Guild Wars 2

Just a thought, since unlike GW1, AFAIK, animations are race rather than profession specific.

I’m not suggesting removing the concept of Heavy, Medium, and Light Armor, just letting each profession use any armor type as it sees fit, and ensuring that each armor class is equally useful, rather than hoping other class features balance out having an inferior armor class.

There are a lot of ways that armor classes could be balanced out. One would be to just give each piece four equal stats boosts (and eliminate Defense, which is mechanically identical to Toughness anyway AFAIK), ensure that one is defensive and one is offensive, and classify the armor piece as Heavy, Medium, or Light based on whether the remaining two are both defensive, offensive, or one of each.

Alternatively, you could give Medium and Light extra minor stats, or a speed and/or endurance bonus to reflect the improved mobility and lower weight.

The only really obvious downside I see right now is that it might introduce some art issues in terms of mix-and-match sets that were never designed to go together. I guess as a hacky workaround, you could still the leave the profession armor class requirement on the armor skin (similar to race/cultural), though that would remove some of the benefit for players.

Anyway, I’m probably completely overlooking some reason why this is a terrible idea. Please enlighten me below.

How about PvPers using gear as a tell regarding what classes they are fighting against. If I see a heavy armor set 2000 units away, it is safe to bet I will notice them coming at me while I’m otherwise engaged in combat. I should expect quite an animation or at least some running before anticipating an attack. Now take a thief in that same armor who can steal/poison/daze/etc from 1500 units away…I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. Also there’s already 3-4 threads regarding this same topic.

No.

That suggestion often comes up, but in the end Armor is an integral part of a profession’s visual identity. It would denature them if they didn’t have to wear their own armor.

If you’re suggesting that because you want total freedom in how you want your character to look like, that’s what town clothes are supposed to be there for, but Arenanet never did anything with them. I would start there. There should be some limited ways to wear those in combat in some situations, in town there should be an option to auto-turn your town clothes, in cutscenes when your character is with civilians she/he should wear town clothes (no need to be in battle suit), etc. Town clothes should also be one-piece IMHO, or at least have the chest and the legs be one slot, so there’s no mix and match clipping issues between legs and chest pieces.

Also, the armors of this game wouldn’t look as good if you could match different armor classes because the artists would have a lot more restrictions. Things like pieces that cover more than their “area” (like the trenchcoats covering part of the legs even though they’re chest armors) wouldn’t exist, or they would impose heavy restrictions on other pieces. For example, the skirts and kilts of the light and heavy sets wouldn’t exist or would be a lot more stretched on the character’s body because they would clip with the mediums’ trenchcoats. By separating them and forbidding mixing and matching, the restrictions on designing light armors are not the same as those on medium armors, which are not the same as those on heavy armors. So this allows diversity of gear looks without dumbing down the complexity of the skins.