Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing since release now and for the longest time I’ve been trying to put my finger on why just going out and doing general PvE content is so painful to me.

Today, I hopped back on Guild Wars 1 and for the hell of it I started playing through Prophecies again. What I noticed was that each new area brought a new enemy to fight. With this, an entire new skillset of these enemies was brought to the table. Thus, I had to change my build entirely to effectively counter what I was going against, skillwise, in multiple facets:

1) I had to choose my skills so that I could counter the skill-set that the enemies had.
2) I found myself choosing skills that would be beneficial against a certain species. (Burning against Ice Elementals and Plants, Holy damage against Undead, etc.)

Now this may be a seemingly small thing, but in Guild Wars 2 after familiarizing yourself with an enemy type (ie, Risen) you know the 2-3 different “skills” they possess. These skills place a red circle around your feet and may have varying effects, but regardless you avoid them only because of the circle that has killed you countless times in the past. Aside from those maybe 2-3 “skills,” the only thing you have to do is dodge-auto attacks that can hit you for a varying amount between 10-100% of your health (looking at you, trash mobs in CoE) instantly.

Just so that this isn’t an endless rant without any sort of solution provided, here is what I would recommend. I get that this may not even be possible due to “technical or engine related limitations,” but I’ll throw it out there anyway:

1) Give enemies the same skills that characters get, depending on their class/weapon.
2) Most importantly, give us a cast-bar/tooltip for each skill that enemies are using, so that we can counter them on a skill/character based concept, instead of counter them based on dodging and how much endurance we have.

End of rant, thanks for reading.

Sadly the AI will never use our skills as effectively as we do, so that wont make it much better. The main edge the mobs in GW1 had was their level up to 10 more levels than we had. Some mobs in GW2 do have skills that resemble our own too (risen wizard vapor blades and geysers, ascalonian ghost firestorms and the like) yet they dont pose any more threat or excitement than any other mob.

Castbar/tooltip would only be useful for interrupts. Thats pretty much all you need in terms of countering somethin other than dodging or sidestepping out of the way or blocking.

What i would say that GW2 is lacking is the damage specifications. Ice elementals suffer no more damage from specificly fire-based attacks than physical or even ice shards. The only thing that comes to mind that resembles anything like this is the burning immunity of destroyers and blind immunity of dredge. Even in GW1 destroyers were actually healed by the burn condition. Things like this give a deeper tactical level to the game, while getting rid of most of this makes the combat somewhat more shallow.