Enchanter/Enchantress

Hey guys, I got this idea for a new class thats probably already been thought up several times, but i'd really like to spread the idea and maybe see it in the second chapter of GW.

An enchanter, most of there skills are enchantments obviously. They're sort of like a reverse mesmer you might say. But when i say enchantments, I mean the long term kind that the caster can maintain its activity for the price of Mana regen arrows. And maybe they could have a few really awesome enchantments but they might cost more than one regen arrow. They wouldn't have too much mana because hey, gotta have balance, but their items would give the more regen arrows instead.

You could combine this with many classes and it would be great, like a monk could be a more flexible support class, and a enchanter/fighter could give himself some sweet enhancements before rushing into battle.

I think this would be a great class, because the ones that the monk has (which are few) are only based on health, and theres really no limit on the crazy little spells this class could have.

There's enough enchants already :P in fact, people are complaining about enchant removal at the moment.

I don't think there are, not ones that can be maintained, and i think that its such a cool element of the game thats only seen in a few skills. Sure there are tons of enchantments that last for 5secs to 2 min, but I'd like to see an enchanter who can maintain his enchantements.

Maintainable enchants have been in the game for a long time buddy.

I know, buddy, but there arn't many of them, and they don't have an incredible amount of variety. I said it was a cool element of the game thats seen in few skills.

If you say so. But there's already full on maintained enchantment builds already.

Whether more are added or not, I'd think it should be something that's left to the Mesmer, rather than creating an entire class for it. Mesmers are enchanters. Having a Mesmer class and an Enchanter class would be like having seperate Warrior, Soldier and Fighter classes. Sure, you could do it, and give them differences, but in a game like Guild Wars, why would you want to? The game would just become convoluted and harder to balance. I really think that new classes should be introduced only if they add something substantially different to the gameplay. If an idea already fits the mold for an existing class, it should just be incorporated into that one.

Just because there's builds focused on a type of skill doesn't mean more shouldn't be added. Not saying I'm for the enchanter class, but variety isn't a bad thing in GW.

Maintainable enchantments are currently the monk's gimmick (18 skills in their set requiring upkeep), as rangers have nature rituals/traps, elementalists have exhaustion, warriors have adrenaline, necromancers have sacrifice (only mesmers don't seem to have a special trait) - you could say it's already taken.

Enchantments are primarily a positive buff (negative enchantments being hexes), and as such I think you'll soon find the nature of the "enchanter"'s skill list to overlap with the nature of the monk's skill list too significantly to warrant a seperate class for it. Furthermore, as interesting as maintainable enchantments may be, there wouldn't be much point in bringing eight of them along.

Everquest/DAoC: We want some new classes. Let's figure out how to make them fit into the game.

World of Warcraft: We need classes that fit our original series. Let's figure out how to make them fit into the game.

Guild Wars (hopefully): Here's an interesting new gameplay dynamic that won't work with the current classes. Maybe we should create a class that utilizes it.

See what I'm getting at, here? Variety itself isn't a bad thing, but variety just for variety's sake can be a bad thing when it comes to something like classes. There are a lot of woefully unbalanced games out there, that introduce classes and abilities left and right. I'm not saying GW's perfect, but it seems to come a lot closer than most do, and I think that one of the reasons is that its classes consist of several carefully chosen archetypes with a number of specific functions in battle. These functions cover a broad range of possible strategies, so there are plenty of different ways to play them, but each overall class seems to remain pretty carefully clipped and pruned.