Guild Wars 2: Speculation About Skills
Doubtless you’ve heard that dragons are coming around again this year. If you haven’t, know that Guild Wars 2 is going to emerge this year. GOOD. I DON’T HAVE TO BUY SW:TOR ANYMORE.
Sorry, I had to get that off my chest. Ahem.
Arena.net has stated before that they wanted to break down the trinity. Some MMO gamers probably can’t imagine how this works and automatically assume it’ll be a button-mashing fest of nothing but DPS. It won’t, because it’s entirely possible to create a game without a dedicated healer or a dedicated tank, yet still have a dynamic, active game.
The core problem with the trinity is that it bottlenecks player enjoyment by forcing people to wait for the specific role to be filled, but the existence of a tank and healer are not inherrently bad in game design. They are unfavored because tanks and healers traditionally level slower than the other classes, and therefore there’s less of them by the time endgame rolls around, creating a bottleneck for successful team compositions. It’s a problem that is almost universal across all MMOs, and it needs to be fixed. It shouldn’t be ignored.
In the case of Guild Wars specifically, random arenas helped impress the negative image of the trinity into the player conciousness. If you did not have a dedicated healing/damage mitigating support in your composition, you likely lost. Normally, this is a sign of good games design because it emphasized the importance of team composition, but in MMOs, team composition is not easily adjustable without a large pool of players because of how classes gravitate towards one or two roles.
Final Fantasy 13 comes to mind. For all intensive purposes, the game does not force you to play with a dedicated healer. When you blur the class lines with flexible class-changing opportunities mid-fight, the emphasis changes from strategic team composition to tactical thinking. Most MMOs don’t have a lot of strategic choices overall becuse you control yourself and only yourself most of the time, so class flexibility is a small price to pay to remove the inevitable team-composition bottleneck.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that players will overcome composition problems, as many of them will likely assert that they perform the damage class better and therefore do not need to switch, but it helps alleviate the stresses involved with being a certain role yet requiring another. Rift: Planes of Telara saw plenty of this. Despite the fact that a player could hold host to three completely different roles, there still was a healer/tank bottleneck in the overall community. Giving flexibility isn’t necessarily enough. Healers and tanks need to be fun, and they can be.
League of Legends has a lot of examples of how supportive characters can be aggressive despite their roles. Sona is a support champion that provides a small heal, speed boosts, a safe means of poking with damage and a large AOE stun. That sounds like an offensive mage DPS, doesn’t it? It’s because it sort of is, and yet she still falls into a well-understood area of support. She’s fun to play for plenty of people. Even Soraka, who is the closest champion to the prototypical healbot, can be played aggressively. The primary reason why these characters are aggressive is because they cannot constantly spam heals, whereas in Guild Wars, entire bars are dedicated to healing. If you have a class like this, they will likely focus solely on healing because it is always efficient to do so. If you limit the potential for such a character to exist, you open up tons of variety for different kinds of supporting roles.
What is likely to set Guild Wars 2 apart from other games with class flexibility is the combo system. I imagine that Guild Wars 2 will not have a strong spike heal skill, but there will be ways to create a spike heal with player coordination. Someone setting up an AOE heal and having the rest of the team fire through the field at the wounded ally. Conversely, I could see a water elementalist contributing to DPS by passing her projectiles through an offensive aura while providing a small, but necessary amount of support for the front-line. This’ll prevent zerging because attack rotations will vary and will be based moreso on timing to be effective. Positioning will likely determine whether a strong party-initated heal will work as well.
Either way, I don’t want to get too ahead of myself. The baseline is that there are real examples of what Guild Wars 2 has been talking about in the wild, and if there aren’t, they make sense in changing the formula.
