Hello, it's me again, the wordiest of birds, with another analysis and design post. This could easily be ten different posts, but I'm cutting it down to two main themes. As always: I mostly play PvE, but spend time on every class in every mode; The goal of this is not necessarily to wildly invent new systems for the game, but to identify themes, and what it takes for them to flourish, not condemn and start over, and invite conversation; I find spoiler-hiding my walls of text helps keep it digestible. Part 2 will cover non-attribute designs and tech in GW2, and open discussion about whether our current obsession with "hit big monster make big numbers go up more" is stifling the diversity of the game, and whether there could be a place for builds that aren't exclusively about damage or boons. A lot of this has been cooking for a long time, and as much as I love the game, I do worry about it's longevity, and the diversity of elite specs, builds, and challenges that we've been getting for the last several years, and what it'll mean for content in the future.
TL;DPremise/Highlights: - Identifying each gear attribute as a distinct gameplay loop or objective, while limiting which of the nine any single player is meant to fulfill at the same time, would help educate players on the importance of each attribute, make a greater assortment of gear prefixes be valued, increase build diversity, and help the devs design future challenges, elite specs, and core mechanics that goes beyond "stack and whack" basics.
- Precision should proc more effects than just crit damage more often, and Ferocity should enhance melee-range hits more than ranged hits to promote melee play.
- Expertise should not be limited to propping up Condition Damage, and be the key to several non-damage challenges in game, while different enemy types should be more or less vulnerable to specific damaging conditions.
- Toughness is awful and should negatively impact incoming condition duration, not just strike damage, and not be undermined by Protection, which should be converted to a stacking buff to encourage multiple applications.
- Baseline healing and boon duration should be close to zero without first building for Healing Power and Concentration, which should be their own roles, separate from one another.
- Different content shouldn't be defeated by the exact same gear as everything else, and more professions should benefit from a wider variety of gear, and different gear sets than each other.
- Gear prefixes with different purposes should be found in specific, but not unique, places in the game, to promote maps and content that lack replay value.
- 4-stat gear often outperforms 3-stat gear by a wide margin, and Celestial even more than that. 4-stat gear should represent fulfilling multiple roles to a lesser extent, whereas 3-stat gear should perform one role greater, at the loss of every other role. It currently does not, outside of Berserkers, due to the relative weakness of every other attribute combo's roles.
First, the state of the game.
While GW2 is both celebrated and chided for it's [relative] departure from "holy trinity" teamcraft, it still fails to present the 'role' of RolePlaying Game especially seriously. Increasingly, traits and skills lack any kind of narrative or thematic flavor, opting instead to slap numbers and % increases around until some unseen meta god is appeased, while teamcraft has identified a flexible DPS/boonDPS/boonHeal to be the main way to approach challenges, but with severe consequences should they be played off-design. This leads to an ENORMOUS amount of dead traits, dead equipment prefixes, dead runes and sigils, and some dead weaponry, plus oversimplified gameplay with spammable moves, and while a limited number of meta/best-in-slot equipment makes it easier for the developers to target overperforming builds, it means that there are many elements of buildcraft that sneak under the radar, unnoticed and unassuming. Questions are asked, "Are there any advantages to melee combat over range?", "Are we expected to stand still or move around during combat?", "Should every profession be viable at every challenge, or should they have unique advantages?", and "We don't believe that profession complexity should translate into an increase in DPS," among others. In attempting to form a baseline for the game, and make it's various components easier to balance, the game runs the risk of becoming too homogenized, too bland, reliant increasingly on roleplay themes that the devs don't seem interested in mechanically representing, while as many as 30 different non-PvP attribute combinations fail to see use. All the while, powercreep slowly inflates the average player's output, undermining the difficulty of old content, failing to teach players how the intricacies of the game works, and shocking inexperienced players who jump from location to location with difficulty and mechanics they are neither prepared for, nor understand. Gripes aside, Guild Wars 2 has perhaps the strongest foundation for MMO buildcraft I've ever played. It's huge array of diverse traits and swappable weapon sets, and diverse component interactions, both within a profession and between professions, is what drew me to the game, kept me playing the full range of content, and what leads me to make these lengthy, passionate articles. There's a good reason why many other MMOs see GW2 as an inspiration, or even copy from it directly. For all it's challenges, all this game needs is a slight clarification in philosophy, even without making any of the changes recommended here, and the pieces will fall into place over time.
