User:Armond/Strong mechanics

Introduction

On this page, I'll make a list of skills that use strong, interesting, and balanced (or balancable) mechanics, with some commentary. Not all of them will necessarily be from Guild Wars, but most of them will. If you have suggestions or comments, you know where the talk page is.

Guild Wars

General

1. Stances: The ones that are meant to be maintained are a good on-the-fly way to change your character's area of focus. I wish more games had these, and I wish (for example) warriors had 3-4 stances that didn't take up skill slots so they could fluidly change tactics mid-battle.

Warrior

1. Bull's Strike
2. Dragon Slash
3. Eviscerate
4. Hamstring

Ranger

So many goodies here.

1. Burning Arrow: Ranger elites, like elementalist and (to a point) mesmer elites, really change how you play your character. A BA ranger plays very differently from a Mel's ranger, and etc. It's kind of like stances, except the difference is so extreme that you shouldn't be able to change it mid-fight.
2. Distracting Shot: Would be better with 20s cd and half recharge if it interrupts.
3. Melandru's Shot: Perhaps my favorite ranger elite. It's like cripshot but better designed (thus cripshot's removal from the list).
4. Nature rituals: One of the major reasons these have had issues is because there are a large number of ways in GW to do the same thing, which means the drawbacks of a nature ritual can be mitigated fairly easily. I still think it's a potentially viable design.
5. Precision Shot: In GW, the damage is too little and the energy cost perhaps a bit too high for this to be worth using. In other games, this sort of skill can be an amazing spike assist that requires some skill to use correctly.