141 replies to this topic

[Diovid of the Land]

Looking Back
I think Arenanet made a mistake with the way they handled the Guild Wars 1 expansions . I know I'm not the only one because I've seen the complain a lot. Balance was ruined. I think there are a couple of reasons for this:

- The original classes present in any game (even in offline rpgs) are conceptualized, developed and balanced with eachother and with the game itself in a period of multiple years. New classes and abilities never have this luxury.

- The original six professions of Guild Wars 1 each had a certain role. The professions that were added later had no one role in which they excelled.

- Because new professions were added the amount of skills that had to be added with both campaigns was pretty big. This was aided further because the original professions of course also needed new skills.

- The above arguments were all amplified even more by the dual class system.

What exactly did this cause? A couple of things. First of all, the non-core professions were hardly ever used as primary professions in top pvp, outside of a few niche builds which were quickly nerfed. Second of all, certain builds were never viable, such as smiting monks (outside of farming certain mobs that is).

Originally I was quite a big proponent of more professions and was active in theorizing and discussing new professions. However as the above problems became apparant I figured out an alternative. The Assassin could have easily been added by giving the Ranger a Dagger Mastery attribute and adding Assassin-like skills to Expertise and Wilderness Survival, the Paragon could have been added by giving the Warrior a Spear Mastery attribute and adding Paragon-like skills to Strength and Tactics, the Ritualist playstyle could have been added to the Necromancer in a similar way and elements of the Dervish could have found their way into the Monk and the Elementalist.

This would have limited to huge influx of new skills and it would also have limited the amount of professions, limiting the the third and fourth causes of balance problems I named. I also think this would have limited the second cause, because the added playstyles could have been added in such a way that they would also fit the role the existing professions already had. Of course the first cause would still stand but because of the reduction in skills and professions the developers would have had more resources to balance the new skills but before and after their introduction. All in all I think this way the amount of viable builds would have been higher through better balance, even though the amount of possible builds would have been lower.

Guild Wars 2
How does this apply to Guild Wars 2 and it's future? That is a good question. Guild Wars 2 is of course an entirely different game. In my ways the way professions are set up in Guild Wars 2 is much simpeler. No multiclassing, much lower amount of skills, much less freedom in which skills to bring, no clear roles etc. All of this would make the addition of new professions a lot different in Guild Wars 2 and probably easier.

Further more there are arguments against my solution. From the perspective of players, especially more casual players, more variation is more often than not a good thing. New professions are great because they feel fresh. A little less balance is a small sacrifice for the addition of new professions. Guild Wars 1's non-core professions still have a lot of fans. Then there is the argument from the developer's point of view, namely that adding new professions with an expansion probably increases the chance players will buy the expansion.

Discussion
My question then to you all is, should Arenanet add more professions with future expansions or should Arenanet focus it's resources on balancing and expanding the options of existing professions?

[FoxBat]

Diovid of the Land, on 20 March 2013 - 02:35 PM, said:

Originally I was quite a big proponent of more professions and was active in theorizing and discussing new professions. However as the above problems became apparant I figured out an alternative. The Assassin could have easily been added by giving the Ranger a Dagger Mastery attribute and adding Assassin-like skills to Expertise and Wilderness Survival, the Paragon could have been added by giving the Warrior a Spear Mastery attribute and adding Paragon-like skills to Strength and Tactics, the Ritualist playstyle could have been added to the Necromancer in a similar way and elements of the Dervish could have found their way into the Monk and the Elementalist.

Funny. I rather think commandigon shockaxe, escape DB spam, and spirits + soul reaping + healing would be big balance issues. Actually thanks to dual classing many of them were, but it would be even worse when you get the runes going and more freedom with secondary choice.

Basically as you keep adding truly new functionality to existing classes, you will wipe out their distinguishing weaknesses, barring some specific countermeasure designs that GW2 currently lacks; or you water down the new functionality so much that it has minimal impact. That doesn't automatically rule it out, but it is a significant limit on how far you can take things.

