Originally Posted by
PAX Prime 2011 Guild Wars 2 Panel
Q:...what are you doing to incentivize people to "smartly" make a party and, like, min/max?
A: John Peters: Okay, it's a good question, but to me, the real answer is: most of the time, people really actually just want to play with their friends, so that's what that system is about. The aren't really builds that are "so much better" or "so much worse," there's things you're gonna do and you're gonna wanna coordinate AFTER you make a team, but you don't have to coordinate BEFORE you make a team. If, let's say the five of us are all playing together, and all of us have Warriors, you know we can still play together and after we make our team and start going to fight stuff we might want to think about, you know, someone should prolly bring some Support Skills, someone should prolly have a Shield, you might wanna have a guy with a rifle, but it's not about, "we can't take Eric, even though he's our friend, just because he's got a Warrior too and there's already four of us" - that's not what the system's about.
Eric Flannum: I can elaborate on that a little bit too. So, one of the things about it is that the Holy Trinity systems are very much about taking a specific strategy, the same strategy - over and over again and imposing that upon the encounter. That strategy is almost always: pull, tank, damage, heal, right? And what we wanted with Guild Wars 2 combat is to live more in that space where "something went wrong," and now you have to pay attention to what's going on, and you have to use the tools at your disposal to react to the situation. And so, what ends up happening is, in Guild Wars 2, I would much rather have a good player than a player who plays a specific profession. And the reason for that is because that [good] player's going to be able to react in the right way with the right tools at their disposal to any situations that we get into. And so it's very much about learning what your profession can do in various situations, and about us as designers building that versatility in. You know, trinity systems get built very specifically for that. The guys [(classes, not players)] who can heal generally can't do a heck of a lot else. The guys who can tank generally don't do a lot else. And so what we've done is, we've said, "well, let's make all of our guys do different things, but let's let them do it in kind of a different style," and then the game becomes much more about applying the tools that we give you in your toolbox to the situation at hand. And so there really isn't as much of a sort of min/maxy thing because Player Skill is really going to make up for it.