Guild Wars 2

The holo will never really have a good offhand for power builds with how the system works now. You can say that the holoforge is a tie in to help with that but it’s the class mechanic which every class gets with the elite specialization. That should honestly be enough having a unique class mechanic change along with the heal/utility/elite skills being tied to it…. Them having the weapons tied to them as well is just going to end up making the game feel very bland as time goes on.

Honestly the game would feel more fluid if they would just tie the heal/utility/elite skill to the elite specialization and make it so you must fully train to allow the use of the weapon even if the specialization wasn’t chosen.

This is a issue that is going to get worse as time goes on and honestly I think the devs really need to take a long hard look at how elite specs are handled in the future.

Anyone else feeling this way ?

I feel that unlocking a specialization fully should unlock the weapon for core, and all future specializations. Not everyone liked hammer, but I for one would love to play around with it with Holosmith.

But as a side note we have a perfect offhand for power… That is if you play PvP and WvW like some of us, Shield! Shield is awesome, and I’m so glad I finally have a reason to use it as a power engineer.

I feel the overlying issue of elite specialisations is that we never should have had them to begin with.

Instead Anet could have parceled out additional weapons training for those who’d wanted to expand their respective professions that way. Allow players to seek out weapons trainers around the world via quests or training book purchases. Adjust trait trees to reflect more weapon availability but otherwise keep the professions and their flavours as they were.

Then instead of complaining to the community through state of the game letters about lack of sufficient funds for expansion development Anet could have properly given us the expansions we’ve wanted.

Imagine the moneys and man hour savings if, with any given expansion, instead of having to come up with an elite specialisation for every single profession Anet could set aside funds and devs to deliver a single new profession and/or new race- with funds and manpower to spare for actual expansion content?

Balancing one new profession and the other professions is easier pve wise and pvp/wvw wise than balancing all old professions and all the new elites to come from them.

And now balance is going to be made even worse this autumn when another whole new set of elites is released.

They’re essentially going to have to balance twenty seven professions. This as opposed to ten or eleven.

Power creep and all the other problems that have come with elites wouldn’t be nearly as terrible as what we have now.

And thanks to the lack of funds incoming when players become worn or underwhelmed by these half-hearted expansions- thus leaving- money is shorter than ever for development.

And due to so much effort having been wasted on expansions with little good content in the way of dungeons/overworld/wvw/pvp come with them, having two elites come fall is going to make us twice- no thrice all dressed up and nowhere to go.

Put it down to bad priorities or whatever.

^^^ I disagree. ES gives classes new ways to play. Yeah some been bad designs at doing this. Not excusing that, but some been nice and fun to play if done unique enough. Druid Ranger comes to mind. Very different from core class and gives a new way of playing. That’s what I want from all ES. Revenant I believe been the one class least likely to do this. I like what I see with the Holosmith so far