Guild Wars 2

It would be wonderful if there was a way to let our characters choose between the three armor types, but it’s much too late to try balancing such an option in for the existing professions. Everything from their health to their skills are leveraged against their armor type, and it works great.

But a new profession can be more flexible, if designed that way from the start. Hence I propose a new class built around this idea: switching roles and armor types as their primary mechanic.

The player would have to maintain three sets of armor—and runes—simultaneously, making this an advanced profession aimed for players who have built up some resources.

F1-F3 skills swap you to your light, medium, and heavy armor sets, respectively. This drastically changes your role in combat, altering the effects of traits and skills similarly to an elementalist’s attunement. The recharge on role switching would be necessarily long, to avoid abuse of stacking lingering bonuses from different rune sets.

The light role is based around damage; medium is control; and heavy is support.

We need only four trait lines, instead of five. The fourth line has three versions that would change with armor role:

• Light: Critical Damage; Weapon Skill Recharge
• Medium: Condition Duration; Utility Skill Recharge
• Heavy: Boon Duration; Elite & Healing Skill Recharge

The kink in this trait scheme is that one of the other lines would have to combine two major attributes. It could be Toughness and Vitality, so that the increased defense in this one line can be easily offset by slightly lowering the profession’s base health. Alternately, combining Power and Precision could be offset by bringing skill damage down a tick.

Making the profession a gemstore unlock should be enough to keep newbies from breaking their banks trying to equip one of these guys, and I don’t think many people would argue the merit of paying for a new profession when there are no known expansions for it to be bundled with.

(Note: I’m not concerned with the profession’s theme right now. It could be pretty much anything.)