Guild Wars 2

I’d rather have acess to new weapons or utility skills. After those perhaps some better healing skills, then I’d prefer a lot of the current exsisting traits to be fixed/reworked and perhaps some new traits all together. After all this I’d say why not some new Ultimates.

Im more excited about the prospect of giving players more viable build options and creative freedom. I believe Ultimates don’t truly conform to this as they are simply a form of a “tie breaker”. Primarily used to give a player a sudden edge over someone else and to me, are not very integral to build diversity.

Just my $0.02

I see all these great threads about ideas of changes to current skills, or new skills/class ideas. But I think we need to keep focus on the fact that we have barely gotten any, and those two heal skills barely count. For that sole reason, I think this thread should stay alive a bit more, to keep the awareness there

icandothings.6378:

I still want melee longbow for mesmer.

I need it.

ANet pls.

or ranged hammers for Guardian :|

edit: ah wait, guardians already have them :<

usernameisapain.7163:

I see all these great threads about ideas of changes to current skills, or new skills/class ideas. But I think we need to keep focus on the fact that we have barely gotten any, and those two heal skills barely count. For that sole reason, I think this thread should stay alive a bit more, to keep the awareness there

They’re aware that we want new skills, they just don’t care. They feel it’s in their best interest to pour the bulk of their resources into the Living Story and the cash shop, and that leaves those of us wanting (begging for) new skills out of luck.

Bhawb.7408:

New weapons would be massive towards increasing diversity, followed by new elites, new utilities, and new traits.

And a 100% increase in unaddressed bugs across all lines!

They cant even balance current weapon skills and you want new weapons so you can complain on how op and garbage they are…

Biohazard.7523:

They cant even balance current weapon skills and you want new weapons so you can complain on how op and garbage they are…

Yes, because waiting around for another 2 years just to balance the current weapons is worse than having a larger selection of still broken stuff.

I would really like to see new skills added to the game (new weapons for each class would be great as well), in particular new elite skills (some of the existing ones aren’t even all that elite) and underwater skills both of which are sorely needed.

Biohazard.7523:

They cant even balance current weapon skills and you want new weapons so you can complain on how op and garbage they are…

Which would you rather do? Complain about the stuff you always complain about or complain about something that isn’t a dead horse?

Man, I’ve been gone for about a year, I was hoping some of those ideas for weapon proliferation or secondary weapon skills would have stuck. Hell, I’d take a new race to play (wanted Tengu from the start), but it looks like the most I get is the revamped wardrobe/transmutation changes.

I probably just plain missed about 66% of the released content since I know its seasonal, which is okay. I just wanted a shiny new race or a sword for my elementalist, maybe a longbow too.

Mainly the necro needs 3 things

1: Better party UI so that people can tell from looking at the UI weather or not your about to die or just in death shroud.

2: Death shroud could stand to be a little more condition mancer friendly (maybe lower the base damage on life blast slightly in exchance for making it scale better of power & having a trait that causes it to apply bleeds, or lowering the Cd on Dhuum Fire).

3: A real cleaving weapon. Either lower the range on Axe #1 and make it cleave or hurry up and add great axe then let necro’s use it. (imagine something like the executioner’s axe toy, but for combat)

Oh it could also stand to have a look at some of its traits, it really does have some absolutely useless ones & extremely under powered traits.

Bhawb.7408:

Yes, because waiting around for another 2 years just to balance the current weapons is worse than having a larger selection of still broken stuff.

Actually, from WoW (took ages to start being balanced) versus GW1 (lots and lots of broken and redundant skills) we can surmise that yes, waiting is better than throwing more skills at it.

WoW got there. GW1 never did.

definitely need new weapons,

Lance scythe, fist weapons etc

I rather that ANet buff skills/traits to be useful.

Many skills and traits are useless. If those get buffed so that they are useful on the bar, it is the same as adding skills.

Carighan.6758:

Bhawb.7408:

Yes, because waiting around for another 2 years just to balance the current weapons is worse than having a larger selection of still broken stuff.

Actually, from WoW (took ages to start being balanced) versus GW1 (lots and lots of broken and redundant skills) we can surmise that yes, waiting is better than throwing more skills at it.

WoW got there. GW1 never did.

First, WoW balance improved but it was never balanced. Im not even going into to much detail because we’d be here all day.

