InsaneJournal

Current mood:	cynical
Entry tags:	game: guild wars

Fixing GW profession balance
Y'know what, no one cares about this so it's going under cut to save all you people's f-lists.



Okay, so not all professions are created equal. So I'm going to bitch and propose how to actually fix things so that each profession has a unique role that it fills that both buffs the party and is not utterly and completely necessary.

Monks:
It's not that monks are broken, it's just that they carry some of the most important skills for success (aka healing and damage negation). So I don't really feel that monks should be nerfed, but instead the other professions made to take over some of the monk's skills should be buffed. However, I believe monk party-wide skills should be reduced in efficacy and specialize in one-on-one protection/healing etc.

Ritualists:
On the subject of healing and monks, ritualists were supposed to serve as a second healer profession in Factions, but thanks to spirit nerf and nearly zero energy management skills, Ritualists are near useless. So I propose that to fix Ritualists, their primary attribute line should contain energy management skills. Boon of creation should return more than just a mere 5 energy. Rather, it should work more in line with elementalist attunement skills, giving back a percentage of the spell/ritual cost. Spirit Leech Aura should return energy as well as health. This is simply because the only reason spirits are not seeing any action is due to their expensive cost and immobility. If the energy cost can be reduced, even with a long recharge and limited range, spirits are preferable due to their versatility and party-wide support. Furthermore, group healing from spirits should outstrip that of monks, simply because monks are already specialists at spike healing and protecting single targets from attack.

Weapon spells are actually quite functional and therefore should remain as is, untouched to make Ritualists worthwhile.

Paragons:
The other major healing profession would be the paragon, specifically motigon. The problem with the motivation line is it's extremely heavy recharge. Unlike spirits that can last the full duration of their presence, shouts and chants and arias are reactionary and are usually are gone in one hit. The mechanism makes sense, due to these skills' permanence and mobility, but nonetheless at 20 seconds recharge for one skill that may only be useful for a few seconds at most is still quite a hefty price. Reduce the recharge down to 10 seconds and Paragons are suddenly much more useful and effective as a party wide healer/protector.

Of course, since Paragons also have the second highest armor, extremely good survivability, and their skills are untouchable, it makes sense that their damage should be limited. Currently, I feel the paragon's damage ability is reasonable, not high enough to reduce the necessity of a good nuker/damager, but at the same time not low enough to be completely superfluous. However, the command line could use some serious help, due to the much better buffs come from every other profession.

(Now the reason I'm talking about these three professions in concert with one another is because these three are the major sources of healing. Now onto the support healer, the dervish.)

Dervishes:
Dervish plays an interesting role with in a party in that while it is a heavy hitter melee wise, it's obvious when looking at the dervish skills in its attribute lines that it also provides minor healing capabilities. However, unlike the other three major healing professions, the dervish possesses no reusable resurrection skill, therefore relegating it to support healer. That is, a dervish's role should be split between keeping the enemy occupied and helping the healers to keep the group alive. A dervish should be in the midst of things helping the other melee professions to get through the enemy. All in all, a dervish's skills and attributes seem functional enough and not that particularly hated.

Warriors:
Since we're already on the melee professions, let's talk warriors. In tradition, warriors are the tanks. In GW, this means they should be causing party-wide problems to the enemy by dealing slow and steady damage. For the most part, warriors are actually underpowered compared with some other physical classes (and I have no idea why people think warriors are more efficient spikers). The primary Strength attribute is pretty much useless, since running at max attribute (12) only delivers 12% armor penetration. Hell, elementalists deal better armor penetration. I say the Strength attribute should deal 2% armor penetration per rank and give +1 adrenaline gain per hit every 4 ranks. Over powered adrenaline skills should drain all adrenaline to avoid abuse. However, it should be important that the warriors are not capable of spiking an enemy all by himself but should rely on the rest of his team to give him better attacking ability. Hexes, enchants, weaponspells, shouts/chants/arias from the rest of the group should help increase the amount of damage the warrior is producing. However for real damage, we should be looking at the next profession.

Assassins:
Okay, okay, I admit, I'm biased towards assassins. But this is because I feel assassins are heavily biased against by the game itself. After all, they are the only profession whose armor does not give bonuses in the glove piece. The assassin's role, in theory, was to provide quick spikes to take out the really annoying enemies, like the elementalists, monks, ritualists, and warriors that are almost killing your own teams' casters. In short, they...well, assassinate the problematic pieces off the board and help ease the pressure. They are the true spikers of the team and should be dealing damage that cannot be mitigated (armor ignoring, enchant stripping, etc. etc.). They should also be dealing enough damage to actually...y'know, kill. An average spike chain (3-4 skills) should be dealing at least 600 damage (the general mob health level) and if it cannot deal said amount of damage, should be fast recharging enough that an assassin can cycle through the damage skills without breaks. But most importantly, all of an assassin's skills should be worth bringing, either for insane spike damage or has a recharge of less than 4 seconds.