Guild Wars 2 is sometimes compared to Magic the Gathering.>! They both share an incredible number of sub-mechanics and themes that all fold together in intricate, and sometimes unexpected ways. Fans of each game are probably aware of the remarkable confidence that MtG has in it's color spectrum: for each color, there are a series of powerful, and well-documented sub-themes, many of which overlap with other colors. It's when the colors combine that the game truly shines, creating dynamic playstyles and themes that appeal to an incredibly diverse audience, with 3-color decks having much more tech available, and much stranger themes, than 2-color, or 1-colored decks. From the moment that a colored card is revealed to you, a practiced player can instantly make inferences to what their opponent's strategies may be, and begin to move in a way to counteract it, while pushing their own strategies. This "foreknowledge of theme" rather than "foreknowledge of event" means that two players can effectively combat each other, despite never having met or taken the chance to look through each other's deck list, and makes for more personalized decks, and more enjoyable games.!<
I give this example because such a case could be made for Guild Wars 2's attribute system.>! Much like MtG colors, each attribute aligns with a purpose, some objective that promotes value when travelling the world or the Mists alike, with each "color combo" coming together to form an attribute prefix. The problem with this analogy is that Guild Wars 2's gear prefixes aren't each designed to carry a mechanic that helps the player succeed, either while travelling alone, or in a group. Many traits exacerbate this with attribute conversion, usually from +Power, and if your selection doesn't result in you or an ally killing an enemy faster, it's generally regarded as a dead choice. !<
Were GW2 to shift to recognize each attribute as a genuine gameplay mechanic, it would grant the designers a foundation from which to design content that harnesses specific challenges, and grant the players of the game confidence in their build, as well as flexibility in purpose, when approaching said challenges. (As an aside, first:
many MMOs have rather abstract stat and buff systems, that make it impossible to understand without extensive out-of-game research, and even once understood in concept, Guild Wars 2 doesn't always communicate how these effects are supposed to interact. An across the board UI fix here would allow players to see a breakdown of where their stats are coming from, by source, and what % impact it has on each of their attribute, such as from gear, food, utility consumables, or traits, without having to actually slot it first, possibly at an armor-repair station so as to not blow out the during-gameplay UI. Being able to see the exact number of points they are away from their next +1% or 1sec effect increase would be helpful too. )
In the case of the attributes themselves, each attribute should be viewed as a
component of a larger puzzle, that each have their own, special identity. By considering which professions, skills, weapons, and group content are defined by which attributes, much stronger combinations of those attributes should arise.
- >>>Power:
- Well understood as the de-facto, go-to attribute for inflicting instantaneous damage. However, defined as a role, it should be more clear that inflicting damage every strike is the target objective; too many prefixes grant Power, as a sort of "This is all you need"-attribute instead. ANet once stripped the damage from disables for purity of purpose, but several weapons still fail to deliver adequate Power-based damage while lacking damaging conditions, controlling conditions, utilities, boon effects, or trait interactions: examples include Thief and Ranger MH sword and Willbender OH sword, Dragonhunter longbow, and Guardian scepter, Necromancer axe, or Daredevil staff. (This isn't to say these things aren't used, just that for purely power-based damage, they are sometimes subpar and with clearly better alternatives of weapon or trait.) If Power is a role, it should reflect in high-damage, long-cooldown abilities, or features used to set up or recover said abilities: Ranger's Hilt Bash > Maul, Guardian's Banish > Mighty Blow, and Gunslinger's Gunstinger > Dragon's Roar are excellent examples of this.
