Guild Wars 2

Build diversity. It fuels PvP and PvE, and it fuels players with the incentive to try something new and keep playing. It fuels counter-play and the formation of tight balance and a competitive level of the game where ease of play is weighed against potential effectiveness on the battlefield. It turns the best into the best and and punishes poor play.

It fuels games.

GW2 got its attention because it emphasized this build diversity. The declaration of removing the “holy trinity” (tank/healer/DPS) made this game praised even before beta and was a groundbreaking effort to vitalize player freedom in their builds.

But as it stands GW2 has less freedom in build diversity than almost every major game on the market. While the trinity doesn’t exist, the promises of player freedom in their builds almost do not. If one wants to play a given class or style, he is expected to build one way and suffers from penalties across the board if he does not.

This is enforced for two reasons:

1.) The lack of a given style actually having significance based on a simple formula for calculating damage as well as blatantly obvious superior builds within one’s class or style.

Simply put, there’s no reason to exceed in certain stats over other ones in this game (okay, overstatement, but does that 300 precision REALLY matter in the grand scheme of things?). People build not for the stat points but for traits. Some traits are better than others, and therefore builds are regulated and very, very similar. There’s no exploration, and literally no reason to explore the boundaries of a given class. The superior builds are obvious, and building in a matter which you want to play versus the best way ultimately does nothing for you – you can build 30/30/0/0/10 with full berserker and deal less damage than the guy building 10/0/30/30/0 because of traits or skills by certain classes. There’s no real skill/stat scaling and no real incentive to play the way you want to.

“But doesn’t that just mean we’d see the holy trinity again if this were pursued?”

NO!
This encourages players to choose how they wish to play. One should expect to die easily by building 30/30/0/010 on ANY class, but they should also expect to deal VERY superior damage as opposed to the person building full-tank. Effectiveness shouldn’t be measured by requiring a healer or not because that’s why we can dodge to begin with, but effectiveness should be measured by a player’s synergy with his build.

If a group of organized players wants to make the “holy trinity” because that’s what they choose to play, then they should be allowed to play that way. It doesn’t mean it should be any better than a group building a bit of all three and bouncing off of each other, though.

2.) The similarities between every weapon paradigm, the classes, and how these are designed to be used more by their utility than means of playing.

Basically, scrap the idea of everything being similar, but choose to be different. Why is it that each weapon paradigm/class has an awfully similar kit to every other weapon paradigm/class aside from polar opposites such as dagger vs GS? Why do we not have the choice to pick some of our skills but are locked into the spamfest of low-cooldown weapon-derived ones? Being able to choose between high-cooldown burst and low-cooldown autos/bonuses helps define builds and makes more concepts come to life.

So what’s the proposal?

1.) Make stat points actually worthwhile in determining damage/survivability.

2.) Reconsider the “you should do everything” aspect that you force players into doing and capitalize on the fact that “everything can be done by anyone (if they know what they’re doing)” to encourage diversity.

3.) Release more options for weapon skill setups. Allow players to choose how they wish to build, and allow the option for sacrificing one option for another.

I am aware these are big changes, but this is a triple-A, game of the year MMO; awards which have been granted seemingly BECAUSE of the hype that was built upon giving players unprecedented levels of freedom by doing away with the necessary “holy trinity.” It’s this ideology that brought many players (notably hardcore PvP and dungeon raid players) to this game, and the current lack of freedoms has caused a lot of them (such as myself) to get bored with repetitive and overly-similar content with really shallow character build limits and design.

Now recently having professional experience in the MMO genre, I understand the limitations on development schedules and how it can take time to pursue development, so nowhere am I expecting this to be considered as being on a level of “Drop everything and get on this immediately,” nor am I expecting this to be considered/resolved any time soon; however, this issue is a large one that would bring a considerable amount of positive attention to GW2 again.

It might seem “traditional,” but incorporating this with the current systems in game would in fact be even more mold-breaking and really add a massive amount of depth to the game.