The problems of introducing more professions

I do believe that in one of the posts on this site I read that they do not intend to introduce any new proffesions in chapter 4. Hopefully this will give them time to look at what they already have and come up with something that is truly unique and not just the same old profession given a bunch of new skills and named differently. Also doing this will give them time to actualy work on the visuals of the game instead of trying to fix some new skill that is broken or overpowered in some way.

Mega Mouse

Ok, this is the third or fourth time you and others have said this? Where is it posted on Guru by a Mod, by gaile or by Alex Weekes saying this is so?

And it won't make any difference to skill balnces which is done by izzy's team, who are seperate from the chapter devs

There is an invalid assumption going on.
Every player is going to have every chapter.

From the perspective of a player who owns all the games, it's easy why they think of new jobs will either mess up the game or blast anet for re-using the same idea in a tweaked form.

Most average players that own 1-2 games won't care that "new" profession is a altered version of Sin for example (in actually game affect, not plot, look, etc) that don't own factions. They can even make a new class that merge Rit and Paragon for example that would be different.

In one of the interview they stated about how the core jobs are the core and the most versatile and the campaign jobs are specialized for specific things. From a concept point, all you keep a focus on is the core and look at how the specialized fits in.

Also if the people at wizards of the coast can keep adding new twists to keep magic the gathering going, I do feel Anet dev team can pull this off.

Although I fail to see how a "twist" would be completely abandonning 2 non-core classes after 2 campaigns. I know for a fact that I would feel like I have just wasted so much time and effort in working 2 classes that only have a purpose in 2 campaigns, PvE and PvP wise.

Magic the Gathering almost "didn't" keep going, when hasbro took over they had rejeuvinated alot. Yet we shouldn't be comparing this to a card game. The tournament format should not impact the imbalance introducing new classes every 6 months does. Something needs to be done and badly, more skills need to be available for the non-core professions to make the choices numberically similar.

I guess that's why new Rit and Sin skills were in Nightfall.

the very idea of "Chapter 4 core professions" is a contradiction. A Core profession is something that encompasses all of the guild wars universe, if chapter 4 6 new professions, that's just what they'd be, new. They wouldn't be core, and you'd have a whole heck alot more skills to balance.

If you go with making them just new names for old professions, with some new skills, that'd just be lame......what would be the point? A new race?


The whole "new players feeling lousy" thing is just part of the mmo/expansion pack world. Eventually Anet will release compliation packs to get people to start, probably with a small bonus (think GW GOTY edition). Actually about a month from now would be perfect timing to release a GW Trilogy box set, just in time for info of CH4 to start to be released.

After an eternity away, meaning 1 year...I arrived back into GW and bought the extensions, and right away, I knew I loved everything they did.

Each "world" has new classes, more advanced and powerfull skills for all the other classes, another story than the Flameseeker prophecies... new armor, runes, insignias, weapons, unique weapons, weapon mods, skins etc etc etc.
These are the positive points that were heared and instored into GW after reading the 8th July 2006 threads on quoting:
"WHY IS THIS GAME SO SHITTY??? WHY?
THIS IS WHY:
-same classes over and over
-need more skills damit
-powerfull guilds have the best oportunities, halls cost a lot
-HOH is useless, pvp and pve.
-Economy is a piece of shit
-Not enough runes
-Need too much money
-Perfect weapons are hard to get
-GVG is useless, no point in winning!
-WTF are the drinks here for?
-MORE UPDATES
-STUPID NAMES IN ORDER TO GIVE ONE-SELF IMPORTANCE"

After 1 day in the new gw guess what:
-4 new classes
-6 elite 20 normal per class and per add-on, cap'em all!
-New halls, sigils for 9k
-Unique drops, fame even gold
-It is the same in every galaxy
-Radiant, vitae, insignais
-Quest and missions give money, farming is easier (for pros only)
-Mod em honey
-Fame, title, xp, faction, money, towns, missions, drops, unique mobs, hardcore gaming
-DRUNKARD TITLE YAH (= nothing)
-Add-on every 6 months and 2 updates per month, how's that?
-Titles for ur ego and fame

These are the aspect they changed and made BETTER! and now what you desire in this thread is:
-no more new classes
-no more new skills (cuz we really can't gvg anymore /cry)
-
-
-
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-we still need too much money
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-make GVG the same booring pvp shit it was, without updates PLZ
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-NO MORE UPDATES NEVER!
-

The blanks are the points I haven't wasted my time to read.
So, morale of the story, we got happy, we got boored, make us happy and restart again.
Close this thread, it is simply useless.
And thank you for welcoming your old whishes with such joy.
/clap

Stormbringer...you rock man lol

I dont agree. I get bored by the current professions. need 2 new the next chapter :P

My personal opinion is that I wouldn't mind new professions if they could be played like Core professions, from lvl 1-19. I'm PvE only and I like playing the core prefessions because I can set them up as simple but effective build that don't require lots of enchant/shout/chant/etc management. My current expereince is that for the 4 new classes to be able to get to that low maintenece level you have to more or less finish the chapter to get the more 'rare' skills to be able to play like I want. That's why I've never gotten past lvl 7-11 with any of the new classes. For me it's not fun to have to over micro my own guy. But that the way I'd like to have 'my' PvE experience...

without new professions, many players would stop buying future campaigns...
professions are one of the reasons people buy more gw chapters

Agreed. Having a "warrior" is so broad it means most future melee classes will either have an overlap or desperately try not to and have extremely specific skills, essentially being pushed into a corner. The same with "monk". It also seems that it's too late to correct this by splitting the classes.

