Hey, everyone, Lead Game Designer Eric Flannum here. As most of you know by now, it’s a very exciting time for all of us here at ArenaNet. We just finished a huge beta event weekend, and we’ve got beta events just around the corner.* We have a lot of work to do to get the game ready, but we’re definitely up to the challenge and eager to show off the game to a larger audience. With that in mind, we’ve been adding all sorts of new things to the game, as well as revising and improving on as many aspects of the game as we think need it.
In this blog post, we’ve got Randy Knapp explaining improvements to the compass, Devon Carver discussing some of the additions we’ve made to our open-world content, and Jon Peters talking about changes and additions to our boons and conditions. But first, I’d like to talk about some changes to being downed and defeated.
Downed and Defeated

When you reach zero health in Guild Wars 2, you go into a unique “downed” mode. While in this state, you have a set of four skills that you can use in an attempt to fight back. If you manage to kill an enemy before your downed bar reaches zero, you will rally, getting back up to continue the fight. If you are unable to get a kill before your bar runs out, you will be defeated and have to either go back to a previously unlocked waypoint or wait for another player to come by and revive you.
The first three skills that a player gets while downed are determined by their profession while the fourth skill is shared by all professions. This fourth skill is used to call for help and make you invulnerable for a short period of time. While playing, we found that it was possible to get into a situation where you were down, but there were no enemies around to either finish you or that you could use to rally. This left you watching yourself slowly slip into unconsciousness while there was nothing you could do to stop it. Needless to say, this was not a particularly fun experience. To fix this problem, we turned this fourth skill into a channeled heal that is interrupted by damage. This means that as long as there are no enemies around to damage you, you’ll be able to revive yourself.

It has always been the case that the more often you are downed, the shorter your downed meter will become until eventually you will go straight to being defeated. It was the case in previous builds of the game that this was a fairly subtle effect that took some time to become noticeable. We’ve tweaked the numbers a bit as well as added some elements to the UI to let you know how much of this penalty you’ve accumulated. Each point of downed penalty you accrue will reduce the length of your starting downed bar by one quarter. This starts with the first time you are downed and each point goes away after one minute. This means that, in order to have literally no chance to rally, you would need to be downed four times within a minute. Making these changes has allowed us to up the power on many of the downed skills. This results in a player with very little downed penalty being able to rally more reliably and providing more of those come-from-behind moments.
When a player is defeated, it’s important that there to be some sort of penalty associated with the defeat.This can serve several purposes, including reinforcing to the player that whatever they’re doing may be too difficult for them, as well as providing a little bit of extra excitement by upping the stakes. In the builds we’ve previously shown, when a player was defeated, reviving at a waypoint cost twice as much as traveling normally would. This approach had several drawbacks. Since every player in our game can revive another player, and since we do a lot to encourage a sense of teamwork and camaraderie among players, this penalty was almost never meaningful as it only kicked in if there was nobody around to revive the player. When the penalty did kick in, it tended to only impact players who were playing solo at off-peak times.
With the removal of potions from the game, we also found ourselves lacking a long-term attrition mechanic. An attrition mechanic does some of the same things that a death penalty does, particularly in reinforcing to players that they shouldn’t be playing in an area they’re not ready for. One of the most important things an attrition mechanic does, however, is provide players with a way to maximize their efficiency through skillful play. Since both attrition mechanics and death-penalty mechanics tend to have a lot of things in common, we started looking at how we might accomplish both things with one system.
Very early in the game’s development we had played around with the concept of armor durability as an attrition mechanic but we didn’t like how it felt. We revisited this idea when looking for our new system and combined our old durability concept with some new ideas to get our current system.
When a player is defeated, and not just downed, a random piece of their armor will be damaged. When a piece of armor is damaged, it imparts no penalty but serves as a warning. If a player is defeated while all of their armor is damaged, then a random piece of armor will break. When armor breaks, it ceases to provide any benefit to the player and must be repaired by visiting an armor-repair NPC in town. This NPC will charge a small sum of coins to repair any broken pieces of armor, and will repair any damaged armor as well. Having thus transferred the coin cost to the armor-repair NPC, we removed the multiplier on the cost of traveling to a waypoint when defeated.
We like this system for several reasons. Unlike most other armor durability systems, it doesn’t start becoming a factor just through normal play but only kicks in when a player is defeated. This means that it’s not a tax on playing and can be avoided through skillful or careful play. With every piece of armor needing to be damaged before any of them are broken, it also provides ample warning for the player before any real penalty is incurred.
So those are the changes to being downed and being defeated; now I’ll hand things off to my fellow developers.
The Compass

