Question to the Community

I hate posing questions that I already have an opinion on, but here goes.

Would you think it would be more competitive if the class labels were removed from your character upon entering a PvP arena? Not in the party window, just when you highlight an opposing player.

Its not like you couldnt play spot the monk, but I think it would add a much needed degree of dificulty to the already easy "i see you from a mile away and we are all coming for you" PvP.

Im sure this has been discussed before, just wondering what the general consensus is.

Not a PvP'er - but that makes sense to me. If it were a real "arena match" all you would have to determine what someone was would be their actions and armor....

That is a pretty cool idea give us more of a challenge even tho we already do trying to kill them lol(or at least i do)

since the armor gives you away it does not make much sense to get rid of the "title"

It makes sense to get rid of the title if you can see the title from further away than you can see the armor. It -forces- you to come into visual range as you would have to do if it were a RL situation....I know, I know. It's not RL. *yawns*

Awww but I like holding Ctrl and looking at everyones proffessions and then choosing which one I'm going to kill first...

Exactly.

but the armor doesnt give you the second profession.

well it would be more challenging. i think it's better to make a hardcore arena to support this. winning is this arena gives slightly more xp and faction point as it's more challenging

Yes, the secondary class should _not_ be shown in PvP -- only the primary class. This would add a rich dimension of suprise and strategy.

I'll support anything lets me live for more than 10 seconds into the battle!! yeah, i am a monk, a weak little monk

It would make PvP a lot more challenging, and increase the gulf between the advanced guilds and the new guilds. Besides, it would take way too long to spot the mesmer whos hexing you all if that mesmer is in fact an E/Me. Classes would be all messed up, since having monk or mesmer secondaries as opposed to primaries would be all too common disguises. I picture a team of 8 elemental and ranger(expertise) avatars...so yea I'm against it.

Not a bad idea, I'm not a pvp'r too often myself... but the the not knowing right away might be a little extra challenge.

To those who say it's all about the skills and strategy... start putting this into the suggestion forum.

As an E/W, N/Me and R/Mo, I'd hate this as it makes things really hard. And then I'd realise something very important: THAT'S A BRILLIANT IDEA

I don't understand your reasoning...up until I got to the second half of your post I thought you were stating reasons it would be a good idea.

It would make PvP a lot more challenging -> More skill (ala what GW advertised)

increase the gulf between the advanced guilds and the new guilds -> More skill

it would take way too long to spot the mesmer whos hexing you all if that mesmer is in fact an E/Me -> Adds a dimension of awareness and mid-battle reaction -> More skill

all too common disguises -> Adds a dimension of awareness and mid-battle reaction -> More skill


Plus it would make a tradeoff for the monks. Go primary and have divine favor and healing runes, or go secondary and have a longer life expectancy. Name me one successful high level team build that doesn't have monk primaries right now. The fact that there are none says that Monk primaries are too heavily focussed on. You can't say that for any other class primary as things stand atm. This would be a step towards changing that.

Basically everyone here is advocating chaos over skill. As a mes, locking down certain classes makes sense. Not the monks mind you, but taking their one stripper necro completely offline with a bonder group, for example, is a skilled and experienced move.

This suggestion would basically allow people to "hide" their available skills, which is completely bogus: i can't see your skillbar as a mes, so does casting backfire do much to the monk who's running persistent enchants? How's about one that has signet of devotion? No, it does next to nothing. That's odd: the posterchild domination skill useless against a caster?

Here's a clue: if you're worried about people "figuring you out" by seeing your classes, then try to mix up your groups a little. Throw a prot smite monk into your group, but have him use prot until people get close, then drop some snares and aura them all to death. Having problems with people taking your marksman ranger seriously? Why don't you go R/E and team up with a mes running fragility for your kindle arrow/rodgort's invocation combo. How's about running a W/Mo that uses protection to drop prot spirit on a focused target. Why not try a N/Me that drops life siphon on half the team, then spams order of the vampire and order of pain? Why not be Me/W, but use tactics for shouts and shutdown against people focusing. You might have thought i'd say the Me/W was the illusionary weaponry warrior, but nope, you'd be wrong.

You'd be wrong because the 8 skills i load up are secrets: each of them unknown the the enemy. That's where your skill lies, not in the W/Mo or N/Me next to your name.

