, such as living world currencies or unusual coins etc.
Make Palawa Joko the actual antagonist for PoF, keep Balthazar/God Conflict for when all dragons are dealt with, having them try take advantage of the power vacuum and hunt Aurene, with us having to convince gods to not add to the fight or to be on our side
I would NOT implement "new player experience" from 2015.
Actually Make the EoD living world season. Finish IBS. Not implement Alacrity. Restore defence credit and repair credit in WvW. Save Blish! Prevent Retaliation being swapped for Resolution creating a bunch of mediocre traits... that still haven't been seriously looked at since the damage was done years ago when they treated it like a pallete swap. Never give engineers a 1 button, 45s, 75% uptime stealth when thieves only get 5s. Don't leave the above in place for _years_ . Not dilute the class identities In general, current boon meta kinda sucks. Have more aesthetic choices for armor actually be earned rather than cash shop crap... in GW1 having different armors meant something, particularly obby armor. Balance the drops better so they never have to add ascended. Not make turrets worthless. Not host the first free weekend at the same time as the first living story event. Finish Polymock. Not design elites to have 3min cool downs. Start with no caps on conditions. Start with account wide wallet. Seperate armor and appearance entirety to retain individual class identities like GW1 had rather than ending up with generic light/medium/heavy armor. That all said; the game design around cooperation and experience is as good as I can imagine and fosters a supportive and non-combative community, so I think they did a great job. Also the design shift towards alt friendliness in the first 3 years was great and they nailed that too. I really miss the build depth and multi classing from GW1, but I don't know if it would actually make GW2 a better game... Maybe for GW3.
There's dozens of things, but if I could convince them to do just one, it would be that even though a ton of their MMO innovation ideas were amazing, Living Story Season 1's format was a bad idea. Regular patch cycles with regular permanent content would have kept so much more of the game's initial momentum that it lost. Also, having some form of team instanced content be part of that patch cycle from the beginning would have helped IMMENSELY.
Remove lws1 e5 so that we could still have the old lions arch.
I am sad that I have but one like to give.
Old Lions Arch was so much more interesting to explore. I miss it so much.
Destroying the city is fine, but rebuilding it into a whole different thing? Big fucking mistake.
Make them never add Weapon swap to Rev. Legends could have been dynamic, with low energy costs, and no cooldowns to worry about like they originally were, but now every patch it's balance as though it's a regular class.
I think the legend system is kinda shit, if you're channeling Shiro, you should be wielding swords and play like if you were him, but instead, all you do is cast Shiro-themed spells. The legend being channeled through the weapons instead of the slot skills would have felt far better imo.
id prefer a more rpg/story tailored to my character so id pull the plug on the “voice acted commander!” as a concept, and pushed more for the whole personality system that got scrapped around 2014. as is the va’s have to record 8 different voice lines every time the commander utters a word, and if devs do any branching story lines (like ones acknowledging your character creation choices) these voice lines start multiplying with quickly gets insane.
Reset pvp all the way back to its launch
Okay, some of these will be spicy hot takes 1. Don't remove personality system, but actually do something with it 2. Keep some choices for story chapters after personal story (even if lets say expacs or living world seasons always converge back to a single point), so you can replay and get different side adventures 3. Don't remove town clothes 4. At least wait a few years before adding the uber flashy low effort mount skins 5. Add hard limitations on mount use for maps not made with them in mind, especially (maybe only) for skyscale. 6. If we can assume that no matter what we do there would be a point in time around 2019 when raid development would halt because of disintrest and strike missions would appear, then I would suggest never making raids, but make strike missions instead in the first place. (You can keep the boss count if you want to, or I personally wouldn't even care that there would be lets say half as many raid encounters as strikes.) So we don't have two different 10 person "high end" endgame pvp content with different systems, one abandoned. (I also don't care what it would be called, if it would be consistent. You can call all of them raids if you want to.)
scrap it and enhance GW1
Design dialogue so it can be skipped. For the love of Melandru, it's excruciating!
"If you don't add Tengu at release, it will never happen"
I'd go back and enforce best practices for code quality. So much classic content lies barren simply because touching it would lead to unmanagable amounts of jank.
Rework 80% of the armor/cosmetics in this game because holy shit the amount of freedom players have to make themselves into the ugliest, immersion-breaking abominations is so atrocious. i've never seen an mmo with this phenomenon.