- Should a challenge be defined by a Power requirement, it should>! mostly be a DPS race, or swamped with weaker foes to cleave through. They don't need to go down in a single hit, but it should enable the fantasy of being powerful.!<
- >>>Precision: (a big one)
- Crits are simple, but misunderstood: inflicting a critical hit to gain the damage multiplier does result in higher damage, but that multiplier is the result of Ferocity, not Precision. As well, several traits generate different special effects or inflict conditions on critical hits, or increase your crit chance in various circumstances, such as striking a disabled foe, or attacking from the sides or behind. This would indicate that Precision is not the stat of "extra damage", but the attribute of "special effect". If so, then Precision could take on an entirely new meaning in buildcraft, based on which other attribute you combine it with:
- Precision+Ferocity: Inflicts higher damage multipliers on crit, and the current standard application of the attribute, crit-capping essentially translates to "permanent damage increase" rather than a rare event like it should be. Berserker and Assassin gear is easily available for this, but on it's own, fails to present any kind of real downside to not inflicting tons of damage on every hit.
- Precision+Healing Power: Could apply healing or barrier to self or in an AoE on crit. Several frontline assault builds fail to scale well with +Heal, leading to strange skill intentions from Spellbreaker, Willbender, Daredevil, Scrapper, Soulbeast, Vindicator, and Weaver. Battlescars especially is abhorrent, with an +Heal modifier of x0.006; if the skill simply required crits and high healing to function, rather than require neither, it would encourage buildcraft and purpose-selection of traits. Ele's Healing Ripple could AoE heal not just on attuning to water, but on crit,>! barrier-on-crit would help enable "effect on barrier" professions like Scourge and alacDPS Mechanist, and heal-on-crit would help grant Vindicator some license as a group-healdps, a role that currently does not exist. Zealot's, Marshal's, Seraph's, and Magi's gear are all seldom used, but could see new life with this interpretation.!<
- Precision+CondiDMG and Expertise: Applying conditions on crit leads to very reasonable hybrid-dps builds, but controlling conditions on crit, like cripple or chill or slow, creates some very intriguing debuff builds. Paired with traits that could trigger on "application of a non-damaging condition", and suddenly Necromancers, Mesmers, Rangers, Thieves, or ice/stone Elementalist become very real control casters in competitive play. The Bringers' attribute set, with Expertise, precision, and vitality sees no use, but becomes interesting for this purpose.
- Precision+Concentration: Traits and weapon skills that grant a variety of boons on a crit, or escalating boons up a ladder the way Specter's Well of Bounty and Sorrow works, would create a frontline boon-DPS that doesn't rely on feverishly mashing utility skills off-cooldown, something the devs don't seem to be able to stray away from, quickness and alacrity boon-providers being the obvious winners here.>! They could then consider using Commander's or Seraph's gear instead of Diviner's, but the lack of a 3-stat Precision/Concentration block is troubling.!<
- Should Precision be considered a role, gameplay that includes a Precision requirement should>! involve durable champions in some way. Precision/Ferocity builds would chip health down much more effectively, and Precision/Expertise builds would assist in controlling the enemy. That said, Precision could easily take a role in just about any team-wide content that involves striking quickly and often to proc the various effects.!<
- >>>Toughness: (a big one)
- I think that most players have a poor understanding of the impact Toughness has on the game, and I don't think anyone at ArenaNet much cares for it. This is a big flag, considering the popularity of tanks and bruisers in other games, and shouldn't be underestimated. Raid tough-tanking was an interesting concept, while it lasted, but more of a chore than an actual pursuit of an attribute. The theming is clear: the more Toughness you have, the less damage you take. What shocks the would-be bruisers is that this only affects strike damage, with tanks burning to death just as easily as anyone else. While this should create an identity role for Condition Damage over strike damage, the unpopularity of Toughness means cDPS never feels this advantage. What's more, as the only attribute that demands incoming effects, rather than outgoing action, it doesn't feel significant to play around, and when increased on champions and bosses, it results in purely hidden information that doesn't lend to player choice or agency.
