Guild Wars 2

Perhaps this is not a topic entirely fit for lore, but see it as the sequal to the ‘6th playable race’ topic. Try to describe the professions well.

1. Battle-bard: Light armored. Able to use instruments and entertainment-based skills. Gives decent boons to the troops and summons mystic forces trough songs to attack their foes. They are able to make ‘bridges’ with the profession mechanics buttons. These bridges are used between skills: when a skill is followed by a bridge and another skill, the combination will change the effects of the last skill. That way your skills will get stronger when you form combinations and melodies. Also able to use off-hand weapons in the main hand (like the warhorn.)

2. Shaman: Light armored. Uses the forces of nature to strike their foes. Conditions and boons caused by skills depend on the types of enviromental energy present. The Profession mechanics show the kinds of enviromental energy nearby. Also able to comune with spirits and alter his body to gain the powers of the spirits.

3. Samoerai: Heavy armor. Expert in every weapon with sharp edges (including bows). Doesn’t swing his sword at anything that moves like the warrior or the guardian, he mostly singles out one enemy. He waits for a foe to strike: if he blocks at the right moment, he responds with a devastating counter based on the type of attack the enemy trew at him. When he counters one foe that’s in a group, he’s able to do a quick chain-attack striking lot’s of foes individually.

Show me your pick, and give feedback to others!

There’s already a few threads on this…

But if there would ever get a 9th profession, it’ll be heavy armor just to even things out I’m certain. Given how there seems to be 2 Destruction magic users and 2 Denial magic users (both being 1 light and 1 medium – albeit ranger using Destruction like elementalists is questionable), it’d probably be an Aggression magic user in heavy armor akin to the guardian, or alternatively more of a heavy armor technology focus fella (though that holds potential clashing with warrior who’s no-magic). I say this since it’d be silly to have 2 heavy armor Preservation magic users.

not-quite-a-Paladin: heavy armor, but all support, very little personal offense or personal defense. Just boons, conditions, and heals. Sorta like a Ritualist but heavily modified.

I suspect (though it’s not a given) it’d be heavy armor as well. Past that it gets trickier to call; it can’t be too similar to a guardian or warrior or you might as well play one. I could see a more offensively-oriented “spellsword” to contrast the more defensive guardian though.

While the “samurai” idea sounds intriguing considering where races are probably going to go, in and of itself it’s way too similar to the warrior to merit a separate profession. You’d need to add something extra, and I can’t think of anything that is both distinctive and not so un-authentic that you’d really need a different name for the profession. Maybe ArenaNet could come up with something, but I’m not counting on it.

Outside the heavy armor set there may be a few more options, although there are questions to be answered. For a bard profession, mightn’t constant music eventually start to grate?
I can see a druid working, although there is some overlap. If it summons wild animals, we basically have a necromancer’s summon ability with the flavor of the ranger’s animal companion. Nature magic, well, the ranger has some of that too (granted, it’s not particularly broad and they’re all utility skills; a druid could much more conceivably run staff/scepter/torch). Wildshape has issues with making character customization irrelevant if it’s too dominant a mechanic. Oh, and the D&D version also had an animal companion. That’d definitely have to be dropped since it’s the ranger’s thing.

I think, though, you could definitely make a viable druid profession within GW2’s setting that would be distinctive and have its own niche. Just have to play up the nature magic thing – there are plenty of things you can do with that.

Oh, yeah, and the other thing that hasn’t really been done in GW2: a monk. Specifically, the oriental martial-arts kind. It’d probably require new weapon types (bo/quarterstaves, unarmed/brass knuckles, etc) but could work pretty well.

Since we don’t know which direction the next expansion is going, it’s kind of hard to say which ones might be likely. But if I had to choose, I would wish from them to bring back the chronomancer and summoner idea they were going to add into gw:U.

Plus, heavy armored chronomancer sounds really interesting.

