What weapon you DONT-WANT? (Specialization)
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: knightmawk.5673
Showing Posts For knightmawk.5673:
From what they said the utility skills are locked to the legend and there will be enough legends to match with your playing style.
There aren’t going to be a lot. I wouldn’t expect many more than four. And because of the energy mechanics the by design optimal play style is jumping back and forth between two as frequently as possible.
I remember them saying a while ago that you can equip two legends at a time to swap between. So the total number of legends doesnt really matter. What makes me think there will be only 4 is the trait lines they showed off, it seemed like there was one for the profession in general and one for each legend, so 5 trait lines and 4 legends sounds about right.
Someone doesn’t know who traits work. They are usually 4 traits that reflect the favor of the class and one class mechanic trait. Also why would Revenant only have four trait lines? Or less you think Arenanet will give them less trait points as well?
Revenant is just a new class, it isn’t anymore special.
I said four traits corresponds to four legends because in the video they specifically said two of the trait lines they revealed were complimentary to the two legends they revealed, so two more trait lines plus the one for the class mechanic, the “flavor” in this case being legends, same way Ele has a trait line for each attunement + Arcane
From what they said the utility skills are locked to the legend and there will be enough legends to match with your playing style.
There aren’t going to be a lot. I wouldn’t expect many more than four. And because of the energy mechanics the by design optimal play style is jumping back and forth between two as frequently as possible.
I remember them saying a while ago that you can equip two legends at a time to swap between. So the total number of legends doesnt really matter. What makes me think there will be only 4 is the trait lines they showed off, it seemed like there was one for the profession in general and one for each legend, so 5 trait lines and 4 legends sounds about right.
I still dont know what to think about the Rev, entirely because of this. Im wondering if there will be a handful of utility and heal skills for each stance, or if maybe when you unlock a single skill it actually unlocks 4 skills (im also thinking there will be 4 legends at launch), or maybe just each legend has a locked skill bar.
The last way sounds the most boring, but it also doesnt make sense to me because it removes unlocking skills and skill-points become meaningless. But I guess you could use skillpoints to unlock legends and there might be more legends then I was thinking. It also pretty much completely removes racial skills.
But then unlocking more utility skill slots as you level and stuff makes less sense. So really I have no idea what to think about the Revanent. My one glimmer of hope is that each of the skills on the bar had an arrow on the top, so either thats a UI relic or there is still hope for multiple skills to chose from per legend.
(edited by knightmawk.5673)
During the POI the other week where they didn’t really show anything important, they did get booted from the game at one point and on the character select screen there was what everyone is at least assuming was a level one Revanent because the class symbol was unfamiliar
So I’m pretty sure we’re going to see Revanents start out just like anyone else.
Name a specialization for your profession
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: knightmawk.5673
Considering it’s confirmed currently only 1 spec to each profession “Druid” is the only thing Ranger is gon’get
Its confirmed that we’ll have one specialization at the time of HoTs launch, however it’s my understanding that we can expect more specializations to come. Someone at Arenanet, and I don’t remember who, said they wanted to make specializations like traits and skills in that they’re easy to swap between at any time so players are free to play around with new builds. You can’t really switch between one thing.
Anyway…. I want to play this game too.
Thief : Blade Dancer (Offhand sword)
New mechanic : Chain skills, ala GW1. The better timed the use of a chain skill is the more effective it is.
Mesmer : Chronomancer (Shield)
New mechanic : The ability to slowdown or stop local time for a short period. So they can stop and slow down time in a little bubble for them and friendly players, it basically would amount to a mass stun/cripple on enemies in an area of effect.
