Guild Wars 2

Arenanet was bold to abolish set roles in Guild Wars 2. They were bold to give every class the ability to perform every role. These were, by all means admirable innovations – brave experiments that had (and have) a lot of potential.

Now I’m going to go into detail as to why the system doesn’t really work as is. I am not going to say that a game that doesn’t implement the traditional holy trinity can’t work. In fact, I thoroughly believe that the trinity is outdated and can be improved upon. It has its place, but there is a need for innovative new titles like this one that create an alternative.

Specialization breeds interdependence, generalization does not

No, this is not the same thing as saying “Blargh, trinity good, generalized roles bad!” This simply refers to skill design. Nothing more, nothing less.

This is the primary area where Guild Wars 2 completely missed the mark.

A skill that is generalized is a skill that is uninteresting. A build that performs well in almost all situations is one that does not lend itself to team play.

Let’s compare some skills:

Bull’s Charge (Guild Wars 2)
Charge at your foe, knock them down, and do damage.

Bull’s Strike (Guild Wars 1)
Damage your foe. Knock them down if they were moving.

Counter Blow (Guild Wars 1)
Damage your foe. Knock them down if they were attacking.

The distinction is a fine one but an important one. Bull’s Charge is too versatile, too standard, and too generalized. It doesn’t depend on any particular situation for success. It doesn’t serve a specific role for the group. Bull’s Strike, on the other hand, serves a much more specific function – it’s great for stopping a foe from kiting and it’s great for stopping a foe from pursuing an ally. Counter Blow is great for stopping a foe that is actively pressuring you or an ally – allowing you to turn the fight around. Bull’s Charge does all of these, but it is also a core burst skill, a core cc skill, and a core mobility skill. It does everything. The existence of too many skills like this leads to a class design that is nothing short of “perfect” – here meaning bad design as opposed to good design. A class that does not rely on teammates to round out its situational weaknesses is one that does not mesh well with a team-based game.

To extend on the former point, generalization breeds redundancy

The aforementioned generic, multi-purpose skills contribute to classes that are too similar. They don’t function differently. Not really. They all perform very similar roles and can all do so while performing all of the other roles in the same build. The result is stagnation and redundancy.

No longer is it the case that each class brings desirable benefits to the table that can’t be covered by other classes. It’s all about doing the same thing as everyone else – but better.

This is why GW2’s class design is so prone to group bias and imbalances. It’s not just because “Rangers suck” or “Warriors are the best class for PvE.” It’s that the Ranger brings almost nothing to the table that isn’t better covered by another class.

So, to bring this first post full circle, I will make a bold statement. A “No-trinity System” cannot work without specialized skill design.

Damage isn’t a role, it’s a given.

This is actually one aspect of Guild Wars 2’s design that is right for all of the wrong reasons.

Guild Wars 2’s system considers damage to be part of the trinity but allows everyone to deal it as if it weren’t anyway.

What do I mean by this? Damage should not be a role. It should have never been a role. It should be an extension of your class’s natural identity.

First and foremost, it should not be something to gear for. Damage gear isn’t an interesting choice. It isn’t a compelling choice. In a traditional MMO, it’s either a given for your class or useless for your class. In Guild Wars 2, it is a given, period.

In a good gear system, damage is no longer a stat. Instead, you flesh out your gear with buff durations, crowd control durations, healing power, and durability, among various other support, control, and survivability stats.

Now, damage as an extension of the way your class naturally performs its functions is an entirely different factor.

Let’s consider several different avenues through which a class can deal damage without doing so redundantly.

The Standard/The Direct – damages through direct means. No tricks or subtlety.

The Punisher – Damages by punishing foes for taking specific actions.

The Indirect – Damages through an AI Vector (minions/illusions/etc.)

The Support – Damages through skills that buff allied damage or damage in an area around an ally, among other various effects. Consider this one the ambiguous one, as it has so many venues, but they are all, without exception, centered upon helping allies.

I’m sure there are others, but you get the point. Damage is an extension, not a role. It is a facet of who your character is, but it is not an aspiration. It should come naturally and should be handled in a way that is not redundant.

Everyone should do damage, but every class should do so in a way that is wildly different from the others.

Now, you might ask how Guild Wars 2 is different from what I’ve put forth. In short, it is different because its classes do not deal damage through one or two sets of ideals, but rather through too many venues all at once and without losing anything of real significance when doing so. The roles are blended. The Mesmer, for example, is the Standard, the Indirect, AND the Punisher, with a little bit of the Support to boot.

But if Damage is not part of the roles system, what is?

Guild Wars 2 was mistaken in its original trinity concept – Damage, Support, Control.

It’s actually a bit more specific than that. Support, Control, Obstruction.

Support is that which directly benefits teammates through healing, damage mitigation, or buffing.