Hello, everyone, my name is Randy Knapp, and I’m a programmer here at ArenaNet.
A lot of us use the compass as an important and informative gameplay tool, but everyone seems to want more from it—so we made it better!
The compass now provides different zoom levels that let you get a better view of your surroundings. Just scroll the mouse wheel in and out to zoom. There’s also a nice little set of buttons to show you which zoom level you’re using. If you need a better look at the world just beyond the compass’s edge, you can also pan the map by right-clicking and dragging. The map will snap back to your character’s position once you start moving again.
Don’t forget: if you want to coordinate tactics with your party, you can use the left mouse button to draw lines and create circular pings they will see on their own compasses. Enjoy!
Meta-Events

My name is Devon Carver, and I’m one of the game designers working on content for Guild Wars 2.
As we’ve been working on the dynamic-event system and building out the content for Guild Wars 2, we’ve come to the realization that the only thing cooler than a series of dynamic events is a series of dynamic events that come together to tell the story of an area. It was through brainstorming that we gave birth to this concept of meta-events. Meta-events are all about immersing the player in the story of an area in a way that incorporates standard events and helps to make the world feel even more alive.
A meta-event might tell you the story of a norn area in danger of being corrupted by the Sons of Svanir, or maybe a human region constantly threatened by centaur armies. When the area is peaceful, you’ll know that the centaurs are being held in check, but when the invasion begins, you’ll see information pointing you where to go to help the people of the world stay safe from centaurs. Driving the centaurs back might require a herculean effort with groups of players destroying several catapults and killing centaur captains. A meta-event can cover a much larger region than a standard event might; you could as much as a quarter of the map thrown into turmoil by a meta-event!
Meta-events provide us yet another tool in our tool kit to create a world that reacts to player actions. Once you run across your first meta-event, we’re sure you’ll come back for more. And keep your eyes open in areas that seem relatively calm. The bandits might be just over the ridge, ready to put the torch to the village!
Hidden Treasures

Another recent development for Guild Wars 2 has been the implementation of hidden areas with interesting challenges. Our amazing environment artists have carved out a variety of caves, cliffs, and structures in the world. We’ve been stretching our imaginations to fill these spaces with content that should provide an exciting change of pace. Some areas will test your platforming abilities, requiring you to make a series of difficult jumps before you find your treasure at the end, while others contain dangerous foes that will stop at nothing to see you dead.
We hope that these experiences bring a new level of challenge for the best Guild Wars 2 players and provide everyone with a chance to test their mettle against a different type of content. Whether you are fighting off bandits or using the broken remnants of the Great Northern Wall to climb to a hidden chest, we think you’ll find these areas to be both fun and formidable. Just remember that not every leap is what it seems, and occasionally, you have to have a little faith.
Boons and Conditions

Hey, everyone, this is Jon Peters. I’m a game designer working primarily on our combat systems.
Boons and conditions are positive and negative states that can be manipulated by player skills. This is an important system in Guild Wars 2 for a variety of reasons. It helps us keep things simple by limiting the number of states in the game that need to be displayed and understood. It also helps us maintain a balanced system by making sure that when you grant regeneration to an ally, for example, it is the same regeneration available to other professions.
We’ve spoken about this system in the past, so why am I writing about it again now? Well, we had designed this system to have a lot of power and flexibility, but quite frankly, it just wasn’t interesting enough. We found that players didn’t know—and often didn’t care—when a particular condition or boon was affecting them.
This late in the development process, it can be hard to make the call to revamp something like this, but we felt that the current list didn’t live up to our expectations. We knew that we had to be very careful with how we revamped the system; we couldn’t just scrap it all and start over. With that in mind, we took a long, hard look at each boon and condition and tried to modify them into something more interesting that wouldn’t undo all of the skill design work we had done to this point.

