The Kind Healer

I’ve been doing some fan fiction dabbling for the better part of two, perhaps three years now, and its been centering on a Guild Wars 2 alternate timeline I call ‘(Lay) Healers of Tyria’ – LHoT for short.

While I’ve had the general outline of its events in my head, there have been times where I’ve needed to be more concrete in what the overall setup is. This post is the beginning of that.

So, where to begin? In most AH formats, there is a PoD – a Point of Departure – that is the beginning of where things actually changed. Problem here is that, in order to do that in a sane manner (for its Story’s sake) you have to undertake two separate PoDs – and the actual first one is not what you’d normally think of.

Lets begin with the more obvious PoD – the actual ‘Lay Healers’ dropping into this new world. Unfortunately we have to do some worldbuilding on the side, as very few gamers have even heard of the RoleMaster RPG (other than in frustrated cursing perhaps). So I have to first lay down the note that these two characters are, in effect, ‘magical surgeons.’ There’s more to it than that, but since about 99.5% of their spells aren’t carrying over anyway, that’s good enough.

A second issue is with character backstories, but in the cases of Sungak and Arthur (our two ‘drop-ins’), I am letting their personalities and dialogue (internal and external) do that for me.

The third (and hopefully last) issue is with character translation, but again their old character archetypes are well known to me – they’re my old characters after all – and so moving them to appropriate (mostly) character classes in GW2 was relatively straightforward.

So, with PoD 1 outlined, what is PoD 2 exactly? Its the ‘standardization’ of the entire GW2 Storyline.

Let that sink in for a moment – I’m effectively having to re-write the perspective on its entire story so that its changed from a traditional MMO’s ‘you are central, regardless of those around you’ to ‘there is only one set of “Big” heroes, and yet you do play a part in the larger scheme of things.’ So there is only one Pact Commander from the start, which in turn (during the Scarlett ‘campaign’) leads that person to personally pushing for what we know of as the Guild Initiative. But, the Guilds (as I shorten it) have a larger supporting role – some can become more active and more toward ‘hero’ status over time.

This eventually does cause a larger systemic issue with the Pact, post Heart of Thorns – they’re in tatters, and the Commander (now officially the Marshal in my outline) ends up taking the extraordinary step of expanding Pact Command so that never happens again. As Sungak and Arthur arrive sometime in the middle of LW-S2-E9 (Point of No Return), Sungak (who for a time was a Mayor) helps in this planning – at the expense of being tapped for one of these Command positions. Though he only agreed because his role was to be a permanent liaison to the Guilds, and assist in their movement throughout Tyria – basically what he was originally doing anyway.

It is a pretty massive change; when compared to the rather linear fashion of the existing Living World and Expansion content, a lot of it can now run in parallel – which can either shorten or lengthen relevant parts of the timeline, depending on circumstances. Also, a lot of it will not be run by any one person(s) anymore – I’m slowly assigning Command slots to the major parts, but its been a new form of slog that I’m unfamiliar with. Its been a fun challenge anyway, so I keep at it. I’m even finishing a little ‘one shot’ of sorts by adding a glimpse of what the current-day Pact/Guild operations (as well as the central city, known as Lion’s Arch) are looking like these days.

So, there in a (not so small) nutshell is the high level view of LHoT. Part of it will likely be split off to something more generic, as part of a useful worldbuilding exercise; that can potentially save this pain by others later.

Well.

First, to sync with the last post (nearly two years past), I did in fact find a new Guild Wars 2 Guild, on par with the Guild of Greeters from Uru. And not only did I discover that multi-game guilds are quite fun to be with, but I even accepted an Officer-level position for the GW2 side. Admittedly I’m as surprised as anyone else would be, but its fun again, which is what matters for now. More on that later.

So yes, I am still playing GW2, albeit after nearly a year of hiatus at this point. Though half of it was still within the guild, just on another game. More on that too at some point, as well.

Anyway. GW2 recently added what is known in most MMOs as Build Templates, though (as their usual MO) in a slightly different way. There are three different parts:

1. Equipment Templates & Storage. This is probably the handiest of the three types, as inventory slots just got massively freed up if you had a character that liked to run with different Ascended-level armor and weapon sets. It also works with Legendary equipment, allowing different stat selections on them per tab. There are two to start (per character), with another four available for unlock in the Cash Shop (one at a time on each character).
2. The ‘Actual’ Build Templates. These store all the ephemeral bits of the build – Traits, Skills (and their order), and profession-specific things like Ranger Pet selection. Three to start per character, max of six per character, addable per character as well (one at a time).
3. Build ‘Storage.’ This is more in line to an actual template in an MMO, which is Account-Wide versions of the character templates (per item 2), and can hold any class builds – including for setups you don’t have access to yet. Three to start, 24 max, buyable in ‘expansion’ sets of three, and a free expansion was given out during the first week this was rolled out. There is no Account-side storage for the Equipment Templates.

My original impression of this was that I was on the fence for it being as practical as ‘off-game’ implementations (which worked with ArenaNet to disable their version of the feature when this went live). Folks using the aforementioned plugin were upset, and rightly so, because there are limited slots (as opposed to near-unlimited ones that ‘end game’ folks used) which are only expandable by the Cash Shop. While the max is still somewhat limited, I’m of the mind that its reasonable to have six max per character.

I was also of the view that the average player never used more than one or two anyway, and this has not changed; for nearly all of my characters (bar one, getting to that), its business as usual. The problem starts at what I would call ‘mid game,’ that hazy point where a semi-casual player sits in most of the time. Usually on one or two characters.

And so, we come to my primary character, the one where I participate in a wide variety of content on, while (up to now) tried to keep on just one build with the occasional trait or weapon tweak. Well, with templates, I figured ‘OK, lets try to compress this a little, move the other character I set aside for a defense setup over to my old character again.’ And that’s where the trouble started.

My initial setup was fine – fill build setups, check. No extra equipment yet, so just merge a few spare weapons into tab #2, check. BUT, that was the core of my problem – my style of play does take into account ad-hoc weapon swaps, and in moving weapons into a position where there is ‘incorrect’ stat mixing, I discovered myself in a situation where I accidentally placed myself in combat with only one viable weapon set to work with, rather than the usual two in a build – the other one was disabled due to Trait picks in the other section. While I was still able to salvage the situation, that’s a very bad thing to be in when undertaking certain higher-level content. I now feel I’ll need to clear that second tab for the moment (and just bear with having extra weapons on inventory); or perhaps buy two more equipment tabs on him, so there are two for an aggressive build and two for a defensive one. Ah well.

So, to summarize: The average, casual player will experience no issues (or major requirements to reach for the Cash Shop). Folks in semi-casual to minor hardcore content will need to expand their favorite characters only, and true hardcore folks will likely restrict their character choices or outlay serious RL money. Or perhaps quit; but from my experience, a game company relying on RL$ transactions should be catering to the lower money outlays (far more of those) rather than ‘Whale’ players.

Final Note, on Cost: Not bad really. Initial outlay for the transition I’m talking about should fit within the confines of one $15 Gem card, which is still dirt cheap if I’m only spending that every four to six months (as opposed to the old-school monthly sub at that level). Even every three months is fine IMO. So I think they’ve done a good job there.

If you’ve not looked at this new system yet, do so, and determine for yourself what you really want to do with it. From there you can determine costs, and if alternatives exist – after all, if you were already dealing with multiple ‘Alt’ characters for different roles, you’re likely unaffected as well. Barring an interest in having individual characters do more.