About levels above 20

I don't see the point of an increased level cap; it's not like it would do much for the game. For me, the levelling curve in GW seemed more like a way to match the learning curve of early-to-midgame missions as opposed to something that you constantly strive for. Once you ascend, it's all about how you play as part of a team (or as a commander, if you hench all the missions).

I know people want a way to improve their character in PvE; you can always get enough skill points to unlock every skill if you want that. Hey, that's what Sorrow's Furnace is for (well, UW and FoW too, but we don't always have favor or a decent group for it).

I wouldn't doubt the possibility of an increased level cap. I just don't see a need for it.

Problems mentioned above: Increased attribute points will unbalance certain skills, backout for instance.

Increased HP will make degen useless.

Increased energy will make energy degen useless.

But... apparently PVE players want lvls to mean something, so how about just adding a level, and all it does is affect your hit rate and spells failure rate against monster foes. So, against an even level monster you're hitting 100% of the time, getting 100% of the time, and against a +5 you're getting hit 100% of the time, and only hitting 75% of the time. This will slow the rate at which content can be seen, which is usually the goal of lvls for the designer. You won't be able to fly through zone x and do anything in zone y without lvling first. Obviously this has to be tweaked for healer chars, but you get the picture.

Bah, who wants to listen to kids going off about how their uber-level actually means something? You think you have to listen to enough just regarding rank, ... ugh.

i think a level cap increase is an insanely BAD IDEA, simply because more skillpoints would allow certain classes that are designed to be branched an enormous advantage.
example; the primary downside of an ele is that they cannot branch into, say, air and fire magic both with lvl 12, and not be severely lacking in other key areas (specifically energy storage), even with only adding 30 skillpoints, you would allow a vast increase in lower-level skills, and an ele would be able to effectivly use 2 classes at once, and deal immense damage. n/me or me/n degen nuker's primary downside is that because they have to focus on domination magic and curses/blood magic, they cant put much into the way of fast casting/soul reaping and inspiration/death magic, a simple 30 extra skillpoints would fix that rpoblem, and make for a severely deadly enemy.
as previously mentioned, rangers would be able to max out expertise and marksmanship and close to something else, making for a high-damage hero with virtualy no cast in the way of spells.
the 2 character types that would suffer the most would be monks and warriors.
because divine wouldnt be nearly as effective as the increase in damage potential from casters, they would have a near impossible time keeping up with heals, and monks would become near useless for any role other than smiters; and in that role they would do deplorable damage compared to the other casters.
a warrior's skillbar does not possess the space to make them effective in mroe than 1 weapon type, even with the added skills, and a half decent warrior will have high levels in thier main weapon class, tactics AND strength, so adding 30 points to them would barely boost the effectiveness.
all in all you would repeat the mistake that was made with diablo 2; when the power of skills is upped, casters gain the largest bonus, and instead of having every class counterable by any other class built a cetain way, you would end up with 3 highly rigged character types.
and if you werent aware, even the small bonus of +30 skillpoints as i mentioned would throw off the game entirely, and thats less than half the skillpoint bonus you would recieve from upping the level cap to as low as 25.

My view on increasing the cap or what have you changes depends on the reason behind it and how they execute it.

If it's done just to shut the people up who want Guild Wars to be more of a Hitting monsters gaining arbitrary numbers and loot simulator, forget it. Anet would be better off making a sequal and rebuilding the game from the ground up than screwing up Guild Wars in hopes to please people who are probably going to hate it no matter what they do.

If it can be done to deepen the game and not just to make numbers bigger for grind monkeys, I would be willing to accept it.

that would certainly not solve the problem...

ok, im going to cast lightning orb which maxes out around 150 on that level 40. ok, cool, hit him for 142. now he only has 633 hit points left...

/signed

As a side-note, in case anyone's forgotten, spells that don't ignore defence are affected by level modifiers as well as attribute rank. Hence why a level 28 elementalist monster can deal massive spell damage to you despite having a cap at 16 attribute.

However, any spells/skills where level modifiers do not apply, would be comparatively worse.

Think ascalon post-searing;
Elementalists that go back there as level 20 can nearly one-hit most monsters there. Warriors hit hard, and so do rangers.

Necromancers can deal decent damage with Deathly Swarm, I suppose, and same holds true for Monks and Zealot's Fire, but for most practical purposes, Necros, Monks, and Mesmers deal poor damage in comparison.

While an ele's fireball is dealing ~200 AoE damage per cast, a Mesmer's Energy Surge will hurt a mere 80. Balthazar's Aura/Symbol of Wrath/Chaos Storm/Spiteful Spirit are jokes compared to the massive damage laid down by Fire Storm at that point.

