[IDEAS] “Heroes” System + Masteries for GW2

[TheLadyOfTheRings.9148]

I like this "companion system" idea :) It's actually pretty close to my dream-idea (which is to play with 2 characters "at the same time", i.e. bringing my guardian and my warrior together and swapping to one or the other like we do with weapons or pets).

[Einlanzer.1627]

Here's the deal with heroes - we already have them in the game. They are the player's various companions you fight alongside in instances.

The problem is that this isn't a fleshed out system and it should be. They should have bios in the story journal, appear in a HUD during combat, have adjustable AI & skills, and a light-weight way to mange them as companions. Entering a story instance should let you preview your fixed companions, let you modify their skills/AI, and let you add one or two optional ones that are featured as "unlockable". You should be able to acquire them as a collectible and take them into classic dungeons as well as story instances. All of that would be amazing.

They should not be usable in the open world.

[ugrakarma.9416]

dude the game barely manage our "companions" in history mode. most players think of them as annoyance them something helpful.

[Ashantara.8731]

@Malediktus.9250 said:No. Heroes were already a mistake in GW1

I think they were the best addition to GW1, so much fun to equip and control. They could have blocked them in certain content (UW, FoW), but for map exploration and missions, I think they were good to have.

@"ugrakarma.9416" said:dude the game barely manage our "companions" in history mode. most players think of them as annoyance them something helpful.

So true. The story NPCs are useless. As for Heroes in GW2, they would have to create special future content for them, as they don't fit into the already existing one. The game is too easy already, it would be very boring with an OP team of NPCs. The old content would require a complete overhaul on their behalf.

[kharmin.7683]

For me, heroes in GW1 were extremely useful as I really didn't game with too many others. In GW2, the map content isn't instanced like in GW1, so I have less need for AI assistance that heroes could provide.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Heroes in GW1 as progression relied on more than just you personal character. This is far from the case of GW2. I can also see this having issues in the open world. Heroes should not be the solution if players are unwilling to use the LFG.

[Zola.6197]

Why are y’all resurrecting this thread and blowing up my notifications

[Gryphon.2875]

@"Svennis.3852" said:Why are y’all resurrecting this thread and blowing up my notifications

Cause someone liked your idea.

[Zola.6197]

@Gryphon.2875 said:

@"Svennis.3852" said:Why are y’all resurrecting this thread and blowing up my notifications

Cause someone liked your idea.

hey that's a first

[Poormany.4507]

Really do not like this idea for GW2, personally seeing how heroes made GW1 a solo game and removed almost any need for playing with anyone else in game.

Also, seeing how they're handling build templates, heroes/companions would likely be completely paywalled and not worth getting at all for most players (arguably even pay to win for farming), since the game is already really easy in open world and story instances.

Strongly prefer they spend their time/resources on adding something useful to the game or fixing bugs that have been in game for years.

[starlinvf.1358]

@"Kheldorn.5123" said:The hostility in some comments here really makes me think.

Heroes would allow people who have troubles with socializing or simply don't want to get involved into relationships with other players to complete group content. On their terms, builds and at speed they want to. That would obviously be disabled for PvP and WvW, however I would love to see such feature e.g. for dungeons - as a test. If it works we can make it part of fractals and even raids.

Heroes could be gold/money sink on its own and with hero skins/armors anet can earn more money.

Outside of development time... what are the cons? They have time to manually place chairs for people to sit so they can spend this time on other features aswell.

This is flawed premise on multiple levels though...... especially on a technical level.

If we completely disregard the social aspects of the situation, Companion NPCs are still a massive problem on their AI alone. The amount things required to compensate for that is very extensive, and have (over time) have been adding various forms of soft immunity to them during Story missions to prevent them from being a total liability.

The issues are as follows:

• The AI is incredibly simple, and can only manage "move to marker" and "IF target_inrange=TRUE, THEN attack; IF FALSE THEN move_toward_target". Their attacks fire off cool down with some conditional caveats (like delays before they're allowed to use them), or fired off in specific sequences (became a new standard form LS3 onward).
• AI lacks the ability to be fully aware of their surroundings, nor playing off other ally's actions, or form complex strategies. Those elements have to be baked into the level/event scripting, group compositions, and their individual skill times/sequences.
• The above conditions make them incapable of opportunistic behavior that isn't governed by single IF variables.
• Heroes would not be able to understand buildcraft or skill rotations and combinations, which is foundational to how these classes operate.
• How and when they decide to engage has always been a problem, and off loading that to the player requires very granular controls.

