User:Bubbinska/GWS

Consistency across continents/campaigns
Main suggestion is that the campaigns have certain elements that are inconsistent. Some examples:

Shrines
When you summon an avatar of the gods in Elona, there's a much larger list of blessings available than the ones in Cantha and Tyria. Considering that the shrines are few and far between in Tyria, I think it's a bit of a bummer that trekking all the way up to Dreadnought's Drift doesn't yield even the basic rewards that kneeling at a shrine in Elona can. It'd be great just to have statues of the gods across the game able to give the same bonuses. Right now Canthan shrines are missing the Nightfall-specific blessings, and Tyria is stuck with just a Morale Boost or +100hp, if I remember correctly. I don't expect it'd be too hard to change, either.

Weapon Inscriptions
Considering that Prophecies-only players can still buy and use Inscribable weapons and offhands, why don't we make it so that item drops in Prophecies are Inscribable? It'd be nice for crafter and collector weapons to be inscribable too. I think the argument that "the game's economy will be altered" is a bit lame anyway. Sure some weapons will go down in value because it'll be easier to find a perfect one, but this doesn't affect anyone except those who are demanding incredibly high prices for the rarer skins.

Deldrimor Armor
What's up with that not counting toward the "Resilience" monument? Yeah, they're four separate pieces, but only really in name. My ele's Deldrimor armor clearly is meant to be used as a whole set, since no other armor set is similar in pattern or color. I know that they're re-skinned versions of other pieces but so are most of the other EoTN armors.

Expansion professions
Ritualist, Assassin, Paragon and Dervish are all great ideas. I enjoy playing my Ritualist a whole lot, almost as much as my Elementalist. Problem is that there's a substantially lower number of skills for the Rit, Sin, Para and Derv. The core professions have 35 elite skills each (only 34 for mesmer which is wierd) while the expansion ones are 10 or 20 short. Regular skills, the core professions have ~140 each, while Sin and Rit have 110 each, and Derv/Para have 85 each. This is severely limiting, because while the core professions have a wide selection of skills in each attribute, more than enough to make up a build of good skills, the other classes, who also have more specific effects such as the Ritualists Item and Weapon spells, don't have enough skills per attribute to fill up a bar of synergistic skills. I know this will never happen so late in GW's life, but Ritualist and Assassin need 30 more skills each, 10 of which should be elite. Dervish and Paragon need a whopping 55 more skills each, 20 of which should be elite. As evidenced by these numbers it's clear that the expansion professions are weaker classes because of their lack of skill variety.

Harvest Temple
It's frustrating to go to Harvest Temple to buy a Factions skill that I need, only to be denied service. Could the NPCs in hostile-controlled towns be given the same "bribe" option as the shrine tenders in explorable areas? Perhaps the prices could increase with how far into the territory you go, for example Harvest Temple's bribe is 25 gold, House Zu Heltzer's bribe is 200 gold, with other outposts and towns having values between those 2.

PvE Elementalist
I play PvE almost exclusively, and my main profession is Elementalist. I like to play as the heavy-damage-dealing nuker type. Of course, the problem with this idea is that due to the introduction of various skills for other classes, along with title-based skills, that the Elementalist class, the one whose main focus in PvE is the dealing of heavy damage to groups of foes, is taking a back seat in many areas. The main reason for this is that most enemies have more than 60 armor in higher-level areas, some foes have resistance to elemental damage, and others are immune or resistant to other effects the elementalist's spells can influct.

Cry of Pain spammers, Ray of Judgement nukers, Spiteful Spirit necros (to a lesser extent) and the various other PvE-skill-based gimmick builds are making the "nuker" profession almost obsolete. I'm frequently finding myself performing more "utility" in the way of causing weakness, blind, dazed, knockdown, etc. than doing the bulk of the damage. This is frustrating for me because I make an elementalist to blow things up, not target the monks and sac-MS them so they can't heal.

Problems with elementalist:
 * Damage-over-Time Area-of-Effect spells such as Firestorm are useless in harder difficulties because enemies scatter
 * In elite areas and most high-end content, enemies have very strong armor and as such armor-ignoring damage is favored by players.
 * PvE-only title skills such as Cry of Pain are more and more favored in elite areas because they're more powerful than regular skills.

