this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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I'm thinking mostly from a fantasy angle. I'll give some examples from the classes I play:
Warrior: lacks a spec focused on the defensive juggernaut fantasy that you infer from the class description. Hammer Spellbreaker kind of fits here but it's a bit of a stretch of what a spellbreaker should be thematically. Also lacking is a commander/captain support spec, maybe something built around shouts and/or banners.
Elementalist: why is the only spec not about going in and smacking people in melee tempest? And even then the best weapon is the sword. There's a reason newbs go in and try to make staff work as a ranged weapon.
Engineer: turret spec please.
Mesmer: maybe mirage kind of fits the core mesmer fantasy, but I'm not sure if the ambushes fit there. The other specs don't really fit since it's mostly about doing away with your clones.
Those all seem like good ones to me, too. Honestly the defensive juggernaut thing doesn't really exist period in GW2, so I guess it's by design. At least not compared to other RPGs. Everyone is quite squishy.
You've made me realize that a mesmer fantasy I miss from GW1 is a domination magic mesmer. Something that heavily punishes certain types of gameplay and doesn't do the illusion thing. Is that what you were getting at with the mesmer part?
I wonder if they would ever consider adding new specs to only some classes instead of all at once. On one hand people would definitely rage and whine, but I could imagine that making for much better designed specs over time.
The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can't be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.
Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. "Being unkillable" or "controlling this space" can't be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you're now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that's a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.
Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you'd interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can't punish a playstyle because playstyles aren't that well defined, and you can't create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There's also no energy denial in GW2, and you can't give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1's mesmer--like a lot of things that were better in GW1.
If you ask me, we don't need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs--stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have--and we need the elites to be "de-elited" so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they've taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.