Again I don’t believe there will be a new playble profession, but I agree that it would prolly be heavy armor. I would say that the concept of the chronomancer (from the cancelled Utopia project, see concept art here http://wiki.guildwars.com/images/7/78/%22F_Chronomancer_Standard%22_concept_art.jpg ). Yields some nice possibility’s. I know some elements of the Crhonomancer are present in the mesmer. So this should be an unique thing. I see it as a profession that uses time and dimensional portals to replace all over the battlefield. Besides that they can summon creatures from analternate dimension (steam creatures are lore-wise likable here cause of the infinity-ball story-line). This makes the Chronomancer very OP. To counter this, the summoning and portalling takes a lot of the Chronomancer, making it weaker(weakness?) wich stacks up and won’t go away till out of battle.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

There’s already a few threads on this…

But if there would ever get a 9th profession, it’ll be heavy armor just to even things out I’m certain. Given how there seems to be 2 Destruction magic users and 2 Denial magic users (both being 1 light and 1 medium – albeit ranger using Destruction like elementalists is questionable), it’d probably be an Aggression magic user in heavy armor akin to the guardian, or alternatively more of a heavy armor technology focus fella (though that holds potential clashing with warrior who’s no-magic). I say this since it’d be silly to have 2 heavy armor Preservation magic users.

I don’t think it would be necesary to make it 3-3-3 on armor class. Remember GW1 was 2-3-5. Also, there are 3 HP tiers too, and I don’t want another tier 1 armor + tier 1 HP (both tiers are 2-3-3 right now so by that logic it’s the only option).

My personal choice would be a return of the Monk, but only as a “name”, to make the original 6 professions back, but make it more orientated to martial arts instead of healing. GW1 Monk dance was very martial arts orientated, so something on those lines, and a “yin and yang” type profession mechanic, giving buffs depending on how much damage you receive and how much you hit (and it would fit with Mhenlo GW1 inner fight between Balthazar’s Smite and Dwayna’s Protection).

The only problem with that is it would fit more with Cantha and apparently we’re not getting it in some time.

PS: Really I think we don’t need new professions. The 8 we have, with more weapon options cover all holes. Give Staff to a Ranger and you got a Druid with nature magic, animals and spirits, give a Thief a second sword and a rifle and you got a Corsair with pillagin (steal) skills, give him a Staff with melee skills (same way Necromancer uses Axe as a totem) and he’s a martial artist (many Thieves in different stories use Staff as a melee weapon, like Gambit who is a Thief), etc…

It would obviously be the Commando. Duh. :P

I’m all up for seeing the Spiritualist make an appearance from Guild Wars 1, they were unique and had a cool Lore about them. Them being an ancient magical profession that slowly lost it’s old ways and took on the way new magic is done while not truely forgetting their routes.

Means another light armour class but oh well, means we get Spiritualists and I’m ok with this

Dervish. Of all the classes from the original Guild Wars campaigns, the Dervish is the only one that doesn’t really have a specific similar class. I mean think about it.

Warriors, Necros, Eles, and Rangers are the same. Mesmers are similar, just switching from denial focus to misdirection. Assassins have become Thieves. Ritualists are similar to Engineers, with the various things they summoned, turrets and the like. And Guardians are almost like a combination Paragon and Monk. That just leaves the Dervish, an armored warrior with a scythe and a focus on enchantments.

Chessrook.8643:

That just leaves the Dervish, an armored warrior with a scythe and a focus on enchantments.

Take out the scythe and that basically sounds like a Guardian, with boons instead of enchantments. The Avatar transformations, which were the Dervish’s other major defining characteristic, also got subsumed into the Human racial skills. Finally, the Dervish’s focus on veneration of the Six Gods means it would be out of place on any race apart from Humans.

I don’t know what a 9th profession would be, but it would have to be generic enough that it could be freely used by any race (including any new races that might be introduced).

Indeed. Lorewise, the Guardian might have grown out of the monk and paragon (although other things might have gone in there as well). In terms of playstyle… the way the guardian plays is as a heavy fighter that doesn’t have the upfront toughness of the warrior, but makes up for it through defensive conditions (such as blind), healing and protective effects, while also augmenting their martial skills with magical attacks. That’s pretty much the dervish in a nutshell as well.

Now, in GW1 the distinction in toughness between warrior and dervish came because the warrior had heavier armour while in GW2 they both have the same armour but the guardian has substantially less hit points, but it’s the same tradeoff. One is better at simply absorbing damage, the other is better at preventing and mitigating that damage.

