Feedback:User/Erasculio/PvE only professions

PvE players love variety; having more and more skills is a way to find more and more fun ways to beat the AI. However, for PvP players variety is bad - when you have too many professions and too many skills, the game becomes almost impossible to balance, and so ends in an imbalanced mess that makes PvP players leave.

This is easy to see in Guild Wars 1. By the time of Prophecies and the first few months after the release of Factions, the game was rather balanced, with a high level of PvP and really good teams around. With the influx of new skills and new professions, though, the game reached such a degree of complexity that an update aiming to fix a balance issue would cause twice as many problems. If all professions and skills introduced after Prophecies had been PvE only, however, we would still have a PvP game with plenty of options and much easier to balance, while PvE would have the same variety it has today.

I think it's safe to say the community as a whole expects Guild Wars 2 to have its share of expansions/new chapters/whatever. In order to avoid the problems Guild Wars 1 had (too many professions and too many skills for PvP), I would suggest that all new professions/races/skills introduced after the core GW2 game would be PvE only.

Of course, the PvE only professions and skills would have to be balanced; this isn't meant as an excuse to introduce overpowered professions or skills. However, PvE works with looser rules than PvP regarding balance, so keeping PvE balanced is far easier than balancing for PvP.

PvP players would less of an incentive to buy the expansions, but that's a good thing; if someone has only to buy the core game to become a PvP player with access to all skills, maps and PvP modes, it would be easier to introduce new players to GW2's PvP. This is also a problem in GW1 - despite how it's easy to find the chapters being sold for less than their original prices, a new player trying to be competitive in GW1's PvP would have to buy the three chapters and GW:EN, making it less inviting for those players. Meanwhile, PvE players would still keep buying GW2's expansions, and given how there are far more PvE and PvEvP players than PvP only players, the number of expansions sold would still be high.