Guild Wars 2

It just occured to me what one of the major issues with the elite specs is. For several classes, the playstyles of the elite specs are so contrary to that of the base class that the elite spec attracts people that are either tired of or just overall dislike the design of the base class.

Druids are probably the biggest example of this. They’re an elite spec that’s very close to 100% based around healing, attached to a base class whose only source of healing to allies are a long cooldown heal skill, and regeneration.

A good number of the people that the druid attracts are those that love healing. But, due to rangers being a class with very little ally healing built into them, it clearly isn’t the sort of class that they’d want to play, so forcing them to play a ranger with no healing for at least half of the new maps in order to unlock their healing spec is going to feel awful, as it’s the exact playstyle that they didn’t want to play.

If hero points were account bound rather than character bound, it would allow them to pick a base class that they enjoy, in the case of druid, say, a water focused elementalist or medic guardian while gathering their hero points and then make a druid once the healing spec that they wanted to play is available to them rather than spending the majority of the time having to play as a DPS.

The same applies to people who like dragonhunter because they love ranged characters, who quite logically avoided base guardian like the plague due to the scepter being an underwhelming ranged weapon, people that like the scrapper due to its melee playstyle while disliking the base engineer due to its lack of variety in melee weaponry, etc.