Hero Profession Limit

Show me a screen of a single tangible in-game accomplishment recognized by ANET attainable by people only using Mercs. Owning Proph is a clear advantage.. get Guardian of Tyria without it. Now, go buy Proph, and get Guardian of Tyria or any other Proph goal without extra char slots, storage panes, costumes, merc slots, skill unlocks or any other store purchase. Having NONE of those extra purchases would not prevent anyone from accomplishing a Prophecies game goal.

Owning Prophecies is a clear cut purchased Advantage in Game Play.. and attainable game achievements. Without it, you cannot, by any means, experience Prophecy gameplay.. All of the other things are merely convenience. Speed is convenience. Nothing more. No one is gated from anything. You have yet to justify a gameplay advantage from Mercs worthy of a mechanics change.

It's amazing when you stop and think beyond the "ZOMG cash-shop advantage!!11" logic, isn't it?

And how is this not closed yet? How many times do people have to be insulted and arguments go full circle?

ANet doesn't recognize that Elementalist damage needs buffing in HM, so good luck convincing them that there's an advantage to using mercenaries.

I tell you what. Buy me mercenary heroes, and I'll go do UW HM for you using them (+ no consumables). Then you try without mercenaries. I bet you can't do it.

By the way Guardian of Tyria provides no in-game benefits. A Legendary Guardian has just as many options as someone who doesn't have the title. I rolled my way through PvE without Legenddary Vanquisher, and if you check out Pom's HoM you'll see he doesn't have all those titles either. And yet we churn out some of the best 7H times around. Why?

The things you mentioned are not in-game advantages, but content.

I agree. It's always better when you can set the terms of your debate. Glad to see I'm not the only one who only accepts ONE or TWO possible positions in any argument as valid. It makes things a lot less complicated.

This way, if my opponents ever try to come to the table using any argument that *I* don't want them to use, then they lose. I just reply in bold type and that's that. I mean, it's bold type. You can't front on that.

Actually, in this case, I don't believe there's anything wrong with Jeydra defining his terms. He's just made a hypothesis based on the evidence he has and it's not too unreasonable to me, although that's opinion and not fact - but I'd like to point out the difference between Mercenaries is 2 mesmers as opposed to 3 or more, not zero + one less party member as opposed to a full party, so his testing is a little off. Also, there's nothing wrong with bold font for emphasis, it beats ALL CAPS, doesn't it?

A better test would be say, a bunch of mercs running a Mesmerway build and then swapping any Mesmers over 2 for N/Mes or E/Mes (or whatever you could build just using default heroes) running the same or similiar skillbars (You mainly lose out on Fast casting and runes if you're copying what the Mesmer primaries are doing, but on the bright side, you can try to equalise things with SoLS or ER. -Recharge caps at 50%, so it might be possible to show that with Ebon Vanguard standard of wisdom, you can break about even with fast casting even if not using Mesmer Primaries)

As an aside, I agree with him on Anet not realising the problem with elementalist damage in HM though. I originally started Guild Wars as an elementalist and I haven't even touched him in four years because armour was giving me too much of a headache and I had no desire to run around relegated to Earth and Water support roles. (This is why I'm playing a Mesmer now)

This is purely anecdotal opinion though, but it shouldn't take too much evidence to show how comparatively bad Elementalist nukes are on Hard Mode things compared to Necromancer or Mesmer ones.

Edit: I'm going further off-topic to rant but the recent change to Invoke Lightning in PvE really took the cake. I mean, look at
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Destructive_Was_Glaive

I don't believe all classes should necessarily be equal, but I understood back then that Elementalists were meant to be damage specialists. Of course, I know better now.

/signed for fairness.

It's a good idea for a solution. But I got another, IMHO a better one would be to introduce hireable Zaishen Mercenaries of any profession (as a ZCoin sink), all using the same dull basic Zaishen guard model. This way players who bought mercs wouldn't lose anything (taking away features is uncool) and the paid feature would be a truly 100% cosmetic. WIN/WIN.

Game balance is another thing but builds with 4+ of the same profession aren't dominating or significantly more powerful than builds capping at 3, so it's more about the number of available choices than sheer power. Because of that FAIRNESS matters more than skill balancing in this regard.

Doing VQ's with say 6 necros was never outside the realm of possibility for me since I have two accounts that I often paired up to have 6 heroes before it was possible to group 7 of them per account.

However, I wouldn't purchase a merc simply to have an extra of a certain class, I'd do it for the sheer fun factor of grouping with one of my own characters that I've put so much time into. That alone is what I find most appealing about mercs.

The price for Mercs is too much for me to justify capping the amount of heroes you can have from each profession. If anything, that will just cause a massive storm of hatred compared to what little it helps with.

I do admit however that they do offer up the option for far more power than before, but the advantage given by Merc Heroes doesn't seem a significant enough one to have anything similar to this done in response. Especially with the fact most people with Merc Heroes spent a good $50 on a set of eight the moment they were released.

If anything in response to this, it just shows that skill balancing needs to be done considering everyone just sets up teams of 5 - 7 mesmer heroes with their purchase, pumping out faster times than whatever else is available provided the person in question isn't another Jeydra in terms of H/H skill (in which case they probably have something else designed specifically for their play-style and are actually capable of hero micromanagement).