The reason Heroes even worked in GW1 was a fluke of the Skill system, and mobility/positioning being practically a non-issue to combat.

• The freeform skill bar let you organize skill chains using simple left to right priority, and the targeting requirements of most skills made for easier conditional checks.
• That set up allowed for functional combat with very reactionary AI, and the Trinity Comp structure mitigated a lot of the edge cases
• Range and positioning where much lesser issues, since the majority of skill were single target, targeted AOE or PbAOE. Cleave didn't exist, dodging didn't exist, and any skills with a cast time required you to stand still.

Why this doesn't work for GW2 as it stands:

• Despite AI being superior in terms of reaction time, Positioning is too important in any combat that isn't just a 1v1 slug fest.
• The moment you introduce AOEs , CCs and highly mobile enemies, combat shifts very heavily toward predictive thought processes, counter strategies, and dynamic threat prioritization. I remember fighting Modrem in the Silverwastes BEFORE the overwhelming damage and shutdown power of Especs..... at a time when the only substantial difference between a player and NPCs were players using dodges whenever they took too much damage. The feral mordrem WRECKED an entire population of players, because the majority had never actually fought something that could fight back before.
• Even at its height of environmental awareness, the AI never got much further then understanding what an AOE circle was, and simply moving toward and past the closest edge. The only major advancement in their outward behavior since then is how they handle target selection.

In order to be even marginally worth using, Heroes would need the following systems added to get past the liability threshold.

• Positioning control to avoid ground hazards and lining up multiple targets. Since AI will probably never get that far, this falls on a granular and easy to hotkey Waypoint system, and complimenting behavior controls when and how far to engage targets. Considering the GW1 implementation, and some of POF missions explicitly built around this concept, theres no way this will work without monopolizing the players attention. And given how much attention is needed to survive combat in post expansion content, even one Hero becomes a heavy burden on management. But without it (using the current auto-pilot minion behavior) you can't hope for anything greater then Ranger pet's 2 state system.
• Heros would have to have their own bespoke skill system designed to work around their AI. The problem I see with this off the bat, is how those skills would have to be incredibly strong to be even marginally effective. This has a compound effect with how their HP and defenses have to be managed, since its nigh impossible to replicate a player's efficient use/management of Dodges and active defenses without stronger predictive capabilities.
• For defense, the next closest feasible solution is a matrix of defensive reactions tailored to each class/type skill profile of enemies, so the AI knows how to appropriately act when fighting one. This sounds good on paper, until you actually start making a list of attack types found across the game...... POF mobs have almost entirely bespoke attack skills, while HOT uses modified versions of player skills. Core Tyria Mobs use either older/modified versions of Player skills, or use the same archetypal skills as Ranger pets. This could easily give the Mystic Forge a run for its money on manual upkeep. Theres also a risk of their defense reactions majorly interfering with their offensive actions. In fact.... if we look at the behavior of players, most go all in on offensive for a faster kill; as being put on the defensive is can quickly snowball with how strong many enemy attacks are.
• And even with all that in there, it would STILL need most of the special advantages already given to major named NPCs during story missions, in order to offset the substantial difference in combat effectiveness between Players and everything else. Things like universal damage reduction, downstate replaced with temporary disable, and condition purging/immunity.

However, I still have one more HUGE problem with the whole thing.................... Allowing this in open world creates a whole new level of scaling problems that is currently isolated to WvW. GW1 never had this problem, because the entire game is instanced based. Heros also had an entire game structured around a party system that they could easily slot into, and would not change any of the balance considerations since they are (at best) comparable to a player. But with the open world format of GW2, and how its balanced around Solo players.... if a Hero NPC is even close to supplanting another (even casual) player in terms of combat power, this creates a power creep problem that the open world Events/Metas and random enemies are going to have to take into account. With companions, every player that congregates in the area realistically adds an extra 30-60% to the damage output on top of the their own. That means events and bosses would have to scale as if there were 50% more players then there actually are, otherwise risk them being finished way too easily. We've already seen several instances in the past where event scaling was broken in either direction; and shown us how delicate the tuning for these things are.