Second, WoW is your example of “balance” over “new”? WoW added a ton of new talents to the game, new skills and even new classes.

Balance in GW2 right now is not in a terrible spot. One of the reasons of balancing is to retweak the game, shake up the meta and keep things fresh for the players. Something new skills would do aswell.

@Terrahero:
What I meant is, WoW takes the approach of “simmer”. Each xpack they tend to either add new talents/abilities or merge/split existent ones. Mostly merge. But between that, they usually remove/merge/nerf/consolidate stuff.

All in all, they start with a lot of ideas, then simmer it down until only the part needed to balance is left and tweak numbers along the way. It’s also much better balanced than any other MMO I know (and that’s a lot), but it owes most of that to it’s phenomenal shelf-life, really.

GW1 took pretty much the opposite approach, throw more and more and more skills at a problem in the hopes that one of them happens to be the right one and “sticks”. Which is a huge waste of ideas because 90%+ were terrible at best.

And yeah, GW2’s balance (for sPvP) is not too bad. WvW and PvE are in pretty dire straits IMO, although pretty easy to fix if the balance team ever switches to them. Ok, PvE not so easily because the programmers would have to do new AI. But WvW! :P

Every xpack for WoW had some drastic changes were made, not nearly all of them to balanced as illustrated by often sweeping buffs/nerfs (mostly nerfs) in the patches immediatly following a new xpack.
Even to the point of destroying/removing talents they so “carefully” added in the first place. A year of testing with a certain talent, and not two months into the actual release and its cut completely.

I would not call Blizzard a paragon in MMO balance, or meticulous in their balancing whatsoever.
And adding new talents and skills was standard in expansions (which happend by every 2 years or so). And a class added every other expansion. These are pretty impactful to the game balance aswell.

I also dont think balance in pve or wvw are as dire as you mention. I think the biggest problem with pve is how pve is designed in rewarding stacking. But content is perfectly doable with any class combination.
And WvW primairy problem is how stale the meta is, Guardians and Warriors with a bit of Necro and Ele sprinkled on top. After more then a year of the same Hammer-train kitten id like to see something else.

Small scale wvw isnt as terrible as people mention either and often complaints are blown wildly out of proportions. Like the whole “condition meta” nonsense people kept bringing up, altough that seems to have died down a bit when enough people called bullkitten on this over and over.

I think balance patches should happen with increased intervals, to intercept and intervene with the events that are outliers. Sure, absolutely. But bigger patches should do something else, and that is shake up the meta a bit.
Every pvp team runs a guardian, and very likely a hambow warrior. And they have for the longest time.
Change the meta a bit, get people playing different setups and figuring out new ways to play, build and combine a team. Keep the game feeling fresh, and adding new skills or profession/weapon-combo’s helps with that.

arenanet has gone with little changes and often very cautious changes for the most part, and the result is that everyone is still complaining about Warriors (and have for over a year) and a lot of people feel the game has gone stale. Shaking up the established meta once in a while is in my opinion a good thing. And after 2 years, i would like to see some new options on how to play my characters.
Im actually glad that arenanet has demonstrated with the Skill Bar to atleast put on their big-boy pants and actually make some significant changes.

Big changes are not a bad thing, so long as you dont wait to long to follow up on them with maintenance patches.

I realy would like to see new weapons, utilities, elite skills! The more the better.

Oh yeah, I definitely agree that what is hurting balance most right now is the cadence (or lack thereof) of the balance patches. It’s meh for classes plagued by a lot of crippling bugs (Mesmers…), in any case. LS patches only fix tooltips.

But further than that it forces the metagame to go stale before something is done again. On paper this sounds good, “wait for the dust to settle”. In reality it’s horribly disheartening. If you don’t feel right playing your spec, you know you’re in for 6-12 months of disappointment.
If we at least had monthly balance changes there’d always be a little bit of excitement to see what gets refined next month.

By this time after Guild Wars 1 had been released, factions and nightfall were already out, in addition to hundreds of more skills.

Halberds (polearms?)? ill tell you what that would represent

Ranger: Agressive Midrange style based on scoring multi physical hit (aka Tiger fury mode)

Necro: Reaping based ability similar to what dervish did (the halberd is a form of polearm wich also include the scythe)

Elementalist: Magic themed on longrange single target high damage striker such as lightning orb, Ice spear etc.

