Guild Wars 2

First off I want to say that Ive played mostly Guardian, so most of my views are based on this profession. Even then I don’t doubt that most of what I say goes for any other profession as well.

As it is I see a big issue with the way elite skills are made. I wouldn’t say its a Problem, but it’s really just not fun, some would say “Anti-fun” even.

Rather than letting Elite skills be something that enhances your professions gameplay, or alter it slightly in some way, ArenaNet has decided to make Elite Skill into something that I could only explain as a Gimmick.

• 1 out of 6 Elite skills for the Guardian is not based around your role at all, instead what it does is totally replace it by changing your character model to “Something awesomely Cool!”.
• These Elite skills have high cooldowns and quite short duration.

What this means is that ArenaNet did the same error Blizzard did with their Wizards Archon Form. It creates big chunks of time where you don’t really do much but simply wait for the cooldown to finish. This for me is as much anti-fun as it gets!

Rather than offer something unique to enhance the gameplay of your class, or perhaps even your chosen role, the game gives you 20 seconds of “Cool Spell Effects” which when it fades, forces you to go trough some 3 minutes of mediocre before you can use it again.

I’m not saying these sort of “Transform” skills are totally bad.
They are all viable for sure
I DO however have an issue with them when they occupy 4 out of 6 options.

The option I’m given when picking elite skills should be something like

• Can this skill improve some part of my gameplay?
• Can this skill change the way I play?
• Can this skill be useful in combination with any of my other regular skills?

But what we are given is simply

• What do I want to Transform into?

It’s not much of an option at all!

As it is Guardian has exactly 1 elite skill which I consider to be somewhat “Good Design” and that is the only non-tranform non-summon spell we have to pick from
Renewed Focus
What Renewed Focus does is make you invulnerable for 3 seconds, and then resetting all your Guardians Virtues. This allows you to be tactical at times and activate all your virtues, only to then reset them using this Elite Skill. After this you can decide if you want to instantly use them again, or remain with their passive effect.

This is a Great Skill! It does exactly what elite skills should be all about, It Complements, rather than Replaces your gameplay.

You created all these amazing Professions, which with Weapon Switching, Stance Dancing and Utility Skills can become very Unique and Versatile.Then you go and basically Force us to Totally Abandon Them!, In order to become a supercreature for 20 secs with no weapon switch, not even utility skills!.

Why not simply let us have skills that makes our Professions more special, or specialized?

As such I would make a plea to ArenaNet.

• Remove most of the Transform Skills Add more Non-Transform Elite Skills.
• Replace them with skills that actually enhance the professions gameplay, rather than replaces it.

For example Guardians have an Elite skill that turns you into a Support God for 20 seconds, how about replacing that with something that simply makes you better at support all the time instead of Godly for 20 secs each 3 minutes.

Elite skills should useful for your character, not something that allows you to flash cool spell effects 5% of your gametime.

• Rather than making those 5% Awesome.
• How about making 100% of your time really nice?

An Example of what I would consider a much better ability, gameplay wise
Healing Sword

• Cooldown 120 seconds
• For 15 seconds your main weapon is replaced with a Healing Sword, allowing you to target allies, each hit Healing and applying Protection. All Your regular Sword abilities now heal instead of dealing damage.

Using something like this would actually be fun and helpful, it would allow you to use your utility skills like before. You would have to take care to not hit enemies too much while the sword is active, meaning it would take some better tactics and skill to use overall.
Also take into account the fact that your Burn sigil now applies Regeneration instead and you got yourself one nifty and diverse ability.
It Alters the way you play your character instead of totally discarding it.

As a final note I want to say that I enjoy GW2 tremendously, It done a whole of things right while keeping away from some of the obvious mistakes of the past.

As such I make posts such as this, trying to explain why I think changes such as this would make the game better

For now I see the current Elite Skills to be a Huge Waste of Potential

TLDR

• Transform Skills Sucks for Gameplay
• Please make more Elite skills that Complement the character we spent 80 levels building, rather than pissing on it.

but if you look at the book skills from other angle then theyll be your 3rd weapon set that is super stronk and because of that you can use them only once in a while, what means you have to time the switch pretty well.

and archon is awesome, try activating it on the very first boss in act 4 and youll down the second boss while its still active.