- To top it off, the protection boon grants a whopping 33% damage reduction in strike damage from one boon alone (or 40% as a Tempest or shield Engi), while Concentration benefits many other builds outside of high durability, and boons affect up to 5 targets. Even with 3-stat, Toughness-priority heavy armor, good food, a utility, and Rune of the Dolyak, getting 30-40% damage reduction out of Toughness is extremely difficult, with heavy diminishing returns, with 10-20% being a more realistic useage case. Add in that most damage-reduction traits are a flat value that doesn't scale with Toughness (or any other stat), and Toughness becomes one of the most worthless attributes in the game.
- Recommendation 1: Flip those values, protection granting 20-33% damage reduction, while Toughness on a heavy armor class maxes out at 50% with full investment. Recommendation 2: Make protection a stackable boon, at 5% reduced incoming damage per stack, to a maximum of 5 stacks, with profession tech like Hardy Conduit or Over Shield granting 7% reduced damage per stack instead. This would mean that there would have to be a far more significant commitment to "keeping protection up" on allies as a defender, than to simply spec Concentration, and passively churn out enormous damage reduction, and create a space for more than one defender to contribute. Recommendation 3: Change damage-reducing traits and skills to scale with Toughness as well. Recommendation 3.5: Make Taunt duration scale with Toughness instead of Concentration? This would be a weird one I dunno I'm just spitballin ere
- Recommendation 4: Either additionally or alternatively, grant Toughness the added effect (either universally, or as a common trait tech more likely) of %-reduction of incoming condition duration, at -1% per 15 points of Toughness, to a maximum of -75%, as a form of negative-Expertise, if you will. This would help cement high-toughness, heavy-armor builds as a durable tanking effect in game: protectors who can grant allies Toughness, like Firebrand's Unbroken Lines, allow them to power over area hazards, while those who can pull conditions off allies and onto themselves, like Necromancer, Guardian's Save Yourselves, Rev's Pain Absorption, and Specter's Hungering Darkness, can help snuff out conditions in a way that doesn't rely on condition cleansing skills or traits, truly tanking for the team in more ways than one. It combos with the resolution and resistance boons without supplanting them, much like how Toughness already combos with protection. Above all, it creates a distinct gameplay intention, one that can be proactively built around, using forgotten prefixes such as Crusader, Captain's or Knight's, Cavalier's, Nomad's, Settler's, Giver's, or Trailblazer's. Minstrel's, Cleric's, and Apothecary's are all great for heal-tank builds as well.
- Should Toughness be considered a role, gameplay that demands Toughness should involve a lot of sudden or prolonged threats, and regular condition application in groups. Dangerous traps, or an environment that applies conditions over time, would be repelled by anyone who has better armor and defenses, and the overall nerf to protection as a boon would means that proper healing, blocking, dodging, and relocation are all made more important.
- >>>Vitality:
- Simple: more +VIT, more health. There needs to be some purity of purpose, however, where traits granting Vitality should be a distinct tanking/front-liner option, or have traits that convert their Vitality into other, more thematic attributes; various alchemical effects make sense, as does Necromancer's manipulation of life forces and Ranger's Wilderness Survival, but Guardian Power of the Virtuous, Force of Will, and Imbued Haste, and Virtuoso Quiet Intensity, are questionable sources, especially given their other effects and themes. Specter's Strength of Shadows feels custom-made for Ritualist's, not just a convenient coincidence, since it doubles or even triples up on different technologies and build requirements, while Plaguedoctor's, Shaman's, and Sentinal's all fail to see use by comparison.
- Should Vitality be considered a role, having a Vitality challenge would mean enemies strike hard and often, in a way that having less than a certain amount of health could put you on the floor. This may be through strike damage, possibly after a knockdown or disable, or repeatedly applied damaging conditions, or fights with a strong opening strike, requiring either high Vitality, or barrier application to survive for those first few seconds. Alternatively, an applied debuff that prevents the player from receiving health for a period of time would be a great test of their Vitality.
- >>>Ferocity:
- A UI element showcasing the end value of a critical hit on weapon and skill tooltips would help describe the value of this attribute at a glance.