Given GW2's lack of secondaries you also have to significantly bloat options within a class rather than simplifying for the end user by cordoning them off in a separate class, and you also greatly increase the number of intra-character combinations to worry about. And really GW2's total number of skills is not small compared to say prophecies. It's the limitations on how they can be combined (no secondaries, chunked into weapons, synergy minimized, etc.) that have kept the balance more controlled. And nothing is more controlled than grouping new skills into a totally new class that can't combine with the others.

Edited by FoxBat, 20 March 2013 - 02:59 PM.

[Desild]

At the very least new races should be added to expand the options for personal story that lead to expantion's story.

Personaly, they kinda hit a sweet spot with 8 classes to start with. Plenty of variety already.

[Gruunz]

New races I can understand but new professions I would be against because just thinking about it logically, when a game is designed they think about this stuff what professions to have, once decided they then split what each can have.

In a strange analogy it would be like having an apple and then splitting it amongst children.

The apple is the skills, abilities, everything. Once it's been divided out they it's been decided who can do what which ties in with balance.

If you add in another profession it's simply going to going to be pulling out abilities from the already existing classes which would then upset the balance as the game was already decided upon those 8 classes from the start.

Also there is the question "when is it enough" we already have 8 I think it's fine as it is, if you keep adding more it starts to get messy.

[Ritualist]

It's going to be almost impossible to convince me to buy the expansion unless they add new classes.


EDIT:

Gruunz, on 20 March 2013 - 03:48 PM, said:

If you add in another profession it's simply going to going to be pulling out abilities from the already existing classes which would then upset the balance as the game was already decided upon those 8 classes from the start.

The current classes basically differ in lore and a few gimmicks. There's barely a difference between them when it comes to their playstyle.

Edited by Ritualist, 20 March 2013 - 03:55 PM.

[Coren]

I want a ritualist. Nuff said

[konsta_hoptrop]

Ritualist no one forces you to buy the expansion ANd i am sure that you gonna buy it even without new classes. But i hope for 1 new race 1 new class and many new zones (full tyria map, all missing places to be accessable )+ plenty of new armor sets  and weapons(ascended), may be legendary armor sets. And for second expansion Cantha +1 more new race.

[Feathermoore]

There is no benefit to adding more classes. Expand the existing classes and at the most (yes the most meaning this isn't even necessary) add a new race.

Hopefully Anet hasn't forgotten ALL they learned from GW1 and doesn't shoot balancing in the foot by adding more classes.

[Kuskah]

NOTE: Didn't read the OP as I'm fairly tired atm so responding to the thread title only.

I don't think any more professions are really needed, although If they decide to add, I'd like to see a third heavy armor user. However, I have no idea what the class would be about.

[NerfHerder]

In the future? Yes. Now? No.

The ones we have require more equilibrium.

We should repurpose under used skills/traits and even add more weapons if need be, before working on an expansion/new profs.  

But in the future? Why not. I'd love to see a new Ritualist variant. A Dervish too, but that would be even more problematic. In the end I think GW1 could have been balanced, just not enough initiative. Everything was either Smiter's Booned or Shadow Form.

[Raagar Deathclaw]

Coren, on 20 March 2013 - 03:58 PM, said:

I want a ritualist. Nuff said

Yes please, I loved my rit and still occasionally get on gw1 just to play him. As for new classes I think that if done right won't cause any significant problems but i'd much rather see the current classes debugged completely first. As for new races i don't really care but i play mostly charr now anyway

[Captain Bulldozer]

I tend to think that the introduction of new classes wasn't the primary reason for some of the imbalance that creeped into GW1.  More, it was the introduction of massive numbers of skills combined with the dual classing system.  To make players want the new skills, anet went down the road of making the new skills more powerful than the old ones in many cases.  So we had power creep (pretty impressively in Nightfall) combined with what eventually became a huge list of skills to try to keep in mind when talking about balance.  The dual classing was never particularly balanced even from the start (plenty of profession didn't get much better even with their 2nd prof, while several could become massively powerful.... like necros and eles).

