User:Auron/gtawow

As a sister post to my "good things about Guild Wars" article, I've seen things in other games that should be ported over to Guild Wars to make it better. Some things are not entirely compatable - WoW's raid makeup relies on 25 people to buff one another to get the most damage possible, but many of the concepts can easily be carried over.

Effect cooldowns
In Guild Wars, you can maintain Guardian or Weapon of Warding on a target indefinitely. Chaining prots really isn't a sign of skill, and it is entirely too rewarding for how cheap it is - your prots never lose effectiveness and they're cheap enough to spam over and over. WoW has a built-in cooldown for that kind of thing. Once you've been affected by Power Word: Shield (a priest's basic prot skill), you gain a debuff that makes you unprottable (with the same spell) for 15 seconds. This is different from skill cooldown - PW:S has a 4 second recharge, so you can use it on multiple party members, but you just can't maintain it on a single character.

As limited as WoW's prots are, that mechanic is a good one to carry over to Guild Wars. It awards timing prots to mitigate the most damage, and penalizes bad monks who just maintain Guardian because they can't read a warrior's movement.

The effect cooldown doesn't just apply to prots, either. There's a really powerful skill called Bloodlust that increases the entire raid's attack speed and decreases casting time for 40 seconds. Once affected by bloodlust, however, you get a debuff that renders you immune to bloodlust for 10 minutes. If the debuff didn't exist, people could bring a number of Shamans (the class that gets bloodlust) and just chain it all day, making their entire raid really powerful. That's obviously a bad thing.

In Guild Wars terms, what does this mean? Look at paragons. Paragons, alone or in pairs, are relatively balanced. They still have too much energy for their own good, but overall, they're okay. When you have 5 paragons, your party becomes mostly invincible because the huge stack of defensive shouts and chats never ends. An effect cooldown would help to prevent this without making singular paragons useless - if you are healed by Ballad of Restoration, you cannot be healed by it again for 1 minute (or something, the numbers can be tweaked). If you have only one copy of Ballad in your build, fine; you won't ever have a problem with this cooldown. If you have 5 copies of ballad (or any shout) you will run into problems. For Guild Wars, the easiest way to implement this is to have a separate cooldown for each attribute of shouts (not each individual shout). A cooldown on restoration shouts would prevent the combined effects of song/ballad of resto, song of purification, and finale of restoration. A cooldown on command shouts would prevent mindless GftE spam (or at least make it conflict with fall back chains, stand your ground, etc).

Skill trees that have a point
Have you looked at Tactics, Spawning Power, Communing, Earth Prayers, Wind Prayers etc, and just said "what the hell is this supposed to accomplish?" Each of those trees have a ton of skills in them, but the skills are fragmented or weak and have no connection to one another, so when you try to use many of them in a build, it just comes out jumbled. Some attributes have singular powerful skills that see play while the entire rest of the tree is ignored. That's not okay.

In WoW, each class gets a number of skills by default; every level 80 Priest will have skills a, b, and c because they're universal. Once you spec into a talent tree (much like the attribute system in Guild Wars), not only do existing skills get more powerful, you get a few completely unique skills that no other spec will have. Priests who spend 51 (out of a total 71) points in Discipline will get a unique skill called Penance, which is a huge single-target heal. The rest of the talents in the Discipline tree make Discipline priests strong single-target healers, while their party healing skills suffer. Holy priests are the opposite - their AoE heals are cheap and fast, so they're great at healing a bit of damage spread out over many people, but they aren't good at keeping a single person alive through tremendous pressure.

Guild Wars suffers because it lacks a clear role for each tree. What the hell are communing ritualists supposed to do? Originally, they just spat a bunch of spirits and sat around, but in time, each of the spirits got nerfed to a point where the tree was no longer viable. Earth prayers and wind prayers have never had a point. The skills were ambiguous buffs to a class that had more powerful options available in other trees, so, since release, those skill trees were entirely ignored.

It might be an interesting idea to lock certain skills in certain trees unless you have X amount of points invested, but that could get messy with Guild Wars' design, so I would suggest they just re-think the trees and give each of them a viable build. Even if it is only one viable build, making the attribute useful again will enable future tweaks to come more easily. Without a clear role for the attribute, individual skills get individual attention and ANet never stops to think what the tree is trying to accomplish.

Skill separation
Some skills should simply not work if you are in a spec whose purpose is completely contrary to that skill's effect. WoW does this pretty easily. Shadow is the Priest's dps line. For now, just think of it as smiting prayers. There's a skill priests get called Shadow Form (lol) that increases the damage of their smiting prayers and reduces physical damage taken by a smidgen. On the flipside, it prevents them from casting heals outside of very basic stuff like Abolish Disease (mend condition). This enables smiting prayers monks to be perfectly viable damage dealers without allowing them to be perfectly viable healers at the same time.

Another example is the Paladin and Druid classes. Both can deal damage, tank, or heal. These are a little easier to separate because each role requires different gear. A damage paladin can't just throw around power heals because his spell power and spell casting speed (called haste rating) is low. Guild Wars isn't gear-dependent or gear-based, so ANet needs to have something to prevent smiting monks from being better healers than healers while being better damage dealers than elementalists.

Originally, the entire concept of attributes helped separate roles - but as Shard has pointed out on many occasions, ANet has been ignoring attribute separation when adding new skills. They can either revert to the idea that attributes prevent you from doing everything well, or they can come up with some new way to prevent smiting prayers monks to be better healers than healing monks.

Gold sinks
On a completely different subject, Guild Wars' economy is bad. This is news to nobody. If you have been playing for any real length of time, you probably have amassed a small fortune. As time goes on, these small fortunes get bigger and bigger, and for the most part, people have nothing to spend it on. Then ANet gets the bright idea to add like 50 of a particular minipet in the entire world, and suddenly you see how the economy breaks. People ask literally hundreds of ecto for these rare minis - sometimes into the thousands. That's not good for the economy. There should be things in the game worth spending gold on to prevent people from having endless purses.

WoW does it in a number of ways. The most obvious is the repair bill. I don't advocate it for Guild Wars, but it's a possibility. If you die in PvE, your equipment takes 10% durability damage, and the higher level your equipment is, the more expensive it is to repair. This punishes dying and helps keep the economy in check, but doesn't do either too harshly.

Second, NPCs sell items you need. Certain buffs in WoW require item reagents to cast, and hunters in particular require ammo to shoot with. There are only a few things worth buying from NPCs in all of guild wars, and most of them are lockpicks and salvage kits. You can argue that consumables fall into this category, and I sort of agree, but consumables are way too cheap for their huge effect. Cons should at least be tiered, with the most powerful being the most pricey.

Thirdly, there are vanity items in WoW that are plain and simple gold sinks. A motorcycle mount (that comes with a side car) costs 12500g plus rare Mining and Skinning materials. A multi-person mammoth mount costs 8000g. A mammoth mount with merchants to buy/sell/repair stuff costs 18000g. Outside of mounts, there are special clothes you can buy that have unique looks - a Navy admiral's hat, a mexican musician outfit, a medic's robe, and even simple things like bouquets of flowers that can be equipped to your hands for show.

Lastly, in WoW, maintaining a proper raiding set of gear is pricey. Every time you get a better piece of equipment, you have to buy expensive Enchanting materials and gems to augment your item. Total costs for enchants easily run over 100g, and uncut gems are roughly 150g plus whatever it costs to have a Jewelcrafter cut what you need. Guild Wars lacks crafting professions and isn't gear based, so porting this idea over directly is impossible, but there are ways to keep your own economy in check, and ANet hasn't done any of them.

Auction house
Fucking duh.