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Will you miss secondary classes and customization?
VowOfSilence
Member UncommonPosts: 565
My main gripe with GW2 is that secondary classes have been axed and the number of skills will be lower. One of the best things about GW1 was collecting, mixing and experimenting with hundreds of skills. It was what made GW1 really different from other MMOs: The sheer amount of different builds and possibilites.
Yeah I know, GW2 has races instead, and it's supposed to be "quality over quantity". But:
1) We don't know how much race matters.
2) You can't switch races/professions without starting a new char every time.
3) Tactics will matter more than builds/strategy.
4) No matter how you look at it, the variety of builds will be lower.
I can't help it, but it looks a lot like they are dumbing down GW2 to make it more "accessible". In fact, they basically admitted it, - but I didn't see much rage among the fans.
GW2 has all these great innovations, but removing secondaries and reducing skills seems like a step back. It feels more like - dare i say it? - World of Warcraft...
Well, how do you feel about it?
Hype train -> Reality
Comments
Well as the developers said, its a completely different game from the first game. You can't look at it as simply an upgraded GW game. You have to change your mindset when you play GW2. That is what I will try to do. And yes, I will miss the secondary profession and build customizing from the original GW.
Customization.... depends on how you see customization. I like the fact that I can perform a chain and then switch weapons to perform another chain and then switch again to top it all off. In my mind that is another level of customization, getting that selection of skills and weapons that you can use to bewilder your opponents. Its customization on a totally different stand point.
If GW2 was GW1 and GW1 is GW2, I believe we'd still be having this very conversation about customization.
This is not a game.
I won't miss it - I believe the GW2 system offers more interesting customization options, even if there aren't quite as many of them necessarily. A lot of the subclass combos were not really even compatible, or you would use very few of that classes skills, plus they would be less effective - that's not as fun imo. I'd rather they just build a ton of flexibility and customization into each class without crossing them over, as they are doing with GW2. It gives the player a little more sense of identity with their character and continuity too, instead of just feeling like some incomplete mixture of 2 classes.
Dumbing down and streamlining for simplicity are different things entirely - and it still bears no resemblance to WoW in the character customization department.
I never played GW1, so cannot compare. But I can comment on what we've seen in the vids and the general idea of what the devs want to do with this change.
1. I like the skills attached to weapons idea. It's great seeing melee use a bow and dps use a sword eg, it seems flexible.
2. When you stack up all the options: Weapon, skill, attribute, trait, race etc it seems there could be a lot customisation, still?!
3. The idea that all professions can do Support, Control, Damage and use different weapons is very versatile and can be changed to suit the context or enemy or team gameplay?
4. The change will probably be most advantageous in pvp. As 3. all players can do the above, balancing should be a lot easier.
5. The HUD looks simple and clean and it's more about looking at the stuff happening on the screen and using what you have got set-up has impressed me by comparison to other mmos.
Less skills, but more with a few interesting rules, and complex gameplay can still emerge, is what I hope this approach achieves. It's clever to make race a secondary to profession and profession all the same versitily, I reckon.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
what i hope is that diffrent wepons may have a diffrent skillset on them, otherwize it may feel a little like you only really get to choose 5 skills (i dont know if you can even choose the heal skill either.)
You'll be able to choose different healing skills, at least that is what the devs told us. Also different weapon types will change out the first 5 skills.
not types, i mean one greatsword to another greatsword. but i dont see that happening
Well at first I missed it a lot, but now just a little. After seeing the vids I didn't really miss it. Afterall, even with those in GW1 at the end there were a lot of standard builds that most people used in PvP.
Ahh I getcha. No, I don't see that happening either. The one thing I am kind of disapointed in is that those weapon skills aren't customizable. I was kind of hoping that you could have a pool of about 10 skills per weapon type that you could choose from to make your own skill bar so to speak. So that it is a bit more personal. I think that would have been a nice compromise.
Ima sure that there will still be tons of builds you can experiment with in gw2. plus as someone mentioned a little higher, theres combos and skill chains to discover. to me, that is worth cutting the skill count in half for. And....theres gunna be expansions and I'm sure they'll add a few more skills to the count.
Those answers can't be answered untill you have played the game for a few weeks...
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
i know what you mean but i think that haveing wepons with diffent skills built in would have been cool. and could be explained as takeing the wepons shape and physical attribuites then they can be weileded a diffrent way,
IE: a bow witch has diffrent notches in it allow for more arrows to be shot , but a bow that is stronger can allow the user to use arrows to pin.
or a sword with a saw end can use a skill like "rip" to cause a deepwoud liek effect or "barrbed" for bleeding. but a smooth wepon might have "slice"
that would have worked very well in my opinon
Well, I don't buy the hype in that regard.
Anet says the changes will make things more accessible and easier to balance. But at the same time, it will also be just as complex as GW1.
Wait, what? Not even Anet can have the cake and eat it, too. A lot of versatile combos are just as hard to get into and to balance as a lot of skills. Maybe even harder. If you really want a game to be simpler, you need to make it simpler.
