Guild Wars 2

Specializations are Arenanets method of introducing new skills/abilities etc to the game without imbalancing it too much. New skills and abilities are fun to have and mix up the meta. They were unable to do this very well during the first Living World rounds (eg Antitoxin Spray) so they needed a method of doing this which was one of the main reasons I think they made Specializations (or elite specs).

Obviously a single or even a season of Living World is not enough time for Arenanet to put out a full set of new specializations BUT I am wondering what people would think of 1-2 professions getting new specializations that are possibly relevant/thematic to a Living World Release??

Obviously there is the “Not Fair” factor for peoples main prof that is not covered. So would people in general only be happy with all new specializations as expansion content? Obviously with incremental Living World updates it would eventually build up (across a few seasons) so that all professions had 2 complete elite specs.

These elite specs could potentially fill in holes where a profession is not performing well or introduce new roles that professions can now viably compete.

Example: Druid seems like the only viable dedicated healer/support spec at the moment. Why not introduce 1-2 specs for different professions that add viable healer specs to those professions? (eg Spiritualist – elementalist healer spec)

Example2: More thematic, with a pirate themed Living World season you could see one or two professions getting a swashbuckling like elite spec.

I hope they do this, starting with adding another option for Ranger as many rangers did not roll a ranger to become a heal-bot do druid adds nothing to those people.

I disagree that a season isn’t enough time to produce a full set. Although LS2 only consisted of 8 chapters, it ran for over 6 months (early July 2014 – late January 2015). It’s also worth remembering that weren’t just working on the first elite specs last year, first they had to overhaul the core trait system to make room for elite specs, as well as produce an entirely new profession, neither of which would need repeating for a second set of elites. Although we don’t know precisely when they started working on the first elite specs, it was ~10 months from announcing to releasing, so 6 months may well be enough time to produce a full set on their own.

Rather than include the elite specs piecemeal in living story releases, perhaps they would instead add a second set as a feature pack released after living story season 3, to avoid the unfairness of classes gettings specs at different times.

Either way, I think it’s doubtful we’d have to wait for the next expansion to get more, considering that the current number of hero points available means we currently have (I think) 364 spare, more than enough assuming a new elite spec would cost 250.