Control is that which directly hinders foes through stuns, snares, slows, blinds, silences, and other effects. It also encompasses effects which discourage foes from taking actions as opposed to preventing them from doing so.

Obstruction is the evolution of the traditional tank. It is that which actively blocks projectiles, manipulates or blocks opposing pathing, taunts (NOT threat-builds) foes off of an ally, etc. This is distinguished from a normal aggro-based tank in that it is highly active. Whereas a traditional tank stays glued to the enemy, the Obstructor acts like Braum from League of Legends, positioning himself in the right spot to actively divert damage – whether that be by leaping to a specific ally or by keeping a specific enemy off of his teammates by blocking its pathing and reserving all of his short-duration taunts for it. The Obstructor is the most difficult role to play.

Now, it isn’t wrong for all classes to be able to perform all of these aforementioned roles. It’s wrong for them to do all of these in such similar, redundant manners.

With both of the previous sections in mind (damage is not a role + the new trinity), let’s consider how this works by using the Mesmer and as an example.

The Mesmer is The Punisher and The Indirect. He uses AI-Controlled, highly specialized illusions as a vector for his damage and control while also thwarting opposing actions. The Mesmer can Support through skills that debuff foes to give allies (including his illusions) buffs as they perform specific actions. He can Control through skills that interrupt foes and punish them for taking specific actions – often triggered by the death of an illusion. He can Obstruct by obstructing opposing pathing with his illusions, commanding them to encircle specific foes or by taunting a foe to attack the nearest illusion – in other words, he has a highly active, but indirect style of tanking.

There is a need for many avenues of accomplishing tasks

Now, while my description on Damage may have seemed like a limiter that reduces the number of ways to play a character, it is actually a foundational change that paves the way for each class to be defined, fleshed out, and expanded out through a plethora of SPECIALIZED skills.

For Guild Wars 2, that’s going to involve some changes – quantity upgrades and skill reworks:

Every class should have access to every weapon and there should be more weapon types in the game (eventually).
Every class should have a selection of at least 50 Utility Skills (eventually).
Every class should have at least 7 Elite Skills (eventually).
Generalized skills should be reworked into specialized skills, often with conditional triggers.
The selection of buffs and debuffs should be expanded for greater depth, variety, and class-specific buffs and debuffs

Yes, there should be class-specific boons and conditions

This is one of the EASIEST ways to diversify classes and ensure that each class has an innate purpose that they can bring to the team.

I’ll give a couple of class examples:

Mesmer –
Unique Condition – Perplexity – Increases the cast time of skills.
Unique Boon – Focus – Interrupt opposing skills when you hit them. (Always applied in SHORT durations and/or with long cd’s).

Guardian -
Unique Condition – Mercy – Heal your enemy when you attack them.
Unique Boon – Courage – Increases your damage output by x% of missing health.

Elementalist -
Unique Condition – Exposure – Extends the duration of future condition applications on you by 2 seconds.
Unique Boon – Knowledge – Reduces cooldown times by 10%.

Progression Through The Horizontal

Horizontal progression means much more than just aesthetics. It means expanding your OPTIONS, but not your direct power through exploring every facet of the game and unlocking new skills and traits to experiment with.

In a good horizontal progression system, a seasoned player will not play the same as a new player. They will be able to play in many different ways from when they started playing and will be able to experiment with various new styles.

You had the right idea in creating new Grandmaster Traits that are unlocked through specific tasks. Unfortunately, this was much too little. It came across as jarring rather than organic.

Much like Guild Wars 1’s Elite Skill capping, Guild Wars 2 should encourage exploring and tackling various dungeons, explorable areas, dynamic events, and other facets of its gameplay by giving players new skills to play with.

But whatever you do, make sure that all of these are unlocked in PvP (barring emergency balancing/bug abuse disables) at all times. And do not put any skills behind a PvP unlock. PvE players do not want to be forced to play PvP to unlock a new skill or trait and PvP players do not want to be forced to play PvE. I think you understand that point already, as you’ve been good about sticking to it – much more so than most MMO developers. WvW has ever been the neutral ground. It is acceptable to put skill and trait unlocks there and it is acceptable to have PvE-unlocked skills and traits work there.

I hope I’ve been informative and helpful.

These are ideas that I’ve been toying around with for a long time. I’ve come to a great many realizations and wished to share what analyses I could with the community and with you – Arenanet, my favorite developers of all time.

And no, that wasn’t brown-nosing. Guild Wars 1 is the game that I still hold up as the pinnacle of good design and one of the best games ever made. Flaws aside, I do love Guild Wars 2 and would love to see it flourish as a game that does justice to its prequel while also making an identity of its own and succeeding in ways that Arenanet couldn’t have even conceived of when it made the first game.

