Guild Wars 2

My hope is that Specializations are going to make Support builds way more attractive in PvE/PvP/WvW. Not necessary, but so much more attractive to players as to make them an integral part to a team. Highly organized PvP seems to be the only place that Support is a must. I would like to see the same thing for CC, but it jsut seems like an afterthought for ArenaNet at this point.

What would be the point of doing specializations, if running them in PvE amounts to just more zerking? I love that people have the option to run a support class in PvE if they like, but it should be more pronounced and more relevant by being better at what it does in PvE.

I feel really bad for professions who are inevitably going to have their sole release specialization and have it be support oriented. Not because playing support is lame, it’s not, but because it just isn’t important enough in the grand scheme of things in this game. It needs to mean something going forward with specializations, otherwise we can just keep running the classes we have now with the DPS oriented builds we’ve been using for years.

I found what you wrote contradictory. First off I agree that ‘support builds’ should be more integral to a group fight. That said I don’t see how they can become integral without being necessary. I would argue they should be necessary for some challenges/dungeons/bosses/WvW. It’s silly to me that since GW2 has come out it is still much (almost entirely) a DPS game. There are some exceptions but they’re obvious and few. Such as with arena play.

Iason Evan.3806:

My hope is that Specializations are going to make Support builds way more attractive in PvE/PvP/WvW. Not necessary, but so much more attractive to players as to make them an integral part to a team. Highly organized PvP seems to be the only place that Support is a must. I would like to see the same thing for CC, but it jsut seems like an afterthought for ArenaNet at this point.

What would be the point of doing specializations, if running them in PvE amounts to just more zerking? I love that people have the option to run a support class in PvE if they like, but it should be more pronounced and more relevant by being better at what it does in PvE.

I feel really bad for professions who are inevitably going to have their sole release specialization and have it be support oriented. Not because playing support is lame, it’s not, but because it just isn’t important enough in the grand scheme of things in this game. It needs to mean something going forward with specializations, otherwise we can just keep running the classes we have now with the DPS oriented builds we’ve been using for years.

Whenever a dev team adds a skill or an item in a game two reactions can trigger :

• it’s better than the actual meta => New meta and ongoing power creep
• it’s not better that what we already have in the meta => No change and people will complain on how Anet fails to add anything new and relevant to the game.

Note : You only have 3 ways to speed clear something in ANY PvE game :

• You kill the stuff before it kills you => Max DPS meta (e.g GW2 berserker meta)
• You set up a classic Trinity to maximise the DPS with minimum risk and randomness (WoW raid meta)
• You perma crowd control your ennemy so it cannot retaliate while you DPS (e.g falcon builds in ME3 Multiplayer). This one is a very rare sight ’cause it feels dumb.

If you want to make Healing power useful in PvE, you have no choice but to force players to have a classic trinity meta.

Note : support sorta exists in the actual GW2 meta in the form of aegis ; protection and condi removal. In GW2, it happens that you can fully support while wearing a zerker armour. One way to change this is to tie support skills effectiveness to statistics and gear, effectively resurrecting the classic trinity.

If people can solo entire dungeons then I doubt having effective support builds would “resurrect” the trinity (at least not in the sense that it’s the only viable way to play), it’d just make the trinity a viable thing to do.

An easy way to make other stats and builds viable in PvE is to make certain skills scale in damage with those stats (but only in PvE). Wouldn’t really solve the underlying issues in the actual gameplay though, I suppose.

Keep in mind that GW2s version of support is buffs and debuffs, which can be achieved with still using full-offense stat sets.

One of the things mentioned as part of HoT is “challenging group content”. I don’t know how many people thought “raids!”, as in 10-25 man structured, instanced group content, but I don’t think that could work as we’d hope with GW2’s combat system.

Because we have no Trinity, fights are a simple matter of killing the boss before it kills you. The only place ArenaNet can add challenge and – well, some would view it as “unnecessary mechanics/minigames”; let’s call it “variety” – is Tequatl-like fights, where aspects other than DPS are required for successful completion. I’ll be honest, I enjoy Tequatl, Evolved Jungle Wurm, and Vinewrath (when they work), and it’s much more satisfying to me than clearing a dungeon or killing a less-involved world boss. If ANet can translate that to defined group content (so that the boss scaling and such can be more precisely tuned), it might actually offer that challenge.

That doesn’t really add much role for support, but of course, ANet should also continue to try to invent new things that bosses can do to, above all else, either stop or reduce the damage you deal (which makes support more important because you need to survive to deal damage longer). Whether that’s splitting your group up, trying to negate well-known tactics like stacking, healing, calling allies, whatever… ANet can still do some interesting things, but I have the (perhaps jaded) feeling that no matter what the boss does, once people figure it out, they’ll just claim it’s another DPSfest ezmode fight.