Guild Wars 2

Skip the bold text if you played the original Guild Wars.
For those of you who never played the original Guild Wars, you need some background info. In the original game, you were only restricted to your core profession (what you chose at character select) up to a certain point. Partway through each campaign you would be allowed to sample a few abilities from other professions, and choose a secondary profession to augment your abilities. You had access to every skill from both professions, and you could change your secondary profession at any time while in town, after you had purchased the ability to use each profession as a secondary. The only drawback is that you couldn’t put points into the primary attribute of your secondary professions (akin to trait points, but each profession had 4-5 unique attributes and one of them was restricted to those with the proper core profession).
Example: Elementalist
Attributes:
Fire Magic
Water Magic
Earth Magic
Air Magic
Energy Storage (Primary) <— Players who started as an Elementalist could put points into Energy Storage, but a Ranger who chose Elementalist as his secondary profession could not.

Okay, so the background info is done…my question is, has ArenaNet ever considered bringing back the hybridization system? It was one of my favorite parts of the original Guild Wars, and made the number of possible viable builds nearly limitless…as a testament to this, websites like pvx.wikia.com and gwpvx.gamepedia.com still hold thousands of player-created builds for various purposes.

Also, where the heck is my Dervish? WTB spin-to-win scythe man. :(

This would mean a comlpete overhaul of balancing for pve and pvp, si i doubt it will happen.

There are loads of issues that might arise from allowing hybrids, and I don’t think they are worth the trouble:

Everyone able to use Portals when they want? Everyone using Wall of Reflection when they want? How about Shadow Refuge? Some of the most commonly used utility skills, that are at least a reason to get a specific profession in your team, now completely gone.

What about Traitlines that offer the same stat boost? Like Fire Magic from Elementalist and Marksmanship from Ranger both giving more Power? Massive imbalance of Power coming from increasing both, or what about using Thief damage modifier traits together with Elementalist damage modifier traits, it’s going to be like hell to balance.

I’m not sure this would work in GW2, in GW1 there were too many limits in your build, only able to change your skillbar and traits while in town, only having access to 8 skills at a time, those limits were balancing hybrids, in GW2 there is no limit at all.

You only have access to 5 skills at a time (weapons are irrelevant since they’re specific to the class and weapon type). GW1 had far fewer limitations on builds precisely BECAUSE the game was balanced around hybridization. The only problem I see with implementing it in GW2 is that each class only has around 30-40 skills. Hybridization would have to be less extensive than it was in GW1. Granted, it would be a year’s worth of work to put the system in play but I feel that it was a core part of the Guild Wars experience and shouldn’t have been left out of the sequel.
The only thing about traits you need to change is the runes you have access to. Adding more traits would be irrelevant and imbalanced for the exact reason you just mentioned.
As for some classes becoming less desirable since you can grab their skills form a secondary, limit the skills you have access to from your secondary profession. Keep the unique mechanics locked to the core profession while basically providing alternate means of applying common effects through hybridization. And as always, hybridization is a big fat helping of opportunity cost. While you have several options, you can only take one.
Mesmer portals are an interesting mechanic, but by enforcing a minimum distance between entries and exits, there wouldn’t be much of a problem with them.

@MassIneffective.2364: With portals I think He/She means Teleportation skills like mesmer that has a skill that is named Portal.

I do not support this idéa though becouse it is for me more interesting that Anet would focus their balancing on stuff that’s still in game and if there where something new to balance I would rather have a new class than dualclasses.

The reason hybrids worked in GW1 is opportunity cost.
You had energy – and each class managed it somewhat differently – so while you could run high-energy demand ele spells on your warrior you weren’t going to be able to cast a lot of them.

The problem here is that we have no energy management – because we have no energy – we have cooldowns.

Some combinations would make certain classes OP, whilst some utilities being crossed over would make others useless.

Take warriors for example – only wanted in dungeon runs anymore because of banners. If any other class can take them -we’re completely out of the loop as far as DPS goes.

They would have to basically reinvent the game from scratch to be able to implement this – and we all know that’s not going to happen.