In my opinion, the only different enough concept for a 9th class would be a heavy armor Chronomancer, as per the previously talked about GW:Utopia concept. I’d always imagined it as a Scholar class, though Heavy can easily be made to fit (akin to Guardian level magics), with potentially a more steampunkish feel a la Engineer (it doesn’t really need it though, time mage is itself far enough removed from any other fluff we have now to work). ’Twould also fit in as a mid HP tier prof, as War is High and Guard is low.

A bard idea might be fun, but I think they mesh with Mesmers quite a bit (at least more than a Chronomancer) and they very much feel like an Adventurer, which would break that even 3 split that is so delicious.

The class defining mechanic would be interesting too (read F1-4 abilities). currently, I have it either at reducing cooldowns in some form, or giving quickness similar to Guardian’s VoJ (quickness every x attacks). After those lore friendly ideas (not that we really have Chronomancer lore), I’m kinda stuck without getting super deep.

(not to mention, what other games have a time mage idea as a core class? none that I can think of).

Like many others I’ve heard, I’d like to see another soldier class. My suggestion is for a cross between the ritualist and the dervish. Since, due to lore issues, avatars or god forms wouldn’t be possible, my idea would be spirit invocation. I see these as being the elite skills, where the class would take the form of whichever spirit. For the class ability I would use the weapon spells from the ritualist line, and for utilities, I would make use of the dervish’s flash enchantments. I feel the weapons would be obviously be a mix similar to the guardian’s.

I want dervish and I don’t care if it isn’t actually like dervish from gw1 because i really just want to be able to murder things with a scythe again.

Murdering things with a scythe could be achieved by simply adding scythes to existing professions. Guardians, elementalists, and necromancers are all contendors – necromancer scythes would allow for a truly melee-oriented necro rather than the hybrid we have with daggers, while guardian and/or elementalist with scythe would approach the dervish fighting style.

I’m guessing it’s not going to be the Dervish but I hope it is. I really loved the Dervish in GW1 with the avatars of gods. But they would have to add a whole new weapon which is the scythe

For a while I was thinking of something called the Centurion. Heavy armor mid hp with a focus on team play. The profession mechanic would be similar to necromancers, a bar that allows the player to enter Legion state upon activation. The Legion state skills are
1. Summons soldier
2. Commands soldier to shoot target
3. Commands soldier to hit target with rifle butt, 1 second daze
4. Commands soldier to heal you
Max 2 soldiers at a time, does not give a second health bar

(Note: this is heavily influenced by the charr blood legion storyline level 10 quest)

Lokheit.7943:

I don’t think it would be necesary to make it 3-3-3 on armor class. Remember GW1 was 2-3-5. Also, there are 3 HP tiers too, and I don’t want another tier 1 armor + tier 1 HP (both tiers are 2-3-3 right now so by that logic it’s the only option).

However, GW1 had a dedicated healer while ArenaNet has explicitly stated that there will never be such in GW2. Furthermore, each school of magic had a caster – now that there’s no dedicated healer, that fourth scholar went into heavier (specifically heavy with Paragon) armor. Then with the mechanics of the ritualists being changed into the engineer, that removes the fifth caster.

Unless ritualists are vastly different than their GW1 counterpart, they won’t return. And given how in both mechanics and lore the monks became the guardian, they won’t either. So GW1’s standing on professions only go so far as “if there’s change, the dervish may return (but unlikely given lore), and if there’s change the ritualist may return (but unlikely given Cantha’s isolationism and the seeming lack of the profession spreading before then).”

Don’t get me wrong though – I’d love to see the Ritualists return. They were among my favorite professions, aesthetic and lore wise.

Lokheit.7943:

Really I think we don’t need new professions. The 8 we have, with more weapon options cover all holes. Give Staff to a Ranger and you got a Druid with nature magic, animals and spirits, give a Thief a second sword and a rifle and you got a Corsair with pillagin (steal) skills, give him a Staff with melee skills (same way Necromancer uses Axe as a totem) and he’s a martial artist (many Thieves in different stories use Staff as a melee weapon, like Gambit who is a Thief), etc…

I’m in agreement regarding the basics. Rather than new professions, I’d rather see new weapons given to the existing professions.