Hype train -> Reality
Probably a game breaker for me, but ill play open beta to check it out...
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Holy Flamin' Frost-Brand Gronk-Slayin' Vorpal Hammer o' Woundin' an' Returnin' an' Shootin'-Lightnin'-Out-Yer-Bum!! ~Planescape: Torment~
No resemblance to WoW?
GW1: 100 primary skills, plus 5x 75 secondary skills = ~475 skills.
At least 200 of those were usefull for your class combos.
GW2: Maybe 50 primary skills + some racial abilities.
You know... pretty much like WoW and most other mmos?
Hype train -> Reality
Wow what a massive generalisation. Many of those 50 skills interact with other classes skills and other profession skills as well. Plus many of them have relatively complex mechanics like the phoenix skills. Does WoW skills do any of those things? No.
There are less skills due to the quality of each skill in gw2 it's not the same in WoW.
There appears to be a disconnect between the two, put that way. Their verbatim is more like: "Easy to pick-up, but hard to master".
The above is my own optimism that complex combat will emerge (fundamentals feel right from what info I have seen, not played any yet tho).
And the big simplification of classes reminds me of builds in a FPS more, which again alludes to better things in PvP, but still managing some flavor of distinctness. How does the 2 heavy armourers affect things if at all compared to the 3 medium armor wearers, there are still plenty of questions too on this, still. I have even read one hands on report that does say the tinkering of all the options with weapons, skills, traits (attributes were fixed for the demo as was race) took a lot of time and saving these setting would be a BIG part of the game, they reckoned.
True I also heard reports from ppl saying that spamming 5 skills was sufficient and even button 1 skill is all you need to win.
But I am still optimistic, judging by my own mmo experience (limited, yes) and what reasoning I can apply to their claims. It still feels like the right direction and looks right too on the demos to these eyes.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
im really hoping that the high level, hard to get weapons will have sort of special skill(s) attached to them, wich will make getting one of those more interesting and fun. Anyone else really hoping for this?
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The developers said that much of the content has been made a lot easier, because of the demo.
SteamID: Sertii
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And you got that figure on GW2 from where, exactly?
And how bout that you can assign different skills to make different builds without talent trees? Not like WoW where you're stuck with whatever abilities the class has and you have them all on your bar at once?
Why do you feel the need to compare the game to WoW in the first place? It's still much closer to GW1 than anything else mechanically.
anyway, in WoW, you will only ever use 10 of the skills you have at most. The rest are just out of combat utility skills (Mage Portals) and useless skills
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won't miss it one bit because in guild wars you only ever ended up using 2-3 skills from another class, and mostly they made the setup a: gimmicky or b: stupidly overpowered.
it will be a lot easier to balance.
+it just didn't really fit.
i mean, come on, which of the class combinations was logical?
warrior elementalist?
necro monk?
assassin paragon?
this will allow them to focus on other things.
have to say moving whilst casting + rolling/jumping/swimming make gw2 look awesome in comparison with the 1st
This copy/paste from Guild Wars 2 Wiki sums things up pretty nicely.
Skills
There will be fewer skills than the original, with the aim for quality rather than quantity. Skill animations and graphics should provide a clearer indication of the range and effect of a skill as it is used. A character will have a total of 10 skill slots, five of which are weapon and profession dependent and can only be changed by switching to a different type of weapon. The other five are dependent on profession and race and can be changed by the player whenever out of combat, with one skill being reserved for healing, and one for an elite. The goal of this change is to give more options for truly viable builds than Guild Wars allowed while at the same time decreasing the potential for less useful skill combinations (like bringing Gash without a skill that causes Bleeding).
Each race will have a set of skills unique to it. These will be weaker than profession-specific skills, but could cover weaknesses that a character's profession may not be able to provide for.
wrong.
i use, shiv, kick, gouge, dismantle, envenom, eviscerate, cold blood, preparation, vanish, evasion, kidney shot, cheap shot, garotte, rupture, sprint, deadly throw, distract, sap, blind, expose armor, slice n dice, and of course, ambush.
that's at least 22 skills i use on a regular basis, and i may have forgotten others.
other classes use more as far as i know.
I will actually miss the system a good amount. Why? Because it did add for some interesting class combinations. It meant that, while there may not have been specific classes to fit a player's play style, they could combine them to match that need. Fan of combat mages? warrior - elementallist. Fan of paladins? warrior - monk. Fan of shadow priests? necro - monk. The only one off the combinations up there that doesn't mimic a pre-existing class in other MMOs would be the assassin - paragon combination. This is primarily because the paragon was a very unique class type, as was the assassin (though to a much lesser degree).
I do admit that having 2ndary classes did increase confusion a bit for a lot of people, but part of the appeal of GW to me was that the combat required you to think. You really had to take the time to consider different skills from different classes and how they play off each other. If that was too hard, there was always the Wiki. On the whole it made for very diverse and dynamic combat. I can't count the number of times I played a guild battle, tournament, or factions battle and thought "wow, that's a really interesting combination that guy is using, I'll have to try that out".