Since GW2 system is so simplistic, I tend to think new professions wouldn't be very problematic to balance... other than a few class specific issues, many of the current professions already feel basically the same.  I personally find that kind of boring... but then I've never been one of those people who thinks things are always best when well balanced.  If GW2 had been a game designed so that what you do is more situational than what it is now, lack of balance wouldn't be a big deal in many ways.  As it is, when fighting mobs in PvE you can pretty much do the same thing in every fight and be successful, and a lot of PvP seems to work that way too... it makes it more boring, but easier (and more important) to balance.

[Diovid of the Land]

FoxBat, on 20 March 2013 - 02:44 PM, said:

Funny. I rather think commandigon shockaxe, escape DB spam, and spirits + soul reaping + healing would be big balance issues. Actually thanks to dual classing many of them were, but it would be even worse when you get the runes going and more freedom with secondary choice.

Basically as you keep adding truly new functionality to existing classes, you will wipe out their distinguishing weaknesses, barring some specific countermeasure designs that GW2 currently lacks; or you water down the new functionality so much that it has minimal impact. That doesn't automatically rule it out, but it is a significant limit on how far you can take things.

Giving the Necromancer Ritualist healing was not what I meant. What I meant was giving the Necromancer spirits (and possibly ashes and weapon spells) but in such a way that the Necromancer's role would not have changed, or only minimally so. Basically they could've expanded the number of ways the core six filled the roles they already had. Otherwise, I would agree, it would have been unbalanced and wiped out their weakness and unique position.

Edited by Diovid of the Land, 20 March 2013 - 07:17 PM.

[Lunacy Polish]

As it currently stands a whole new profession is a terrible idea.  They have a lot of other work to do first.

Eventually?   Well probably at some point they will have to either add them or embrace an equivalent alternative.  The alternative is to add tons of traits or additional lines to the existing professions so you could customize them more.

I doubt they would do the latter though.   They seem to value a stable Meta.

Of course they have so far been more about adding stuff to the actual game rather than adding more stuff to characters (Ascended gear being the major exceptionz) so I would be surprised to see higher level caps or something like that.

So it will surely come to it at some point but please not yet.

[Feathermoore]

Captain Bulldozer, on 20 March 2013 - 06:01 PM, said:

snip

The issue with adding more classes is that they have to find an actual niche to be worth the development time. With GW2's watered down classes, it becomes even harder to create a class that is truly different than something that already exists. From GW1 we can see that different but equal is incredibly hard to achieve. GW2 went with the aesthetically different, but really the same and equal in order to avoid this. Does adding classes actually do anything for the game with this system?

The addition of extra classes broke the game more than the addition of extra skills. The extra classes were not included in the original power dynamic, and couldn't fit into a unique area. The series of nerfs and buffs saw a predictable oscillation between the original class and the newer class that filled the same role (the warrior and assassin went back and forth competing for the same role as one became better/worse than the other during the balancing process and the Paragon is the biggest example of this with it fighting with monks, rangers, eles, AND warriors for a role and only really ever worked when it was the Imbagon as it could do all 4 roles at once).

Basically, the 6 original classes filled every possible role that the game was designed around and the new classes attempted to butt into the system but couldn't be "different but equal" as that is so hard to accomplish. The dual class system was only an issue because of the new classes as well. Power creep would still have occurred, but the addition of 4 extra classes made balance effectively impossible. Power creep doesn't make balancing the game easier or harder, attempting to make classes balanced does do that.

Edited by Feathermoore, 20 March 2013 - 09:55 PM.
stupid typo

[Kaneth]

I guess it really depends on the reason why they are adding the new profession. There aren't exactly a ton of roles that aren't being fulfilled. There's plenty of spec options for tanking mechanics, glass cannons, support, debuffers, etc. What could adding a Paragon achieve that just simply couldn't be added to Warriors and/or Guardians? What would be the F1 series of abilities for a Paragon? Would the abilities and traits of a Paragon overlap too much with a warrior or guardian?

There's a ton of options that ANet could use to add more diversity to current professions. Like adding new weapons (2 handed axe, Javelin, Whips, Scythes, etc), or adding more weapon options for existing profession mechanics (like adding Greatsword to Necromancer, Longbow to Thieves, etc), or change utility skills to be more like active skills instead of being mostly reactionary or used to line up burst damage. The list could go on and on with a myriad of options.

