Recommendations for developers of Guildwars

Exactly, why all the rehash and redundancy. Is is really unnecessary. Allow the "rest in mission" and this would help.

That's supposedly the beauty of mulitclassing, In theory, you should be able to take some redundant primary classes into the battle due to secondary classes being in place but once again with the current limitations (8 slots) on skill bars equipping backup skills from the secondary class is kinda limiting. For example: everyone in my guild/party carries a resurrection signet (who isn't a monk) simply because you never know if your the last one standing when the battle goes arry --you just may be the only person to bring the party back from the grave and thats not something you can always determine in the chaos of battle. Thats one slot lost just for safety sake. Now we're down to 7 slots. Now for me, I usually like to either bring a signet ring that steal's boss's powers or a glyph that saves me a little energy during story line missions (one or the other usually). Now we are down to 6 slots for just purely character skills. Do you really think I am going to equip very many secondary class skills with 6 slots left (Of course not!). I know some of you guys keep saying its an imbalance to add a couple of skill slots in previous replies, but I have done my research and dbled checked it- As long as everyone else gets the xtra slot or two what imbalance could their actually be????. I've played coop multipalyers D&D type games both online and locally for the past 5 years and some even had similar mulitclassfeatures such as neverwinter (See previous posts)-it wasn't a problem then and it's not a problem now. As long as the slot allocation is spread to everyone their is no imbalance. The theory of imbalance due to one class getting more powerful in previously proposted replies does not hold any water, especially with the fact that everyone has a secondary class. Also, the only reason why adding one or two skill slots would make one class more powerful than the other is if the designers did a poor job designing the classes themselves. As far as a I can tell (especially multiclassing involved), I don't see this really being a problem (Their are tons of combinations and options in all the class types that are xtremely effective in their own way). Heres an example of good balanced game design: it doesn't mean a whole lot in battle as an elementalist to cast huge damaging spells if one fighter/ranger keeps interuppting my spells with interrupting skill powers such as "distracting shot" (rendering me ineffective). Its just a matter good technique to whether your effective in combat and with xtra two skill slots those techniques can be more explored/used. So in summary, I still going back to allow the 'rest in missions" and allow the xtra two slots.

P.S. By the way, these recommendations are for future expansions of the GuildWars world. I understand the guildwars system is what it is currently. It would be hard to revamp the current system as it stands now I'm sure for these suggestions (as someone else indicated in an earlier reply). I am at least trying to emphasize ideas to the developers for future Guildwars exapansions/sequels.

Jarrod (P.S. I change my signon from [email protected] to jarrod, didn't realize it would show up on posting till later).

Well said... Well said indeed....

If they do add some cool graphics and effects from attacks there should be an on/off button in the options menu for it.

I went back and did some long distance checking on some of my spells I listed.
I was slightly off on the fireball spell on no "ball of fire" effect. If you are at a distance from the enemy, you can see a "small" flame ball (same as the low level spell "flare"), shoots out in an arch from the caster. However, its the same size/graphic effect as the much less poweful spell "flare". I also noticed pheonix was also the same way, the distance graphics are the same as the low level spell. It's like all the spells got grouped in the same graphical sense without regards to the effect and power of the spells. If it were me, I would at least make the fireball 3 times the size of the flare spell (It does 3 times the damage and effects area effect instead of one person- all other suggestions I've already made would stay the same). The pheonix spell, I would make the spell more visible on the local and distance explosion effect (same as I stated for fireball in previous post) and I would make the arched flame ball for the pheonix spell look more like a firebird instead of like the other spells. Basically, if you give the spells a little more defining character/effect (and not just an image appearing over you head), it would be the right direction. I have played much, much lower graphic local/online coop games on playstation 2 (Such as baldur's gate and champions of norrath), and the special effect graphics for powers/spells are much more defined and unique from each other than guildwars -if you can believe that (You get a real large fireball, your sword is sheathed in electricity due to a spell effect, you see a wide cone of cold or fire from a dragon's breath weapon, so on and so forth). Same thing goes for neverwinter as well which is also a coop game for the PC (it also has more ability/spell effect graphics than guildwars but the general graphics are not as good). Doesn't make alot sense considering the graphics capability of guildwars to be less comparible in this department to other lower graphic coop games???