Before the change, we had the following conditions with the following effects. (All boons and conditions stack duration unless otherwise noted.)
Old Conditions

  • Bleed: Inflicts X damage per second. (Stacks intensity.)
  • Poison: Inflicts X damage per second. (Stacks intensity.)
  • Burning: Inflicts X damage per second. (Stacks intensity.)
  • Cripple: 50% movement-speed reduction.
  • Chill: 66% movement-speed reduction. 66% skill cooldown increase.
  • Immobilize: 100% movement-speed reduction.
  • Weakness: 20% damage reduction.
  • Vulnerable: X armor reduction.
  • Blind: Your next attack misses.
  • Fear: You flee from your opponent.

Some of these felt good, but some felt, for lack of a better term, “mathy.” What I mean is they were effective, but you would never notice it. Math has a lot of great uses, but generally speaking, making you feel awesome isn’t one of them. We tried to put a twist on a number of these conditions to make them feel cooler.
Here is what we ended up with:
Updated Conditions

  • Bleed: Inflicts X damage per second. (Stacks intensity.)
  • Poison: Inflicts X damage per second. Reduces outgoing heals by 33%. (Stacks duration now.)
  • Burning: Inflicts X damage per second. (Stacks duration now.)
  • Cripple: 50% movement-speed reduction.
  • Chill: 66% movement-speed reduction. 66% skill cooldown increase.
  • Immobilize: 100% movement-speed reduction.
  • Weakness: Attacks result in a glancing blow 50% of the time and endurance regeneration is slowed.
  • Vulnerable: Lowered the amount of armor it reduces, but allowed it to stack so that it creates moments of super-high vulnerability for damage spiking.
  • Blind: Your next hit misses.
  • Fear: You flee from your opponent.
  • Confusion: Inflicts X damage each time a foe attacks. (New condition; stacks intensity.)

Some of the damage conditions went from stacking intensity to stacking duration, so we had to change how much damage a single stack did, as well as the skills that could apply them. Ultimately, this makes condition damage more pressure based instead of spike based, which is good because we wanted our damage over time to fulfill this role. It’s also good for creating variation in condition removal. It makes some conditions, such as poison and burning, ones that you can react to and remove, while making other conditions, like bleeding and confusion, ones that you only want to deal with when the stack becomes overwhelming.

We did a similar revamp for the boons in Guild Wars 2. This is what they used to look like:
Old Boons

  • Aegis: Blocks the next attack.
  • Protection: X armor increase.
  • Regeneration: Regenerates X health per second.
  • Fury: 20% Critical Chance increase.
  • Might: X damage per attack increase.
  • Vigor: X maximum health increase.
  • Swiftness: 25% movement speed increase.

Many of these already did what we wanted them to do, but again, they were very “mathy” and lacked impact. We tried to bump up their effectiveness while also clarifying what they do. For example, protection increases armor, but most people don’t want to do the math to figure out what that means. Instead, a 33% reduction in damage is easier to understand. With that in mind, we made the following changes:
Updated Boons

  • Aegis: Block the next attack
  • Protection: 33% damage reduction.
  • Regeneration: Regenerates X health per second.
  • Fury: 20% Critical Chance increase.
  • Might: X damage per attack increase. (Stacks intensity now.)
  • Vigor: Faster endurance regeneration.
  • Swiftness: 33% movement speed increase.
  • Retaliation: Does X damage to an opponent each time they hit you. (New boon.)

In addition to updating the functionality of boons and conditions, we’re also working on improving their visibility. For instance, since vigor and weakness manipulate endurance, the endurance bar UI should reflect this. And because poison affects heals, your healing skill should look different when you are poisoned.
Finally, we’re also working to make each boon and condition display a noticeable effect on your character; this way, you’ll be able to devote more time to watching the combat and less time looking at the UI.


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