Guild Wars 2

Just read this on the thief forum:

http://dragonseason.com/Front/tabid/124/EntryId/211/Lunch-with-Colin-Johanson-Part-II.aspx

One of the aims of the game was to make every class feel unique, but also viable and fun to play in a variety of ways. What professions have been highlighted as a falling short of this target and what crazy ways have been tried internally to spice them up?

Colin: For me, every profession actually has a lot of different variety available to it. It’s just a matter of if you enjoy that playstyle or not. So I think people look at each profession and they’ll judge it based on “Do I enjoy playing the ways of this profession offers me to play?” And so just going around the table, everybody is playing a different main for the most part. There’s no thieves or warriors here but there’s plenty of them in game. So we know those are represented. We talked about that graph that’s up on the wall. We look at that every day based on what profession people creating and it’s almost always very close to being even across all professions. That’s a really good sign, that is very, very hard to do. In Guild Wars 1 it was not even relatively close to that. It’s a big difference between viability of playstyles versus, you know, not at all. I’m actually really impressed at how generally balanced the professions are. There are certain skills or abilities that all need to get better but across the professions it’s actually pretty decent. It’s just a matter of what playstyle are you interested in. The thing that we have to improve is look at weapons sets that aren’t interesting for that profession or don’t fit the playstyle that we’ve said that profession should have and bring those up to the point that are.

• (Before the lunch started, Colin spoke about a chart displayed in the office that tracks live results of how many of each class and race are being played, so when one class becomes OP, it shows on the chart. At the moment, all classes are at a level field, with a slight increase in warriors and a slight dip in engineers. Races are hugely different, with humans and norn hitting the highest rolled races, and charr being the lowest.)

So I guess this is the official answer to requests about diversifying guardian WvW roles, getting cripple, range options, etc.

I don’t really see how that addresses our (or anyone’s) issues. It’s a vague answer.

He also mentions in the interview that he has no idea what the team responsible for fixing broken/under used utilities/skills/traits is doing, so I wouldn’t read too much into the statement above.

We do have range options. Scepter/Torch, for example. However, if they changed scepter to be a little more interesting to use (because it feels like the spammiest weapon in the game), that would be nice.

Heavy armor long range nuker isn’t going to happen though. Would defeat the whole purpose of having ranged specialists in other classes.

Oh, an asterisk point got broken with forum codes. Fixed.

And about him saying he doesn’t know anything, he says that every time he speaks. It’s a common PR CYA measure. This is an interview for the press. The questions are prepared ahead of time. Elsewhere the interviewer also commented about PvP issues being blacklisted for this interview and so they can’t ask something.

Heavy armor long range nuker

You mean: Warrior?

You know, it seems to me that very few people entertain the possibility that we lack “stuff” by design. In otherwords, it’s on purpose that we don’t have good long range capability, mobility, etc… . The answers to this stuff is always vague.

Am I the only one to find this quite shocking ?

So, balanced done only on the basis of statistics ? Seriously ? What about the thousands of players (casuals for most of them) who just play their class even though it’s underpowered ? “Thanks to” them, there will be no buffs to the classes ?
I totally agree that this should be one element of reflexion, but it should not be entirely based on that …

Take what they said with a grain of salt. The interviewer asked about the possibility of dual pistol mesmers and the guy said if no one plays those we need to address it. Mesmers can’t dual wield pistols.

They should take another page out of Magic the Gathering’s book and design a system similar to the color pie.

purpleskies.3274:

Take what they said with a grain of salt. The interviewer asked about the possibility of dual pistol mesmers and the guy said if no one plays those we need to address it. Mesmers can’t dual wield pistols.

To put that in context, mesmer main hand pistol is one of the most suggested play style on their forum. It is a suggestion- or should I say request, that is on par with guardians asking for a ranged option, both were around since alpha, and has consistently re-surfaced over time until now.

Colin’s response to it is simply dodging the question entirely. You can expect that if the interviewer has instead said ranged combat weapon for the guardian, the response would be the same.

Colin isn’t a dev so it wasn’t really a good question to ask him in the first place. If players want specific information about design decisions for something ingame, he’s not the guy to ask. If the guy asking that question was more experienced, he should have known that. He did the right thing to dodge it … he didn’t appear to know the answer.