Bring back the bunny humper (aka give rangers a hammer)!

I wouldn’t mind one or two more professions just to balance things out – not only with the number of professions per armor tier, but also number of profession per schools of magic (hence one (former) or two later). I really wouldn’t mind seeing a dark knight kind of heavy armor (Aggression magic (necromancer’s school)+heavy armor? No need for life stealing and minions, just as thief doesn’t use illusions this Aggression magic soldier could go in different directions).

I could see life stealing being the shared mechanic between necromancers and this third soldier akin to how mesmers and thieves share stealth and teleportation (aka shadowstepping).

One interesting thing to note there, actually, is that a lot of the stuff that keyed in the necromancer as being Aggression in GW1 is missing from the GW2 necromancer. The orders necro, for instance, was a staple of GW1 physical-based team builds that has disappeared from the GW2 necro, but which could fit well into a heavily armoured profession that uses a little bit of Aggression in the same way thieves and rangers use little bits of Denial and Destruction respectively. The hard part would be giving it enough that it’s not too warrior-y, but not enough that it starts stepping on the toes of the actual necromancer.

On the ritualist question… the ambiguity of just which school they’re from could allow them to be folded into a heavily armoured aggression profession as some have suggested, or as a scholar counterpart to the guardian. The problem with questions of having an equal number of professions using each school, however, is that the mesmer/thief and elementalist/ranger pairs have a clear distinction between ‘magic user’ and ‘martial character assisted with a little magic’. A similar distinction could be made between necromancer and a hypothetical new profession, but the problem is that the guardian is already split down the middle – there isn’t really room on either side for a full caster profession or an ’I’m martial with just a little bit of Preservation’ profession. Unless, that is, that profession already exists under the name “Warrior”.

Hmm… You may be on to something there, draxy. It could be a heavy armor-wearing, magic-using profession that’s kind of like the offensive variant of the Guardian, with a blend of Orders (Necro), Shouts (Paragon) and Spirit Weapons (Ritualist) to infuse allies with greater fighting ability. While the Guardian is mainly about protecting his allies, this guy could be about driving them into a frenzy so they’re more potent during battle.

However, this also raises the spectre of imbalance that the Paragons had in GW1; too many Paragons made large scale battles a joke, but after their nerf, there wasn’t any point to having more than one Paragon in a party because their abilities didn’t stack.

I like the idea of just adding more weapons and maybe more skill trees. Maybe give a ranged spear to the guardian for example; similar to the paragon.

I’ve honestly always assumed that their wouldn’t be new professions, only new weapon types.

Seriously, I want muh scythes back.

I’ve never touched GW1, so I have no idea if what I’m about to say is already in line with something else.

As I see it, there’s this light/nature/order or just “purity”, darkness or “befoulment”, balance trend going on.

Scholars: Elementalist (purity), Necromancer (befoulment), Mesmer (balance: I could go on and on about how you can’t have chaos without a basis of balance, but instead, I’ll give this: The Confusion condition hurts someone whenever they attack you or heal themselves ~ thus not tipping the scale, but keeping the equilibrium)

Adventurer: Ranger (purity), Thief (befoulment), Engineer (balance: So I’m actually undecided if Thief is balance and Engineer is befoulment or vice versa. I think they could be argued in either light.)

Soldier: Guardian (purity), Warrior (balance), and…

Tainted? Marked? I’m not usually a fan of the anime-esque “guy corrupted by a demon”, but I think it’d be an interesting mechanic. We have dragon corruption. If anyone would even consider a way of playing with corruption, it’d be the Asura. The idea would be they did numerous experiments and figured out a way to mix magic, science, and training for someone to stabilize a corruption. The class would be a mix of a berserker/spellsword ~ becoming a bigger pain as more crap happens to em, and able to imbue their weapons. Instead of transferring conditions, they’d literally become more destructive while under the effects of a condition, while still suffering the full effects. The heavy armor is only because they entire idea becomes worse than a glass cannon if given light armor.

