User:Quizzical/Unclassified

One great thing about the class system in many games is that it forces you to make choices. You can be quite durable yourself, or you can deal considerable single-target damage, or you can harass all mobs in an entire area, or you can bring quite powerful healing skills, or various other options. Maybe you can be good at two or three things at once, but one character cannot simultaneously be good at everything.

The way this used to work in Guild Wars is that if you were a warrior, you had some skills available, while if you were a mesmer, you had different skills available. Even within a class, you could not simultaneously max all attributes, so a domination mesmer plays quite differently from an illusion mesmer, for example. This is especially important for players that use a secondary profession.

Even if you wished to be good at the same thing as different classes, the way an elementalist deals damage is very different from the way an assassin does. Their skills will be relatively more effective against different types of mobs, and they have to worry about different counters to their skills that various mobs have.

The reason this is such a good thing is that it provides replay value to content. If there were only one possible build, and you complete a mission using that build, what reason is there to ever go back? Maybe you could clean up some mistakes to make for a smoother run, but it would be essentially the same as before. In contrast, if you beat a mission once as a beast mastery ranger, you know that if you go back as a water elementalist, you'll be in for a very different experience. The same amount of content put out by ArenaNet can thus be interesting to a given player for several times as long.

But this assumes that players have to make choices in choosing their builds. Design a build around blinding a lot of mobs, and maybe you can be immensely useful to your group doing that, but you're probably going to give up some of the other things that your character could have done.

But what if players didn't have to make such choices? What if all classes had exactly the same skills available, with the maximum rank in everything? In that case, you could pick the various combinations of skills most suitable to the mission and beat it that way. The other characters in your group could likewise choose the same particular build, and because each player would have everything necessary to the mission, they would all get essentially the same experience.

Again, we're in the situation that there's no reason to go back. If the player switches to another character, to choose the same set of skills and beat the mission in the same manner is the optimal approach. To do anything else is merely trying to make things artifically harder.

If a monk, elementalist, and ranger do very different things when in a party together to complete a mission, then you can do the mission once as each class and get to see very different sides of the same mission, even if the parties are identical and use the same tactics. If all classes do the same thing, there's only one side of the mission to be seen.

This is why the portions of the game where everyone has an identical skill bar are so egregiously awful. Whether wurms in the Desolation, a siege devourer in the Charr Homelands, Ursan Blessing, or the various other complete skill bars, once you beat something once, there's no reason to go back. You've seen everything there is to see, and the only sensible things to do are to move on to some other content that you haven't done, or quit the game.

Skills not linked to classes are obnoxious for the same reason. A ranger using pain inverter, finish him, and summon mursaat will play somewhat differently from an elementalist using those same three skills. But it's far less of a difference than the difference between a ranger using ranger skills and an elementalist using elementalist skills. To degrade the replay value of all of the game's content isn't as bad as to destroy it entirely, but it's still not a good thing.

Worse is that to use such pve only skills not linked to any class does not require that the player give anything up via fewer attribute points in something else. For example, an assassin could put 12 points each in dagger mastery and critical strikes. If he wants to also bring some self-heals or other defensive skills from shadow arts, in order to make the shadow arts skills effective, he must reduce his number of attribute points in either dagger mastery or critical strikes.

But the use of pve only skills requires no such compromise. If the assassin wants to bring great dwarf armor, he can get it at its highest possible effectiveness without giving up any points at all in dagger mastery or critical strikes. The choices that the player has to make are thus reduced. The player is then able to be simultaneously good at more tasks, reducing the variety from one run to the next.

This is to argue that all skills should be linked not merely to classes, but also to attributes. It is true that there have been no attribute skills from the very start, and I think that was a mistake. It was, however, a small one: to use echo, for example, one must use the mesmer profession, as either a primary or secondary. A single player thus cannot have echo, wild blow, resurrect, and antidote signet on the same build, even without regard to their level of effectiveness.

What about linking skills to classes? While most unlinked skills were introduced by GWEN, a few sunspear skills came earlier, and resurrection signet has been around since Prophecies. I'd maintain that having the sunspear skills unlinked to any class was a mistake, but make an exception for resurrection signet.

Resurrection skills are quite different from other skills in that one hopes to never have to use them. Even among skills that are linked to classes, it would be quite a peculiar mission that one hoped to complete by spamming renew life as often as the recharge timer allowed. Resurrection signet does slightly blur the distinction between classes, but the infinite recharge timer and aversion to using it even when it is available makes this very slight.

But more importantly, there is actually something gained by making resurrection signet available to all classes. Every MMORPG has to answer the question of how to handle death. Guild Wars' answer is to make deaths hamper the chances of success in the mission at hand, but be countered most effectively by limited rez signets, and less effectively by unlimited reusable resurrection skills. This is most easily done by making resurrection signet available to all classes.

The other unlinked skills bring no such game design advantages. The often cited one is that some classes are useless in some areas, and letting them take powerful skills not linked to any class lets them actually be useful. But this effect is vastly exaggerated.

If you play as class A and use skills linked to class A, but try to run your play style as if you were class B, it won't be as effective as if you really were class B and used skills linked to class B. This says virtually nothing about the relative strengths of classes A and B.  Different classes do different things well. Do the things your class does well and you're fine. There are no bad classes, but only bad players.

But one could protest, surely in a given area, the relative strengths of class A can be more suitable than those of class B. While this is true, there are other areas where the relative strengths of class B are more valuable. Still, it is vital to observe that very rarely must any particular class truly fight alone. With other characters in the group able to fill the vital roles that your class lacks, any class can be quite useful in any mission. I must emphatically state that this is not a case of a "less useful" class tagging along while the rest of the group does everything. Every class is useful in its own right and has something valuable to contribute.

Even if the differences between the utilities of classes were sometimes drastic, this would easily be rectified by merely taking and using a secondary profession in those few areas. But even this is wholly unnecessary.

But if one class being slightly better suited to a given area than another were such a problem, the only true fix for it would be to take unlinked skills to their logical conclusion and abolish classes entirely. But this would completely destroy the replay value of the game as discussed earlier. As the saying goes, the cure is worse than the disease.

It is important to note that the above analysis does not rely heavily on how strong the unlinked skills are. If they are strong enough that a few classes may find them useful, this does not mean they are overpowered, but still, the skills ought to be linked to a class and attribute for the reasons cited above. The only exception is if the skill is so weak as to be useless to all classes, in which case, while harmless, there is still nothing to be gained by adding it to the game.