A discussion on 7 heroes

I don't think anyone is getting ticked at anet.

If the game had 7 heroes it would be pretty much the same - only more interesting for those that do it that way.

For many this would be more important than fixing Shadow Form, for example, as people that play h/h probably don't do that much Speed Clears or really give a shit at the economy - they want to come and play - if they were interested in profit they would be doing SC, smiting dungeons or solo farming all day.

Interestingly, the argument used against 7 heroes is that will destroy PUGs. Nerfing Speed Clears, shadow form and similar tools, which seem to be a much wanted priority by certain players (I think u included Bryant, but I might be wrong), will have a much bigger effect on PUGs - look at what happened after UB nerf.

Its not only for the sake of appearance. And why should group play be catered over H/H? Do we have any data on who is the majority? I could bet that the PvE players play most of their time alone, maybe with 1 or 2 persons more and occasionally play in bigger parties unless they are SC players by nature.

Building physical heavy teams with only 3 heroes is a nightmare - the monk henchies don't generally have good hex removal, the physical henchmen don't generally have good damage/utility builds.

Physicals, to work at peek efficiency need both buffs and hex/condition removal and sometimes even ways to get rid of blocking.

It isn't a surprise H/H teams are dominated, with very few exceptions, by caster AI (and not only because of the lacking melee AI).

Additionally, giving spears+shield sets or 20/20 caster sets to "heroes 4-7", runes and insignias are far from being cosmetic.

Most of these problems could be somewhat diminished by improving henchmen build, mostly monk builds - in areas monk henchies builds are "decent", things go a lot smoother.

I don't know though, how hard would be to activate 7 heroes. We don't really need flags and skill bars for all of them and I'm not sure how the game manage the heroes that aren't in your party, but they surely keep their builds and inventory, so maybe we wouldn't even need interface changes.

That's assuming far too much.

There's still very, very little that we do actually know. It's ANet who has first hand at all of it, if they kept it.

Do I believe that an overwhelming percent of people using H/H were people originally soloing/not playing? Yes.
Could I be wrong? Of course, I could be entirely wrong!

For as much as I've advocated the choice, that's a commodity no one here on the forums will ever have: cold, hard data. We can assume a lot, but that's about it. Some things are harder than others with H/H/, but in the end they're largely trivial to the rest of the steamrolling that occurs when you give your heroes the best builds.

Again, it isn't about being easier - although some things will be considerably easier, after all no more healing breezes type of spells - it is about being able to have more choices.

The steamrolling builds are basically abuse of summons and soul reaping.

Isn't a much like guru forums argument that lack of variety and options means lack of depth?

That quote wasn't a summary, more like a little additional tidbit. I'd say more but it would just be me repeating myself from prev. post. I know that it's not about being easier.

And playing with pugs gives you a tumour.

It does not matter what we say its whats on anets agenda to keep the ball rolling

Take EOTN for e.g go there at level 10 they buff your attributes hand you 3 level 20 heros and say go play some g/w.

Map back and do some areas if you did not have heros unlocked yet on other campaigns.

Comon the real reason is We thought of it first that does not go down well J/K

They have your money and all they will do is think up something else to add to get some cash from you before they get round to 7 heros...

we all can dream and as you know you wake up and its still the same 26 heros and can only play 3

Being limited to 3 necromancers really makes it not feel like there are 26 heroes in the game

Why necromancers? Because they're such a huge help to the team that can synergize with the other roles that henchmen are too dumb to do, of course!

Has anybody commented on my post that you should have to buy hero slots? I haven't been keeping up with this thread, and I suspect that is something Anet would do nowadays.

This would'nt surprise me if this happened, but of course you'll get a slot free or something to limit the community backlash.

Soon everything will be in the store, just the way anet want it. Its just they have to be sneaky with it :P

Exactly.

I was in Gate of Madness the other day on my monk, a group wanted a monk and I thought "meh they can't be that bad plus I wont have to micro manage stance removals and flag etc etc" First part of mission went smoothly, got to portals, derv somehow managed to aggro at least 3 groups which resulted in a very dead group in with my heroic use of the UA build.

In short, other players suck. Not because they run bad builds just because they are prone to error and can make mistakes. Not saying I'm not it's just I'd rather fail at a mission with H/H and know it was my fault rather than pug it and have someone else screw it up for me.

Anyway I think this topic is rather over discussed. There isn't an option for 7 heroes, there aren't any plans to have this option that we know of and it's clear Anet very rarely listens to it's player base so don't go hoping for the option any time soon.

Gosh 121 pages of repeated arguments. If you all put everything into perspective you'd actually notice this debate is heavily one-sided despite whatever arguments anyone can conjure up. Case closed.

