Ok well first off, a disclaimer. I cannot wait for guildwars 2, as a student without the income to support a monthly subscription, it's good to see that the most promising upcoming mmo is going to be free to play, and has a decent design team behind it, and beautiful art. But, and it's a big but, there are some obvious cracks already appearing in what arena net has shown us of the game so far, and some of us are turning a blind eye already. I want to start by asking everyone reading this to be objective, I believe there is a naivety when players follow a game that has a lot of hype. I fell for the marketing machine twice before, in city of heroes and war-hammer on-line, only to realize in beta that everything that failed in the game in beta the designers didn't fix and refused to make any radical changes despite obvious problems existing which were highlighted by the community during this phase and even pre-beta. I've seen this sort of "it'll be alright on the night"(of release) attitude already appearing around this game, please try not to see it through rose tinted glasses.
Anyways disclaimer out the way, here are some of the main issues i see with Guildwars so far, i guess considering the other thread, a good name would be 5 reasons NOT to be interested. Again, im not anti Guildwars 2, in fact i plan on per-ordering it, i just would like a good discussion about some of the problems i can already spot and i hope some others can too, and maybe i've got some stuff wrong. Plus there’s plenty of threads on why Guildwars 2 is going to be awesome.
1. Removal of the "holy trinity"
Ok well this is a pretty big deal. Basically arena-net has this idea that they can remove the holy trinity and make the game work. Well lets look at the reasons behind doing this, basically the point they make, the only justification i might add, is that it's often hard to find the role your lacking, ie a tank or a healer. But they COMPLETELY fail to address all the advantages it gives. and what will make up the loss of these advantages. Firstly, having played many MMOs, missing a role isn't that big of a deal, i didn't find it ruined my experience of any MMO I've played, sure it was very frustrating at times, but when you take into account the sheer amount of time i put into these games it wasn't a very frequent problem. Breaking it down into the two sides of the game, pvp and pve:
Firstly it's effect on pve. If i compare it to world of warcraft, the 5 mans could be a bit frustrating to find a tank or healer, this was TBC when i used to play, this was largely caused by the lack of classes that could play tank/healer and the general fact that you had to take the gear that suited your main spec/play style, ie most players opted for maxing their dps gear and ignoring the fact there class could dps/heal even if it could, and blizzard failed to implement anything to gear up offspecs and dual spec came into the game way too late. If you look at how blizzard executed the holy trinity it was horrible. They were far too few tanking and healing glasses at the start of the game, even in tbc only druids and warriors could tank, and only warriors really bothered tanking because they couldn't really dps. While EVERY class had a dps spec. and people wonder why there were too many dpsers. They also didn't implement any hybrid classes, by hybrid im not referring to classes with multi specs (ie shaman) but a class that was capable of say, dpsing and healing at the same time. Also raiding was a joke, your tank needed the best gear and all encounters encouraged having mainly one tank, with a few off-tanks in your pocket on some encounters. And going back to 5 mans, lets not even talk about how unintuitive the looking for group system used to be, or non existent as the case was pre-tbc.
So what's my point about world of warcraft? well basically that blizzard made it actually difficult for themselves by not addressing the problems i listed and yet the holy trinity wasn't really a massive problem on forming groups anyways.
![[image loading]](http://www.simply-natural.biz/media/The-Healer_big.jpg)
Lets now look at what you REMOVE by getting rid of the holy trinity in pve. Well for a start your stripping a layer of complexity off the game, having to rely on your allies to achieve your goals is somewhat diminished. And to those that are no doubt about to point me to the whole "arrows shot through fire" synergy they have talked about, well isn't this just another hidden version of the holy trinity? at the end of the day the holy trinity is a system that forces teamwork and synergy and dependence on others, so unless they implement so much synergy your just as dependent anyways and so you have just created a holy-not trinity- but actually an ugly mix, then you've gone full circle. Let me explain this. Ok you might not get "lf1m healer last spot" for 5 hours, but you might get something equally worse, were you get "lf1m "insert specific glass last spot" because you need that classes synergy to have enough dps/survivability so either they are removing your dependence on allies and lessening synergy, which is a bad thing in a sociable game imo, or they are actually replacing it with something worse! Think about it, if synergy is just the holy trinity, all you need to find is a healer, a role that many classes can fill in other games, but if the synergy comes from each individual class then there will always be a specific class thats wanted for a role that other classes can't fill. So there are 3 outcomes, either theres is less synergy and dependence on your allies, not something i look forward too, they find a good balance, and replace the holy trinity with basically another version of itself, which would be very hard to achieve, or they go too far and make you MORE dependent on specific classes, rather than 3 roles that multiple classes can fill.
