Guild Wars 2

For those of you that play mostly other MMOs and very little action/shooter games, give this a shot. No outside modifications required!

1. Hold down the right mouse button at all times, unless you need to sift through menus/inventory. As long as the right mouse button is held down, the A and D keys will automatically become sidestep left/right instead of merely turning your character left/right.
2. Use WASD extensively, and sidestep/dodge whenever necessary. Always be on the move in combat (circle around enemies with A/D while facing them, for example), unless a skill requires you to stand still.
3. Disable double-tap to dodge and bind the dodge button to Left Shift (or another key that’s within reach while keeping your left hand on WASD). You can still dodge in various directions via WASD + Dodge key.

Now most of these may feel like common knowledge, since GW2 has been advertised to have a more active combat system. To my surprise, judging from people I have spoken to, both ingame and with RL friends, it seems that many people don’t take enough advantage of this, so I’m just posting this as a PSA.

One thing is for sure, though – Elementalist (and probably a few other classes like Engineer) almost plays like a different profession once you treat the game as an action game.

Thoughts?

I’ve been doing this since launch and making it more action combat-ish makes the combat a whole ton more entertaining. Although, the auto-targeting is a pain the rear and doesn’t allow for any creativity or versatility in combat (Ex. a lunge with an arcing slash; using the lunge to move off to the side of your opponent just enough as a psuedo dodge to avoid a hit, while the arc from the strike is able to still cut your target. I use this all the time in action combat games; inspired from the “do” strike in kendo); click targeting enemies is even worse.

Turn off auto-targeting and half the skills don’t even work because they need a target (Example: Rangers Hunters Call with the warhorn).

Holding down the click button is also a pain; if you have a programmable mouse or keyboard or a scripting program you can macro the right click to be a toggle-able though.