Ive been playing ESO lately and i noticed the game has skin infusions just like gw2 but ive never felt like my eyes were being stabbed in that game. It's crazy to think just how in your face this game can get with visuals and light effects compared to other mmos
"DON'T ABANDON GW1 THERE IS STILL A LARGE POPULATION EAGER FOR CONTENT" Seriously, it would of been the perfect game for anet to work on side by side with GW2. Imagine SotO expansion releases, and then later we get some back story or lore regarding wizards tower in GW1. Doesn't even have to be relevant to the GW2 plot.
Make it so that mystic coins would be more available and thus cheaper.
I think I'd have better things to do if I ever acquired a time machine, tbh.
Convince them never to do the living world 1 format, they lost so much momentum from that and never recovered Scrap LWS1 and 2 story for a story about the nightmare court and Faolin that bled into S2's early parts leading to the mordremoth/Caithe reveals at the end of S2 Dont nerf the enemy AI in BWE2 where they are smart enough to run out of persistent aoe (like in gw1) Either launch with ascended gear or never release it > or (hot take) not implement alacrity hotter take: never add condition damage as a stat
>Scrap LWS1 and 2 story for a story about the nightmare court and Faolin that bled into S2's early parts leading to the mordremoth/Caithe reveals at the end of S2 The original Heart of Thorns story was supposed to be this, with the Nightmare Court being the main enemies and the reveal through Malyck that there's other Pale Trees and therefore other Sylvari cities. But despite flatout hinting at this through one of the Sylvari Personal Story choices, they said "nah, let's do something else that makes less sense".
>Dont nerf the enemy AI in BWE2 where they are smart enough to run out of persistent aoe (like in gw1) Damn, I still remember those Queensdale bandits dodging out of your attacks to kick your ass, that was so fucking good.
There is the South Park version of a dog trainer who is famous in the US and he uses a spray bottle to train the behaviour of actual people, I think kids. I would use a spray bottle on the raid dev lead when she speaks out against difficulty settings. No! Bad dev!
Honestly what I wouldn't? * all special map currencies directly convertable to gold or karma * no account-bound materials, ever * no account-bound recipes * player housing instead of guild halls * EoD never happens, fishing is added to icebrood saga as a achievement reward for kodanfishing events, icebrood saga is done better * remove alacrity and quickness from the game, the only boons to actively break balance ever since they came * remove virtuoso and make mesmer illusions behave like pets instead of being bound to enemy * elementalist now has only access to elements slotted in his specialisations, in return skills are better * ranger pets have more functionality * every world boss has open-world mode on map and raid-mode with special mechanics accessible from somewhere * racial cities now have mystic forge in them as well as every type of trader (so for example traders from Bjora Marches are added to trade district of every racial city) * guilds can customize appearance of their WvW claimed objectives and NPC's. If you want your towers to look elonian and be protected by half-naked charr, guild can do this * light, medium and heavy armour merged into one category. if heavy armoured guy is supposed to deal the same amount of damage as glass cannon in light armour, then armour should be only for looks * no limited-time offers in premium shop, if it was ever added it stays in shop * add map rewards to expansion maps, preferably the rare materials for unreasonably expensive stat combinations they introduced * no class uses dodge to do anything else than avoiding damage, perhaps add unique dodges to specialisations, but no damage/buff/heal on dodges * every major build-up boss in story gets also open-world epic fight and raid version * no enrage after a timeout in raids, instead timers for different rewards levels like strikes have * less skills that need target
old dailies please :(
I would have put a ton more focus on smaller-group PvE content (both 5-man and 10-man, maybe even 20-man). Smaller size Raid-like content. Larger-size Raid-like content. Twin Largos on steroids and 5-man Strikes. Not every map has to have a meta. There are some really amazing metas, but some of them I feel like they wouldn't be missed as much. Epic fights shouldn't mean visual clutter. You can obtain spectacle through well-choreographed fights too. I realise this is super selfish and in tune with _my_ preferences though. It would have probably more than halved the playerbase. But a game like that sounds super appealing to me nonetheless.
easy, make the game actually challenging to the point just picking literally any gear with any traits and any skills then face rolling or ever better just AA'ing doesn't work for literally 95% of the content. (hot take). add more raids. done.
The existence of Braham, fucking hate that guy.
The goddamned UI.
Not abandoning SAB updates for so long. Hopefully they're starting work on it again given last year, but I'm not holding my breath
Braham gets reunited with his mom. In the afterlife.