Additionally, the addition of new professions would need to be tied in with lore as well, and the new professions may need their own starting area as opposed to the racial starting areas. Would the Norn moot with the battle of Isomir make sense if a Norn Paragon was there suddenly?

There's a ton of what ifs that need to be considered.

[Sandpit]

Expanding the classes was a terrible idea for GW1. Problem is, they already messed up with some of the classes in GW2!

Guardian should not exist, it should have been a warrior build option, as should engineer, where did that dumb invented class come from? Mehsmers should have got the chop too. I'm not a fan of the assassin class but at least t's different, I just wish it was more different on the thief style than a continuation on the mess that was the GW1 sin.

The more classes they add, the worst the game gets. If they want to add more then add more diversity and weapons in the existing classes.

[Featherman]

I'd answer, but I'm having a difficult time figuring out what ANet's focus of balance is with GW2's professions. Are they basing it purely off of their class philosophies and their perceptions of class themes? If so, there's probably room for an infinite number of classes. Can't guarantee that they'll be "balanced" in the sense that they won't trivialize one another. Are they balancing based on DPS, condition, sustain and the occasional projectile block? If so, there really aren't any niches but variations on the speed of DPS and sustain, and that already exists thanks to the stat system. You can certainly have more variety of it with more professions, but it won't be meaningful in any way.

Feathermoore, on 20 March 2013 - 08:49 PM, said:

Basically, the 6 original classes filled every possible role that the game was designed around and the new classes attempted to butt into the system but couldn't be "different but equal" as that is so hard to accomplish. The dual class system was only an issue because of the new classes as well. Power creep would still have occurred, but the addition of 4 extra classes made balance effectively impossible. Power creep doesn't make balancing the game easier or harder, attempting to make classes balanced does do that.

I agree, but when you have exponentially stacking stats like power, crit and crit damage, power creep can have some nasty side effects in regards to balance.

[Captain Bulldozer]

Feathermoore, on 20 March 2013 - 08:49 PM, said:

The addition of extra classes broke the game more than the addition of extra skills. The extra classes were not included in the original power dynamic, and couldn't fit into a unique area. The series of nerfs and buffs saw a predictable oscillation between the original class and the newer class that filled the same role (the warrior and assassin went back and forth competing for the same role as one became better/worse than the other during the balancing process and the Paragon is the biggest example of this with it fighting with monks, rangers, eles, AND warriors for a role and only really ever worked when it was the Imbagon as it could do all 4 roles at once).

Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree.  When I look back at GW1's PvP for example, there were only short periods where ANY of the newer 4 classes were particularly good (in most cases it happened shortly after they were introduced and then their skills were nerfed into oblivion from a PvP perspective).  On the other hand, Monks, Mesmers, Warriors and even Rangers were staples of the PvP scene.  If you played a Rit in any high lvl PvP chances are you were relegated to being a flag runner.  Sins and Dervishes were mostly too squishy (though dervs had a few revivals after they were re-designed,and shadow stepping was a sin's sole advantage) and other than a few shouts, Paragons were pretty worthless throughout most of GW1's PvP.

The PvE side is a little different, but the way it worked out was that Anet allowed the newer profs some UBER builds to compensate for the fact that they had half as many skills to choose from as the core profs.  Paragons and Dervishes really only had 1-2 real builds, rits became little more than spammers and assassins had either Shadow Form or Mobius strike.  Its not that having these professions was so much the problem, its that Anet was (in some cases intentionally) bad about trying to balance.  It was clear basically from the start that skills like Shadow form and Ursan Blessing were way to powerful, but anet waited YEARS to do anything about them.... mostly because they only cared about GW2 at that point (which seems to have been mostly the case since shortly after Nightfall was released, given that they didn't even finish their 4th campaign which later became EotN).

