I’d love to see gw2 take the elite specialisation and take it to an expansion in a really sideways direction. Be aware that these ideas are a basic framework that are cobbled together from other peoples ideas too. You’ll see:
I’d love to see an expansion that focussed on momentum.
Imagine the new expansion’s focus is about movement and stillness. Your new elite specialisation changes your weapons so that half your weapons have skills that are low cooldown, high movement, low damage, high breakbar damaging attacks, and half your weapons have skills that dramatically lower your movement speed, allow you to tank heavy hits, have high cooldowns and can do high damage.
This would tie into a really large map. Instead of a mount mastery, you use your high speed weapon skills to navigate your way. In fractals, raids or in meta-events you use your high movement skills to tag fast moving enemies that move in a pattern and sometimes do extremely high damaging attacks. Your speedy abilities let you shred large breakbars and move out of high damaging fields, your slow ability let you tank unavoidable big hits and drop in big burst damage as a group.
Theoretical example of this happening would be something like this:
Ranger becomes a Skin Walker and can temporarily fuse to transform into a larger version of their pet. They use fast pets like birds to skim across the battle field doing many all along their flight/dash path (range around 1000). They use their drakes to turn tanky more or less siting on the spot then using their breath or bite attacks to do big damage and Harden Skin type abilities to tank big hits. While they’re using the high cooldown abilties movement speed is limited as if crippled. Swapping has becomes situationally dependant.
There’d have to be others for the other classes obviously and some of my names really suck. To make build diversity more interesting make high toughness above baseline lower the cooldowns of your tank abilities without upping damage up to 105/20% as appropriate. For the speed skills it would lower your movement speed distance add cooldowns but up your damage slightly without affecting breakbar damage. On the flip side you could trait for precision to up your damage on your speed abilities, drop cooldowns by up to 10%/20% as appropriate but increase the cooldowns on your tank abilities equivalently and lower damage there.
The idea then is you specialise in movement if you like the fast paced reactionary play there, tagging up mobs and bosses but ultimately always doing way less damage than the tankiest build, having an easier time hitting in the first place and shredding breakbars. Your role is going to be breakbar shredder letting you temporarily root mobs for the heavy hitters. Or you focus on tanking damage and doing hi damage but being relatively rooted in place and reliant on the movers to drop the breakbars on moving mobs or damage immune mobs so you can kill them fast. To up the defensive feel some abilties might be heavy counter attacks on your weapon skills.
Some classes will focus on giving out boons like protection and conditions like chill to slow down mobs enough that the heavy hitters can smash them.
Against trash mobs there would be elements of rounding them up for the heavy hitters to destroy. You’d have tank play by making some classes have defensive cooldowns that can be shared by friendly characters within melee range or very close range like the elementalist lifting friendlies into the sky on stone pillars or warriors. Guardians can spam aegis on friendlies in range blast holy fire fields all over the place.
You could avoid traditional tanking in raids by having your tanky characters give protection style boons or healing on fast moving focussed people to help them last while the movers can get focussed and need to place the boss or groups of enemies into position where they can be hit by the tanky damagers.
Masteries could let you add verticality through modified gliding. The moving abilties can be aimed upword or let you attack in the sky while the tank abilities let you drop from above or burst upward to knock people temporarily out of flight or knock enemies to the ground.
This is very vague and incomplete but it’s the base for an idea i’d like to see that involves enemy swarms. It’d give tougness and nomads style gear some meaning.
If you limited the areas where the high breakbar/high movement areas are within the maps you’d have reason to use your vanilla builds for sustained dps on those enemies while being ready to switch to your movement or tank spec for the new high breakbar/high damage on slow timer, lots of low damage through movement enemies.
This is just a veeery rough sketch of a different direction I’d love to see happen that’s different from raise the level cap now grind for gear direction or here’s new ways to do big damage.