- As a rule, traits that grant Ferocity or extra critical hit damage should be a benefit predominantly earned by front-line fighters, in melee range: Warrior's Axe Mastery is a great example of this, having a passive attribute benefit, but mostly benefitting axe skills, which are melee range specifically. This isn't to say that ranged damage should be nerfed, but there needs to be a very clear distinction of what the advantage to melee fighters is over plugging away with shots from a safe distance, which also negatively impacts the value of defensive and mobility skills and effects. An alternative could be creatures that take extra damage from crits, but only from players within short melee range, or designing certain weapons to have specific skills that inflict individually increased critical hit damage. Snipers and other 1hKO builds, and professions with high or guaranteed crits such as arcane Elementalist, Spellbreaker, or Renegade, would be a great example of this feature, making use of prefixes such as Valkyrie's and Crusader's, which without extra precision, have been left to rot.
- Including Ferocity as a role in a scenario would likely mean>! fevered combat in a close-quarters space, inside a room or hallway, or otherwise have some kind of barrier or line-of-sight obstacle that discourages trying to take potshots from a 'safe' distance. Once combat is met, high-Ferocity fighters should clean house very quickly, perhaps as a result of a short window of high vulnerability to crit damage, much like how Exposed works.!<
- >>>Healing Power:
- While healing is recognized to be a valued role in the game, as spoken by ANet's 'design philosophy' document considering "Damage, Boons, and Healing" the main roles in PvE, the actual applications of healing are a bit scuffed. "Pure DPS", "boon DPS", and "boon healer" are all used often in instanced and competitive play alike, but "Pure Boons", "Pure Healing", and "Heal DPS" are essentially nonexistent.
- As a role, Healing Power should do what it says, and actually be responsible for healing, something that it doesn't currently actually do very well. Fast-moving, selfish assault units like Revenant (battlescars and Vindicator), sword Weaver, Willbender, and various forms of Thief, all have insanely low multipliers to their healing skills, or features that don't scale with Healing Power at all, such that even heavy investment into healing power is sometimes meaningless.
- (again: Battlescars has a Healing Power multiplier of 0.006, and even less in competitive. With maximum Healing Power, runes, and tapioca pudding, on Devestation/Salvation Vindicator below half health, that means you can only squeeze an extra 13.4 extra health per strike out of Healing Power scaling alone. If the healing done by battlescars was a serious problem in competitive play, the solution should have been to nerf the base healing to essentially zero, and crank the multiplier to reward gear investment, not crash the multiplier to rely on the unmodifiable base heal instead).
- >! Warrior's Vigorous Shouts grants power->healing power conversion, almost as a joke, given Warrior's overall lack of heal tech, as is the heals available to Necromancer, several Mesmer skills, and even some effects from our very own pocket-medic Specter. The regeneration boon is often the only consistent source of healing, and often scales more than twice as powerfully as skills or passives with healing attached, and even then requires Concentration, which is just ye olde "Boon Healer" raising it's head again.!<
- Given how Healing Power begins at a base of 0, if healing skills received a significant buff to their multipliers, especially on single-target or self-healing skills, while hammering down their base values, perhaps 'group healer' may actually get an opportunity to breathe in this game, the way the devs like to pretend it does. If this is tied into Precision's special-action identity, gear such as Magi's and Seraph would have a use as well, and if battlescars only inflicted their lifesteal on a crit, or Elementalist's Healing Ripple caused AoE heals on a critical hit, there would be a very real incentive to put Healing Power in the hands of front-line fighters, and not just in the back row of people who have Concentration and provide other boons.
- If a scenario was described with the Healing Power role, then there would likely be prolonged exposure to a damaging effect, such as a smog or psychic effect, as the party rushes around to solve puzzles or explore zones. Or, a space where the party is expected to split up, and be responsible for their own healing for a time.
- >>>Condition Damage:
- The UI should reflect both how much damage a skill does across it's lifetime, as well as how much damage it does per second, to help get a feeling for the moment-by-moment effects in combat.