I always liked the idea of adding an attribute with no linked skills that gave another advantage, much like Energy Storage does for Elementalists if you ignore the linked skills. Adding another attribute, say for Mesmers, that increased their spell range would make things interesting. Obviously it's harder to think of such things for all the classes off the top of my head.

Another thing I thought about is how a class needs to have something they are affiliated with, a purpose or a mechanic to manipulate, like criticals for sins, enchantments for dervishes, shouts for paragons, etc. New classes would need new mechanics to manipulate in order to give them a place in the game. Adding "weather" effects and a class to manipulate them would make the class unique, and possibly useful depending on the effects, for example. Terrain manipulation would be another (complicated) example. So think about some new environment or physical effects that would allow new professions to be introduced.

Sadly you are right, but that doesnt help the point that no new classes would be better from a balance point of view. Out of the 4 classes introduced so far, 3 had huge balance issues:

- Rts were far to powerful with the RL build, then nerfed to being not used
- Ass were did lose out badly to their W and D competition for places in the team line up
- P lead to far to powerful energy builds

All of that does not stem from some inherent flaw in the class, but the fact that there are so many interactions between skills that ANet is bound to miss some opportunity for exploitation. The more professions we get, the worse the issue.

- Xeeron

The reason why ANET introduces new professions is due to the fact the expansions are really stand alone games people that may have never played Guild Wars before may be interested in one of the Expansions just because of the new characters and content.

For those of us that have been playing this game since day one and have all expansions know that with the introduction of new professions things became unbalanced certain classes I feel are of no use if you do not play them in that certain expansion like the Ritualist/Assasins.

I like the concept of have more secondary classes to choose from in other words have your main classes like the war, monk, ele, ranger, necro and then give them various secondaries that will improve/expand on that class like other MMO's which was stated by other people. To a degree this is what Anet has done giving you a way to create various builds because other issues along the way.

my favorite classes are ranger and ritualist

I would hate to see the ritualist neglected

I would like to see all of the classes achieve the same number of skills, at least in a best case scenario situation <or at least close enough that quibbling would be silly> and remain that way

as to armor, I care what it does, not what it looks like, I favor insignias greatly, if there were only three total armor choices in the next chapter I wouldn't cry, all the people who play dress up would, I wouldn't, but since the people who play dress up do matter to the bottom line there need to be a fair few sets of armor <I'd just like a really cheap setwith really cheap materials for each profession, it can look like crap, hell, think I love lucy burlap sack, whatever, just so long as it is the same effect I'm happy>

new professions? if they can do it, they should, I enjoy both the dervish and paragon, with the nightfall skills the assassin has grown on me, none of hem are ritualist or ranger awesome, but, hell, they try

Although I love my little band of humans, I think Freekedoutfish is right. All you have to do to solve the balance issue is to have make new races with new professions that CANNOT mix with human professions. This would cap the potential skill combinations as they currently are and would allow us to play new fun professions that don't cause fairness or balance issues.

Future chapters could expand on these new races with more professions to give them massive potential combinations; just like the current humans possess.

Shoot if you don't want new races then how about more bloody humans that come from different time periods, worlds, or just some stupid rule the doesn't allow professions to be mixed back farther than X # of chapters.

Truly! thats exactly what I think. This , and the realistic always and not fantasy like architecture - makes me feel like I'm playing a history game , not so much fantasy. Aside from the Skill imbalances and lack off community spirit and moderating (too many ppl are rude and abusive ingame)/and trade spam etc , Guild Wars has three big gameplay lackings , as far as make out.

1 - You can only play as Men and no other fantasy race.
2 - You cannot go indoors. ....Lions arch feels a bit more like a play pen then a town...
3 - ok i forgot the 3rd one ha , but it was pretty important rofl.

1- Yep, I also feel a strong will to play as a bug, don't you?
2- After playing WoW and seeing dungeons everywhere I hope I will NEVER see this into GW.
3- Yeah, funny...

I'm thinking that they need to do is call NF a final chapter and then move on to GW2...that way they can have a better plan of how to layout new clases in such a way that the new ones in chapters are just as playable and interesting as the core ones...

That idea is nice. I'd be really interested if you posted it in more detail in Sardelac. (PM me if you do :-) )


IMO new professions would be cool...but think about it. If they add more professions every campaign then Anet will have to spend more and more time balancing, and less times working on new campaigns/ bug fixes.

QFT that is the problem I am not sure what you mean about the Paragons.

6 Man paragon teams, or "holding halls" because you have 2 "Incomming!" Paragons when NF was released, they became more balanced. Yet I still find them disturbing when I'm in HA and with no pure healers we can't take any of them down. 6 Man Paragon needs to be looked at.

I really seriously believe that adding two more professions to the game would be a bad idea.

With the release of the latest two campaigns we've seen two big shifts in balance for each. While some see this as a good way of envigorating and refreshing the current meta-game and play style, I felt that the releases of factions and nightfall were too close together to properly absorb all the new ideas, skills and balances.

Pretty much all the balance changes happen because new skills and professions are introduced. I imagine that it's reasonably easy to balance new warrior skills vs old warrior skills, old and new necro skills etc. etc. but to balance everything against two entirely new professions is just madness.

Recently, I've seen quite a few people leave the game, and I'm not talking about just anyone, these are people from guilds who live in the top 20 and top 10 and have done for ages. Some of my guild mates are saying "Guild Wars is dying", and while I really don't want that to be true, it seems a little like that. The reason for this is that there still exists far too much imbalance between all the skills and classes (now well over 1000 skills) and the game hasn't really settled since the release of factions.

Maybe the game isn't supposed to settle; constant change and adoption of new tactics is the thing to keep some people interested, but the rules seem to change all too often at the moment.