Possible future expansion feature/mastery

[starlinvf.1358]

@BlueJin.4127 said:

@"starlinvf.1358" said:You severely under estimate the power coefficient of an extra actor, when working in concert as a coherent group comp. This would utterly break open world on multiple levels..... mechanical, technical, power creep, encounter balance, scaling, support skills, Mob AI behavior, the list is long and touches nearly every aspect of it. Even just in the presence of a second entity like with Ranger's pets, makes the majority of standard difficulty scale of content (which is open world and story instances) fairly easy just by taking aggro off the player. But Rangers are also balanced around a pet being 25% of their base line damage, causing the rest of the ranger to scale that much lower when given any type of external buffs, such a Might or % based traits. The mechanical advantage alone can double or triple the effectiveness of many classes when allowed to focus solely on one task.... and giving a thief a tank, is taking away the one thing that keeps them in check.

There is no way this is going to be a limited "%" effectiveness bonus, when you're dealing with altering of multiple combat dynamics. And this is on top of the fact that most builds allow for strong defensive aspects to be weaved in through choice of skills/traits, or opting for certain strategies. To build an entire expansion around this is to repeat the mistake of Nightfall- and that was a game designed around a party of 8, where most content in this game is designed around solo players already.

it sounds like a good idea on paper..... but the ramifications in practice are much greater on both social and mechanical levels.

I can understand your concern

, but it's way too overblown. There are other MMO's and other types of games that already added heroes like I mentioned, and it doesn't cause these problems you're worried about (when done properly, of course).

Heroes in open world MMO's are nothing like heroes in GW1. In GW1, you always do contents designed for a party so your heroes need to be every bit as powerful as a real player. In open world MMO's, heroes are minor additions that have very little HP, very little damage, etc. You do not need to worry about a Thief with a tank hero not having to worry about aggro at all. The heroes won't survive long enough that it completely negates a player's own effort to survive.

To explain in a way so players who never played these games can have an idea, having a damaging hero is like having one more damaging ability. Depending on your build, players already carry like 10 damaging abilities, so 1 more is nothing. A healer hero is like having 1 extra healing skill, which is not even as powerful as the vast majority of self heals players use in skill slot 6. A tank hero is like having a skill that blocks a few regular attacks since a tank hero will not hold aggro, nor will it even have the survivability to fight even a regular enemy alone for 5 seconds.

The percentage I added was just to give players an idea. In reality, it's not that high. In fact, some players simply not use heroes in these games because the increase is so trivial and heroes have a tendency to aggro extra enemies.

I do not believe you do. And not I'm even more confused about your whole thought process with the "they're inconsequential because they die" argument, when that is literally self-defeating their existence. If they're inconsequential, then why even have them? So they have to add something, and in doing so its an avenue that players will inevitably find a way to abuse for additional gains.

You're also skipping over how the game handles difficulty in the overworld, and the effect power creep has had on it. Mobs have 2 vectors for difficulty scaling; internal stats, and group size. The latter is most common for trash mobs, while the former is more common in Vet+ mobs and boss fights. Having Heroes creates a problem of "how to scale" a fight using these mechanics, because not only are they power creeping on a per player basis, it immediately raises the question on whether or not Heroes should count in scaling because of the power creep they are contributing. This is a big deal in open world, where theres a very high player cap, because you're effectively increasing the total output on the player side by a % across the board (or more if multiple heroes have a compounding effect) because every player is likely to have heroes with them. Their additive nature is the cause of all of this. Just like if a bunch of thieves all use "Theive's Guild" at the same time, adding a substantial increase in damage while they're active. Except Hereos being a separate mechanic isn't even costing you a skill slot to make happen, and everyone has the ability to use them.

"One more ability is nothing" is NOT nothing. If it was nothing, you wouldn't even be pushing this as a viable idea. Unless you somehow have a method of preventing them from being directly and indirectly cumulative, this idea is going to suffer a flaw that risks overscaling anytime multiple players gather in a location. The only way I can see around this is to make them part of the Environment, and balanced within the map design. Theres already an example of this with Exalted Assistance, that spawns a companion that patrols the area and offers support. But I doubt thats what you're looking for, since you've put major emphasis on Heroes being attached to the player.