![[image loading]](http://www.splitreason.com/Product_Images/308d47f9db87.jpg)
Now the big one, pvp. This may surprise some people, but i believe this is actually where it will effect the game the most. One brilliant thing that the holy trinity provides in this situation is an easily identifiable distinct 3 roles in pvp. The healer/support, who supports his friends, the tankish class, that runs in and soaks the dmg while pissing people off, and the damage dealer, who's as weak as a wet sponge, but then eats your face off in half a second given the tank. What you do by removing this is merging the classes closest. THIS IS A MASSIVE PROBLEM, why? Because of balance, balance, balance. The holy trinity slaps balance's game ruining, lack of diversity enforcing, uglyness, in the face. Again, im going to use wow because its the mmo ive had the most experience with, but i have played others, infact a lot of others including GW 1. Blizzard's only option to balance the classes was basically to merge them into one in pvp, especially the healers, what this means is without the distinct roles of the holy trinity your going to get even less diverse classes or unused ones if you want a balanced pvp. It's actually incredibly difficult to balance something and keep it diverse, as shown with sc2, obviously perfect balance would require perfect symmetry, but balance negligible enough for most even high level players not to notice imbalance but still retain good diversity (see BW) is actually incredibly hard to achieve, and the holy trinity helps a lot with diversity. Trying to make a bunch of dps classes all diverse will be VERY hard if not impossible.
And just some closing notes on the thing as a whole, my favourite role in mmos has always been tanking and healing, which guildwars 2 wont actually let me do, they assume that everyone plays tanks and healers because they are forced to, but I for one actually enjoy both dedicated roles more than dpsing. It just doesn’t make sense to remove aggro mechanics, reactive healing and essential interrupts in pvp on healers and claim this will improve the game. Lets not forget the skill created by interrupts and monks heals in GW1, that’s now gone. My point being, leave the holy trinity in the game, and deal with the single problem of finding a healer/tank in a team fast, rather than create a headache of problems to solve one small one.
2. World vs World vs World
I’m not going to write an essay on this one, because its largely speculation, but I REALLY struggle to see how having a free-for all is going to be fun. Just the principle of free for alls in any online games doesn’t produce fun results, even if it is 3 servers with thousands of players. Im interested to see how the hell they will make this work, but it just seems like a mess to me, it’s hard enough in big fights to feel like your making any difference without the added element of another server allying and then attack you at any moment. It sounds like it will be overly complicated and confusing for most players, very difficult to isolate the best tactics, and will probably produce some bizarre and less than fun tactics, ie defending and letting the other two server fight it out is better. This just seems like the most random design decision ever.
![[image loading]](http://www.blogcdn.com/massively.joystiq.com/media/2009/10/pvp1.jpg)
3. The inclusion of random elements.
Some of you maybe have heard of some the abilities, such as the elixir gun of the engineer and other RNG elements, again I wont harp on about this, because there is already a thread on it. But it does put a bit of a question mark by arenanet and just how seriously they are looking at pvp balance.
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4. Only having 8 skills
This to me seems like a limitation that isn’t needed. Yes I know you can switch weapons on the fly, but until we play the game we don’t know how much people will be changing weapon sets on the fly anyhow. When you count in the self heal and other redundant must have spells, your left with even less than 8. This encourages build wars more than ever, because you cant maximise your skill through lots of abilities for reacting to others, instead you have to make sure the very limited number you picked really are the best. Again, look at wow, I remember someone else on TL or somewhere using a good example of hunter, and how they had like 20 different reactionary abilities. Why limit it to so little as 8. I know some will say “but there’s loads of different combos!” and “You have to aim them/positioning is important!”, well actually positioning was incredibly important in wow as well, this is no excuse for lessening the skill bar. Why not have 16 skill slots and 8 billion skills or w/e the game has promised and on top of that most skills require good positioning/aiming? Obviously you don’t want 100 skills on your screen but to me the compromise should be a good 4 skills higher than 8 realistically, especially when they have removed healing classes meaning you have to take some sort of heal on top.
![[image loading]](http://manaflask.com/images/galleries/scaled_1310491053_hilariousWoWui[1].jpg)
5. Having 10^10000000 abilites.
Some people like this idea, and It does seem to have advantages. But I also see A LOT of disadvantages. Firstly the fact that there is no way the games designers a) have the skill to and b ) have the time to try out every build at a competitive level. This means there will be literally millions of combinations that the games designers don’t know about, just lurking around, waiting to break the game. It means a constant headache of patches (which we saw some of in guildwars 1) and certainty of build wars. I for one don’t want to sacrifice weeks waiting for the patch to fix the new broken imbalanced team build in pvp which requires a class none of my friend play.
/rant
Anyways, despite the overall negative tone of the post I am looking forward to the game lol, just have some concerns about it, and the direction they are taking.
EPT
still guess this is a starcraft forums so people are bound to mess them up.
