A while back, when discussing Classic Guild Wars with MOP’s Chris, who was playing it for Choose My Adventure, I found myself explaining that secondary classes in the game are very often noob traps.
I dunno how other folks use the term, but I’ve always used it to describe the kind of choice in a game that specifically trips up new players, the kind that sounds much more interesting and powerful than it is but in most applications is pure junk that is wasting your time and character development points on some sort of fantasy that is not backed up by the numbers. It’s as if the devs laid a trap and just waited for noobs to fall into it. And I bet you’d agree with me that a lot of traits and spec choices in MMOs are basically noob traps. They’re bad, but they sound cool, and they seem to exist specifically to trick you into taking them and making your toon less powerful.
Now, I wasn’t saying that secondary classes were useless in Guild Wars; on the contrary, a lot of my builds made expert use of one skill from a secondary to enhance the primary. But you really need to know what you’re doing to pull that off, and in most cases, a new player lacks both that experience and the skill breadth to do it anyway, and they get the impression that they should be running, oh, say a Monk build that’s half Elem skills. (Which, by the way, is also what I did when I first played at launch, so Chris is not alone.)
What would you say are the worst “noob traps” in MMOs?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