Also, fix the goddamn armor.

Elementalists:
The other heavy hitter. The catch being that their heavy hits can be mitigated, but has the bonus of being spread over an area and deals crippling damage to everyone in the other team. The problem that do exist with elementalists is that their skills are often better used by another caster class than they, but we can fix that soon enough. We see that in elementalist attribute lines, almost all lines of attribute have skills which work in synchronization with another attribute lines. These are often the defensive spells. But this mechanism when combined with the damage dealing skills would also increase an elementalist profession's effectiveness at nuking. And in order to promote the usage of multiple attribute lines rather than just one attribute, the Energy Storage attribute should also increase elemental attributes by 1 for every two ranks and thus increasing the variety of nuking instead of just burn, burn, burn.

Necromancers:
The reason why most casters tend to be thrown to the wayside. The necromancer's primary attribute was originally designed to help offset the heavy cost of many of their minion skills and the fact that they're sacrificing so much of their health to cast certain spells. However, by connecting their energy gain to mob deaths gave them infinite energy. While this may be great for the necromancers, this also renders every other casting class nearly useless. Sometimes the minor buff provided by the primary attribute lines simply is not enough to offset the benefit of infinite energy. To correct for this problem, I propose that Soul Reaping energy gain is changed so that it actually involves reaping of a soul before energy can be gained. What I propose is this: for every rank of Soul Reaping the necromancer gains 1 energy per corpse exploited or when sacrificing health. And now the energy management is only benefiting the heavy expense of necromancer skills.

Mesmers:
On the other end of the spectrum, mesmers are running into constant energy problems and have skills that are not desirable by a group. They, like necromancers, run a heavy passive support build, neither healing the group nor increasing their damage, but provide distraction to help prevent damage. However, mesmer skills limit their usefulness due to long recharge, heavy energy cost, and almost no energy management in any of the directly useful attribute lines. Their very useful Inspiration line is often abused by other professions that do not have a necromancer's infinite energy. To help mesmers to become more efficient at their job, I feel an additional clause needed to be added to the Fast Casting attribute. For each successful interrupt, mesmers gain 1 energy for each rank of Fast Casting, thereby freeing the mesmers from their dependence on the Inspiration attribute.

Rangers:
Last of all, rangers. I know many feel that rangers are too weak, but that's because rangers, much like mesmers and necromancers, plays a mostly supportive role. They are not supposed to be dealing insane amounts of damage that the spikers and nukers are dealing. Nor are they healing the group or directly increasing their damage. Instead, they provide an annoyance. They serve to make life difficult for the enemies by bringing about many small but potentially deadly conditions that, much like mesmers, help distract the enemy. However, their preventive skills are subpar compared to their mesmer counterparts due to the dependence on a bow or pet, but at the same time have much more annoying conditions in their arsenal to make up for the higher miss rate. As is, I feel that they are doing fine.

And now some general comments on the party construction.

With 10 different professions and only 8 character slots per party, it's obvious that some professions are going to lose out some of the time. However, the point of this discussion was build each profession such that they provide equal but different roles for the group and that no single profession hinders or advances the group in any significant way that is better than the other professions.

Amongst the healers, two paragons should heal just as effectively as two monks or two ritualists. A paragon and a ritualist combination should heal better than just two monks or any other permuation. Similarly, if a warrior is not available, an assassin or dervish should be able to deal enough pressure to keep the enemy busy while the elementalist burns everything in sight. Or an assassin should be able to chop things to pieces while the elementalist keep things in place with a mass knockdown or hex. In the meanwhile, the ranger can daze the healers so the warriors can actually do some damage, or the necromancers provides some minions to distract the incoming warriors while the assassin is spiking the enemy nukers to death, or the mesmer keeps the elementalists frustrated while the dervish is chopping through the enemy backline. And a monk's Protective Spirit is great keeping the warrior alive through an enemy assassin spike, but the Ritualist's Shelter spirit is keeping the entire party from wiping from a single Spirit Rift.

The point is that all permutations of professions should be viable and that a group of varied and unique professions should run more efficiently than one that consists of a warrior tank, two monk healers, and 5 elementalists or necromancers spamming Fire Magic spells.