Guild Wars 2

Being able to select 4 instead of 3 specializations will surely give the game a fresh new perspective, New builds, New possibilities.

HELL NO!

The game is unbalanced. a 4.th one would destroy it absolutely.

Imagine full crit thiefs with shadow arts.

fire/air/arcane/tempest?
strength, tactics, berserker AND arms?

hahaha. The balance devs would be cringing in their graves.

Hirasaki.6208:

Being able to select 4 instead of 3 specializations will surely give the game a fresh new perspective, New builds, New possibilities.

Not really. Strong builds would become even stronger and all it would cause is powercreep not diversity.

Hirasaki.6208:

Being able to select 4 instead of 3 specializations will surely give the game a fresh new perspective, New builds, New possibilities.

Limitations creates meaningful choices.

Soooo

You mean like the old trait system?

I would be curious to see just what allowing a fourth specialisation would do to interclass balance, actually. I wouldn’t recommend actually doing it in the main game, but having a side arena with four (or even five!) specialisations allowed could generate some interesting supplemental balance data.

Three is probably the sweet spot for the most meaningful choices, though.

Hirasaki.6208:

Being able to select 4 instead of 3 specializations will surely give the game a fresh new perspective, New builds, New possibilities.

There are fewer permutations when choosing 4 specs out 5 (or 6 with elite) than there are when choosing 3 out of 5/6. Going to 4 specs would reduce the diversity in builds.

Stitch.1794:

Hirasaki.6208:

Being able to select 4 instead of 3 specializations will surely give the game a fresh new perspective, New builds, New possibilities.

There are fewer permutations when choosing 4 specs out 5 (or 6 with elite) than there are when choosing 3 out of 5/6. Going to 4 specs would reduce the diversity in builds.

Fewer permutations yes, but more choices overall. For a lot of classes, 1 traitline is almost mandatory for survivability, and then you add in your elite spec 97% of the time because of how much better it is than your other options, and you are left with only 1 “free” spot where you really get to choose what you want to build. Giving us 4 slots would allow us to choose 2 of the remaining 4 traitlines instead of only 1, which would increase the amount of viable choices people have.

I’m not necessarily in favor of this, but it would give players more choices.

This is not a good idea. Changing game systems over and over is not good at all, we have already tried going down that road.

When the second set of elite specs come out you’ll see a lot more variety without the need to destroy the balance of GW2

Why stop at 4? Why not have 6 lines?

(lol, jk. It would broken, but fun for a day or two [furture April Fools?])

It’s good that the game forces us to choose. Granting access to more skills or more traitlines only means people will give even less thought to their builds.

Well, I like to be forced to choose: I like the fact that I must try to find those 3 specs that I really want to use.

I mean, sure, my build would be better if I could get a fourth specialization, but everyone’s build would be. Plus, it would require a lot of work to even balance things because some builds would clearly be godly now.

And as people pointed it before, we’ll end up with more or less the same builds…

Get rid of skill trees altogether.
Each profession can choose;
3 x grandmaster traits
3 x master
3 x adept
9 x conjunction.

If you need a form restraint, then cap that only 3 skills can be taken from any one tree. If you find people aren’t using any traits at all..those are the ones you need to change. If you find people are only using certain trees, those are the ones that were never balanced in the first place. It lays a better framework and has more linear metrics to work with for future development.

This way you can as many trees as you wish, but the total pool of active skills any one player can utilise remains capped.

Like many players, it becomes tiresome and boring having to elect dead weight traits in order to get the one grand master you’re after, or having to take a whole tree when all you wanted was the adept trait.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s good that the game forces us to choose. Granting access to more skills or more traitlines only means people will give even less thought to their builds.

Try talking to warrior. They are forced to take trees they don’t want for one singular skill or forgo traits they want because the entire tree has nothing else of any use to offer.

Try playing a power warrior where you want to make use of the arms tree signet trait and unblockable attacks. It just isn’t going to work for you at all. This is why guardians and warrior 90% of the time have the same utilities for the last 3 years. Poorly structured trees with traits in terrible areas they don’t fit into or belong to.

That’s a problem with poor traits in already existing traitlines, not with not enough accessible traitlines.
Also, you may have a poor memory, because for the last 3 years there were some changes and variations in utility usage, and that’s even when ignoring HoT elite specs. And if some utilities are overused, it’s generally not due to traits, but because they are just too useful to not have them when needed (WoR on guardian, for example).