You accuse me of overblowing this, but I don't think you've even bothered to think this through beyond the scope of solo roaming. Because if you had, you'd realize players naturally congregate around events and farming areas. And this is even more prevalent in older maps where this was their express intent. On top of which I've been leaving out the Buildcraft from the discussion, which already solves the problem you're presenting by increasing combat performance and self sustain. That too has scaling issues thanks to how the current batch of Especs are being handled; but at least that be reigned in universally with balance passes, while Heroes remain purely additive power.

[BlueJin.4127]

As I said, there are already open world MMO's and other games that have heroes that give players a minor boost and they don't cause balance problems that you're concerned with. I also have some experience with balance and game design and have created similar stuff with no issues. In any case, I apologize if it sounded like I was accusing or sounding condescending.

[IndigoSundown.5419]

Heroes in the open world.

AKA Equal Opportunity "Inattentive Farming." Now players need not play Engineer, Necro or Ranger to semi-AFK farm. Let Heroes do it for you!

Yeah...

no.

[Sylvari.2953]

No thank you. The Hero system was the main reason why I couldn't get into GW1. The fact that I had to rely on NPCs to do story and my character felt totally useless alone was a huge turn off. My characters can solo every story instance in GW2. I don't want Anet to ruin this, nerf us and make NPCs mandatory for story again (or even worse, open world). That would be the day when I quit.

[BlueJin.4127]

It looks like a lot of players are not really reading beyond the title. :disappointed:

I'm not talking about a hero system like GW1. Maybe I shouldn't even use the word hero since that may instantly make it sound like I'm talking about a system like GW1's heroes. If you played with heroes/followers/whatever they're called in games like WoW and Diablo 3, the system I'm talking about is more like what you see in WoW and Diablo 3 when you're playing alone.

Some classes have glaring flaws that make it inconvenient when playing solo. Heroes can help mitigate some of these flaws. For example, if your class is very squishy, a tanky hero can help absorb some damage. You're still responsible for negating majority of your damage. But a hero may grab an enemy's attention for 2~3 hits. If you want CC but your class lacks any kind of CC, you may want to take a hero with CC. It's not going to stun an enemy for 3 seconds every 10 seconds, but it'll give you something if you need to interrupt something critical against a difficult enemy. If your class has no healing, a healer hero may give you some healing. It won't heal you for half your health every 10 seconds, but it can save your life in some close situations. If you want a hero for damage, you can take a damaging hero, but heroes are meant for "features" so a DPS hero will give you like 10% extra DPS at most.

The heroes are not powerful enough to do things on their own. They're mostly cool customizable additions so that when you're playing alone, it can help to create the feeling that you're not playing alone.

Heroes won't break fractals, raids, etc. They won't be usable for fractals, raids, etc. They're for doing soloing world contents (and story instances, preferably).Heroes can't be used for inattentive farming. They're not powerful enough to kill things on their own.There is no need to balance older world contents any more than new skills, new attribute combinations, etc. require rebalancing old world contents. The heroes I'm talking about are not powerful like GW1 heroes.There will be no change to turn GW2 story instances into group instances. As I said, I'm not asking for a hero system like GW1.

[Einsof.1457]

No..please God no.

[joneirikb.7506]

I'll admit I dismissed this thread as another that wanted GW1 heroes in the game :p and didn't bother with it (Yeah we get those threads very regularly).

So in short, what you suggest would work closer to the Chocobo from Final Fantasy 14 ?

https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Companions

They're nowhere near as strong as a normal player, or even most normal veteran creatures, though they might have been able to take on 1-2 normal grunt mobs I guess. But allows for each character to gain "some" support in one of the trinity fields they lack (healer, tank, dps).

Ironically GW2 was initially planned to release with something similar, that you could create a own "npc" that you could play with, at a slight cost to your own stats, sort of like how Ranger and Pet works now, And make it optional so player could choose if they wanted the extra npc or the extra stats for solo.

---

All in all, I think it would be too much work to add it this late in the game.

But if they do, it would require a good bit of work on the AI, which could have been used for some good things down the road in other directions as well, like hopefully giving us interesting enemies to fight against some day. Other than that, the best we can hope for is single-tracked story-mission style npc's with a 100% hardcode break what you're doing and rez the player for script. Not very exciting :p