No one's saying a character -can't- lock down on a certain class. What they are saying is that they shouldn't be given an unfair advantage in KNOWING what class someone is. They should have to get within 'striking' distance to find out.

And I categorically agree that a char's secondary class should NOT be shown. It adds a dimension of the unknown that doesn't currently exist.

It'd be a great idea, if only skill visual effects were clearly identifiable. Unfortunately most of the skills have fairly generic visuals and sounds, it's hard to tell just from looking around the 3d world what people are doing what.

Until they solve this problem, i dont think removing the class indicators is good for gameplay.

This would be interesting so long as it would be implemented in a "hardcore" version of the arenas. The give aways would still be in the Enemy Skill Indicators when you select them but would double or triple the skill necessary to do effective team combat.

Team 1: "Hehe, we are so totally owning that group, they don't know what hit em! ...eh, what!? OMG! What the hell!?"
Team 2: "Hidden trump card for the win!"

Like a Magic the Gathering deck suddenly whipping out Upheavel and throwing down a 'Tog after someone had totally served you up until that point. Makes for fun battles.

Except with experience, you generally learn who you should lockdown. You call that skill, but I say it's no more skill than you can get out of a monkey. How long does it take to learn that 'skill'? Not long at all if you're reasonably intelligent. You could probably teach a monkey to lockdown, and lockdown is supposed to be one of the more 'skillful' roles to play. As it stands right now, you could probably teach monkeys to do all the key class roles given enough time.

Why is this? Because there's a limited number of builds, and you always know what you're up against well in advance. There's a limited amount of adaptation when somebody comes up with a completely new idea, but that happens very infrequently. Aside from that, it basically boils down to identifying the other team before you ever see them, and then going into your usual routine for combating that build.

But now, if you add the element of figuring out who you need to lock down, that's more skill. I can't see at all how you can consider that simple chaos. Obviously it is chaos to those who don't learn the skills of identifying key targets mid-battle and adapting on the fly, and that puts them at a disadvantage. The intelligent players who can think beyond the monkey mechanics of always reacting to situations the same way will learn new skills and the game will become more dynamic.

You call it chaos now only because none of us have these new skills yet, but that changes in time (for the intelligent). To people who are inexperienced in the current GW mechanics, matches right now seem pretty chaotic, but that dissipates with experience.

/signed
This would make PvP and GvG hell even the random arenas so much more fun. It would also increase skill required. I mean you see a lot of heals aand the other team has no monk but has 1 elemtal. A skilled team would know that he is the probably healer and target him while the unskilled team wouldn't.

You're going to have to twist the word unfair here SO hard to make your argument make sense: secondary class listings are useful for EVERYONE on the field, thus there's nothing unfair about them.

Thanks for trying, but you've just killed your entire argument with the one word:

Experience.

and yet you find all the same people continually winning the HoH or staying atop the GvG rankings. According to you that couldn't happen, because a random group of monkeys should have ample skills to trounce them.

Your argument is spacious, and doesn't actually have any substance, you're saying being a shutdown mes is easy: guess what? it isn't. I can lockdown 2 people unless i've got a mes on me, and that's pretty damn good, but to do so i need to constantly monitor both character's distances and know approximately their entire bag of skillbar tricks. Not only that, but i have to repond to team calls for res interrupts.

But yes, a monkey can do that.

So here you're saying that your team has to, and i want to repeat this, identify the other team. First off, you need to identify their build. Second, you need to come up with a method of breaking the build with the tools you have. Third, you assume that the "limited" number of builds allows you to magically know every combination as it comes. This, however, is blatantly false.

Say we have normal boring spike group A and normal spike group B. Both are totally boring, standard, and they run down something like

4 E/Me 3 Mo/N 1 N/Me

First group's Necro uses disease, poison spreading and all sorts of conditions.

Second group's Necro uses Lingering curse, and all dom SD skills.

OMG! same classes, which we could see before, same exact party idea, only one set of 8 skills changed and the ENTIRE battle is completely different. Instead of dealing with DoTs, we have to deal with spike enchant removal/half heals, and a crippled monk.

Note i didn't even start up by noting that the E/Me could be running backfires, or arcane echos, or fire/echo/arcane echo with water eles to snare enemies into 6x meteors.

