Ask Massively: Career day edition

As you read this, depending on the time this goes live, I will either be knee-deep in a Career Day presentation or be coming down off the high of getting to talk about my job to a bunch of middle-school children. I'm writing this before I'll know whether it went well or not, but I'm hopeful. Truth be told, I have exactly the sort of job now that I would have loved to hear about when I was a young boy, so I'm expecting this will be pretty fun.

Plus I'll be having school lunch again for the first time since my high school graduation. That's got to be worth a few points on the nostalgia-o-matic, right?

This week's Ask Massively is thus an honorary career day edition, as we tackle questions about careers, classes, and professions throughout the wide world of gaming. On deck this week are questions about Guild Wars and doing things you oughtn't with classes, World of Warcraft's lockstep class system, and the range of flexibility in Star Wars: The Old Republic. As always, you can send off your own questions to ask@massively.com or leave them in the comment field for next week's column.

Fienemannia asked: Is there anything preventing me from making my Guild Wars Elementalist have a Warrior secondary and carry around a hammer?

Preventing? No. A better question would be "is there a particular advantage to having an Elementalist primarily using Warrior abilities?"

To swipe a turn of phrase for basketball, I prefer to have my characters swinging in the paint instead of casting spells back at the three-point line. Guild Wars gives players a lot of ways to do this. The real question is which class has the primary attribute and armor that you'll find most effective for this particular build. In this specific instance, I can't imagine a hammer build that would benefit greatly from energy storage and lighter armor, but perhaps some kind soul in the comments could suggest something.

Blancmanche asked: Why is World of Warcraft one of the few games that doesn't allow characters to multi-class in any fashion?

I was going to take umbrage with this, but then I thought about it a bit more. And it's true -- the vast majority of games either have abilities available to any class or allow some form of multi-classing, which makes World of Warcraft's one-class-to-rule-them-all attitude a bit baffling. In the game's early days, of course, this was mitigated by the breadth of choice available in talent trees. With talents now so streamlined that it takes active and focused malice to spec your character incorrectly, the dual-spec feature seems to have taken that place, allowing a character of one primary ability set to dabble in another when needed. And it's hardly the only game to feature a strict class system -- Lord of the Rings Online springs to mind.

Domlark asked: So how many classes is Star Wars: The Old Republic actually supposed to have? The whole advanced class thing kind of gives me a headache

I haven't gotten enough (read: any) time in the beta, so I can't say with certainty, but here's the version that's been presented. There are four classes per faction (eight total), each of which has two advanced classes. Each base class has a certain set of abilities shared between its subclasses, along with two specialized talent trees (for lack of a better term) for each class. So the Sith Warrior, for instance, has two Juggernaut trees, two Marauder trees, and one tree shared between both.

Presumably, if you're going with the WoW model in which your specialties functionally equal a distinct class (and I'll guess we are), and if you assume that the shared tree plays differently with a different advanced class (and I will), that comes out to a grand total of 24 different specialties per side. If the shared tree plays pretty similar no matter your advanced class, it's down to 20; if you have enough points to pick up more than one tree in its functional entirety, that number drops back down significantly. The short version is that there are at least eight distinct classes with three specialization trees, which might effectively come out to more or less.

Loki1 asked: Please someone explain how one post-dates [the '80s] -- could I see a phrase from one of these kids?

By being born after December 31st, 1989. Which seems kind of surreal to me, too. Those kids are at least 20 now.

Looking for some advice on which class is best for soloing in Aion? Not sure who this Raph Koster fellow is? Curious about the release date of NCsoft's newest MMO? You've come to the right place! No one knows MMOs like we do. If there's anything you'd like to know about the MMO genre or the site itself, Ask Massively is here to help every Thursday afternoon. Just ask!