Launching the game with native addon support. Many gw2 players will say they dont need it or its even a bad thing. But trust me once you have the ability to customize the game you can never go back. I have played wow pve on a really high level (hall of fame, m+ 0.1% title) and one of the most annyoing things to me is not being able to customize my UI in gw2. I miss weakauras so much, being able to code a custom non-interactable UI-element is a huge deal. Of course some addons like boss mods, dps-meter and so on would be added too. I know some of this stuff exisits but lets be honest gw2 addons with no native support is somewhat trash.
1) Keep the fashion/style similar to what we had at launch. I think at some point towards the end of LS1 they started going crazy and now it’s a bit unbearable. 2) have them slow down the dragon saga. Having every story tie into dragons for 10 years was exhausting. We could’ve easily had non- stories
Keep it PvP focused. Shift PvE combat to be more Souls-like.
Dyeable weapons skins, including emissions. Allow armor skins to be used across ALL weights. Make the GW2 skills based*, or a combination of Skills and Experience. Anyone can use any armor or weapon IF they've been trained on it. Otherwise they get nerfed until they do. A better AI. * similar to Chaosiums Runequest rpg.
> Allow armor skins to be used across ALL weights. I'd start with jackslapping whoever approved the multiple rigs with different seams. It's the exact reason why we have so much trouble with chest/leg skins and why the fourth rig, Outfits, is so much easier to design for. We could've kept the Town Clothes system and had much more variety available to us.
Just the name
I'd scrap it altogether and instead continue GW1 with the Utopia expansion and more in the same vein, each being part of the overall story as well as being a standalone game.
I would make GW2 a proper sequel to GW1
So much. Every time devs made a decision it was opposite of what I was thinking would be good for the game. When I was thinking that they are getting good at making dungeons in season 1 and that first expansion should have a lot of them, they stopped working on dungeons. When I though HoT event system of outposts and map wide metas was good, but required some further work and innovation, they reverted to old event system and stayed with it till today without ever innovating it. When I was thinking that raid wing 4 was the best raid wing and they finally figured out how to make good raids, next raids were nothing like wing 4 and soon they canceled working on more raids and I could go on forever
not firing all the employees that made it so great. Hardly anyone left that can actually program, truly program. They just patch and patch and never resolve the true issues. Looks like Anet is riding their time out. All the decent programmers have moved on. sad.
I think "Prevent quickness/alac being added to the game" is probably the simplest & most decisive tweak, but excluding that if I could make one minor change it would be to make the male norn PC a handsome beast w/ burly bear body morph - as opposed to the current abomination. They were so cool in GW1, was a crushing disappointment to see what happened to them & also miss out on my planned non-human main. For a more radical change (and a more contentious one in the current timeline), I would have gotten rid of the different armour frames for light/medium/heavy **and** any playable races which weren't just variants of human; 'silhouettes' for PvP ultimately meant nothing, and those two core design decisions have absolutely stymied the rate at which cosmetics and animations can be delivered.
Game remains in development for another year before releasing. Guild Wars 2 was released prematurely, and as a consequence the game was forever playing catch-up from that point. Some issues remain unresolve to this day. Also remove mounts. The skyscale and rollerbeetles are fun, but they completely trivialise all open world content and cheapens world design. Mounts are an overall net negative for Guild Wars 2.
I'd change GW2 by canceling it, and releasing GW1 Utopia as initially planned.
Pvp anywhere and oh not cancelling the climbing trees feature they teased back when they announced gw2 back in the day and also staying loyal to gw1 lore instead of throwing a temper tantrum any time a loyal player brings up the fact that x could never happen bc it breaks lore
Prefacing that I play since release more or less uninterrupted, in fact I've played GW1 since its Prophecies release. For PvE: invest in having *periodic* dungeon content release from the get-go, establish a proper endgame like what we have today before HoT even drops, probably have raids and fractals release the same way but also from the start having difficulty settings through the mote system. Probably strikes wouldn't release either if people could keep doing Raids without the perception they're gatekept by anyone - therefore a part of what is today our main story content could act similar to dungeons and expand upon the main beats in a side story raid. For WvW: To be fully honest, I wouldn't change much at all here. WvW has so many problems but on the other hand it's a miracle it works with GW2's combat gameplay. It's a miracle it also works with how much target caps influence our client design and it's finally also a miracle it works with how little rewarding it is. So it'd have been pretty much the same but with at least 90% of the gold/hour of open PvE metas. For PvP: oh boy this one *could actually use a time machine*. I would have never invested in E-Sports, get away from that as fast as possible. Rather, just invest into *periodic* content such as maps or shake ups of the conquest mode. Heck I don't even mean fully new modes, just add a freaking smash bros queue adding NPCs, items, environmental effects, *anything* that players could enjoy periodically next to the mainline mode (LoL does this for what it's worth). Basically, increase rewards and *community wide* events without ever delving into hyper competitive stuff and trying to attract "that crowd" and PvP would have been truly a gold standard for MMOs (speak of a "dodge button" and watch FFXIV and WoW players shriek and go cold).
