Feedback:User/Erasculio/Improving elite areas

Improving elite areas
User	Erasculio
Categories	Player vs. Environment → Other

An "elite" area is one reserved for a minority - by definition, few players are elite. I question, then, the judgment in investing time and effort into something that in theory would only benefit a small amount of players. One of the necessary changes would be changing the name of those areas and changing Arena Net's mentality (and the players' mentality) about those areas being "elite"; it only creates badly designed places and a strong feeling of elitism.

In order to improve the current endgame areas, I would like to propose the following changes:

All areas

• No consumables allowed. An important part of game design is balancing, so the developers know how hard an area is for the majority of players. Consumables destroy this balance, as either something is too hard without consumables (and players would be forced to use them, mostly by themselves) or too easy with them (so players would be told to use them in order to exploit the areas as quick as possible). Removing consumables would allow Arena Net to keep the difficulty of endgame areas stable for everyone, while preventing player discrimination based on who has or hasn't those items. It would also force players to rely less on crutches and more on their own skill and teamwork.
• No Hard Mode. Few things have hurt the endgame areas more than Hard Mode. While common players could finish, for example, The Deep in Normal Mode, they usually can't do so in Hard Mode; and thanks to the rewards being better in the latter, it's accepted that it's only worth playing the endgame areas in HM, so no one even tries Normal Mode. Of course, it would be better to get half reward at half the time than getting nothing by failing in HM, but many (most?) players cannot understand that. And while it is true that a well organized guild group could easily play in those areas even in HM...They don't. Most of the endgame areas are empty regardless of how a good group could, today, play through them.
• Keep the double chest reward of Hard Mode, as an incentive for players to try the adjusted endgame areas, as they would have in Normal Mode the same rewards as they had in HM...At least in some ways. Finishing the areas would give twice as many rewards as they do in NM today, but farming the beginning of the areas would give less, thanks to the loss of the increased drop rate found in HM. This would be an incentive for players to go through the entire area as intended, as opposed to using tricks like trap farming in the Domain of Anguish or farming ectos in the beginning of the Underworld.
• Nerf Shadow Form, or the other changes would be mostly meaningless.

Tomb of the Primeval Kings

• Add a Dark Chest after the defeat of the three Darknesses, offering the green items currently available from those bosses as well as inscriptable versions of Prophecies weapons.

The Deep

• Fix the Scorpion Aspect bug. The skill should teleport characters once every 30 seconds, but in reality it does so at reducing intervals after triggering the first time. The lack of a pattern here makes tactical play less likely to happen, as people cannot predict (and thus prepare) when they will be teleported.
• After killing Kanaxai...
  • Remove the health degeneration in the room. All other rooms lose their environment effect when the corresponding Aspect of Kanaxai is defeated, the same should happen in the last room, especially considering how the healers leaving could prevent players from reaching the Kanaxai's Chest.
  • Remove all enemies from the last room (the one in which the fight against Kanaxai happens). Again, it would be easy for bad placement of enemies to prevent players from reaching the Kanaxai's Chest, as well as for players to draw those enemies to the chest in order to sabotage their own party members.
  • Resurrect all dead party members where they are, so a player would not be prevented from picking his reward thanks to being left dead by the rest of the team. Characters should be resurrected where their bodies are, instead of being teleported to the last room, in order to avoid people being run to the end of the endgame area.
• Add more items to the Kanaxai's Chest, such as inscriptable Celestial Staves (that currently aren't available anywhere, not even in the Zaishen Chest, and are usually useless thanks to how the staves without inscriptions work).

Urgoz's Warren

• Fix the bug in section 3, the one forcing players to use either Consume Corpse or Necrotic Traversal in order to be able to advance in the mission. This is a very old bug that should have been fixed already, and the main flaw of Urgoz.
• Add more items to the Urgoz's Chest, as mentioned above for the Kanaxai's Chest.

The Underworld

• Allow players to split the quests in multiple runs instead of having to do all of them in a single run. The quests may be hard, but the problem is being able to find a group in which everyone can stay the 3 to 4 hours required to play in the Underworld without using any gimmick. Being able to split the Underworld quests in three or four parts (like the Domain of Anguish or Slaver's Exile) would solve that problem while still keeping the area challenging.

More to come...

All ideas above do not address the real issue, however. Players should play in the endgame areas because they would be fun, regardless of how hard they are, how long they take or what rewards they offer. While making those areas fun to (almost) everyone may be possible (the Domain of Anguish would need a large redesign, if only so it's slightly less ugly and instead more terrifying), it would not solve the problem of how empty those places are, not in the long run. Anything fun being done one thousand times would quickly lose its novelty; now, almost five years after the release of Guild Wars, expecting players to continue playing in the old endgame areas just to have fun is demanding too much of a system that is showing its age. The idea behind the suggestions above is to make more players show interest in the current endgame areas and allow more players to play in them, as opposed to just farming in them, so at least for while those parts of the game wouldn't be as deserted as they are today.

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