I also disagree that the core 6 profs filled every roll possible in the game... although I can see why you'd think so.  Players tend to simplify things over-much and boil rolls in online RPGs down to as few bullet points as possible (we used to have trinity, now we have Damage/Support/Control) but that doesn't mean there aren't other more niche rolls, especially for specific uses.  For example, I remember a team build for Urgoz that used a Rit or two to wall off foes temporarily and then basically run past them to speed run part of the dungeon.  You could call that "tanking" but it certainly isn't the same as tanking with a warrior or sin, as the player didn't have to stay there.  Necros had minions but since they moved around they couldn't have made it work they way a rit could.   Plenty of guilds and groups of ppl tried things like that and were able to do it, even if it never became Meta.  Players have a limited capacity for new and different ideas, but that doesn't mean they see the systems the way they actually are (in fairness though, game designers often have the same problems, which is one reason anet tends to be bad at balancing after the fact).

[ChuyDog08]

I think they should add a secondary classes and skill capture.   I would love to run a Guardian/MM Necro!

[Maxtofunator]

I say simply add weapons, that is all you need to add really. Then the classes will become more diverse

[Krazzar]

How can they add more professions when there is already overlap with the professions we have? New races? Ok. New weapons for existing professions? Ok. New skills, traits, skins? Ok. New professions are quite unlikely.

[El Duderino]

Captain Bulldozer, on 20 March 2013 - 10:42 PM, said:

Maybe we'll have to agree to disagree.  When I look back at GW1's PvP for example, there were only short periods where ANY of the newer 4 classes were particularly good (in most cases it happened shortly after they were introduced and then their skills were nerfed into oblivion from a PvP perspective).  On the other hand, Monks, Mesmers, Warriors and even Rangers were staples of the PvP scene.  If you played a Rit in any high lvl PvP chances are you were relegated to being a flag runner.  Sins and Dervishes were mostly too squishy (though dervs had a few revivals after they were re-designed,and shadow stepping was a sin's sole advantage) and other than a few shouts, Paragons were pretty worthless throughout most of GW1's PvP.

Just want to point out that Rit Spike was OP, there was a paragon build that basically held halls til everyone fell asleep, Dervishes were disgusting in GvG and Assassins (or using their skills as a secondary) were the culprit of various OP builds.

Every single class that ANet introduced to GW1 was abused and needed to be nerfed at least once, if not multiple times.

[draxynnic]

I haven't been able to get my virtual hands on it since, but there was an interview or article early in GW2's development where they basically acknowledged all the problems the OP mentions with adding new professions after the fact, along with others the OP hasn't mentioned (such as the pressure to keep coming up with profession ideas on a twelve-month cycle*). Their conclusion, to summarise, was that having new professions as a marketing tool for expansions was a Bad Idea.

Their solution and plan for GW2 was to try to encompass every possible playstyle they could think of in the professions that were available on release (apart from styles like dedicated healer and dedicated twitch-interruptor they expressly chose to eliminate) and then to concentrate on expanding the existing professions rather than creating more. They didn't rule out introducing new professions entirely, but they did specify that they would only do so after careful consideration over whether it would improve the game more than it would unbalance it.

*ArenaNet's original structure had two campaign development teams on alternating cycles after Prophecies released - one went straight to developing Factions and then onto Utopia, the other made the postrelease additions to Prophecies (Sorrow's Furnace and the Titan Quests) before moving on to Nightfall.

Edited by draxynnic, 20 March 2013 - 11:58 PM.

[FoxBat]

Captain Bulldozer, on 20 March 2013 - 10:42 PM, said:

On the other hand, Monks, Mesmers, Warriors and even Rangers were staples of the PvP scene.  If you played a Rit in any high lvl PvP chances are you were relegated to being a flag runner.

Something that was used in every high end team wasn't a staple?

While people bemoaned the death of ether prodigy flaggers, they tended to hate monk flaggers even more than the rit variety. In as much as the game needed a flag bitch that could handle mind blasters and the like, it did eventually add something compared to healer's boon/LoD that would have taken the place. I'm not sure it was worth the cost of so much failed balancing to get there, but rit really did settle into a role that GvG needed. (Was it really that great when people had to run ele primaries just to power monk heal party?) In short it just shows that new classes pulling off a contribution was merely difficult, not impossible.