- Condition Damage suffers many well-documented difficulties. Compared to power-crit DPS, the nine different professions having varying access to each of the five different damaging conditions means that while there's a greater incentive to use some classes or builds over others, it's extremely difficult to balance all cDPS roles against each other, especially if they don't bring some kind of other value to the team. Additionally, enemies succumbing to their injuries wipes the conditions attached to them, forcing you to start over; this should mean that bosses, who can withstand the stacks, should be the intended target for cDPS, but many bosses have the unfortunate tendency to phase, becoming immune to further condition applications, and breaking flow. Plus, some bosses having different Toughness levels means it can be difficult to recognize when a fight would benefit from condition damage over strike damage, when then that information is hidden from the player.
- My first proposal would be that different, specific enemies have telegraphed vulnerabilities to one or more conditions: "burning destroys plants and undead" is always a popular one, but few enemies, if any, have this effect. Torment should have extra effect on spellcasters and ghosts, while bleeding and poison should have extra effect on beefier, beastlike enemies, and humanoids. Confusion is fine, since it already has an identity against enemies that make many attacks at a time. Destroyers used to be immune to burning, and frankly, the game was better for it.
- My second proposal would introduce "stacks for stacks" trait technology in professions that predominantly use long-duration conditions, such as poison and bleeding, to inflict an additional application of those conditions for every 10-15 stacks already applied to the target. This would help with ramp-up during fights where those durations actually matter, without infringing on the ability of hybrid-dps and pDPS to deal damage quickly.
- This wouldn't all be so bad (just requires an affirmation of intention), if Expertise wasn't so monumentally instrumental in propping up competitive cDPS, and had it's own identity. Grieving gear and Sinister should have been fantastic for burning hybrid-dps, Trailblazer's for tank-dps, Seraph for heal-dps, and Ritualist's for boon-DPS, but Viper's is so overwhelmingly useful on every single profession in the game, that there is very little reason to pursue these gear sets.
- Describing a scenario with the Condition Damage challenge would probably mean>! a challenging, single-monster fight, ideally one without phases for it to drop conditions uptime during. It would likely have some form of content that discourages Power damage, such as moving around a lot, or an aura effect that damages anyone who gets too close for too long, which would allow Condition Damage to continue to tick away unabated. Identifying exactly which conditions are meant to be effective against which targets would also help grant the fight some much-needed identity, such as a boss that consumes poison stacks to suffers damage instead of healing, or a boss that cycles through vulnerability to different condition types throughout the fight.!<
- >>>Concentration:
- What a nightmare of an attribute this thing is. Singularly responsible for Might and Fury, Protection, Regeneration, Vigor, Resistance, and Resolution, and Alacrity and Quickness uptime, there basically isn't a single build in the game that doesn't benefit from Concentration in SOME capacity, especially in a group, and between Harrier's, Ritualist's, and Diviner's, there isn't really a single build in the game that can't climb into bed with it.
- As covered, Regeneration has an enormous advantage from Healing Power over other skills that heal, provided it has longer duration. The only builds that don't benefit from it in some way are "hi, DPS" types who otherwise need to trade their ability to generate their own boons for traits that increase their damage output. What mostly grinds my gears is that boons are so pivotal to the balance of the game right now, that there are no easy solutions on how to fix it. The main alternative could be maintaining our current level of boon cap, with full Concentration investment, but amplifying the % increase of Concentration's contribution, so that without it, boons only last for a second or so. Otherwise, having significantly more access to boons would mean that having to stack boons is the only way to keep them up, creating new "Boon Only" spellcasters who's EXCLUSIVE contribution is to buff the team.
- Concentration as a role in content would probably require the team to split up for long periods of time, such that the more duration you have, the longer you can benefit from the effects, until you can safely return to your healer or boon-giver. Moving ground hazards and social-distancing mechanics that discourage group stacking for very long would also enable this.