When viewing the idea as a whole, from a purely technical and game play perspective, the only way this doesn't break the game is to limit it to Story instances. But theres a catch 22 in which Story missions wouldn't require more systems then whats already being used, since it would be far more efficient to bake many of those options into the story missions themselves. IE.... Its either a create system that has to be universally compatible with old content (which is difficult, time consuming, and breaks a couple of paradigms the game is built on); oooooorrrrrr........ build missions and mission areas explicitly around this concept, and limit it to that content block only. In nearly every conceivable way, the latter approach is as optimal as we can get, based on how the overall game is designed.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Playing with other players is kind of the point of MMO’s and why they’re different from single player RPG’s. Over 90% of GW2 can be done solo so I don’t see this as an issue.

Allowing heroes would also create balancing issues, as well as performance issues, in the open world. Imagine doing Teq with every player bringing their full set of heroes. Or any other group meta event. You’d essentially trivialize it at the expense of server performance.

[Ayakaru.6583]

My main concern is that the game is so easy it doesn't even take 1 whole player to get through everything. Wouldn't a hero like we had in gw1 just make everything and every fight redundant?

[kharmin.7683]

@Ayakaru.6583 said:My main concern is that the game is so easy it doesn't even take 1 whole player to get through everything. Wouldn't a hero like we had in gw1 just make everything and every fight redundant?

I believe that to be the point.

[TheLadyOfTheRings.9148]

If this "hero system" was really implemented - in a viable way, considering everything said so far - I don't think it would force players to use it; those who don't see any advantages in the system wouldn't use it.

[kharmin.7683]

@"TheLadyOfTheRings.9148" said:If this "hero system" was really implemented - in a viable way, considering everything said so far - I don't think it would force players to use it; those who don't see any advantages in the system wouldn't use it.

I wonder the percentage of players in GW1 who did use it?

[Gryphon.2875]

@kharmin.7683 said:

@"TheLadyOfTheRings.9148" said:If this "hero system" was really implemented - in a viable way, considering everything said so far - I don't think it would force players to use it; those who don't see any advantages in the system wouldn't use it.

I wonder the percentage of players in GW1 who did use it?

I did. I even bought the tokens to make my own.

[Poormany.4507]

@"TheLadyOfTheRings.9148" said:If this "hero system" was really implemented - in a viable way, considering everything said so far - I don't think it would force players to use it; those who don't see any advantages in the system wouldn't use it.

Only way I could see it forcing players to use it would be enabling level 80 zone (semi) afk mob farming for those with heroes, giving them an advantage over those without them.

In GW1 post-hero content was much harder to do with just henchmen, so the choice was pretty much to somehow find a multiple person party that can work together to clear content or go the easy way and use heroes. Pretty sure you can guess what most players (including myself) picked and what ultimately, turned GW1 into a single player game (not that that's wrong, but I don't think that's something Anet would want for GW2, which is much more heavily advertised as a cooperative game).

[TheLadyOfTheRings.9148]

Yeah, I don't think the system should be viewed as an "advantage" that makes one player stronger than others without the system (and for that reason I don't think it would "kill" the cooperation in the game) but rather as one more way of having fun. :)

[Ara the Elegant.6825]

I could see ANet eventually implementing a single hero system eventually, similar to what they had intended to implement upon launch. The player base in spread so thin throughout the game, that some people could certainly use the help when trying to get some older content done. If a player isn't able to get enough help via the LFG, and wants to get some champs done in Ember Bay (which has been hopelessly empty for a long time) then a "hero" NPC could certainly help get that done.

It's not an ideal solution, but I could see it being done when the game gets put on maintenance mode and ANet knows they aren't going to make any further content. The game is already mostly single-player, so putting in the option for a hero companion doesn't 'break' the game as much as it just plays into a problem that has always been there.

Back during the betas and at launch, there were so many people playing, that you could get help with just about any event on any map. These days, not so much the case. A player who may struggle to get Heart of Thorns hero points done solo is going to have a hard time when the HP trains eventually stop running. The ability to take a companion to absorb aggro and deal a token amount of damage, would help in that case.

[Aeolus.3615]

@Malediktus.9250 said:No. Heroes were already a mistake in GW1

For pve content I would not bother, maybe u could even use your toons has heroes, and make ur own dragon watch :)It could help it, a lot of players even started to buy outfits to theme up their cac heroes on gw1.

Gw1!had that sistem, they could add a veteran/ hard mode has well.