I sort of agree with this. I was mostly bothered by the 2 “epic elites” the tier 2 elites for my Charr warrior. One of them is a transformation as OP described. The other is Charrzooka which also has long cooldown. So neither epics really interest me.

Kaboo if it was indeed just an additional weapon it would be quite fine, for example Elementalists Firey Greatsword is quite nice.

However, unlike those Weapon skills,
Transforming remove all your utility abilities for its duration.
For its duration you are stuck with those 5 abilities only.

I write this in bold as I find the general design of something like that to be utterly absurd.

Transforming is actually more of an punishment unless you make sure all your utility skills are on cooldown when you do it.

and archon is awesome, try activating it on the very first boss in act 4 and youll down the second boss while its still active.

Yes Archon in Diablo 3 is awesome.
It is also terrible terrible game design that forces you to stay extremely passive for 80% of the time you play, just so you can take a boss down quite fast by simply standing still and nuking.

The guardian only has 3 elites the other ones are racial and aren’t supposed to compliment your class. There supposed to be fun alternative options not necessarily viable for most game play.

Yes, guardian has 3 Elites.
2 Are transforms and the last is Renewed Focus.

Doesn’t make a dent at any of my arguments.

Kheft.5237:

The guardian only has 3 elites the other ones are racial and aren’t supposed to compliment your class. There supposed to be fun alternative options not necessarily viable for most game play.

They’re not supposed to, yeah, but Hounds of Balthazar work amazingly when your build is focused on doing hardcore amounts of damage to enemies on fire.

I also don’t understand how your healing sword suggestion is much different from tome of courage. The way you put it is if I don’t have a sword then I will “transform” and get one which then I only have for 15 seconds and then have to wait 2 mins till I can use again. It could also be interpreted as I have to use a sword to have a good healing support elite. With tome of courage I can use the weapons I want and then when a big fight comes up and we need support and healing I can pop my elite and for 20 secs heal my allies and grant boons.

I do not mind the elite skills as they are, even if they change your class so much. They are elite skills after all. Otherwise, they would just be like any other skill that we have.

So I would like to keep them special. Some big effects that only work every few minutes. So they feel elite…

Kheft.5237:

I also don’t understand how your healing sword suggestion is much different from tome of courage. The way you put it is if I don’t have a sword then I will “transform” and get one which then I only have for 15 seconds and then have to wait 2 mins till I can use again. It could also be interpreted as I have to use a sword to have a good healing support elite. With tome of courage I can use the weapons I want and then when a big fight comes up and we need support and healing I can pop my elite and for 20 secs heal my allies and grant boons.

My Healing Sword would allow you to still use your Utility skills, that alone makes it a much better design.

But please dont base arguments on something I spent 2 min typing down as a simple example. Im sure there are way better stuff that could be made if people actually sat down with the question “how do we create a skill that complements this profession?”

I partly agree with the OP. I wouldn’t call the transform skills “punishment”, but activating one of them always means you let your utility and heal skills as well as your traits behind, which basically makes it impossible to embed those kind of elite spells into the rest of their build.

On the other hand – in all fairness – it goes without saying that a pool of only 3 elite skills per profession makes it necessary to design them as “fitting all profiles” in terms of reinforcing the rest of your build. It’s still a miracle to me why they didn’t give the classes more different elites.

Yes, hopefully they will add more non-transform elites in some patch.
As it is atm, my Guardian gets to choose
Do you want to Transform?
No
Then you get Renewed Focus
ok.. so much for customization

No complaints here from a Human Thief, my Elite skills are A-Ok. Looking on the Wiki at your skill set it does seem like those two out of three of your elite skills would suck, but then again I like going in and doing things fast and doing status effects and stealth damage.

Good post. I agree with you.