- >>>Expertise:
- My favorite. Expertise carries the same foundational problems as Concentration, but at least only for one aspect of dps-gameplay. That said, it deserves better than to simply prop up Condition Damage, and should have much more diverse options. Bleeding is a good example: in competitive game modes, the already-long duration of bleeding locks enemies into combat longer, making it harder for them to break out of combat and flee. Poison, for it's lack of damage, inhibits healing, while chill and slow impact cast speed and cooldown. Weakness, vulnerability, cripple, taunt, and fear, all spell out an exceedingly powerful PvP/WvW advantages, and alternative gameplay styles of battlefield control.
- As a role, Expertise is the attribute of pressure, committing to the long game and working to undermine enemies long enough to see them fail or falter. Personally, I'd like to see more underperforming traits get swapped out for more traits that apply, or benefit from, the application of these conditions, and much in the same way as Healing and boons, SEVERELY limit the base durations, while amplifying the %-duration-increase gained from heavily investing in Expertise. Even halving some existing durations, and making expertise grant +2% duration per 15 points instead of 1%, would help open up some variant gameplay builds, especially if combined with precision for "apply condition on crit" or "gain advantage when striking a foe with X condition" builds, for gear-dedicated gameplay effects.
- Rangers should be using mud, thorns, and conditions earned from taking Trapper's Expertise to be hit-and-run guerilla fighters. Elementalists should be chilling with ice, and entombing in stone, and Necromancers should be a dark beacon from which the land and people suffer debilitating curses. Thieves have no trait or gear interaction with preparation skills, and could gain a unique condition for each trap, and Dragonhunter actively competes with itself between it's trap trait, Piercing Light, and Dulled Senses, which inflicts cripple on disable. Even a trait, "Traps and preparations have longer effect duration based on your Expertise" would reinforce the role of control artist, and help introduce more and varied prefixes than the five that we currently abuse.
- Using Expertise as a role in content design would likely mean the same singular boss from the Condition Damage role, but ideally, would involve challenges that encourage the use of NON-damaging conditions. The Snowblind Fractal is a good example of an encounter where ice elementals try to put the fire out, and need to be slowed or stopped, as is having to immobilize the ghosts during the Gorseval raid boss, to prevent them from getting to the boss the middle.
With these roles defined, each attribute combination becomes not just a build type, but a distinct element of encounter design. Simply select two sets of 2-3 different attributes, combine them together, and you have a meaningful encounter:
- The front gate of the Ascalon Fractal sees many enemies together (Power), with a constantly occurring arrow barrage (Healing Power and Toughness), boiling oil (burning, healing again but could be solved with the Toughness change), and a champion guarding the gate (Precision, Ferocity).
- A boss that suffers extra critical hit damage from melee range (Ferocity), but which sheds extremely damaging conditions (Vitality, Healing Power, and fixed Toughness), on a timer that demands at least some players take advantage of the melee-range crit increase to win in time, would mean an active decision between how many DPS, healers, self-heals, and boons are necessary to win. Boneskinner comes close to this, only undermined by the fact this wasn't entirely intentional.
- A Healing Power + Vitality + Toughness fight where the boss will die after a 5-minute chase sequence requiring you to jump through an obstacle course would require ENTIRELY different technologies to win than most players are capable of spinning today. Spirit Vale's Spirit Run could have been this, but instead, was limited to a series of DPS checks against walls, and the River of Souls is instead steeped in cheese mechanics and demands for superspeed and stability.
- A Power + Precision + Expertise fight, where the boss gains Exposed for 2 seconds before inflicting a devastating blow, but who's Exposed state can be drawn out by additional time based on the defiance-damage inflicted by non-damaging conditions, would require several control artists to debuff the boss, long enough and often enough for the DPS to take it down. Disable builds already enable this, in a way, but Defiance Bars completely invalidate the non-damaging aspects of Expertise.
The main problem with these "Attributes as Roles" designs, is the gear combinations themselves. 4-Stat prefixes carry such a staggering advantageous weight over 3-stat prefixes, and Celestial over most 4-stat prefixes, that the more 'roles' are added to an encounter design, the more 4-stat and Celestial gear carries the day. While all the rest of this can be done fairly easily without disrupting metas too badly, I would honestly,
personally,
recommend lowering the stats associated with 4-stat and Celestial gear, even by 5% total, to help 3-stat gear, which is infinitely more narrow in application, stronger and more specialized for purpose. Additionally,
changing which stat conversions exist on which professions, how, and increasing what % they take from other, less ideal attributes, could mean that each of the nine professions stand to benefit from different attribute combinations than each other, which would help enormously in bringing value to the 33 underperforming stat combos.
