Suggestion to make Winds of Change quests exciting

What are you hoping to see in phases 2 and 3 of WoC? Here's ways I think quests could go beyond simply killing large numbers of foes.

Initiate X could bring more to the table than his presence. He could give your party a Blessing of Purity:

Blessing of Purity
You do double damage to Afflicted and are immune to Soul Explosions.

He could also provide your party with an item that, when dropped, provides a ward effect:

Urn of Purifying Mist
Afflicted in this ward have -4 health degeneration and, upon death, explode violently, doing 80 damage to nearby Afflicted.

That would give some kind of rationale why the Afflicted don't come back afterwards.

Now that the Afflicted have become a cakewalk, the quests will have you mowing through hordes of them to... save trapped groups of <insert local faction here> and their bosses! The Canthan empire hopes to take this opportunity to negotiate peace with these factions as payment for their gratitude. However, after you save each group, they see the powerful new weapons you have brought and want to take them from you. Your powerups don't provide any bonus against these foes, so they are the real challenge here.

I'm curious how making the quests easier will also make it more exciting.

By introducing variety. And, as stated, the other factions you save pose the real challenge.

You could try out better skills and builds or even play with some people. I hear exciting things about groups.

I do play with people. I've done up to Haiju Lagoon in NM and HM with wonderful PUGs. What I'm addressing is the monotony of simple "kill X# of foes" quests, repeated over and over.

meh, the only exiting thing they could do is not make all teh quests @follow the quest markers and kill 3 mobs'
which is what they said they didnt want to make gw2 like. if they have realized its boring why are they doing it for this 'exiting new content'

Adding 2x damage won't introduce variety, it will just make the quests amazingly easy.

What I had in mind was huge numbers of Afflicted dispersed all through the map, and the groups you have to save having timers before they're defeated, causing you to lose the quest. So it definitely wouldn't be easy.

That's fine but you can do all that without the OP party buffs you're suggesting. I still wouldn't really call a quest like that "exiting".

You're trying to add variety by making things easier.
Make it DIFFERENT. Not easier.

Here's a potential fix:

Adding timers to WoC is mostly redundant. Any player who's gotten at least a little ways in should be able to complete it with relative ease (see Factions campaign for easy to Master timed missions).
If the timer is made unreasonably shorter, or set at a certain short length, you close up the possibility of certain builds being ran. Not EVERYONE wants to or KNOWS how to run a full damage/slaughtering build to finish quickly within the timer. Not EVERYONE runs tank and spank builds. Not EVERYONE runs ST Rit-No tank-MM-Panic-Ineptitude, etc.. An unreasonable timer would lead to potentially only *ONE* of these builds being viable. Survivability? Damage? and it will boil down to this: Speed?
Even if the timer is set reasonably, it becomes redundant, and hardly adds any depth to the WoC campaign in being timed. The fact that more than half of the Factions campaign was timed was more of a nuisance than it was worth. To take an example of what IS good, bonuses in Prophecies actually ADDED depth by means of exploring the ongoing events of other NPC's in the game rather than be reliant on timers.

Not to mention... if you had 2x damage while being timed, even in HM you could spike and kill the enemy monk, ritualist, and necro within a reasonable 10 seconds under the effect, making the mish go by extremely fast.

Oh- last I heard, the afflicted were cleared out of the Cantha.

Even if the Chalice of Corruption does spread this afflicted disease, it wouldn't be as epidemic as Shiro's spread of it, as the Am Fah attempt this in When Kappa Attack, and the Kappa are not prone on exploding upon death.

this gnashing of teeth difficulty ain't exciting
already hated the War in Kryta quests due to their insane HM difficulty and these afflicted are even worse

Thanks for the thoughtful and constructive input, Aphotic. Perhaps my vision of balanced variety wouldn't work so well, only making trend against creative builds worse. I think of adding variety as a give and take, in this case power and time.

I spent alot of time trying to make unique Firefight gametypes in Halo Reach. I would try things like making players massively powerful, but limiting their ammo, or limiting them to precision weapons.

Double damage explosions may be a better risk than time, but pure melee suffers enough as it is. I like the ward as a portable trap that hurts everyone though. It encourages a different kind of strategic gameplay.

Eh, I don't think we're going to be fighting any afflicted in parts two and three. Methinks someone hasn't gone through the quests yet...

i voted no only cause i didnt like the subjestions. i rather they added in cut sence more of a reward and other things i cant think up atm. xD

I have a better solution. Rather than have your character say things like "I should try to avoid as many engagements as possible. I don't want any needless bloodshed." how about just not putting the hundreds of gang members there to begin with? Giant overlapping patrols in a sea of bodies is the lowest common denominator of creating difficulty.

On a side note, making your group immune to the new soul explosions would make this a cake walk. Definitely not the direction they should be heading...

I'm almost convinced that with all the broken shit players can bring these days, even with heroes, it's impossible to create difficult groups for 8 man teams to deal with, without making them huge or giving them ridiculous abilities. It is possible to create difficult scenarios but, short of defending a particularly fragile and stupid NPC, it's almost invariably going to boil down to insane numbers.

