Guild Wars 2

just to clarify: I have no problem with having to buy access to the elite specializations. they’re going to be different and that’s fine. What Im hoping wont be an issue is whether the vanilla professions will become so outclassed that they become obsolete. Paying for access to something DIFFERENT is fine, but paying for access to something BETTER is problematic. Also I know the balance numberwise is trivial at this point. I have faith that anet will get that right, but adding class mechanics is fundamentaly unbalanced. Im glad to hear Wings of resolve will have decreased radius, and spear of justice doesnt give next hit burning, gives me hope my fears are unjustified.

With two of the elite specializations revealed now, Im starting to wonder if people who buy Heart of Thorns, and gain access to the elite specializations will have an unfair advantage across game modes, most impactfully in PvP. I dont have a problem with the elite specs being gated content with the expansion, but Im having trouble understanding how elite specs aren’t a strict upgrade compared to their vanilla counterparts.

A Mesmer who buys heart of thorns and takes Chronomancer as a spec, will have access to the Continuum Shift ability, which they can use to refresh all their cooldowns, refill health etc., IN ADDITION to the original f1-4 skills. Even if they dont use a single other mechanic from the Chrono, this gives an undeniable advantage to someone who bought HoT compared to someone who didnt.

Similarly with the Dragonhunter: f1 will now do the whole fire chain thing IN ADDITION to giving 5 players burning on their next attack, f2 will give a re-position tool and imobilize IN ADDITION to the heal it gives, and f3 will give a shield aura thing IN ADDITION to aegis.

I do realize that to gain access to these, you have to give up another specialization, so a Chronomancer would have the Chrono. spec as well as 2 vanilla specs, instead of 3 vanilla, which might slightly limit certain build paths, but this is hardly a drawback. At the end of the day, the person who paid for the Elite specs will have the same number of specialization lines and traits, but strictly better profession mechanics.

I might be missing something here, but I think just throwing in more stuff onto the profession mechanics isn’t a good way to go about this. Maybe if Chronomancer has to replace one of the vanilla shatters to get Continuum Shift , and new Dragonhunter virtue actives replace the old ones instead of strictly improving them, this might be better?

I think the GW2 team has done a great job balancing the classes up until now, but it kinda seems like they’ve been overlooking this, just wanted to point it out.