Guild Wars 2

I would like to see some profession specific gear. Before I get into that I think there should be more ways in this game to express yourself as a player. For example, gear that you can ONLY get by doing sPvP or WvW or dungeons. This would allow players to express themselves as if to say “yes, fellow Tyrians, I am a high ranking PvPer” and so on.

This leads me into the main topic of this post. You see a Necromancer, Mesmer and Elementalist and often you can not tell which is which as they all can have the same gear. I don’t think this is bad but it doesnt allow the player to say “I am a great Necromancer!”

My suggestion is that each profession has a guild and each guild a main base, hall or something. This would be where players can go to get missions from the mission board. Completing missions gives guild rank (and typical rewards). More missions open up based on level and rank. The guild quartermaster also offers new items based on level and rank. These items would be different tiers of armor and weapons, unique to the profession.

This system could help to navigate new players to content in the game as well as existing players to content and maps that don’t get seen so much. This system should also introduce new content into the game that are only activated by the missions. These missions can also hint to players what is to come in near future living story updates or even further future updates.

I think this system is a large step forward from GW1’s profession specific armor. I understand you would like to stand out more as ‘a necromancer’, but what does that actually mean? Does that mean you should be wearing green fuming armor, or lot’s of skulls? Any of those cliché’s?

Personally I’m glad to be done with that. I don’t want my necromancer to look like the most socially inept creep, but rather a civilised, high ranked member of the community, that just happens to be adept at necromancer magic.

The thing is, if you want to look like the cliché (by lack of better words) image of ‘a necromancer’, you can. You can look like whatever you want really. Also, I believe there are already a few vanity boast items, such as legendaries and special dyes, and instead of boosting variety they end up being the standard look you see everywhere, ruining any special value it has.

But that’s just my 2 cents really.

Evans.6347:

I think this system is a large step forward from GW1’s profession specific armor. I understand you would like to stand out more as ‘a necromancer’, but what does that actually mean? Does that mean you should be wearing green fuming armor, or lot’s of skulls? Any of those cliché’s?

Personally I’m glad to be done with that. I don’t want my necromancer to look like the most socially inept creep, but rather a civilised, high ranked member of the community, that just happens to be adept at necromancer magic.

The thing is, if you want to look like the cliché (by lack of better words) image of ‘a necromancer’, you can. You can look like whatever you want really. Also, I believe there are already a few vanity boast items, such as legendaries and special dyes, and instead of boosting variety they end up being the standard look you see everywhere, ruining any special value it has.

But that’s just my 2 cents really.

by the same token, you can ignore the profession specific armor and be happy looking civilized

That’s true. However, by locking something to a specific profession, that becomes unavailable to other professions, unlike the current wear whatever you want in your armor class. So in the end it’s more restrictive, for that that reason only because there are no profession specific stats.

I like the general idea!

It would also be nice to get specific tasks in those guilds that lead to unlock new skills or weapons or weaponskills. These could be different for all 3 gamemodes, so that you can choose which one to go for to get these unlocks, either by i.e. doing all dungeon paths of Arah once, or finishing the Arah PvP reward track, or tapping the ruins in WWW and holding them etc.

I would also like to see Legendary Armor to be class specific. You could still change the skin to something else, if you don’t like it.

All in all, the idea to have a class specific guild that gives you class specific missions and therefore going up in rank to unlock new Gear (skins) or other stuff would be great!

Evans.6347:

I think this system is a large step forward from GW1’s profession specific armor. I understand you would like to stand out more as ‘a necromancer’, but what does that actually mean? Does that mean you should be wearing green fuming armor, or lot’s of skulls? Any of those cliché’s?

Personally I’m glad to be done with that. I don’t want my necromancer to look like the most socially inept creep, but rather a civilised, high ranked member of the community, that just happens to be adept at necromancer magic.

The thing is, if you want to look like the cliché (by lack of better words) image of ‘a necromancer’, you can. You can look like whatever you want really. Also, I believe there are already a few vanity boast items, such as legendaries and special dyes, and instead of boosting variety they end up being the standard look you see everywhere, ruining any special value it has.

But that’s just my 2 cents really.

I completely understand what you’re saying but I would like to point out that I only used “Necromancer” as an example. I don’t actively even play a necromancer. But to answer your question as to what it would mean to wear gear unique to professions: it would only give the player more ways to express themselves, and yes stand out as the profession they play. Even if every other player of that profession can get that same gear too if they rank up enough. Second to this, or heck maybe even more primarily, this system would offer new content and ways to get gear skins and as the game progresses more tiers of gear and ranks can be added. Other games have a gear grind based around stats. Well this games grind is in aesthetics and there needs to be more of it.

And you’re right about the legendaries. The legendaries offered players a way to show that they had achieved something challenging and time consuming but since there was nothing for players at level 80 to do BUT get a legendary (I say that loosely) for two years… MANY people have them now and the impressiveness of it is somewhat lost.

I may have come off a bit pretentious there, though that wasn’t my intention. My opinion is in no way better than yours.