I think the point of Act1 is to purify the afflicted to be rid of them. So while the execution is not the most exciting, I think that means Act 2&3 will focus on other things completely.

That's my understanding at least, if someone can correct me, please do.

I'm pretty sure they could have achieved that feeling without having 6 quests that are nothing more than chasing after groups of Afflicted.

@Xenomortis last 2 posts :Even there, with the Titans, we heard of people saying they weren't harder than older quests. I guess that means the game allows for a team (4 man) that is only affected by the number of dmg-packets, or key niche skills (like kill every spirit in RADAR, short cooldown), or literally insane number.
Looks like the game allows for a litterally invincible-by-normal-means team.

And yeah, I'll agree with you. I didn't talk about that. Just saying the OP's idea might simply not have a place, after we do those quests, the buffs are no use.

What they are doing with winds of change and the wik that came before is introduce ideas they have for GW2 I think more than ever GW has become a playtest arena for GW2.
I don't have anything against that as I like variety but it would seem unlikely they will make alterations to the winds of change if its part of their game plan.

I like to think that many of the changes to the game that some of us thought unwise or at least strange were all part of the testing they needed to do.
How else could a game company get many thousands of players test a game for so long.

Haven't tried out winds yet but it sounds a little boring from the comments I have read, I only did wik more than once for the goodies and for the final battle the rest was not that worth while repeating.

Want to make winds more interesting, more randomness the outside world should change mobs and natural creatures change migrate develop new tactics etc.
A lot of that is probably impossible but it would be nice.

Suggestion to make Winds of Change interesting: Remove this garbage and put in quests that are interesting.

@gremlin: I dunno if that is somewhat what you have in mind, but it does seem that once quests is done the map changes, ofc. those changes could disapear once act 3 final is done whatever that will be.... but for the time being the maps are complete changed once quests is done.

@OP: I havn't made a vote because Im not sure about your idea, some of those that commented before seems to have valid points in why it might not be the best idea though. I think one important point is that act 2 and 3 might not have any afflicted in them (actually that seems unlikely to me now) and there will be something else to fight.

What I hope for it more story, and not just as questgiver text... also a little more variation in the quests would be nice... not by buffing/timing/condition, cause even with those changes "walk there kill that walk some more kill some more" is pretty much still the same.

Im actually one of the few that find act one alright (or so it seems)... not omg great, but decent. I don't think it is as terribad as some others seem to think, I did enjoy it, but only while doing it the first time. I do hope for something more interesting in the next 2 acts like everyone else though.

This. Actually , Haiju Lagoon quest was a bit more interesting than others since it wasn't really about killing 5 mobs every 3 steps like other quests...

There are just too many times the ' same ' quest and , let's be honest, you could sum all these quests into like vizunah square mission....I would suggest them to make this more pleasant to finish ( it's not like i even want to do quests on any other char.....), which means more original quests , same ones that we had in nightfall for cooperative missions ....

Well to be fair it's not like the WiK missions had any strong variety in them; mostly it was move from mob to mob and wipe them out.
In fact most of PvE is 'move to the next mob and kill them all'.

With prophesies there were places "Shiverpeaks and Ring of fire" for sure where bosses didn't always appear in the same place.

I have thought for some time that expanding on this would have been good for the game.
It would of course mess up many of the solo farming builds because until you zoned in you wouldn't know what you were facing.

Since they have the code in place to vary the bosses themselves and their location and there is also some variation in the mob composition just increase the variation.

Hm... that would just make them easier without any cost or option from you.
Why adding effects to make it easier, when they can just make the Affliected deal less damage and have less health directly?

It's better to add a choice, a choice that has a cost.

Currently the Factions consumable crafters have just summoning stones.
And I would agree with giving them the whole list of consumables (superior kit, star, resurrection scroll, and unique specialty) but the effects you suggest are a bit too much.


The unique specialties I would add to Luxon and Kurzick are something like this:

- Luxon:
* Shard of the Spear
Cost: 50 of two common materials + 5 amber + 1 skill point + 1p.
For 30 minutes, +30% damage for all skills used against enemies using skills.

* Fragment of the Urn
50 of two common materials + 5 jade + 1 skill point + 1p.
For 30 minutes, +15% chance to block all attacks and 10% failure chance for all enemy skills that target you. Plus a 25% chance to be immune to afflicted Soul Explosions of any type that hit you.

I would also limit the party-wide consumables you can have on to 3. So you'll have to choose between all 5, and only be able to have on 3 of them.

Well for a start, toning down the marketplace quest "tracking the corruption" would be nice. I've spent well over 150,000 gold on consumables and several days with multitudes of builds and tactics. Nobody should die with a full hero team with full consumables including several powerstones in one fight and a summoned ally. I'm not the best player in GW but even i have hit a brick wall for the first time in all these years.
I fear this is one obstacle i cannot overcome, so anything that can make things fun again, instead of myself looking like someone dyed my hair grey IRL... well

Overpowered difficulty is not fun. Big hugs Anet.

And yes, i'm talking HM.

How many activities in PvE GW, quests or other, do not involve "kill X foes"?
Some just have 'better' lore/gameplay/mechanics background, but in the end...

WoC makes no illusion that it is anything other than "go kill X foes"