Otherwise, were these to be adopted, many different dead or unrecommended prefixes stand to open up, which really highlights the extreme extent to which gear has been made useless in this game, by merit of the narrow outlook the balance team takes when viewing each profession.
Disappointing outliers include:
- Nadijeh's Marshal gear (PoweHeal, precision/condi) (no such thing as a healDPS)
- The Twins' Grieving gear (PoweCondi, precision/ferocity) (no Expertise? Garbo, apparently)
- Maklain's Minstrel gear (Toughness/Heal, vitality/concentration) (not unused, just unpopular)
- Pahua's Trailblazer gear (Toughness/Condi, vitality/expertise) (should be ideal jungleguerilla fighter)
- Thackeray's Seraph gear (Precision/Condi, concentration/healing) (to craft this gear you need to actually farm the map and buy the inscription.)
- Ruka's Wanderer gear (PoweVitality, toughness/concentration) (bizarre)
- Ossa's Crusader gear (PoweToughness, ferocity/healing) (bizarre, ferocity with no precision)
- Laranthir's Vigilant gear (PoweToughness, concentration/expertise) (expertise, but no condition damage?)
- Tizlak's Commander gear (PowePrecision, toughness/concentration) (precision but no ferocity)
- Apothecary's, Clerics, Bringer's, Rabid, Shaman's, Sentinel's, Settler's, Nomad's, Cavalier's, Knight's, Soldier's, and Zealot's gear from the core game are all a strange mix of healing power, toughness, and other stats, that should all present exciting, meaningful gameplay structures, but are all dumped and forgotten as random loot to be salvaged and forgotten.
Much of this is exacerbated by the fact that stat-selectable gear is so readily available, with every single stat an option. Gearing a new build has turned from what used to be, at minimum, an excuse to run certain dungeons or farm Heart of Thorns, and devolved into a fairly meaningless scramble to grab up stat-select gear from any source, select either Berserker's, Viper's, Harrier's, Diviner's, or Celestial, and sigh in relief as you ignore the game's 33 other options. (Not that all those are ignored, I'm just being facetious. Easily 90% of all online builds use the above 5 options though.)
So. This concludes Part 1. In part 2, I aim to cover how we might pair these 'attribute roles' with mechanical effects in different classes that help produce roles not currently recognized by ArenaNet. In the meantime, I'd like to open discussion:
- Should each professions be expected to benefit from a more personal set of gear attributes? Overlap is guaranteed in many cases, but should we see more cases such as Ritualist's, which is only desirable on professions with Vitality conversion? Or should all professions benefit identically from the same prefix options?
- Are there any archetypes or build fantasies that you think our current selection of attributes could be used to address, but currently aren't in the game, such as Expertise affecting trap duration? If so, what are they, which profession would be doing it, and which attributes do you think would enable it?
- Do you think stats being freely available is a good thing, or would you be interested in different attribute sets looted from specific zones or content types? For example, high-durability gear looted by roaming open world, or that different metas drop gear with prefixes that are explicitly designed to help you defeat it? Or that 'raid-ready' gear prefixes be looted from champions, strikes, and raids themselves?
- Should 4-stat and Celestial be nerfed, or 3-stat buffed, in order to make them more appealing? If not, what purpose do you propose for 3-stat, non-Berserker gear?
- If more content started to use a greater variety of challenges, other than just "hit big monster make big numbers go up more", would you be excited to experiment with different gear setups, in order to be better prepared for the challenges of each encounter? Or, do you prefer having a small number of loadouts, that can handle any and all content in the game?
As always, thanks for reading! If you have critiques, let me know! And if you're interested in Part 2, find it here! [link later]