Guild Wars 2

I wanted to ask what people think, is GW2 a game of roles and not classes/professions?

Regardless of profession and depending on how the player spends traits and which weapon set any profession can fill any role.

I base this on the simple example of point-holder or tank focused trait: Toughness.

As a Warrior or Mesmer, invest enough points into Toughness and then look for the ‘mitigation’ traits and abilities from other trait trees, signets, abilities and you can be ‘tanky.’

Invest no points in Toughness and rather focus on damage and you become a glass cannon that takes +6k hits!

My question again:

Can each and every profession fill each and every role just as well?

Pretty much. Any class can fill any role in one way or another. Even as counterintuitive as it seems, even light armor classes can tank via evasion tank and range tank abilities.

They claim it’s not… I still think it is… healer, tank, etc.

I’m in the camp that think it’s a mistake to try to shove any profession into a traditional role.

You can certainly build them all different ways, yes. I think that’s absolutely correct.

The way I look at it, you can have a character who is “built like a tank”, but they’re not going to be “tanking” in the MMO sense.

You actually have two different questions

#is GW2 a game of roles and not classes/professions? – My answer will be ‘no’. It is more of professions and the Holy Trinity.
#Can each and every profession fill each and every role just as well? – My answer is ‘yes’.

It does look like it’s a role-based game but once you start doing dungeons, you’ll immediately notice that the Holy Trinity doesn’t really exist. There’s only one – you.

That’s how I look at it and so far experienced.

I piled toughness onto my necro and thought I was tanky, until a champion spider my level one hit me! lol

Are there even taunting skills?
As far is i know aggro’ing bosses was who dealth the most DPS.
I think they looked at the casual players caus you can certainly play without a specific role. People DPS zerg all the time at random events.
People that have played a MMORPG before will always climb back to whats closest to the triangle of traditional mmo’s.
So is it a game of roles?
I think its a 50/50 yes and no.

Are there even taunting skills? No
As far is i know aggro’ing bosses was who dealt the most DPS. This isent correct as im never even close to top of the dps yet i almost always have agro. DPS does take part in agro but proximity to the mob first and for most.
So is it a game of roles? My feeling is that no its not a game of roles as much as it is skill. I’ve seen dps mages tank champs. They dodged the telegraphed 1 shot and relied on the others to do what there class does. And hope the players are skilled enough to get threw the fight.

Darn, it logged me out and ate my post.

Boiled down to, I feel it’s a more realistic and “war-like” approach. You’re all combatants, you’re all exposed to being potentially targeted and you can all help your allies.

It’s really synergy of skill. You need to know how your class works in ALL “roles” to do the best you can. You must work as a team and be situationally aware and use the proper skills when you need to, across classes.

I liked playing a Druid in WoW, and I think that’s why I really like GW2’s combat. You can use skills from any of the “roles” and your ability to jump in as an off-tank or off-healer could get your group out of a tight situation.

I’ve always liked when things get messy and when, as a healer, I’d be doing something completely unexpected – like DPSing the final boss while healing my two remaining group-members. It was more intense and exciting for us to be pushed out of our “roles”.

I can understand that this type of combat is not what everyone is going to enjoy – but I think it’s wonderful if you like a “fast-paced” and intense fight where you’re put to the test as a team across all roles.

I’m always getting aggro for doing X or while not doing Y

Everybody makes that claim…

There has yet to be a reliable basis on mob aggro, but fact remains that at some point everyone will get hit no matter the circumstance. (hence the quote above holds true in every discussion about tanking).

With no dedicated tanking ability, there is no trinity. everybody will be dealing as much damage as they can muster while the rest support… and everybody’s rolling around…

lyka bebe! runnin’ round mekin’ noys, dun no wat tu du.

… and try to make the best of what they can bring to the table.

I switched out my old CC hammer for a scepter + X for ranged damage… Better for when my guardian is feeling a bit beat up than CC. Nothing can replace my GS though.

Edit: there are “pull” moves though, like Guardian GS skill 5. Not reliable for getting aggro to yourself, but does lure mobs away from guys that can’t take many hits. Still doesn’t justify tanking though. ^_

What Ceallach said. This game really has one role – “adventurer” and involves a mix of doing damage, supporting your allies, taking hits (or better yet preventing them) and minding your own health. The mechanics do not support the over-specialisation that a lot of other games are designed around.

Lubrication.8734:

I piled toughness onto my necro and thought I was tanky, until a champion spider my level one hit me! lol

Necros are still cloth wearers in the end. I’ve found that dual-daggers, the aoe healing and life stealing tends to get me through some of the tougher fights. Granted I’ve yet to hit max level so for all I know level 80 champion spiders really are scary. But in general with the dodge system the idea is to not get hit, no matter the profession.

CureForLiving.5360:

Lubrication.8734:

I piled toughness onto my necro and thought I was tanky, until a champion spider my level one hit me! lol

Necros are still cloth wearers in the end. I’ve found that dual-daggers, the aoe healing and life stealing tends to get me through some of the tougher fights. Granted I’ve yet to hit max level so for all I know level 80 champion spiders really are scary. But in general with the dodge system the idea is to not get hit, no matter the profession.