Jarrod..

Skills are not "Roles". Roles are things like the following:

You have your primary roles like:

Anti-melee
Anti-caster
Damage dealing
Damage recovery
Damage prevention

Then you have your secondary roles like:

Anti-hex,
Enchant stripping,
Hex stacking,
Condition statcking,
Sustained dps for x damage/sec
Spike dps for x secs
Area of effect
Interruption
Energy denial
Skill shutdown

On any optimal team, you should have each character tailored for each primary role and one secondary role.

8 skill slots is more than adequate to cover one primary role and one secondary role effectively given your class combination.

Those roles has NOTHING to do with what class you play. Every class can fill any of those roles to a limited degree. Monks are great at damage prevention with their protection spells, but a memser can be equally great at damage prevention by hexing the enemy to reduce their damage.

To do well in this game YOU MUST have a balanced team which addresses each of these specific roles. If you leave a neccessary role open when you construct you're team, then you're asking to have it exploited when you enter the mission.

I could deal with that. Kinda like a specific check box along with general graphics slide bar for better or worse graphics. If some people are barely hanging on in the min requirements, I would understand the reasoning (I've been there).

Jarrod.

i think the fighting needs less flash.
you get more then 3 or 4 people fighting 1 monster & cant tell who is doin what
i get blinded.

you flat out are not going to get skill changing outside of towns or outposts.

same for the extra skill slots

these are part of the core ideas of the game and are not subject to change

if you have the wrong set of skills for everybody you will die and do it over even though you want to do everything one time and one time only

These recommendations I made orginally for sequels and/or expansions (I thought I said this several times in my posts ). My guess also would be that most of these ideas I'm presenting here probably couldn't be added in the current released program (probably alot of the basic game stucture is already in place). I'm not sure about how much the developers can do as far as making changes to the already existing world/program (In otherwords thru automatic patches, updates, program flexibility and so forth) but that is something only the developers themselves would know is my guess, however; I have seen the game designers talk about making some pretty interesting/major changes though to guildwars here pretty soon. I read some interviews with the guildwars lead designer and they've already got quite a few changes in the mix for both PVP and RPG side for future "campaigns" as the designer put it (this included skills, classes, etc). Also, just because core ideas were invented, doesn't necessarily mean they were the best possible overall design choices and certainly doesn't mean they were written in stone for future releases (expansion/sequels/campaigns) possibilities either. I've already made my arguments for xtra 1 or 2 skill slots and resting in missions above and even if they don't necessarily mesh (A call by the developers) with the current guildwars layout they may with future release possibilities for this game.

So in summary, Loviatar, if you have documentation (maybe a link would be good) proving that the guildwars designers have decided to never change # of skill slots and never plan to allow rest periods in missions for this release of guildwars or for any future release of guildwars (such as sequels, new expansions, new campaigns, etc) then I would be glad to read it. And consequently yield to your statement as absolute flat out truth of course . Until proven otherwise though, I will remain somewhat skeptical and stubborn as usual .

I'm not sure what your talking about here . Most spells are currently just not that flashy at all, I've even zoomed in several times for close up during battle to see if I can see a spell effect of my own and dont' see much of anything (A little flicker maybe of fire, cold or electricity depending on which element I'm using, but thats about it). Most other class spells seem to be even more uneventful than mine.

i jus got a new video card & makes everything better except the fighting, where all i see is 100s of flashes, dont kno who's doin what.

Not sure about that one, may want to check if the video card is one of the recommended video card vendors for guildwars (having the wrong vendor caused some issues for me before I got it replaced). I believe there is some flashing that happens with spell/spell effects here and there but it shouldn't be so intense you can't see whats going on melee combat.

Jarrod

*I agree with the balance team idea.
*I've already made my statements on the # of slots in previous posts and about the slightly boxed in theory as it pertains to character roles.