Guild Wars 2

The idea of weapon stances is to expanded game play little more.

with weapon stance when you equip a lets say sword in hero menu next to that weapon will be 3 (or more?) choses of stances that can only be changed out of combat.

basic ideas:
damage: you 1-5 skills are pure dmg skills

support: your 1-5 skills are pure support (such a aoe buffs or small heals)

defense: your 1-5 skills are set up to help your team take less dmg ( such as you make your self in a “wall” that blocks all attacks coming at you and your team mates behind you.)

there could also be some more advance ones such as berserker that would set your skills to do crazy stuff but often debuff/hurt your self and make you easier to kill will making you do crazy dmg.

to me this could help expand and make game play even more fun by giving us more weapon tools with out needing to add weapons to the game.

Personally I’m not sure if I want weapons stances to do any specific changes, but I think it would be great if ANET allowed player to purchase different stances for their classes. Maybe the warrior has an awesome weapon stance that an Engineer would like, after all who shoots a rifle from the hip?

Great way for Anet to fund their game.

I 100% support the idea of having selectable weapon stances and/or ready positions.

For example, my powerful Norn female does not need to drag her great sword on the ground due to its weight.*

Great swords in real life aren’t even that heavy—its an idiotic misconception.

I’m ready to support this idea. This helps the player develop his own playstyle, unique from others.

I feel that the stance system should be limited to a new class… musketeer class? (dreaming)

Something sort of like Elementalists’ ability to switch between the elements, but caters to specific stances and guards that would help them do more interesting moves.

What new would this introduce Dirrey? I don’t think it’s a class mechanism, but rather a gameplay mechanism, that seems like it’s good for any class.
My ideas: different skills per stance:
- Defensive: more skills based on evading, blocking, countering….
- Aggressive: more skills based on attacking. Offensive skills.

In a way, this system is still somewhat restrictive.

I’d much rather that each slots 2 – 5 has a pool of 3 – 4 skills in which I can choose to build my own style. I.E A highly defensive Sword and Board build with one skill that ignores Block (kind of like Seeking Blade). Or maybe a Hammer that’s full of Blast Finishers.

Well Sirendor, my thoughts on using this as a game mechanism is that it seems kind of redundant. Isn’t this the job of the trait skills, to enhance your role as a support, or offense, or tank? Having multiple stances on each weapon would require the game designers to come up with a multitude of new skills to fit weapon + stance. While this would be very fun for players, I doubt ANet is willing to invest the time to develop it.

Alternatively, producing some more traits that can enhance the 3 roles for each class would be far more beneficial without the need to create hundreds of new skills. TheDaiBish makes an excellent point in being able to group different skills in slots 2 – 5. It would increase versatility among players.

My suggestion on using this on a new class was a compromise to players and developers. A new class to explore the stances and guards system (so let’s say a certain stance is excellent at evading) can be built with the existing skills infrastructure while developers can work on additional mechanisms for parries and counters if this is actually enjoyable. I’ve never actually seen a game that uses different stances, and I only draw knowledge from stance philosophies in martial arts. I feel that a more varied combat philosophy would help counter the fact that you can figure out exactly what a player is going to do based on their weapon choices.

I seriously want versatility, and that’s why I say implement it to ALL the classes. I’m fine with you making a class idea about this, but it would even be better to have it all, imo.
If you make a thread about your class, i’ll check it out.