Any system other than Elite Specs - What are your thoughts?

Hey there,

I was thinking about class progression in Guild Wars overall and Elite Specializations are meant to expand on the profession's theme giving it access to more skills to choose from. These come with the trade-offs (or at least that's what I heard). In GW2 professions have dedicated weapon sets +1/2 is available while using E-Spec. And lastly, each class' weapon set has it's own themed skills, so Sword skills on Guardian are different than the Sword skills on Warrior.

Original Guild Wars uses a dual profession system that lets you obtain skills of other classes while still wearing your base profession's armor. Also, every class can wear every weapon.Some of the profession's skills are weapon-exclusive, meaning you have to wear a specific weapon to use a skill.

So, there are lots of similarities but the combat systems are vastly different. I'm leaving Utility skills as these are also pretty different.

My question is - what are the other additional combat features that could work in GW2 in both PvE and PvP?

Is it dual-professions, choosable weapon-skills? Or something completely different?

My personal opinion is that we don't really need to add too much new at this stage. The Elite system is fine and I'm happy for that just to be expanded upon.

I could see dual-professions being quite messy this far in and might cause upsets with the build template system. I appreciate that system has a whole range of issues, but the chances of a redesign there to account for a major new feature seem rather....slim

I think it'd be better off if they just added existing weapons (so we don't have only 2-3 classes using pistol/rifle/mace) to existing classes and no elite specs.If they add elite specs then more balance patches are sure to happen.

I'm hoping alliance battles happen and that competitive aspect comes back (JQ/FA are essentially "stronghold" PvP, GvG/HoH) so GW2 doesn't only get seen as that "casual" story game you log in every time there's a living story made every few months. Factions was the PvP-oriented expansion to GW1, where they introduced multi-guild Alliances (up to 10 guilds) and guild ownership of towns (based on faction points). Alliance chat was a thing as well, so if implemented in GW2 you'd have a way to do emergency callouts to get people from PvE to help defend or attack a structure. Since the introduction of meegaservers you can't drop into Lions Arch to pull people to WvW, so it's only whoever is already in WvW or maybe whoever is in your guild(s).

In addition, GW Factions provided a meaningful link between PvE + PvP since faction points were obtained from competitive missions as well as PvE.

If Arenanet manages to get the competitive aspect going again instead of story mode + dress-up gemstore play modes then it would have greater streaming & publicity. If you look at the popular genres such as MOBAs , autochess, fighters, strategy games & RTS, and shooters / survival games it's not about new maps or story. It's literally the same maps, same characters/champions/etc, same story with incremental changes. The "story" games such as RPGs , flight/racing, collectible card games, etc need new "story" content whether it is maps, environments, "characters" (in the case of flight/racing it's planes/choppers/cars/etc).

I'm glad they finally did rework balance from PvE (Feb 25) and focused less on raids per their disclosure on the idea of strikes but PvP/GvG/WvW adds meaning to guilds and replayable content that doesn't have the "grindiness" of just redoing a given PvE instance/map tens or hundreds of times (Gift of scion requiring 1000 mistborn coffers is an example).

As an example, if the entire WvW map at the start were devoid of anything structural and players had to build walls from scratch with supply on designated areas, you would bring in the city builder/tower defense genre people. If they added new ways to attack keeps/towers then they'd bring in more people with the siege mentality. There's many ways they could bring in people from other genres instead of going for MMO / RPG players.

Henchmen/Mercenary/Assistance NPC for dungeon or some instances area.