I would gladly pay for extra hero slots so long as one extra one is free.
I would just buy one slot and use 5 heroes and 2 healer henchmen.

But I fear that it is too late for that now. I still get bored very easilly every time I try to play a little GW.

I was actually thinking along the line of paying 1k in-game gold for each extra heroes for each use. Basically allow anyone to replicate an entire team at the expense of loosing all loot income. Probably would get so much backlash though since I do not believe for one instant that people want the heroes only for choice and content completion and not for ease/loot.

I guess another way is to buff the average pugs to make up the difference, but then we'll get another 100 posts of complaint about the game being too easy.

Thank god GW2 is literally solo based.

I'd think paying for slots would be a good idea.
5$ per extra slot?
Because so many players want 7 heroes, it would force us to pay if we were to use them, there for helping anet made tons of money!

3 heroes is enough for me, just wish they have an option to force/enable them to pick up bundle items

What exactly are your incredible loot farms you do with heroes atm?

What exactly would be your incredible loot farms if you could use 7 heroes?

I'm going to tell you a secret - Solo farming and Speed Clears (that require humans due to the ability to split or use of PvE only skills) are way way more rewarding in terms of loot that anything you can do with regular teams.

Ah, and by the way, I use 6 HEROES with 2 players or even when I'm solo! Does that mean I should be paying 3k to balance my loot?

And of course it would be easier! No henchies with bad builds!

Maybe to balance full human parties we need to force some players to run charge as their elite and healing breeze!

Oh wait, probably PUGS do that already...

I have no problem with paying for extra hero slots either. Somewhere between the 5-10 euro range per slot sounds reasonable and I'm sure Anet can use the money.

Although they should make it clear from the moment they decide to implement 7 heroes that it's not for free. So we don't end up in a situation like with the extra storage where people first thought they were gonna be free.

I find it sad that people think buying hero slots would be ok...I think it is sad on so many levels I can't even post it right now.

Can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.

I voted yes, but what I'd rather see is that you can modify the skills of the henchmen, so their attributes stay the same but you get to choose which skills from those attributes they use, as some henchmen (cough Tyria cough) just suck.

Before they start making us pay for Hero slots, they had better make their purchase system absolutely fool proof.

One thing the free storage pane deal has taught us is that the system is chock full of bugs. Further, there was this incident in Germany, I think, where lots of people made totally legitimate purchases, and wound up perma-banned for their efforts.

Maybe a better way to gain those extra hero-slots would be through special quests. You wind up going there, killing that, all over the GW world.

That way, at least, you won't have to deal with getting perma-banned because something burped somewhere along the way...

Too bad solo farm and speed clear is only like 1% of the game....not to mention the likely chance that speed clears will be destroyed one way or another judging by all the complaint posts. 6 Heroes + 2 players is fine because you actually have to at least get the one player to cooperate.

Oh and bad pugs aren't exactly the only reason people choose heroes. Even with my guild which IMO has decent players you would see people just going for heroes because it saves them 20 min group forming time. THAT is the part that drives people away from pugs and go for heroes no matter how skillful the pugs are. Impatience is quite common nowadays. I could blow through areas with guild groups in 30 min, but since it took 20 min to form the group, why not just do it with heroes in 40 min? Saves me 10 min....I'm pretty sure alot of people think the same way.

Once Anet finds a good way to implement heroes that would make up for the group forming time/work difference between GOOD pugs and decent guild groups, then I'll bite. The current method of allowing human team to have "overpowered" skills is already proving to have problems...abuse in end game and too much grind for early game.

Which was why I was thinking along the line of paying in-game gold to "hire" extra heroes. Aka Diablo 2 mercenary system...

Maybe a heroes weekly rental/hiring service for zcoins? Probably would be more popular than the rather useless everlasting fireworks...and would give some better use to the stacks of coins since so many people already have like 4+ bags already.

Why stop at 7 heroes? Let me use 11 so I can pretend I'm in a real group for Urgoz or the Deep.

And make have some rediculously fun/insane quest to unlock the function. Something cross-campaign would be nice.

Something like the MOX Quests would be the way to do it, I think...

paying for extra hero slots would be the stupidest thing what they could do.
Players have the hero's already so paying to allow them to use it would be a abuse of players.

Also the reason of peole that say "No dont give us 7 hero's, couse that would
kill the pugs". Should think twice.

Couse are there any pugs in GW accept Farming Pugs? (maybe 1 on a 100)
So in fact you are saying. No dont give the players 7 hero's otherwise
they won't come with our farm pugs anymore.

Wel speaking for my self, and probably other.
I don't wanna join Farming pugs, I hate farming pugs. I just wanna explore do
things.. what ever.. and with that! just use my fantasie builds and make GW last
for a few years longer.