Engineer : Consultant (dual torches)
New mechanic : Works 60 hour weeks and lives in the city to be close to the bars
oh, this. this is so silly.
it’s like people forget that while yes, in theory you could have 90 different combinations, at best 20 of those were worth a kitten , and most meta builds by the end of the game didn’t even need the secondary in the first place…
Im not disagreeing with you, some of those builds were pretty worthless, that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Im seeing the specialization system as a natural extension of the sub-classes though. Instead of being able to go Ranger/anything, you can go say, Ranger/caster, or Necromancer/fighter. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if specializations were archetypal, like by the time everything is said and done we end up with a caster and soldier specialization for each adventurer, an adventurer and caster specialization for each soldier and an adventurer and soldier specialization for each caster. Again, pure speculation, but it does kind of naturally flow from having 90 classes with 20 that people actually used, to having 20 classes
And plus, this is Arena-net we’re dealing with, so who knows what new features each expansion could bring that none of us would have even thought of. I don’t think if youd asked me two years ago what I wanted out of the first Guild Wars 2 Expansion I would have even thought “You know, Hang-gliders would be nice”.
Anyway, this is mostly just me blowing off excited steam. But what does everyone else think that future expansions after HoT will mean? Or just future content in general, the future of the personal and living stories, future dungeons, guild content? I didn’t even talk about the PvP content here, but I think we can expect that to evolve even more in the future too, team objective modes, duels, guild fortress sieges, who knows?
I’ll start this off by saying I’m extremely excited for HoT, it might be small, but if we’ve seen anything over the past few years its that Arena Net will improve on what they’ve built. That being said, it makes me think of what Heart of Thorns means for the future of Guild Wars 2, particularly future ‘expansions’ and content.
Let me also say, everything I am about to write is pure speculation, and maybe a little bit of wishful thinking.
With Heart of Thorns, ANet is establishing three major things, a new way to start (The Revanent), a new way to end (Profession Specializations) and a new way to progress (Mastery system). Along with that they’re trying new things with level design and presumably adding some new gear and at least one new dungeon, along with some high level content and hopefully some low level content, but all of that is kind of par for the course with an MMO expansion.
What I’m hoping that means is that we will see something similar with each expansion in the future. I’m assuming we’ll get one ‘expansion’ for each Elder Dragon, maybe a few will be combined or some of them will be released in episodic content like the Living Story, but either way I think we can assume we will eventually face each Elder Dragon in turn. And for the sake of speculation, Im going to use an Elder Dragon being introduced as a boss to mark an expansion, regardless of how the elder dragon is introduced
But what do these three pillars (new start, new progression, and new end game) mean for those future expansions. Well to start off, the new way to start. I would be a little surprised if every expansion gave us a new class, especially considering that we already have 3 professions of each armor-type. What I wouldn’t be as surprised to see are new races with the expansion packs.
We have two new races that would be ripe for that kind of content, the Kodan would be a perfect pairing with the fight against Jormag, and the Tengu could come in any number of ways. In the lore we also have the Dwarves, probably the most likely of unlikely candidates, and the Undead (Pawala Jokos subjects) which I would say are the least likely candidate. We also have Canthan humans which could introduce all kinds of new story elements, but like I said, all of this is pure speculation.
How would the Tengu come in though? I can think of two major ways to introduce the Tengu to the pact, and get them out from behind their walls. Either have Primordious rise and shatter the wall on his spines, forcing them to fight, now that the Dragons have come to their door-step, or have a colony of Tengu fleeing the pogroms in Cantha break through the Deep Sea Dragons blockade and land somewhere, causing the Dominion to open up to help the refugees.
Obviously introducing any new race is going to require restructuring the personal story completely. Using Primordious, or really any other Elder Dragon, as a vehicle to do this is ideal. Primordious rising up and shattering the land, reshaping the world and pouring his minions into new zones (Kind of like what WoW did with Cataclysm, reformed the entire world) or have Krakltorik stir, opening the way to Elona and causing a new brand of chaos elsewhere. Either way, using one of the currently quiet Elder Dragons as an excuse to re-write the story from the ground up seems like the no-brainer there.
And the new way to progress is an easy one, extending the Mastery system to new zones and to lower levels, adding more ways to get around like mounts, or surfing or something, The Mastery system is brilliant really and it seems natural to spread it around the world, instead of just in high level zones within the jungle.
And then we come to specializations. At first having one specialization per class seems kind of lame, and it is, but the specialization system is described by Colin as a “secondary profession” and I think thats more than just a nod to the original game. Guild Wars had 10 professions, each one could have any of the other 9 professions as it’s secondary. That basically meant Guild Wars had 90 distinct professions. So adding one subclass per expansion, giving us a grand total of 6 specializations per profession (which I think is unlikely, I’m envisioning more like two or three total by the end of it all) we wouldn’t even be close to Guild Wars staggering number of distinct class combinations.