Now onto the other side of the coin ~ such precautions at keeping the individual an individual, and not a minion of the Elder Dragons would mean it’d take more corruption than usual to fully corrupt the person. Bigger, more destructive enemies that have been pushed over the edge. A new profession, a new threat that could possibly be something for the entire Pact to focus on, a new dungeon…its like a package deal with a ton of possibilities.

they should have just made three professions- scholar, adventurer, soldier- and allowed those to branch off through a more advanced trait system into the professions as we know now and more. I think starting as nobody and building your character from scratch would add so much. Of course this would never happen this late in the game, so I would say that a world of warcraft deathknight would be a good idea for a ninth profession. Kind of like a necromancer, but more demonic or even something from the shadows.

My idea would be a heavy armor wearing gaelic druid type of profession. They would be able to use a longbow, shortbow, scepter, staff, axes in both hands, greatsword, maces in both hands, focus, trident, and spear. Their skills would be nature, battle, and life themed. This would even out the current heavy armor balance of warrior (melee/ranged), guardian (melee/magic), by adding the druid class (ranged/magic). They would be very similar to a ‘magic’ ranger by having ranged skills with nearly all of their weapons.

Oh I so want a Druid type profession!

I would actually would like to see a light armored melee wielding a scythe, also known as the Dervish.

Tyloric.7520:

I’ve honestly always assumed that their wouldn’t be new professions, only new weapon types.

Seriously, I want muh scythes back.

I’ve always kind of assumed the same. Most profession ideas I see could be fairly easily emulated by simply giving more weapons, skills, and traits to the existing professions.

While I would love to see scythes return as well I think it would make more sense to add great-axes as a new two handed weapon and include some very scythe-like skins for them. I mean a scythe doesn’t really fight thematically with the Warrior and Necromancers already use one handed axes.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Have greataxes, and then have one- and two-handed scythes as axe skins.

The monk! I always wondered what happened to the monk after a 250 year time-skip from Gw1 to Gw2…

Cowrex.9564:

The monk! I always wondered what happened to the monk after a 250 year time-skip from Gw1 to Gw2…

Teamed up with paragons, ritualists and made the Guardian. Or disappeared

Gandarel.5091:

Cowrex.9564:

The monk! I always wondered what happened to the monk after a 250 year time-skip from Gw1 to Gw2…

Teamed up with paragons, ritualists and made the Guardian. Or disappeared

Makes sense

Ritualist, for the record, is unconfirmed. Monk and paragon are definitely in there, though.

Druid: Use nature-like magic.
Weapons: Longbow, staff, scepter, dagger, sword, and shield.

The only real tie ins with the ritualist is the ghostly weapons and just preservation magic in general, although these weapons are vastly different from the ones in GW1. In the previous game it would take a character’s current weapon and give it some bonus (splash damage, life steal, etc…) and in this game the ghostly weapons are stand alone weapons that fight alongside you.

sweatycool.9624:

I would actually would like to see a light armored melee wielding a scythe, also known as the Dervish.

Well, while Dervish lore-wise isn’t really possible with all playable race cultures and the concept is more or less absorbed by the human race as a whole, if they ever give a profession like the Thief the ability to use the Staff as a melee blunt weapon (same way the Axe is a magical totem for a Necromancer), you could use a hood (Order of Whispers or Inquest armor) and a Scythe-skin staff (I remember at least 2) and have your “Dervish”. You can even use 1 or 2 human racial skills just to fit more with the spirit of old dervishes.

EdhellenCuar.4316:

Druid: Use nature-like magic.
Weapons: Longbow, staff, scepter, dagger, sword, and shield.

Give Ranger a staff in a future expansion. He already has a trait line named Nature Magic, uses the destruction school of magic in a minor way, is related to animals and summons spirits of nature as well as using some skills to use nature in his favor (like Healing Spring).

Put a staff in his hands with some nature spells and you don’t need to create a whole new profession to get a druid.

Most holes can be covered this way and while some concepts (like the Agression user Soldier) might be interesting, if something can be covered with an existing profession, I prefer it that way as new professions means more balancing headaches (new traits, utilities, profession mechanic, etc…) while adding a weapon is working over a profession already in the balancing equation.

I would love to see a Chronomancer.

imo bring spiritualist back