Anyway that's mostly pedantic history regardless. I'm not sure if profs are a great idea in GW2, but I do know that the two games are so massively different, it's very limited what you can draw on from GW1 experience. There are no dual classes, classes differ relatively little, competitive PvP is still nascent, what imbalance exists is mostly irrelevant as long as the focus of the game remains on open world/wvw and loosely tuned dungeons. It's surely alot of work to add new professions, but what balance issues remain are quite different from GW1, especially if they adopted a much slower pace of say a new prof every year or every two years, rather than the insane two per 6 months they had previously committed to.

Edited by FoxBat, 21 March 2013 - 05:37 AM.

[ThiaTheMuse]

They should only add more professions if they are unique and different from what we have now.

[Heart Collector]

In the future? Yeah why not.

For now though I think that they should focus on expanding the existing classes and customization... More weapon types, more weapon based skills + the ability to choose which ones you want on your hotbar (the way it works for utilities), class specific armor skins, stuff like that.

Sandpit, on 20 March 2013 - 10:18 PM, said:

Guardian should not exist, it should have been a warrior build option, as should engineer, where did that dumb invented class come from? Mehsmers should have got the chop too. I'm not a fan of the assassin class but at least t's different, I just wish it was more different on the thief style than a continuation on the mess that was the GW1 sin.

If they want to add more then add more diversity and weapons in the existing classes.

Leave my Mesmer and Engineer alone

I do fully agree with your last sentence though.

Edited by Heart Collector, 21 March 2013 - 07:25 AM.

[Coren]

Sandpit, on 20 March 2013 - 10:18 PM, said:

Expanding the classes was a terrible idea for GW1. Problem is, they already messed up with some of the classes in GW2!

Guardian should not exist, it should have been a warrior build option, as should engineer, where did that dumb invented class come from? Mehsmers should have got the chop too. I'm not a fan of the assassin class but at least t's different, I just wish it was more different on the thief style than a continuation on the mess that was the GW1 sin.

The more classes they add, the worst the game gets. If they want to add more then add more diversity and weapons in the existing classes.

Well I for one love the engineer and am glad they put them in.

As for mesmers, you can't have GW without mesmers. It's like a Halo game without bad story telling, not natural.

[swordmagic]

At the moment i wuldn't want more classes, not even in the future.
New races ? Yeah.

What i would really want and what i think would make GW2 a lot better is adding more weaponskills for your weapon.
What i mean is this :
Now we don't have a choice which weaponskills we have.
Downside of this is that if u see a guardian with for example a greatsword u know exactly what he is playing.

If A-Net would add a choose option (like with the utility skills) with the weaponskills and give each weapon 3 choices per weaponshortcut (so attackskill 1 --> u choose a skill from 3 skills) that would make it a lot more fun and better.
In my opinion this would greatly improve the game and bring a lot more diversity (although i can imagine that balancing this
will be horror).

[Ritualist]

For the people that are against new classes, what do you think A.Net can then sell in their expansions?
PvP or WvW expansion exclusive content is problematic because it splits the user-base. Do you think they'll add 100 new levels? A new continent? And who is going to play a new continent if you get to max power after a zone or two?
We have a game that is designed to allow easy additions of new skills, classes and races. And I think this is the result of A.Net looking at GW1 and learning from their mistakes: their lesson wasn't "no new classes", their lesson was to create a system that will allow for new classes/skills/races to be added without giving them too much trouble. That's why we have basically no skills (even A.Net could balance a damage-based PvE game) and that's why we have downscalling (that way every new race's starting area is still playable by every other race).


EDIT:

konsta_hoptrop, on 20 March 2013 - 03:59 PM, said:

Ritualist no one forces you to buy the expansion ANd i am sure that you gonna buy it even without new classes.

Why would I?
I mean, I bought GW2, so I might as well bitch in hopes of getting the most out of it that I can. But why would I throw MORE money at A.Net when they aren't giving me what I want?

Edited by Ritualist, 21 March 2013 - 08:00 AM.