Especially considering that they made a point of the Tengu hiding behind their walls.
But walls are made to be broken down.
I’ll admit I’m not optimistic about a new race, and if one was introduced I think it would either accompany a complete rewriting of the personal story or the new race/races would just have different story lines to the other races… which would be kind of confusing and make the timing difficult, which is where my optimism completely goes away.
However, I want new races, so this is the part where I do wild speculation. At least one, the Tengu, and ideally two, the Kodan. I can’t think of any other races in the Guild Wars universe that would make sense as playable. And if we ignore the time dilation and personal story issues we could have the Kodan come in with the Jormag expansion.
Then have the Tengu come in by either breaking their wall down when Primordious emerges and GW2 pulls a Cataclysm and rebuilds the whole world or have a new colony of Tengu from Cantha or Elona with the expansion that accompanies either the Deep Sea Dragon or Kralkatorrik.
The only other race I could see making even a little sense would be a race of Undead, but I’m not hugely fond of that idea.
I’m not sure but I think I saw the thief with a rifle in the trailer, and for the necro, maybe a Death-Knight or a Bone-Knight or something.
I’d really rather them not just make this a fan service thing where they bring back the old classes as specializations, I’d much rather be surprised by something new to the Guild Wars world.
During the panel too Colin described the Druid by saying you would learn and master the Druidic powers of the Maguna Jungle. That makes me think that each specialization will be tied to lore in some way, instead of just taking what they already are and enhancing one aspect of it (like making the thief into an Assassin, it pretty much already is)
Okay, try to bear with me for a moment.
When I think of Druid, I think of “nature healer”.
What about Diablo IIs Druid. That was absolutely not a healer, it was a combination of creature control and nuke damage, which sounds exactly like what GW2s Druid is going to give us.
I also agree that the video seems to show the engineer wearing heavy armor, and at the announcement panel they made it sounds like specialization will change more than just the weapon the class uses, so I don’t think its far-fetched so say that the Engineer specialization will let them either equip heavy armor or at least be able to generate it as a skill, kind of like an Iron Man suit.
I hope this means we can expect more specializations in the future, at the very least I imagine that each expansion will add more specializations, but I hope they add them as they develop them, just periodically as content patches.
Also I’m really hoping switching between specializations will be easy. I don’t necessarily want it to be just a re-spec button, but I wouldn’t mind being able to start my Druid over as a skin-changer or something from ‘level zero’.
- Will the expansion be after the fashion of Eye of the North or something more like the three GWs. So what Im saying is is this going to be all max level content or will there be a whole new story to go through from the beginning. Or will we see a combination of the two, say like a retooling of the personal story to make it fresh and have it lead in to the new content rather than where it leads now.
-If there is only one specialization per profession why would I not specialize? Does specializing change the character entirely, so if I specialize to Druid do I lose my Ranger skills and sacrifice them for Druid skills? Or is it just it gives you a new couple of skills, talents, and weapons. Im really hoping there will be at least two specializations per profession, just for variability sake.
-Will stuff like masteries and specializations be on the level of legendary weapons or GW1s more elusive titles where only the people that are really willing to put in the hours be able to unlock them? I actually like the way legendary weapons are hard to get, so having one actually matters, but something like masteries and specializations that change gameplay and add actual new content should be more widely available, they shouldn’t be easy to get certainly but I’d like to see them realistically obtainable.
-Will there be other masteries related to mobility other than hang-gliders? Things like mounts or surfing or maybe grappling hooks?
-Are we going to see new skills and traits for existing professions or races? Including new weapon types beyond specializations. Like adding scythes or spears and giving them to existing classes. And while we’re at that, will the Revanent get a specialization?
-Will there be more than one new ‘zone’? Even if the jungle isn’t split into multiple zones, I hope we’ll at least see some new cities, like maybe the Domain of the Winds, or some of the areas around Orr, now that Zhaitan is gone, those areas should be safer, like the Ring of Fire and such.