And of course, as brought up, healing is another important aspect not affected by level modifiers which would also become less useful proportionately.

I'd heard that World of Warcraft has such a problem in relation to equipment. Melee classes get consistent boosts for their epic equipment, more damage ouput, less damage intake, more health, etc, whereas casters are shafted with odd equipment that gives penalties in exchange for slightly increased chance of spell criticals. Something like that. Seeing as I don't play WoW, I can't truly comment on it, but it sounds like a somewhat similar issue. Maybe someone else can explain the complaints.

The reason GW is so good is because of the balance.. if they mess with the level cap they could screw up the balance.

Anet was really the one to bring balance to the force.. not anakin skywalker.

i wonder, why is it that people feel the need to get big numbers to appear next to their name?

as it is PvP is balanced. if we increase the cap to 40 it stays balanced against lvl 40s (if we assume that ANet manage to balance the skills again). and lvl 40s will be the only chars in those high lvl areas. so percentage wise it would likely mean that everything is EXACTLY the same. bigger dmg and bigger armor and bigger hp.

in PvE it would mean that you HAVE TO spend ages lvling up to be accepted into teams (because of the exponential increase in xp every lvl). this game is meant to be a popular game. an accessable game for those who CAN'T spend 20 hours a week on it. increasing the lvl cap would mean that people would be FORCED to grind. uh huh thats smart.

in PvP it would have no effect save bigger numbers everywhere.
in PvE it would only serve to increase Grind.

so tell me again, why would we want an increase?

IMO an increase is simply a pointless move that will ONLY serve to chase people who can't play much, away.

couldnt have said it better myself; if you want to see numbers like "9999" being spammed across the screen, play final fantasy; if you want 1-hit kills from people that actually know what they are doing, play diablo 2; if you want balance; play guild wars.
guild wars is fine as is and as the saying goes; "why fix it if it aint broke?"

the only thing i think they need to do, is re-rarify the gold item market. having max gold weapons as common as they are defeats the purpose of green weapons; that way players that enjoy the thrill of making a profit will continue to have fun with the game...at noones expense.

here is NCsoft representative Alex Weekes answer to the original poster on this.

not in the forseable future.

WHO NEEDS NUMBER INFLATION FOR...........SAKE.

[QUOTE]Originally Posted by One and Two
They said they are considering raising the max level, as 20 means little improvement.


Exact opposite, actually. We have no intention of changing the level cap at the current time. The level cap has been set at 20 for a long time, and much of the game is designed around that level cap.[/QUOTE]

I love it when people claim Anet has said something and Anet responds to them

Ok, then do the same thing and apply it to a caster with AL 100, just for giggles. You are also forgetting that the char are not at the basic AL 60 either. The only people who benefit from the higher cap would be physical damage dealers.
It is the fear of damage up front with "stupid" acting encounters that cause this.

On the topic of big numbers, I'd almost forgotten about this game;


Does this have any relavence to an increased level cap in Guild Wars? Only minimally I suppose.

Haven't seen a game with bigger numbers than this, with a level 9999 cap, and almost 25k max in each stat.
Though, I hear some people like it for the exploding penguins more o_O

Edit;
Even smaller, lower quality, and not a thumbnail.

[QUOTE=Loviatar] here is NCsoft representative Alex Weekes answer to the original poster on this.

not in the forseable future.

WHO NEEDS NUMBER INFLATION FOR...........SAKE.

Yeesh, in the end, it all matters on what they think is best for them making money.

Granted I'm down for debating this on a player level, but this game was designed a certain way. Changing it, as in upping the level cap, would upset the balance and would require a overhaul of the entire game.

Anyone who gets bent outta shape over this is spending way too much time on the game. They are not going to change it...probably

I think level caps are meant to be broken in time. Yet they said and pretty much designed the game around a level 20 cap. I can only imagine the exploiting that would ensue if they changed that....as they probably aren't willing to change the game.

Needless to say I'm planning on a good time debating on the forums. It's just too easy.

Starting with already maxed level in expansion and having no real way to "improve" your character would be a bit... dissapointing. I don't care if it will be higher level cap or other solution, but if only new things will be skills... Bleh.

there will be new skills and professions in chapter 2. what we dont want is any more imbalances (good job so far for the most part) in chapter one becasue people arent satisfied with an arbitrary number.

If you hadnt noticed "dude" people don't much like grinding for skills either. Hadnt you noticed the huge UAS debate that had been going on a while back?

This is supposedly said by me. Someone please point to where I said this? Um..yeah stop making up shit.