Suggestion for improvement: Take the current Elementalist-only PvE skills, Intensity and Elemental Lord and buff them up. Intensity is currently completely obsolete compared to "By Ural's Hammer!" and Elemental Lord is underpowered for a strippable, PvE-only buff. The following suggestions may seem extreme but I think they would actually put some use back into the Elementalist profession as a primary PvE nuker.

Elemental Lord
Energy cost and Exhaustion are present because it's a long-duration spell, and while vulnerable to stripping, the low recharge makes you able to re-cast it, but at a price. A boost of 2 to elemental attributes would mean that this spell, with Glyph of Elemental Power would allow you to boost your chosenelemental attribute up to 20 in PvE, making your spells powerful enough to cancel out the disadvantage against high-armored enemies in later PvE areas.

Intensity
This adjustment favors multiple elementalist groups, allowing them to cycle the buff amongst themselves to give a near-constant damage boost without increasing damage from armor-ignoring spells such as Cry of Pain, Necrosis, etc. It also means other classes dealing elemental damage (such as Ritualist's Channeling skills, Rangers with Conjure Flame/Kindle Arrows, etc) can gain a bonus from the buff.

Things to consider

 * Because these two skills are PvE-only, there is no need to worry about abuse from PvP groups running spike teams. It means elementalists in a party can co-ordinate their builds for greater effect, and the shout format means Intensity is non-stackable, but it is still powerful enough to warrant use.
 * I haven't considered the possibility that these skills might be abused for farming purposes. While Intensity could be more useful in a group-farm than "By Ural's Hammer!" it is still inferior as a single-person buff. Elemental Lord's high energy cost and Exhaustion make it costly enough that a non-primary elementalist might avoid using it. To further discourage A/E permasins, for example, abusing the skill, the duration could be tied to Energy Storage, perhaps Duration 10 plus 4 seconds per rank in energy storage.

Gold + Purple Items
Currently in the game economy, a gold item is worth more than a purple item of the same function. It doesn't really make any sense, so I've got a few suggestions, dealing with the "issue" in different ways:
 * Blue/Purple/Gold item "colors" change depending on the status of the mods on it. "blue" items are at the moment items which have very low-quality modifiers on them. "Purple" items have middle-quality mods, and "Golds" have near-perfect mods. Why isn't this dynamic?
 * Any item that is "clean" (no mods) or has a low "Total Mod Value" is given a Blue name.
 * An item that has a mid-range "Total Mod Value" is given a Purple name.
 * An item with high-to-perfect "Total Mod Value" is given a Gold name.
 * "Total Mod Value" would be calculated by the quality of a mod. Say for a Hale and Hearty inscrip, your range is (i think) 5%-15% damage increase. We would convert this mod's stat to a global rating, based on its value, and the lowest possible and highest possible values for the mod. So in a mod that has a range of 5-15, a mod with 10 value is given a Total Mod Value of 3 of possible 5. All mods would be given a rating like this, but the value would not be shown to the player, as it is only necessary for calculation of TMV.
 * In the 5-scale TMV calculation, the game would make a judgment based on the quality of an item's mods and decide the name that way. For example, a Longsword with a 14^50 inscription (value 4), a +20hp mod (value 2) and a 15% sundering mod (value 3) would have a TMV of 9 of a possible 15, giving it a Purple rating. Item colors would be judged thusly - 0-5 = Blue, 6-10 = Purple, 11-15 = Gold.
 * In this way, Gold drops are still better than Purple drops, because it means the TMV is in the upper tier. An inscribable item of any color (except green) is able to become Gold for prestige purposes, and the market changes this way: People who want to sell a purple item that was previously considered "worse", or a blue collector's item, are able to sell them at approximately the same price as they would if it were a clean gold. Of course Pre-modded items will always have a place in the market so people will still be selling Gold items with perfect mods, but at least this way people could make their own golds.
 * In addition to this, the game could be patched to make it so Ctrl-clicking your weapon to "ping" it in chat would also show its color. The new TMV system would provide accurate representation of an item's actual quality, rather than its perceived quality.