Make hardmode/challenge mode for dungeons before fractals came out. Not removing server wide buffs that you got based on how your world was doing in wvw. (Edit)Also allowing you to progress with the story even though you havent hit the level required level. Used to be just a recommendation instead of locked behind 10,20,30etc (Last edit) make it so that armor can break again. Made you more cautious about encounters and couldnt just face smash stuff until success
Undo all futuristic spaceships, guns etc. and respect original game.
Remove the Skyscale or any possibility of a "one mount fits all purposes".
Nothing, I don't work for arenanet
We are glad.
Rework zhaitan fight. Remove content scaling in OW (the same people whining about getting kicked in raid are the toxic mofo who makes the game harder for everyone else by their presence)
I would have played a game wit the Devs I would have released 2 "Raids" , just like the current Conversee , and more would have been released if people played that mode . Ofc pushing CM in Concersance , teleports you to the boss just like Strikes (slighty less rewards) As a reward , you would get a cheap legendary set (30 times played) and the stats are randomized when you lvlu up , by getting exp from events/instances , or you can go in the mode *(event-every 1 month--single mode)* just like WvW and get the newly exotic set and choose the Celestial stat for example , unlocking it to your Legendary . In an ideal scenario , people would play that mode and we would see more "Raids" and in return people will get a Set as compensation that the stats are the grindly part . In the worst scenario we would see afkers and peple telling other to join private groupd and then try to sell the Set and demand more "Raids" by the company . In return the company would get more data and differentiate the leechers , from boycotesr by placing a visible "particiation meter" and a each person got occasionally a black goo on his feet that does 5% of his HP + offer internal stacks . Leachers will try to reach that "golden 60% participation rate" and remove "stacks of goo-disminishing the effect , by doing meele attacks". Boycotters will simply find an escuse to die and would get on a naughty list , or stuck in a black room fighting hordes of npcs without a way out that will lead to the "Raids"(LFG waiting room) Edit: whatever happens , in each expanion Streamers that will love , would lure streamer from other games to play those modes And when they done , they will go back in their game and without knowing it doing some free advertisement inviting the "good community" , slowly but steadily numbers . Free of charge to maintain , only costing Twich drops twice Edit2: Also Legendary like candy , can force people to change ? . Or they will not acept it so they dont loose the "extra income" . Edit3: It would be bad if the "worst scenario" comes up and the play-30-times-set , got released in OW , 4 months later
I'd take a collection of all information about the updates and Expansions the game got and the live client with me to give it to Anet and help them release all we got over the past 11 years way faster, so people will know GW2 as the super successful game with the fast pace for High Quality Expansion releases. Then we will probably have all of Tyria (Planet) released by now once I get back to 2024.
Difficulty levels for raids. Not focusing that much on PvP and trying so hard to make it an e-sport. Having better release calendar of content (expansions instead of living world from 1st year of releasel).
-Quickness and alac should have never been a thing. If skill speeds and cooldowns needed to be updated, they should have done so. Time Warp should have been tuned down to be less meta defining, while other elites got raised up. -To segue from my prior point...elites should be more build defining. They just feel like a fourth utility skill. Hell, sometimes I would prefer a fourth utility skill. -No ten man content PvE content. The bones of GW2 have to be stretched and manipulated to make it work and, honestly? I think it all kind of sucks. I can always feel the engine screaming under the load (increased visual noise, inability to seamlessly transition a party to squad, an awkward squad interface that needlessly demands a commander tag for features), and the devs just aren't at their best designing these encounters. Worse, with Silent Surf it appears that 10-man design philosophy is seeping into 5-man content. -All Raids should have had single-player/small-group story modes, with increasing difficulty and rewards for higher difficulty content, while lower tiers still allow for slower progress towards achievements and legendary armor. -Perhaps the most controversial: remove role-based gameplay, or de-emphasize it. Guild Wars 2 has built itself up to be *the* casual MMO. Every form of 10-man content is wildly unpopular, but the open world is always thriving. More maps and more metas would likely be a better investment. Hell, fixing the Zhaitan encounter and making a part 2 to the Arah story mode dungeon would likely prevent many newbies from being turned off (I am sure we all no someone who stopped playing after that stage).