I know what they said in the beginning about level. And I know what they said in Fansite Friday 55. If you haven't noticed by now, companies often change their minds based on what would be most profitable.

Finally, I'm not pro-level increase. Frankly, I couldn't care either way.

Of course they will never raise the level cap or they'd have to remake the game balance from the beginning -___-"

Izzy ftw. He said he never wants to raise level caps, as in, "Not if I can help it."

Thats totally true. I don't see the point in being level 40, with double HP, double the damage and double the heal. What do you get with that? Red, Pink and Yellow number to be higher? Totally pointless IMO, and that supposing the devs find a way to keep things 'balanced' like now.

Ok the game is not only HP+damage+heal, but as I said if the devs find a way to balance everything, the meta-game should stay as of now, so I still don't see why the level cap should be rised.

Its like saying they should un-nerf all the nerf they did, because if I'm, lets say, lvl33 and enter UW, or they make the mobs dependant of my level (Because if they only rise them to lets say level 35, newly lvl20 ascended chars can forget UW right now ) or I'll get rid of the aatxes/terrorwebs/etc really really fast dealing them like *random amount* 250dmg. That would be cool the first or second time , but then it would become boring like now killing lvl4 Charrs near Ascalon...

To sum up, rising level cap should be done along with a lot of considerations. As I said in another thread I think its a good idea to make the mobs some simmilar level like the team's, ala Final Fantasy Tactics on PSX. That would help to populate low level areas, as the rewards would(should) be on par with the mobs level.

i think that the PvP cap should stay 20 otherwise so many people will complain about this (i know i would) and that the PvE cap should be 25 or 30 but when they go into the arena, they should be degraded back down to 20 as long as their in the arena or their attributes are dropped to that of a lvl 20's. i dont know how Anet would do it, but im just sayin this might work. any comments on my idea? please post ^_^

That's sorta the point, and yet people still do it.

People will complain no matter what. This is a hypathetical situation not worth getting your underware in a twist about. And if they do change it people will still play.

Say we increase the level cap to 40? What happens with my monk with 2.5million XP? <_< Will I get instantly to level 40?

what would happen to farming.. if you we're level 40 you could own solo farming.. or even SF and be able to solo farm.. wrecking to econemy...

NO TY is all i can say.

It's not like it would take long to hit the max level if it was increased. What, you spend a few extra days and you're back to where you were before the expansion. Where's the value in that? All this at the cost of potential imbalance in everything.

One problem with increased level/attribute caps is skills that scale DOWN as attributes increase. The balance of these skills, like bond, or even expertise, will be problematic.

HERE YOU GO SONNY


http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...048#post603048

your post number 89

One and Two
Rocinante


Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Lost Anarchy
Character: It is not One and Two. I want my name back.
Guild: FoD

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They said they are considering raising the max level, as 20 means little improvement.

Level requirements on armor is probably coming, because of the abuse in Ascalon Arena.


and Alexes response post number 92


Alex Weekes
NCSoft




Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Brighton, UK

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Quote:
Originally Posted by One and Two
They said they are considering raising the max level, as 20 means little improvement.


Exact opposite, actually. We have no intention of changing the level cap at the current time. The level cap has been set at 20 for a long time, and much of the game is designed around that level cap.


Quote:
Level requirements on armor is probably coming, because of the abuse in Ascalon Arena.


Really? Where'd you hear that? It's possible I guess ... but something like this will most likely be done via a patch, not a retail product.

No point in discussing this again since Anet allready answered it: There will be no higher levels. Its too difficult to balance PvP games with high level chr's and high level gear. True pve players better think twice the next time before buying a game that advertises pvp arenaplay

ok well only read the first page. So this mighta been said. But if not, something for you to think about:

If the cap is increased, what happens for those only with Chapter 1? 1 and 2 can play together... so what happens when a chapt2 char with extra attribs and hp has a pvp match against a chapt1 char? Do the chapt1 chars get the extra levels and attribs too? If so, do you put in extra, higher level monsters in a free area update so they don't have to spend hours in SF or FoW?

Doesn't reflect my opinion in anywya, I'm of a mixed opinion actually lol, but just some things to think about. Cap increase could mean an end or a real balance problem with the whole "everyones equal" uniqueness to GW.

Agreed.

I think perhaps they should make weapon mods with increase in damage to monsters if that's the case, so that level will remain the same.

Increasing the level cap would be a bad decision that goes against the grain of A.Net's plan from the very beginning before they typed the first line of code or made their first model.

You keep saying that I'm getting my "underware" in a twist. Yet you're the one who's getting upset because you keep attacking me with that "insult". Think about that.

This argument has gone around in circles long enough, and it seems nothing new's coming out of it. Closed.