Guild Wars 2

After viewing the trailer for the new expansion I can say I’m 50/50 on it. I will not make a full judgement on it until after I get to experience both upcoming beta weekends. That being said on the positive side I think some of the new elite specs look interesting while others simply make no sense what so ever. Especially when they get brought in to the wvw and pvp realms. For example a warrior with 2 daggers..really?? A thief with a rifle so they can pick opponents off from a distance…totally broken. I would have thought with a new expansion we might have seen some new fresh ideas for new weapons for each class. Some more 2 handed weapons, since they are lacking in the game, would have been a welcome addition. For example, rather then give a warrior 2 daggers something cool like a 2h battle axe(like the charr carried in gw1 prophecies) would have been an awesome addition.

After talking with my guild and my wvw server community, mind you I don’t speak for everyone here, we were hoping to see some new(old gw1) classes and races brought into the game. Alot of us agree we would like to see gw2 bring back the monk class. There seems to be an overwhelming response to having a pure healer back in the game. Alot of folks I have talked to were hoping that it would be brought back and incorporated into gw2. If it is properly done(like it was in gw1) it could be a welcome addition to all 4 aspects of the game(PvE/WvW/PvP/Raids). The other classes I hear alot of people wishing were brought back are the ritualist and the dervish.We agree that all 3 of these classes would be fun to play in all aspects of the game. We were also hoping to see some more playable races brought into the new expansion like tengu, kodan, tamini, or even the deldimor dwarf to name a few. Each with new racial traits. Maybe with enough community support we might see this happen in the future.

Just some food for thought in the future Anet

“For example a warrior with 2 daggers..really??’ —--

2 Classes use Staff as a melee weapon, The Rev uses a hammer to cast magical projectiles, The Engineer has a skill that makes Pistols act like a Flamethrower, the necro axes skills never physically touch their target, the Mesmer uses a Greatsword to shoot beams of pure energy….. Of all the things to suggest sound stupid, the top of your list is “Warrior with 2 daggers”?

The problem you’re having right now is that you’re all over the map as to what constitutes a good idea and a bad idea. Like in what way does a 2H Axe uniquely differ from a Greatsword, when they’re both cleaving weapons? How can a Burst skill be made that isn’t already represented by either the GS or Axe? Consider Axe Master Hareth attacks animate the same way one would use a Hammer, and his spin attack is modeled after a Guardian GS skill. If they swapped the axe for a hammer, I doubt anyone would had questioned it.

As for everything else….. it has to get shot down based on backward compatibility. Racial skills are ultimately an abandoned idea… to the point where the Rev influentially doesn’t even have access to them. The race itself won’t be done, because it calls for the creation of a dedicated starter zone, the retroactive recording all story content up to that point, and retconing all previous story to explain why a race that previously choose to stay out of the conflict has always been at its forefront.

This game doesn’t accrue content the way WoW does, and by extension most other MMORPGs, making it prone to some pretty glaring continuity errors when it comes to story. And so far, the suggestions to reconcile this problem are just as contrived as the justification for having the new races in the first place. And those are just the most apparent practical issues, before even beginning to touch on the disconnect on how players are meant to value charters “as characters” rather then play things.

Then looking at story moving forward…. adding more races seriously start to complicate the political scene as they start piling up. Its like Shonen Jump Syndrome…. where the continuous addition of characters inevitably results in the inability to maintain coherent interaction within the story. A common sign of this is when characters start becoming interchangeable, and story arcs are unable to achieve satisfying closure as the cast creates too many plot threads to follow. For instance…. how can a Tengu be Pact Commander, while still reference involvement in Zhaitan’s downfall, when the Tengu didn’t get involved until much later, and how no one seems to react to the fact that the Commander was a Tengu that whole time. Even with the races we have now, any references made to the commander’s race have to be interchange within the main story thread, and to do so, must represent the Commander’s race as being unremarkable in the political climate. And given the significance of a Commander coming from the secondary races would have in the lore…… I have a hard time seeing how this could be work in the story without it getting incredibly contrived.