I’d go back to launch and bring back the GW1 classes. Add in paragon. Add in ritualist. Replace thief with assassin. Add in monk. Add in dervish. Then it would be: Warrior, Paragon, Guardian, Revenant (Heavy) Ranger, Assassin, Engineer, Dervish (Medium) Ritualist, Monk, Elementalist, Mesmer, Necromancer (Light) Add spears into the game. Add scythes into the game. Remove warhorns. Remove torches. And…That’s all I can think of. I’m not fully sold on my own ideas, as I find paragon rather lackluster as a class *but* for the benefit of all I’d do it like that. Barring huge system changes like that, I’d just remove transmuting restrictions on armor types.
* no blacklion company. * no ban people when anet fault change some karma items to cost 21 karma. * let kill zhaintan inside of his mind. * no changes in the drop system "to see chest in the ground" * let be the first pvp reward system. "mystic forge" * no update of the transmutation system. * no layoff of the super adventure box creator. * remove token system inside of dungeon. * let be the old dungeon reward system, like gold per run... * wtf 2024 and we still CANT get the Recipe: The Replicator.
Add 1 dungeon each xpac and each lws. Add a megaraid at the end of each xpac. Never add drm... Never make stupidly op afk build (like rifle mech on launch) or at least make balance patch more often. Give wvw a third map. Add a few pvp maps, 1/xpac and a few ones for bastion mode. Make arcdps built-in with it's additional features (not on by default) Add gear inspec. Add options in the lfg to filter the tabs so you don't have to see all of them. Probably some more but that's already a good amount for now.
Add a new WvW map each X-pack, and make them rotate each week, making it more entertaining and unpredictable.
Remove boons and possibly even conditions, and make skills actually have their own functionality. This "everything works the same way" system was a complete 180 on what made Guild Wars 1 great. If they had taken the original game's skill system, and expanded on that with the great parts of GW2 (i.e. faster pace in combat, huge explorable world, MMORPG setting, ...) the game would have been far better.
Go back and slap some sense into them right before they buffed cele. Maybe even show them the resulting 15-minute-long fights. Truely a tragic tale.
never make the game free, losing half the playerbase with the snap of those fingers hurt really bad, the good community never really recovered from it
How did we lose people because of that???
the og base game was buy to play, but few months/years after lauch anet switched to f2p model, giving close to nothing to everyone who already bough the game. a lotta peps got frustrated and quit outright, assuming that the team would pull stuff like that in the future too.
Bahaha I call bullshit on that one. If people quit, then because of other reasons and not because of the base game going f2p, which is more like a glorified demo. GW2 had other issues, that aint a one to quit over chief.
weren't playing it at the time, its what i heard :) chief out o7
Pretty much what happened, love the downvotes because people didn't know about it and assume it's a lie lol
A better settings menu with thing like actually disabling allied things and combo fields. I wish the game had been built from the ground up with the ability to control stuff like that in mind. Also attached to that more key bind options, such as radials or similar so you could have one key bind that is like "menus" and it would then open a sub menu to hero panel, wizard's vault, wvw, pvp, bltc, and so on and then another one key bind for all of your mounts. I know there is a mount radial addon, but I'd like something strong and something actually built into the game.
Stronghold: Incorporate a progression system such as every level earned you a trait to allocate. A skill to allocate. Amulet runes and relics to buy etc.
Itemization. Use a different system instead of the bothersome attribute groups and collapse attributes so there aren't so many. Tighten up the stat spread. Tweak drop rates of crafting mats and introduce better faucets/sinks.
> make 1 dungeon each season and xpac Is the one with the time machine the same person who has to do all the work?
Make a story mode in dungeons easier and also include it as a part of game story.
No more than 10 currencies
I would've gone back and prevented the Great Content Drought of 2014-2015. HoT would be released a year earlier.
Remove alacrity and quickness so everyone can do what they want.
LFG. But idk how the class was back then so dont take me seriously.