So now all i see is 4 Es, 1 R and 3 Mo. I have to watch 8 people to figure out who's doing what, but if i need to interupt spells (mind you, i don't even know who has the spells i want to interupt now) i can focus on only one or 2 targets. Even then, i've already told you that we STILL need the exact same skills, as per above, and we all already have them, but taking away a nice piece of info doesn't do anything to make the game more skillful, all it does is allow people to hide their possibilities a bit longer: something that an entire class cannot afford. I'm sorry if you don't use mes, never have used mes, or don't like mes, but they already have to know exactly what build people are using in order to cripple a team, and as i stated above, that proves rather difficult, even for carbon copy teams.

Basically you're saying that being able to identify and counter builds based off an approximation of their strat derived from looking at their classes is deterimental to the game, and you've FAILED to show how.

I really like this idea, especially if they put it in a hard-core arena...it creates so many new strategies (like tricks that would normally not be possible )

See below.

I didn't say there was no skill, and it's not really important whether or not you agree with my monkey assessment (I highly doubt anybody is going to spend the time and money to train monkeys to play Guild Wars, and btw you'd be pretty surprised how much you can train monkeys to do). Whether or not anything is "easy" is purely subjective, and not related to the point of this debate. So yeah, I guess the straw man argument you've constructed is pretty "spacious".

The issue here is not whether or not GW has skill, because nobody is arguing that. The issue is whether or not the proposed change would increase or decrease skill level.

So now, restricting ourselves to the context of whether or not the proposed change would increase or decrease skill level, this point is moot. You'd still have to do that with the change in, so it affects the skill level in both cases equally.

So what you're saying is that an element of having to identify builds does add to the current skill level of GW? Well, then, it would seem to naturally follow that making you have to think more to acquire that information would only increase the current skill level.

Who says an entire class cannot afford it? Right now, what are the priority targets? Monk, then mesmer (in fact, I've seen mesmer outprioritize monk many times). Would this change if mesmer had more armor? Maybe a little, but I'm pretty sure they'd still remain the number two target. Therefore, it is their shutdown ability that makes them the second most important class. Therefore, they can afford to be toned down a little.

No point in saying that. My point is that having this information for free removes a potential meta-game that would increase the skill. Your point is that this meta-game would add nothing. As we're still here, neither of us has completely proven our point, so we've both "FAILED" to show how. This is purely an inflammatory statement which serves no other purpose.

I support the idea. Maybe i would take my monk to pvp a little and perhaps survive longer than 30 seconds.

I even made a pvp character monk called "Soz mate dont heal" and i still got gang banged. People want monk blood so badly.

four words: Skill necklaces and charms

Made for some very interesting strategies *heh heh heh*

I like the idea. This would completely change pvp play style. People who have to think on the fly since they do not know what is coming. It will take more skill and be much more exciting.

no, subtle attacks would be way to common, I'd find it anoying- why?

more challenging yes..

but my graphics are bad and my computer is laggy so the only fighting chance I have is all in the names. No way I could ID quick enough to be even decent in pvp

Why bother? The monks will still name themselves stuff like Bubbles the Healer and I R Great Healer.

Those of you who haven't called targets in GvG or HoH, or played shutdown ranger/mesmer, or someone who will look at the build they're up against before they fight it, do not know how much of a terrible idea this is.

Um no, it follows that there is no thinking involved: you have to watch a character's skills as they come up, and if you're focusing you can't do that. More importantly, since you can't figure out where the (insert skill X) here is coming from, the intelligent group leaders can't react: all they can do is stare at the skill list until they can figure out who's stripping the enchants, or hexing, or whatnot.

Mesmers are designed to shutdown 1 member of the enemy team. Playing against a build using a spirit spam ranger? Shut him down and work around their build. Playing against a build heavy on the defence? shut down their monks and try to out dmg their heals. Since most of the mesmers are designed to mess up monks, the fact that the mes is target number 1 is a product of the fact that monks are the priority targets: get rid of the mesmer and your monks are safe.

As a mes, i've often stopped SDing a monk to shutdown the opposing mesmer, giving us the defence we needed to outlast a group.

But yeah, your argument comes down to "mesmers are too powerful, thus nerfing them beyond use is fair". This argument is spurious, and a good mesmer is harder to play than pretty much any other class as it currently stands.

