Guild Wars 2

In skirmish WvW, terrormancer is commonly played with spectral utilities, boosted by Spectral Mastery. But as currently revealed, the Spectral Mastery is being moved from Adept to Master, same as Master of Terror, so they can’t be ran together. Is this intentional?

As a concrete proposal, I recommend the following change: change the steps to 10, 30, 100, 300, 1000.

Advantages:

- same number of steps (5), so the UI doesn’t need to change, only numbers. This should be a minimal effort to develoopers
- lowest tier is 10, which is (in my opinion) reasonably precise
- reasonably few clicks to get the required amount

Disadvantages:

- 30 and 300 look ‘weird’. If an increased number of steps is an option, I’d recommend 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000.

Chrispy.5641:

That’s only if you focus on Subclasses solely for the purpose of adding new skills. If you make subclases in a way that doesn’t lock players out of anything specific while still offering a greater level of specialization, it could work very well in the current system.

Well, if you don’t lock players out of anything, this means no new skills, weapons or traits for the subclasses. This leaves only passive bonuses. I’ve actually found and read your proposal, and this seems to be your idea, as well.

I see several problems with that, too:

First, traits already provide passive bonuses – so why not add new traits instead? I’m not sure that added complexity of subclasses gains anything.

Second, this promotes passive gameplay – something that in my opinion goes against the spirit of the GW combat system; where you’re supposed to tactically ‘do something’ in combat to get a benefit.

Third, and this is more general issue, I think more specialization is the wrong way to go when providing progression (both horizontal of vertical). There is only so much you can specialize before stuffing characters into very tiny boxes; once you hit that ceiling, you’re out of that particular means of progression -and- you’ve risked damaging the game by introducing super-powerful combination of stats bonuses (for example, what happens when signet bonus trait, gear and subclass interact? Nobody tested signet spam builds, and it’s too late when you have to un-add things that looked like a good idea in a small scale test…)

Anyway, this is probably the wrong thread to discuss the point #3 – maybe we -should- have a general combat system and balancing CDI; because I don’t think we’ve ever discussed the design options for specialization vs generality, resource management vs cooldown, and options for power growth without reintroducing the trinity.

I’m not sure if this has been mentioned, so I’m sorry if I’m repeating anyone else’s point.

I think the general problem with subclasses is that they’re redundant in the Guild Wars system, specifically, they don’t contribute much in a game with limited skillbar. The purpose with subclasses, in the games that have them, is to limit the number of skills that a player can use together. But we already have this; and what subclasses would do is that they’d only limit the number of viable builds. Now this could have the side-effect of making the game easier to balance, but only when the number of skills vastly grows; I don’t think we’re anywhere near this point.

So my suggestion in this regard is to simply keep adding skills, at least while we’re still short of 100-200/class. At that point, additional build limiting mechanisms may become important, but one could also instead discuss additional balancing mechanisms in general (such as additional resource management).

These are gorgeous!

If I may offer a suggestion, could you track the points earned from kills and use that to pronounce the top vanquisher servers? The points could be calculated as the difference between final scores and points earned from capped structures (up to a small error for the last-second-before-update caps).