Feedback:User/Adul/Pre-Searing Overhaul

Pre-Searing is designed to be a tutorial area, a small portion of the game players visit briefly with their new characters and then move on. It means just that to most players, but there are a select few who stay much longer, giving in to the temptation that is the Legendary Defender of Ascalon title, a difficult-to-attain, highly prestigious achievement in Guild Wars.

As we know, the Legendary Defender of Ascalon title requires the player to death level from level 16 to level 19 and then some more. Doing this much death leveling is estimated to take around 400 to 1000 hours, most of which time you spend AFK waiting for foes to slain you repeatedly. Going for this title does not urge the player to play the game, but instead set up a farm and go do something else, then later return and reap the rewards, a process very similar to botting except that death leveling is not prohibited by the Rules of Conduct and the EULA while botting is.

The mechanics described above should not be encouraged or rewarded in an online game as they lead to players not playing the game for fun, and cause unnecessary strain on the game servers. What I propose instead is to get rid of most of the death leveling required to reach LDoA, and instead add higher level enemies, while making sure the changes do not diminish the prestige value of the title too greatly.

In essence, what I would do is increasing the level of the charr bosses in the Northlands from level 10 to level 13 only when entering the area with a character who is level 16 or above, and only when they enter alone to avoid this feature being exploited by low level characters. This way a character would reach level 16 in the same time they did before, and it would take them about 57 more hours of boss-hunting to reach level 19 if one run takes 20 minutes. Of course, this is less time overall than what the same would take using the death leveling method, but it is important to note that hunting charr bosses is active game-play, while death leveling is primarily not.

At level 19, characters could take the quest rewards for all quests, bringing them close to level 20 but still far enough to need to complete a couple of death leveling sessions before becoming Legendary Defenders of Ascalon. So why not get rid of death leveling altogether? The reason is simply that LDoA and Legendary Survivor must stay mutually exclusive titles in order to avoid Tyrian characters being able to achieve one additional title compared to their Canthan and Elonian peers. Death leveling would ensure that a character needs to die at least once before reaching level 20 in Pre-Searing.

I believe that it is important to promote active game-play over AFK-farming, and implementing this feature would not only do that, but it would also provide players with one more achievement they could go for while playing the game as it was intended.

Alternative Approach
Add a way to encounter level 14 foes. Doing this would allow the player to reach level 20 via killing only. In order to keep LDoA and Legendary Survivor mutually exclusive, killing the player before they encounter the high level foes is essential. Below is an example on how this could be executed:

Example: The player would first need to meet the following requirements: they must be level 16 or higher, they must be alone in the instance, they must have killed the charr bosses around the shrine. Once all of these requirements are met, the player could kneel at the shrine where the charr bosses were located. This would instantly kill the player forcing them to respawn, and at the same time summon a group of level 14 titans.

Using this method, the need to death-level could be removed altogether.