Guardian: Paragon spear style with a polearm

Mesmer: (clueless about that)

Thief: (doesnt fit the class)

Enginer: (just do not fit the class)

Wolf.5816:

I’d rather have acess to new weapons or utility skills. After those perhaps some better healing skills, then I’d prefer a lot of the current exsisting traits to be fixed/reworked and perhaps some new traits all together. After all this I’d say why not some new Ultimates.

Im more excited about the prospect of giving players more viable build options and creative freedom. I believe Ultimates don’t truly conform to this as they are simply a form of a “tie breaker”. Primarily used to give a player a sudden edge over someone else and to me, are not very integral to build diversity.

Just my $0.02

New skills? Well, these we already have are not working(specially racial) as good as selected few and never used, so why not?

Carighan.6758:

Oh yeah, I definitely agree that what is hurting balance most right now is the cadence (or lack thereof) of the balance patches. It’s meh for classes plagued by a lot of crippling bugs (Mesmers…), in any case. LS patches only fix tooltips.

But further than that it forces the metagame to go stale before something is done again. On paper this sounds good, “wait for the dust to settle”. In reality it’s horribly disheartening. If you don’t feel right playing your spec, you know you’re in for 6-12 months of disappointment.
If we at least had monthly balance changes there’d always be a little bit of excitement to see what gets refined next month.

Well put.
Not to mention how some things have been going on for several balance patches, as most changes are only fairly minor. With balance patches so far and between this means certain professions/builds go on and on and on for a long time.

And incase of guardians, i dont think theyve ever been anything but mandatory in any serious team. Two years, and its still a Guardian-must in every team. Talk about stale…

Yeah that’s the other thing, even changes like the upcoming Engineer/Ranger ones are tiny.
I expected larger changes if they’re making a stream about it first.

Not this number-tweaking and shuffling of existent functionality. I figured we’d be getting something like manual pet control from 3500 range to harass, kits as the main weapon on Engineers, full removal of gadgets + replacement, stuff like that. Or a full trait re-do.

Because, I feel balance could significantly improve from such sweeping reworks. Many of the existent things are based on a game which no longer exists (beta 1 and earlier). It’s time to be rid of them. Traits have a ton of potential, but it’s just not realized due to how jumbled they are. If all traits for a specific play style were in the same line (and you can only pick 3 of them), then we’d have a real interesting mix&match problem.

after seeing what they came up with for new healing skills, you really think theyre gonna come up with some good stuff for utilities and weapons?

not a single one of the new heals is useful in anything but an incredibly small niche situation and build.

i wasn’t my Sword/sword thief =p….and getting dervish back as a class would also be super bad kitten .

But i’d say a big reason holding A-net back is balance. Releasing a new weapon for a class means 2-5 NEW core skills that may or may not be really really broken when mixed with other weapons sets and builds or could be so bad no one uses it, So the way i see it and this may very well just be me anet will probably have to wait till they can add new weapons to all classes so all classes sorta of become OP/really bad at the same time if that makes sense. This way they can balance everything more effectively because they can compare to other classes who get new weapons and builds ect.

Runewolf.8456:

i wasn’t my Sword/sword thief =p….and getting dervish back as a class would also be super bad kitten .

But i’d say a big reason holding A-net back is balance. Releasing a new weapon for a class means 2-5 NEW core skills that may or may not be really really broken when mixed with other weapons sets and builds or could be so bad no one uses it, So the way i see it and this may very well just be me anet will probably have to wait till they can add new weapons to all classes so all classes sorta of become OP/really bad at the same time if that makes sense. This way they can balance everything more effectively because they can compare to other classes who get new weapons and builds ect.

I can see that, the part about holding off so they can make sure they add stuff to every profession…

…but the part that’s killing me is that part you said about ‘waiting’. I’ve waited 11 months off the game (just joined back last week? last I played was around Sept 2013) and no changes seem to have happened to combat. The only slight change to combat was adding new healing skills? By this time, I was hoping for a new profession, advanced professions (specialize your Warrior into a Berserker or Gladiator, etc), weapon proliferation (I had some old posts of mine outlining a Longbow and Sword set for Elementalist…I think I even had a Warhorn set post for Ele!), new weapons (lances and scythes and tomes!)…hell, a new race would come with different racials and storyline!