It’s a very exciting time, for a huge Guild Wars 2 beta was just around the corner. As they will definitely up to the challenge and eager to show off the game to a larger audience, there would be all sorts of new things added to the game, as well as revising and improving on many aspects, mainly on compass, Meta-Events, Boons and conditions. But the biggest change, i think, may what being downed and defeated.
If reach zero health in Guild Wars 2, it will take you into a unique “downed” mode, in which case there would be four skills you can use 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 differs from your profession while the fourth skill is shared by all professions. When you are vulnerable or call for help you can use the the fourth skill and as long as there are no enemies around to damage you, you’ll be able to revive yourself.
As we all know that the more often you are downed, the shorter your downed meter will become but now the number was tweaked a bit as well as some elements added to the UI so that you can 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, means that, in order to have literally no chance to rally, you would need to be downed four times within a minute. 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.
As there had been several drawbacks for costing twice waypoint when a player was defeated so penalty would be also cancelled since when the penalty did kick in, it tended to only impact players who were playing solo at off-peak times.
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.
So those are the changes to being downed and being defeated; Enjoy!
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