I've shown that your meta would basically make one of the classes neigh useless, i don't think i have anything more to do, especially when the burden of proof isn't on me, since i think the current system is fine.

This would work if they included skills like "Illusion of Monk" to my mesmer, which would make my memser appear in monk drab to the enemy. Otherwise, such omission serves no real purpose.

Quite a sweeping generalization of the low-high end pvprs, statements like this one never quite sit well with me.

I think in a lot of ways it would enhance 8v8 strats, opposed to the all pile on builds. How about 2 target callers and everyone on the team knowing who they run with (incedentially how my teams win). If you came up the hard way ala 4v4 then you know that a four man team can be quite the killing machine, times that by 2 and waala, you have 2, 4 man killing teams. It does wonders.

Granted to get this kind of discipline you have to have guildmates (and I stress guildmates) that are very refined and can adapt, but is that not what the high end pvp should be?

To each his own I suppose.

Wouldn´t that increase the gap between casual players and pro gamers? Would not the amount of time you played the game be even more important?

Umm, that's supposed to be the case. I think too many people are reading this "Skill, not time played" and completely misinterpreting it. A-net only meant that the game won't give you an electronic advantage with hours played (ie character level, items, etc.). That doesn't mean you don't get more skillful with hours of playtime; obviously in any contest of skill the person with more practice will have an advantage. That's different from giving him better in-game abilities.

Otherwise it would be "Not skill, not time played, just plain dumb luck".

Riiiight, so because those tasks become harder this is a bad idea? So I guess anything that makes any part of the game more difficult is a bad idea.

That's the metagame. How many competitive games do you play? A guessing game about what it is your opponent is doing is a valid dimension of strategy, and adds immensely to the mindgames of many different games. For example, many fighting games force mixups where you must guess what attack your opponent will use based on previous behavior and other secondary information, and this adds to the game. I, and many here apparently, believe adding something like this to GW would add to the strategy, as opposed to simply having access to this information for free.

I don't understand how it is you've broken down my argument? Yes, my argument is that since mesmers are second highest (note the complete lack of the words "too powerful" and "nerfing them beyond use"), they can be nerfed while remaining balanced. This should follow clearly from the concept of balance. You fail to show how these changes would "nerf them beyond use", but merely make that logical jump, which would refute my argument if it were the case.

Again....how?

Actually, the burden of proof is on you since you are attacking another suggestion. The OP didn't say there's anything wrong with the current system, he merely put out an idea and asked for opinions on it. Thus, if you say that idea is bad, you must show how.

*IF* the debate where about whether the new idea where necessary then you are correct, the burden of proof would be on us, but that's not what the debate is about.

EDIT: double post

Here's my issue as a person who pvps with his mesmer a lot. I already spend most of my time /not/ casting, but rather watching and trying to figure out what the other guy is doing. This is the only way that I can (a) interrupt and (b) pick the right hexes for the right player. What you propose would IMO completely kill the anti-caster mesmer, I would now spend even more time watching my targets to make sure that I was watching the correct target. Couple that with the difficulty in watching the battlefield animations in any sort of depth and the anti-caster mesmer really has become useless. That said, I really do not believe that mesmers are too powerful and need to be nerfed. I think that people just need to stop playing the same 8 builds in the arenas and that alone will throw people off of what you're planning on doing.

However given the way this discussion is moving, I anticipate being shouted down by some monk who's had their healing spell interrupted one too many times in about 5 minutes or less.

-Diomedes

I have a suggestion. Why don't we remove class listing altogether? You can tell what primary a guy is just by looking at his armor anyway. Goodness sakes, why are we even allowed to know what our targeted enemy is casting anyway? We should remove all text skill indicators and let people guess.

This is a stupid idea. I mean no disrespect to those in favor of implementing such a thing, but there's already so many possibilities that you can do with two classes that it's already a guessing game to tell whether the E/Me is more E or more Me. Maybe he's all E, or all Me. You can't really tell until he uses a skill. Having a secondary only narrows it down to a very large range of things he could be doing.

I'm not in favor of making this game any harder... it is already very difficult for a newbie to get off his feet in the higher end PvP portions of the game, we don't need to add another unnecessary dimension to the game just because some E/Mo smiter is unhappy about his Draw Conditions being diverted.