And what is the difference to 1 player + 6heroes?

Or the difference to 1 player+4heroes+4 henchmen, other than you can't give builds to henchmen?

Is the objective of this game having at least 1 player to cooperate?

All I hear is "don't give 7 heroes to players because they will have too much freedom".

The difference is that it still requires interaction in an ONLINE game. And the Heroes and hench option is slow enough that people would still consider pugging when there are enough players around, just look at the Z quest areas.

I rather Anet use the resource to make encourage ONLINE gaming instead, there are still so many stuff they could do in addition to Z quest....X times more drops for having more players, global party search, "Playing with players" title, tuning areas to be more pug friendly, more pug friendly PvE skills that are limited to 1-2 copies per team, etc.etc. Then they can look at heroes.

Of course with GW2 nearly coming out all of this is kinda pointless, chances are they will hit pugs yet again when they deal with the speed clear complaints, and leave it at that.

I'd like to see Anet comes up with a way to prevent player stupidity/bad builds in pugs, but that is less likely then the sun going supernova tomorrow.

Oh but they did come up with a way for players to avoid other players stupidity/bad builds....it's called heroes and henchmen....now all we need is a way to avoid stupid/bad builds on players and henchmen...

Seeing as Anet made it very possible to solo from the very start in an ONLINE game, there is no reason to not allow 7 heroes, instead of heroes and henchmen.

If Anet didn't want soloing then they could have made the game a forced group play game from the get go. Their sales figures would be far far lower then they are now, but they could have done this. They just chose not to.

Let's just agree to disagree...I bought this game for multiplayer so it would be my preference to have the resource go to improving multiplayer portions of the game. I could careless if they add 7 heroes after they put some grouping incentives in...Z quest and speed clears have already shown that once there's some incentives (drops/reward items + faster speed) a majority of people still pugs. Now they just have to expand that concept to more areas in the game.

I have an idea...why not take it further and transfer people to a GW solo edition server? Make it so that people can't see each other and then delete the chat box. Then they don't even have to see those evil players any more. Not to mention save loading time for pugs and soloers because they don't even have to load each other's ugly character in town.[/sarcasm]

Honestly, I would love a solo server. It would mean so much more possibilities without worrying about any drawbacks from being multiplayer.
But honestly, if I get 7 heroes in the end, I'm happy.

O men I thank you so much.

See the Above, Thats why I want 7 Hero's.
people like this make me ignore pugs. Stupidity/bad builds ???
Its a online fantasy game so people want to experiment and use fantasy builds.
And yes maybe they wont work.
But you can't do that, couse they want fix builds in a team otherwise it won't
go fast enough. Pls, men you just don't know what PvE is.
And believe me I know my share of builds, but forcing PvE players to use them
just to speed clear instead of filling a evening with fun builds.
No thank you.

Ratter have 7 hero's

7 heros... wow I am drooling.... Wait, this will never happen lol. I wished it did though.

Come on, Anet. You know you want to!
It's gonna make a LOT of money!!!!

Also, while on the topic, don't forget to add pve skills to heroes so that players won't need the stress of PuGGing for more "harder" areas ever again

I voted yes because they're better than henchmen, but only as a last resort if no other humans are available, or if you're a complete social hermit. I still prefer human groups.

A majority? On what do you base THAT assertion? MORE people might pug for Z-mish-o'-the-day but you're going to need to back up your claim that a MAJORITY do it, or you're just talking out your hindparts.

I can't imagine people pugging for Great Northern Wall, or any except maybe 4 of the missions through the entire game.

What is this obsession with it either having to be multi player or single player?

U know that is the argument PvP players use when they talk about getting rid of PvE to improve PvP.

I have 3 heavy bags and dind't pugged once. Some guildie groups and thats it.

Why would it be stupid? Personally, if they told me I could open up Hero slots in my groups for say $5 each for my account, they'd make a quick $20 from me instantly.

Hero Slots:

1 - Free
2 - Free
3 - Free
4 - $5
5 - $5
6 - $5
7 - $5

SOLD x 2 for both my accts.

$40 just waiting to be spent......

Yawn.

I am SO for this. I cannot wait until GW2, when GW is left high-and-dry, and they make an offline version. Jeff Strain said in one of his interviews that Guild Wars would be running for a year after GW2 releases (to prevent newer players from filling HoM to catch up to the veterans.) Solo play would be ideal. Have a server list like Counter Strike, where individual players/guilds/clans can pay for their own servers, and have people come and go as they please. This would not only save ANet on server maintenance costs, but would also let people like me not see people like you in town ever again