With LS season 3 underway it seems likely that an expansion won’t be far behind, which means new elite specs with with a bunch of new mechanics to play around with. What I’d like to do here is think about how existing tech in the engine could be applied in new and interesting ways, as well as what kinds of new tech could be brought into the game.
To start off, here’s some of the things I’ve been thinking about previously.
Endurance loss
Back in ye olde days thieves would lose all of their endurance when using haste, as a drawback to the power that doubling attack speed brought. Since that got taken out there haven’t been any other skills that cause endurance loss in any way, so I have to wonder: what if endurance loss returned both as an offensive effect and as a potential cost to using certain skills.
Having it as an offensive effect would result in a new kind of offence support by allowing players to reduce the number of dodges available to the enemy and help their allies line up slower attacks. As a skill cost it could be an interesting risk management mechanic, allowing a player to use a powerful skill without a recharge of any kind but sacrificing their precious dodges for it.
Chain skills
The chain mechanic is mostly used on autoattacks and a few other skills that are meant to have some sort of follow up after the initial use. What I thought could be interesting is if some skills could transform into entirely different skills based on the circumstances.
One kind of attack that’s very common in Warhammer 40k is large weapons having access to different firing profiles for ‘focused’ or ‘dispersed’ modes, allowing the unit to fire either a single target shot that’s good at taking out heroes and tanks or an aoe or rapid fire attack for infantry squads. A similar type of move could exist here by having it act as dispersed when you don’t have a target and focused when you do, letting the user get some versatility.
Boon duration manipulation
This got added with HoT and I think there’s a lot more that could be done with it. Right now the only form that exists is to add 2 seconds to the duration of every boon on affected allies. Some obvious things that could also happen with this would be decreasing the duration of boons on enemies, increasing or decreasing the duration of conditions and focusing the effect on one or more specific boons or conditions.
Boon and condition play aren’t very interesting as things stand. With boons they’re essentially free except in some niche circumstances or against a necro, while condis will either turn you into a punching bag for your enemies or do nothing at all depending on how much condi application your enemies have and how much removal your allies have. Being able to manipulate them might be able to make things more interesting.
Tethers
Tethers aren’t very widely used but they bring in an interesting play dynamic that isn’t present with most effects. Usually once a tether is attached there’s no way to prevent its effects unless you move outside of tether range.
Tethers could make for some interesting active area denial if they were a bit more widely available. Another possibility is having short ranged tethers that benefit your allies in some way, with the downside being that the tether could easily be broken if your enemies can separate you.
Targeting allies
Support abilities in GW2 have all generally been aoes of some sort to make it unnecessary to target allies during combat, but I’m not entirely sure that it was for the best. Support tends to be almost entirely incidental during combat; you either fight the enemy and your support just happens on its own as has generally been the case for ele, or you bring a skill to use its effect for your own self defence and it just happens to help your allies as well.
The main reason why I think being able to target allies could be a good thing is that it would then allow for single target support, making things like picking out and changing focus fire targets more important. Also this could potentially raise the viability of squishier builds by supplementing their weaker self defence with stronger single target support and by the need to overcome single target support when focus firing instead of the generalised, weaker aoe support that’s currently used.
In general if this change was made I would expect to see aoe support somewhat weakened as well as some support skills being retooled to work as single target instead of aoe. Some high value skills could even borrow the focused/dispersed style I mentioned before.
If anyone else has some thoughts on mechanics changes post them here.