I can tell you as a guard decked out in toughness a champion of equal level is scary to tank and will one shot you at times.

High level champs are badkitten :p

hmm… the kitten came from an automatic rename of the human behind

I think that when they say there’s no holy trinity means that the role is not tied to the professions. But we still need those roles and every professions can fullfill those roles more or less. For example ele can tank with earth spells and necro tank with minions, but still not 100% tank.

It’s to be noted that PvE encounter balance comes from the PvP balance. I strongly believe that each and every class design in Guild Wars 2 emerged as a set of roles a player performs during fights against other players, unlike PvE oriented games, where the PvP balance is still an unachievable thing due to one-sided class design. So as for me, Guild Wars 2 champions and bosses fights are more similar to the player versus player mechanics, which implies any fighter should control, damage and kite well to win.

Cempa.3645:

Can each and every profession fill each and every role just as well?

Seems so,yes.

I’ve been a “tank” with my mace/shield combo.
I’ve been a “DPS” with my greatsword.
I’ve been a “healer” with my 2H staff.

Especially since you use traits/skills to further boost whatever you wish to be.

There’s no tank at most characters who are a bit tougher than others. There’s no healers, because there’s no good reliable way to heal others big time. There’s conditions and buffs and there’s burst damage and sustained damage. Those are the things you will want to try and balance when playing together in a team. And not every profession will be able to do the same things. A friend of mine plays a guardian. He has this very nice mechanic where he can give the team aegis blocking deadly attacks. No way I can do that playing my necromancer. However I can support my team in other ways for example drawing conditions to myself and then spreading those among foes.

Anyone else want to read the title as Game of Thrones?

you go and build a character all into vitality and toughness, then you go do ascalonian catacombs that people say its really hard and you need tankers and suports. Then kholer pull you in and 1 shot you. there goes your tanky theory.
Now we go again with only but 5 dpsers, we have no hard time completing it. You dont need any specific role for anything in guild wars 2, you just have to know how to combo your skills with your friends and that’s all.

HykCraft.4610:

They claim it’s not… I still think it is… healer, tank, etc.

There are no such things as tanks and healers in GW2 in any meaningful sense of these words. There is no controllable aggro. Even if you could hold aggro, no character could take the damage to its face, and no character could heal through the damage.

GW2 party play is primarily a game of pooling buffs, debuffs, and controls to minimize incoming damage and maximize outgoing damage. It’s a system where every party member functions as a force multiplier rather than being assigned a narrow task.

The closest equivalent you have in existing MMOs would be all-defender/controller teams in CoH.

I encourage you to break out of this habit of describing your character based on a role. The trinity does not exist in GW2. There are no tanks, no healers, and no DPS. There is survivability, there is party support and there is sustained/spike damage, but no tanks, no healers, and no DPS.

This is because enemies hit far too hard and mitigation is far too limited to tank effectively. There’s also no quantitative aggro mechanic. Heals are too limited and on too long a cooldown to play a real healer. Damage is variable, comes from many sources and in different paces—measuring your damage output by damage-per-second is a fallacy.

There are no roles. But there are tactics.

There’s midline, backline, and frontline.

There are concepts like condition spreading, condition removal, boon support, combo field setups, spike damage, pressure, ranged AOE….

Don’t describe your character by your role. Describe your character by their tactics.

To me there is some form of holy trinity , but it’s far ‘softer’ and the edges blurred. That trinity being control, support and damage.
Everyone can damage, but some are better at controling where the enemy is or where it can move, and others are better at throwing boons to everyone else.. whereas yet others focus on damage.

I prefer to think of this in terms of Functions instead of Roles, maybe just semantics but it allows me to differentiate the two in my head.
The Functions as I see them are: Control, Damage and Support.

Control I see is the process of shutting down an enemy and moving the enemy where you want it to go. Please correct me if I am wrong but I believe that the closest ally is the who has aggro so most control can be seen as “Tanking”, but not all. Control would include things like stun, forced movement, and personal damage mitigation.

Support as I see it is the process of improving your groups lot in life. This does not necessarily mean just healing, but the application of boons, the removal of conditions (which is a big one!) and group wide damage mitigation.

Damage is pretty straight forward in its function, but it can be done in so many different ways. These include the application of conditions, straight physical damage and magical damage in all its forms.

Each of the classes can fill these functions but not necessarily in the same way. Also you will likely find that as you go through your abilities that many skills will fulfill more than one function at a time, but you will normally find that as you focus your character through trait points that one function will become more prominent.

There is no “Tank”. No taunts are in the game. There is support, but not “Healers”, because most healing skills are on massive cooldowns. ANet effectively turned every character into a self-efficient character that, when grouped with other skilled players, can combine their debuffs, buffs, and damage to successfully complete content.

Just my two cents.

You can, if you want to, try to shoehorn the design into a model of roles or functions, but it won’t do anything but limit you.

To survive, you use controls or defensive boons and conditions or heals. You don’t use only one or the other because of some model. You use whatever you have on your action bar that will reduce or compensate for damage intake. If you’re playing a guardian, then you may put up a protection boon at one moment and use a knockback bubble the next. One is technically support and one is control, but in the end all that matters is that both make mobs hurt less.