I suppose I’m a bit stuck conceptionally to GW1, with necro’s having rugged, creepy armor, elementalists skimpy dresses and mesmers stuck up formal wear. If I read profession specific, that’s what comes immediately to mind.

I’m with Evans on this one. There is no real need for profession-specific skins. We have all the options available to pick and choose precisely how we want our characters to look like (though i have to admit, I’m surprised hoods have not caught on with sylvari in their cultural gear).

Evans.6347:

I may have come off a bit pretentious there, though that wasn’t my intention. My opinion is in no way better than yours.

I suppose I’m a bit stuck conceptionally to GW1, with necro’s having rugged, creepy armor, elementalists skimpy dresses and mesmers stuck up formal wear. If I read profession specific, that’s what comes immediately to mind.

I didn’t feel you were being pretentious. I like bouncing ideas back and forth with other players, even if Anet doesn’t take notice. I understood what you were saying though about professions falling into a cliché look. I don’t think it would be bad if some pieces were a little cliché but I’m with you, I honestly would hope that Anet would be a little more liberal and creative than that.

They had class specific armour in Daoc that you quested for starting at level 12ish and going through to max level. No reason why they couldn’t do something similar for us here. Except for not wanting to, of course. The end armour could even be Legendary.

smekras.8203:

I’m with Evans on this one. There is no real need for profession-specific skins. We have all the options available to pick and choose precisely how we want our characters to look like (though i have to admit, I’m surprised hoods have not caught on with sylvari in their cultural gear).

I agree with Evans for the most part as well, but the opinion stated was mainly a standing against cliché armor aesthetics. I disagree with you where you say we have all the options available to choose a look for our character, however. It’s my personal opinion that the options are a little shallow with some variation but definitely not enough. With that I’d like to point out that this system would offer a way to add more variation to the gear available (even if it is profession specific) as well as offer players new ways to get gear (skins) in the game and new things to do. Not to mention more character progression.

I suppose i should rephrase my comment then. we have all the options available, from what is available for each armour weight in game, as in… no profession is barred from any armour available to its general type (Scholar, Explorer, Soldier)

I do agree with you that we could use more options and more varied looks.

I’m not sure if I was clear that I meant profession specific armor aesthetics, and not stats or stat combos. Its not my opinion that a stat combo should ever only be available to one profession and not another. I only meant that the warrior would have skins available to them that the guardian would not and vice versa. The same as cultural armor.

I would like to see more armor skins that go well with the general concept of specific professions, but keep them wearable by anyone of that armor type.

Like every technological-looking medium armor (all two of them) that goes with the general concept of the engineer is only available through gems. The only medium armor that goes for the nature aspect of rangers is the TA medium, all the rest are generic leather and hide armors that is more “bandit” rather than either ranger, engineer or even a sneaky thief.

Many general light armor is not fancy enough for a mesmer that wants to go for the good old GW1 fancy-factor, while the same selection of light armor is not creepy enough for the necromancer. The element-based armor skins would be nice as well, but so far we only have flamekissed, and thats gem-locked too.

Heavy armor is… heavy armor. Admitedly there are only 2 professions using them, but they still generally look too similar to each other. There is not enough armor with “divine” look that goes well with a true guardian, but there are plenty that go well with any soldier.

It would be nice to get a big armor package that has class-tailored skins that you could earn, not just buy through gems (though that last point is a different matter)

I think it would be great to see more variety in armor skins that were designed with certain professions in mind, and weapons. Doing quest events tied to personal and living story lore as they might relate to these profession halls could be a lot of fun and help introduce the story aspect of profession halls. All while earning some new skins for armor and weapons.

Perhaps one day there could even be a legendary weapon quest path that is tailored around a new set of weapons, one inspired by each profession. Not only would it be fun to play out a series of adventures to eventually obtain such a weapon, the profession hall concept could make that even more personal to the pc story experience.

I agree any of these profession inspired skins should be usable once unlocked, by any pc with the proper armor weight or weapon skills. The unlocking/questing process could be personal story instance style and for the particular professions only. You could invite friends to help, much like the personal stories, but the pc that initiates a particular profession event would have to be of that same profession. I think that would allow for better in depth writing for those quests/events.

It would be a great feeling to earn new armor and weapon skins through such a process. To see old places in new ways, make new friends and perhaps an enemy or two. To have some personal story details combined with LS actions. Earning a Legendary would be even more so, a weapon that was created via more than just the methodical collection of required materials with some exploration and dungeons mixed in. It would also represent a series of adventures and events the pc went through to acquire it. For me things like that feel like more of a reward in a game. Which is why I think the idea of profession halls has a lot of potential to help create some new options for obtaining skins.

lakdav.3694:

I would like to see more armor skins that go well with the general concept of specific professions, but keep them wearable by anyone of that armor type.

^This.

Create armor sets is a lot of work and having to create masses of different armors that can only be worn by a small percent of the characters is just a lot of wasted work in my eyes.

Of course we can want cultural armor that can only be worn by a special profession that has a special crafting profession, so that in the end there are maybe 10 players that can even wore that, and 9 of them think its ugly.