MassIneffective.2364:

You only have access to 5 skills at a time (weapons are irrelevant since they’re specific to the class and weapon type). GW1 had far fewer limitations on builds precisely BECAUSE the game was balanced around hybridization. The only problem I see with implementing it in GW2 is that each class only has around 30-40 skills. Hybridization would have to be less extensive than it was in GW1. Granted, it would be a year’s worth of work to put the system in play but I feel that it was a core part of the Guild Wars experience and shouldn’t have been left out of the sequel.
The only thing about traits you need to change is the runes you have access to. Adding more traits would be irrelevant and imbalanced for the exact reason you just mentioned.
As for some classes becoming less desirable since you can grab their skills form a secondary, limit the skills you have access to from your secondary profession. Keep the unique mechanics locked to the core profession while basically providing alternate means of applying common effects through hybridization. And as always, hybridization is a big fat helping of opportunity cost. While you have several options, you can only take one.
Mesmer portals are an interesting mechanic, but by enforcing a minimum distance between entries and exits, there wouldn’t be much of a problem with them.

So you are only talking about Utility skills now? As I already mentioned above even for utility skills it wouldn’t work, utility skills in GW2 are how different professions are different from each other and you want to remove any idea of unique profs? Which skills would you limit anyway? Most utility skills are unique to a profession for a reason.

Also, about the weapon skill lock, I really don’t understand why people count only the utility skills and compare their amount to the amount of skills in GW1. GW2 has a total of 960 skills, more than how many GW1 had combining Prophecies and Factions if you add all skills in, but in order to make their argument of less skills, you remove everything and count only utilities.

GW2 released with double the amount of skills GW1 had at release. In GW2 you effectively play a hybrid by weapon swapping, that’s already like playing 2 different builds, a Hammer+Longbow Warrior has a different playstyle (and build) than a Sword/Sword + Longbow Warrior.

There is your hybrid. Accessing Portals / Stealth and Projectile reflection is all people would do from other professions, to give them to professions that miss them.

What bugs me more than a lack of weapon skill varieties/options is the fact that some classes can equip weapons as off hand but cannot use them as main hand. That and dual wield attack chains only using one hand for attack animations.

maddoctor.2738:

So you are only talking about Utility skills now? As I already mentioned above even for utility skills it wouldn’t work, utility skills in GW2 are how different professions are different from each other and you want to remove any idea of unique profs? Which skills would you limit anyway? Most utility skills are unique to a profession for a reason.

Also, about the weapon skill lock, I really don’t understand why people count only the utility skills and compare their amount to the amount of skills in GW1. GW2 has a total of 960 skills, more than how many GW1 had combining Prophecies and Factions if you add all skills in, but in order to make their argument of less skills, you remove everything and count only utilities.

GW2 released with double the amount of skills GW1 had at release. In GW2 you effectively play a hybrid by weapon swapping, that’s already like playing 2 different builds, a Hammer+Longbow Warrior has a different playstyle (and build) than a Sword/Sword + Longbow Warrior.

There is your hybrid. Accessing Portals / Stealth and Projectile reflection is all people would do from other professions, to give them to professions that miss them.

My point being that I don’t like that weapons are the source of over half your active abilties. I liked it more when you could use any skill from your profession at any time, and with more than one type of weapon.

As far as utility goes, aren’t most of the unique mechanics like stealth and whatnot restricted to weaponry now? If they’re not, reworking a handful of weapons would fix that.

Call it fanboy nostalgia or whatever, but GW2 just deviated a bit too far from the original for my taste. I liked the old combat system and skill hunting and not being limited to a handful of viable options. That being said, GW2 is a decent game in its own right, but it doesn’t quite feel like Guild Wars unless I focus on the story.

I think the route that would better serve this game would be to introduce class evolutions where a class has a choice at level 80 to evolve into 1 of 2 new advanced classes(per specific profession)or stay as the vanilla class. This way you get variety, but it’s not game breaking. ArenaNet has a real disdain(justified or not)for skill splits for different formats(wvw/pve/pvp)and this hybridization you are talking about totally flies in the face of that. It just wouldn’t work without skill splits for formats.

Iason Evan.3806:

I think the route that would better serve this game would be to introduce class evolutions where a class has a choice at level 80 to evolve into 1 of 2 new advanced classes(per specific profession)or stay as the vanilla class. This way you get variety, but it’s not game breaking. ArenaNet has a real disdain(justified or not)for skill splits for different formats(wvw/pve/pvp)and this hybridization you are talking about totally flies in the face of that. It just wouldn’t work without skill splits for formats.

They’d just be copying Final Fantasy at that point, and they used skill splits as a balancing mechanism for 7 years with the original Guild Wars. If they really didn’t like doing it, I never saw anything about it during that time. And it was a much better solution than every other MMO’s, which was fix it on one side while breaking it on the other.