And just for the record, the dynamics of 4 v 4 arena differ far and beyond any 8 v 8 or King of the Hill maps you will ever play... for one thing, there are far less targets, which means as a soft target, there's more likelihood you will get ganged. Hiding secondaries is not going to change that, it's just going to make people blindly attack whichever monk they tab to first.

EDIT: Actually, scratch that last sentence. I envision no more primary monks.... Perhaps a spike group with 3 e/mos spamming heal party. So it will look like this: 7 E, 1 N.... mmm, disorganized chaos ftw. Those of you trying to hide in the confusion because you're a soft target just need to learn how to kite.

I agree, here's what your friendly party mesmer is (probably) already trying to figure out and keep track of:

* what hexes are on that enemy. This is a difficult task as you often need to try and keep track of how long a hex lasts, along with the order that the hexes went on and if someone is busy removing those hexes or not.

* how much energy your target has. This is necessary as many mesmer skills require the enemy to have some energy in order to work (i.e. Hey great buddy, you tossed backfire on me, but guess what? I'm out of energy so you won't see me casting crud anyhow, see that signet I'm using? guess what, no energy! please hit me with an energy burn while you're at it).

* Is your target using spells, skills, signets, attacking? (this helps you pick the right hex)

* That thing that he/she is doing right now, what's the casting time on it? What's the recharge time on it?

Yes, these are just some of the very many things that I'm doing as a mesmer in the arenas (and I'm sure I'm not the only one as I've fought some great mesmers in there).

Add to that, "hey, betcha can't guess that I'm secretly a N/Mo!" is just beyond what we need happening IMO.


-Diomedes

Now this is the meat of the issue on mesmers. You have an assumption that for mesmers to be effective, they have to be on the correct target. Right now, that's true only because, generally, skilled mesmers can identify the priority targets and shut them down. Thus, for you to be competitive with other mesmers, you also have to be able to do this, otherwise you are not considered a good mesmer.

However, in terms of being competitive with the other classes, this is not necessary. A good mesmer can choose any two casters, and if left to his own devices completely shutdown one while tossing a lot of grief in the direction of the second. That alone makes him worth spending a player slot on, even if he isn't able to identify and shutdown the top two priority targets.

Imagine this scenario: The leader of team A has the option before the round starts to randomly shut down one player of his own and one of the other team. This is balanced, because both teams are affected equally. Now, alter the situation so that the leader of A gets to choose which one of his players is shut down, to shut down a random member of B. This is an advantage for A, because he can ensure that the remainder of the team is capable of functioning without the lost member, while B has no control over this. That's not even counting that a mesmer can generally shutdown 1 1/2 targets and can choose who the shutdown opponents are.

This is how the game would playout if a mesmer was only capable of shutting down one opponent and had no idea who was who on the other team. Add to that that in the current state a mesmer can effectively shutdown 1 1/2 opponents and can choose who to shutdown, and he is definitely holding more value than the average player on the field.

Thus, even if we put in the proposed change, a mesmer is still more valuable than the average player because he can shutdown more than one opponent, and because at some point in the battle you will know who is who on the opponent team. Even if we were to tone down the mesmer so that he is at most capable of shutting down one random opponent and never at any point in the battle could identify his targets, he'd still be a valuable team member.

I don't believe this either, I simply believe they are powerful and can be nerfed and still be a useful, important, and balanced class. That's different from saying they are overpowered and need to be nerfed.

In this scenario, team B is not playing very effectively. If you're the team leader on team B and you believe that there's a very good chance that person X is going to be shut down you can do a lot to counter that.

Not true, mesmer skills very specifically target certain activities, spells != skills != signets != attacking. Each needs the correct counter. You have only 8 spell slots hence you cannot pick to counter them all (or you can, but you'll do a lousy job). You must be on the correct target and if you're fighting a good team, they know this and working within the bounds of the game /as is/ can make this a very difficult job. All I see this as doing is giving some freebie casting to classes that don't really need it as they can be quite effective as is.

Fine fine, you didn't say they were overpowered, let me rephrase. Class identification is a key balance issue. I believe that the classes are balanced as is (including the mesmer). I see this proposal as unbalancing the mesmer by making it worse and adding power to all the other classes (which I don't think need it).

-Diomedes