But the first step towards that is going to be improving upon the things that make Guild Wars 2 great by both moving to the future and looking back at what you’ve already accomplished with your first title.

Very good post OP. Here is a relevant picture I made because I really have nothing to say since you hit every point.

I see where you’re coming from and don’t have comment on most of it…until I read that there should be class specific conditions and boons.

One of the reasons the game is set up the way it is is not to push people to have to be in certain roles. I don’t really want to wait for a healer or wait for a tank or wait for someone who has access to X condition. That’s exactly what this game was set up not to do.

If I specific condition or boon becomes important enough to warrant inclusion in a party, then one of the main advantages to abandoning the trinity will be lost.

I know a lot of people say that right now necros being nothing to the party and they’re not wanted in dungeons.

But I run dungeons with necros all the time and we do fine. I can advertise a group right now for all welcome and do just about any dungeon in a short amount of time.

That all changes when you start making it so that certain professions have certain specific advantages. We already have that with mesmer and guardian reflects for specific situations or elementalist ice bows and great swords.

In my opinion these don’t make the game better.

Vayne.8563:

Snippity snip. Words and stuff.

I will confess that this is an area with which I had considerable doubt.

There IS a need to expand upon the game’s buff and debuff system. The current limitations are the primary offender in creating redundant class and skill designs.

I went with the easiest venue in suggesting class-specific boons and conditions. The alternative…. the BETTER alternative would be to expand on the selection of boons and conditions to a large degree, perhaps so much so that the hex system is even brought back.

Now, don’t get me wrong, hexes had issues. They were too powerful and too difficult to remove by far. Their complete removal in the creation of Guild Wars 2, however, has created more problems than solutions.

There’s both good and bad points to getting rid of specific roles. On the plus side, it means no more waiting for hours in a map yelling “LF 1 Healer to go!” On the bad side, it also means that the classes all start to blur into each other, and the intricacies of game balance mean that one or more classes will eventually become superior to the others, leading to “tiers” that, while fine in fighting games, are really out of place in an MMO or RPG because it promotes classism.

It also creates a sense of uniformity that can make it harder for players who favour certain playstyles to stand out. It’s one of the worst mistakes that D&D 4E made, in my opinion. All the classes basically were self-sufficient, which also meant that everybody were basically the same character, just with different flavorings thrown on top.

I’ve always thought the problem was two fold. By making it so that you could dodge pretty much all damage, you didn’t need any real kind of support through most of the content.

We need more content were CC is actually relevant. I think all professions should be able to do everything, even if it is differently. Professions should be there for flavor not for requirement. That’s of course just an opinion.

AI needs to be smarter and bosses need to make it so that you can’t just mow them down without any though process.

That’s the real issue I think.

Vayne.8563:

I’ve always thought the problem was two fold. By making it so that you could dodge pretty much all damage, you didn’t need any real kind of support through most of the content.

We need more content were CC is actually relevant. I think all professions should be able to do everything, even if it is differently. Professions should be there for flavor not for requirement. That’s of course just an opinion.

AI needs to be smarter and bosses need to make it so that you can’t just mow them down without any though process.

That’s the real issue I think.

I agree with this. Support roles need to be more utilized, because as it is now, DPS is the more sufficient role right now, whether it’s in dungeons, or the open-world.

A lot of it, has to do with self-reliance too. Players are usually required to heal, dodge, and block for themselves. This makes being support pretty much useless, especially in an open-world environment.

They actually did change the A.I. on some encounters too. Marionette, Teq, Wurm, etc., but all the previous content doesn’t really behave like these encounters, and i don’t think Anet has any inclination of changing them. It probably took them months to redo the Teq encounter. There would have to be dozens of bosses that would need the same treatment.

OP wrote: “Yes, there should be class-specific boons and conditions”

That would be a nice thing, but it would have to be carefully balanced, otherwise certain classes would be excluded. A possible solution, would be for the encounter to change it’s “skill set”, based on group composition, thereby excluding/including the specific class boons/conditions.

Wall of text but I stopped at the whole Bull’s Strike thing. If you were a warrior using Bull’s Strike in the GW1 metagame, you weren’t doing the metagame right to begin with. Which, really, this is where the play-your-way chimes in. GW2 is designed to have a metagame and still be completed by how other people play – the metagame doesn’t necessarily finish content, just finishes content faster. That’s key.

The fact that I can run around with an ele camping air for Lightning Whip or use bearbow on my ranger or, if I wanted, use swordhorn/dual axes/sword and board/staff mesmer for PvE content makes play-your-way viable. Which is a nice bonus for me, because I love using this stuff for cosmetic/cosplay purposes.

It doesn’t require specialization to complete – although it does require people to have some idea of what they are doing. When you run across a player who’s not very good, there’s a strong likelihood even if you gave them a good build they wouldn’t be very good.