There are many reasons I don't find Guild Wars 2 enjoyable, and many of them are because it is missing what I enjoyed in Guild Wars. One of my favourite GW past-times was creating random builds and testing them out, there were so many possibilities within the profession system that I'd never really get bored of this... it made PvP very interesting (for me) and allowed for a lot of different team compositions and strategies.
The skill system in Guild Wars 2 isn't so much mix and match skills and "build" how you want to, its more a series of presets, not nearly as interesting. Going off on a tangent I wish they done elite skills in GW2 the same as GW1, finding elites in the world and capturing them lends itself much better to the exploration of GW2.
Your idea is interesting, I'm all for allowing players to customize their build more. Though I don't think it goes far enough or really adds all that much to the gameplay, perhaps something more impactful would be better (imo).
Edited, Oct 4th 2013 11:02am by Crainey
The Scrying Pool: Second Class
In this article of The Scrying Pool, I look at how secondary classes could exist in GW2.
Other games have taken this specific spell to mean only a handful of the other class’s skills can be used with other classes. Games like Final Fantasy XIV allow players to use skills from similar classes after they have first unlocked them on that other class.
That, however, is not what I imagine this specific spells to be within GW2. Picking out only certain skills that can be used by any profession still would create balance concerns. It does limit how much of these concerns exist, but it also can make the players feel limited in how they can build their character. Imagine if the only skills that were usable by other classes were the ones you like the least on that class.
Instead I would like to see brand new skills exist within the dual profession system. These skills would, therefore, just be more utility skills available to any single profession. Balancing them wouldn't be a concern if it works, not with every class, but just the single class that has the option to use that skill.
Unlike adding new utilities to classes, these dual profession utilities would be flavored to match with different classes. For example, maybe my guardian has elementalist as his secondary profession. Now he has access to a handful of utilities that only a guardian/elementalist can use. One of these unique utilities then could be Heaven's Descent, a combination of the elementalist's Meteor Shower skill and the guardian's iconic holy blue flames.
Adding a bunch of new skills for all of the combinations may seem like an enormous task, but it wouldn't really be creating a multitude of new skills. My Heaven's Descent skill for example, would use the same animations as Meteor Shower just recolored with guardian blue fire instead of elementalist fire. Initially creating the skill would be as simple as copying over the current damage, cast time and cooldown, but because it is a separate skill it can be balanced and adjusted until it fits the guardian.
The limitations on gaining access to these secondary professions, being level 80 and having another level 80 of the desired secondary profession, would help to keep the image and uniqueness of these classes. In this setup I would play a pure ranger until max level before it is diluted with the style and flavors of other classes. Likewise, once my ranger is 80 he wouldn't be able to dilute the thief until I have played that in its vanilla form up to level 80. Then both classes would build and keep their own identity before things got complicated mixing classes together.
The only one active secondary profession at any moment was a good setup in GW1, a limitation that I think should be kept with this system for GW2. If possible I'd like to limit the system just a little more. One of the complaints I mentioned earlier in this article was that in GW1 I could have a ranger with zero ranger skills on the bar. While this system in GW2 would only allow replacing the three utility skill slots, I would still like to limit the usage of dual profession skills to a maximum of one or two on the bar at a time. With this limitation, I feel that the secondary profession would always remain as a secondary without the chance of usurping the main class.
Matt "Mattsta" Adams can't wait for the Halloween content in the next patch!
In last week's article of The Scrying Pool I said how I think the dungeon paths should be replaced with a single normal path, a heroic path and later on a 10-man path. It was amazing to take part in the press preview and find out within an hour of my article going live that the new TA path was replacing an old path and becoming a heroic path in a way. Now we just need one of the other old TA paths to get replaced with a 10-man...
First, however, the other dungeons need some of this same attention. I love the new TA path. I had already achieved Dungeon Master, and while TA used to be one of the dungeons I liked the least, this new path is now at the top of my dungeon favorites.
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