User:Endrosz/2016 April

Update - April 19, 2016

Heart of Maguuma — Rewards and Experience

The rewards in the Heart of Thorns maps have had a significant rebalance focused on providing more frequent rewards while playing through all content on these maps. Many of these changes were made in concert with the map event structure changes, but general changes were also made that will make exploration and solo play in the map more rewarding. Finally, some new rewards were added for both veteran and new explorers of Maguuma.

• Experience from killing creatures has been increased by 50%.
• Events in the Heart of Thorns maps are no longer subject to diminishing returns for their rewards.
• In the portions of the Heart of Thorns maps that no longer use the map-wide progress bar ("Securing Verdant Brink", "Defending Tarir", "Advancing Across Tangled Roots") have had rewards added to the individual events. These give experience points, map currencies, keys to map chests, and other goodies.
• Rewards that now come from individual events have been rebalanced and consolidated into a smaller number of bags, reducing the number of inventory slots that players' loot takes up during these event chains.
• All maps should give more of their appropriate currencies and keys for completing event chains, and new chests will appear while completing an event chain.
• New items have been added for defeating map bosses, offering players a choice of items including ascended crafting materials, currencies for collections, and other valuable goods.
• Mastery vendors across the maps have acquired new souvenirs for heroes to purchase. Players can now take home their own Exalted Chest, Crystallized Supply Cache, and Airship Cargo into their home instances. These can be opened once per day and come with 3 keys.
• Adventures are easier to access, easier to complete, and have increased experience rewards.

Heart of Maguuma — Map Changes

We revamped map event rewards, splitting rewards out of many meta-event chains into their individual events to free players from feeling trapped by map cycles or by the progression state of the map they're placed in. We revisited the events and rewards in the Maguuma Jungle maps to allow for greater single-player accessibility and progression while still allowing for key bigger moments in which players

Heart of Maguuma — Adventures

Adventures are now unlocked more often. They have more forgiving time limits and allow players to more easily reach bronze, silver, and gold completion. They also give more experience for reaching those completion tiers.

Achievements

• • Heart of Thorns Dailies: Specific dailies for Heart of Thorns will only appear in a player's rotation if they own the expansion. The following dailies have a chance to replace similar dailies currently in the rotation:
    • Earn bronze or better in these adventures:

• • Complete daily jumping-puzzle achievements:
  • Complete daily minidungeon achievements:
  • Complete 1 explorable path from a dungeon:

Dungeon

• Added a new repeatable achievement for completing 8 unique dungeon paths. Completing this achievement will award players with 5 gold and 150 tokens from the dungeon of their choice.
• Dungeon tokens given in the daily bonus chest awarded the first time each dungeon path is completed have been increased from 40 to 80 tokens.

Fractals of the Mists

Ad Infinitum

Players are now able to complete the quest to obtain Ad Infinitum, the legendary backpack! Once they have crafted Unbound, they can speak to Kelvei to unlock the fourth collection and start the last part of the journey.

Level-80 Boost

A new Level-80 Boost consumable has been added to the game for all players who have purchased or will purchase Heart of Thorns. All Heart of Thorns owners will receive a Level-80 Boost consumable. In addition, this item will automatically be delivered in a one-time, free Shared Inventory Slot, which will not count toward the Gem Store limit of shared inventory slot purchases. Because so much of our Heart of Thorns content is for level-80 players, we want everyone to be able to experience this content as soon as possible. Furthermore, we want players to be able to experiment at their own pace and make sure the character they are boosting is the one they really want to permanently boost to level 80. With this in mind, we have included a trial mode in the Level-80 Boost that players can use on any character below level 80.

Looking for Group

The Looking for Group (LFG) tool has been updated to handle groups larger than five members and to be better equipped to respond to the ever-evolving needs of players. Efforts were made to support current player use cases as well as make it more clear which of the broad categories is most appropriate to list an advertisement under. Additionally, players can rely on description searches to help more postings get exposure. Moving forward, we are open to the idea of more granular subcategories and will continue to monitor LFG use.

• Squads can now be advertised in LFG.
  • Squads can be merged with other squads. Be aware that merging a squad with another already-listed squad will relinquish any leadership rights players have over their current squad.

PvP

Our primary goal for this off-season was to update existing Conquest maps, most notably Spirit Watch and Skyhammer. We're releasing these two maps with "Beta" tags, as we felt that the changes to these maps were substantial enough to change their overall gameplay, and we would like the community to play a role in evaluating these changes before we decide to keep any or all of the updates for next season.

Existing Map Changes

We had a different set of goals and updates for each map, so let's go through each of them individually.

WvW—World Linking (Beta) =

WvW—Provisions Master

This new ability line improves a player's ability to gather loot and grants access to the wares of the Permanent Portable Provisioner.

• Provisions Master I: This allows players to purchase a Permanent Portable Provisioner from any WvW outfitter. This item allows players to purchase siege-weapon blueprints from anywhere in WvW.
• Provisions Master II: This allows players to purchase tricks and traps from the Permanent Portable Provisioner.
• Provisions Master III: This allows players to also purchase food and utility consumables from the Permanent Portable Provisioner.
• Provisions Master IV: This teaches players to automatically pick up loot from fallen foes.
• Provisions Master V: This increases the number of Badges of Honor players find when they loot fallen foes.

WvW—Skill balance

The following changes were made largely to improve balance in WvW. These changes are also mirrored in their respective profession skills sections.

Stability

• Stability: The frequency at which stability can be removed by control effects has been increased from 0.05 seconds to 0.75 seconds. A brief effect will now play on the character when stability is removed via control.
  • This change will ensure that there is at least a minimum duration of immunity to control, without being as binary (on or off with no middle ground) as it was when the boon stacked duration. While this change is primarily targeted toward WvW, it does also carry a positive note for the PvP and PvE game types as well. We'll continue to monitor the effectiveness of this and address it where appropriate.

Player Walls and Hit Caps

Wall-type control effects are currently too effective in areas where there are a ton of targets, causing stagnant gameplay in large combat scenarios like WvW. With this update, we'll be reducing the number of targets that a wall can affect so that things like stability and player numbers matter a bit more. As such, you'll see multiple notes through the professions that introduce target caps.

Elementalist:

• Static Field: The number of times this skill can be used to attempt to stun an enemy has been capped at 10.

WvW—General

• Experience will no longer be awarded in WvW.
  • Tomes of Knowledge have been added to the Chests of the Mists awarded for ranking up in WvW and exist in the new WvW reward tracks.

Profession Skills

General

• A new option called Effect LOD has been added to the graphics options of the game. It limits the detail of allied players' skill effects. This option has been turned on by default.

• All combo fields in the game have been given a visual update to make them more distinct in combat.

Other Balance, Bug-fixing, and Polish

General

• Players can now specify a quantity when purchasing items from a vendor.

Improvements

• Added the ability to link items in chat.