Would Horizontal Progression Help this Game?

[seraf]

I was going to say that most games that I have played which incorporated Horizontal Progression have had reasonable success, with the notable exception of Guild Wars 2 :|

Then I was lied to. :P Like I said I couldn't confirm it but maybe the person who told me how great it was is just a huge fan of the game.

[Kaurie]

Then I was lied to. :P Like I said I couldn't confirm it but maybe the person who told me how great it was is just a huge fan of the game.

In terms of horizontal progression, they made it very very easy to choose your gear build; however, they designed the content around no healing and no tanking - so it made most support/utility builds not viable (speaking PvE atm). Further, they designed the stats of Power, Precision and Ferocity to multiply by each other. Every other gear set didn't have this advantage, making 1 point in power more valuable in Berserker gear than 1 point in power in any other gear (for example). So, it became the PvE meta to stack Berserker gear and DPS stuff down as fast as possible, if you didn't wear berserker you were doing it wrong.

I would say my main issues, and what I think resulted in this issue is:

1. Too many 1 hit kills in higher level end-game, meaning vitality was fairly useless - you just had to learn to dodge.
2. As I said above, they made 3 stats multiply by each other, but no other 3 stats worked this way
3. They removed healing and tanking
4. Support stats scaled very weakly with skills (i.e. you could stack up a skill to up your healing abilities, but your heal would still be very weak, on a long cooldown and virtually useless because everything is one-hit-ko).
5. All the stats were very 'basic' in design, as in this raises your attack power, crit power etc - and there weren't really interesting stats to experiment with (i.e. +Fire Damage that you could put on your Elementalist, even though Elementalists stance dance among the elements).
6. Most bosses had CC shields making the use of a lot of cc/utility less viable

Further to all of this, they made gear way tooo easy to obtain. Shortly after launch, you could be in max stat gear within 5 minutes of hitting level 80. It was fairly absurd.

Anyway, I would love for Horizontal Progression to be in this game, but not with the basic stats we have. We'd need stats that aren't (add this much to have all of your attacks do x% more damage).