Guild Wars 2

Hi,

I have been exploring a lot today the pros and cons of different Druid builds, it’s mechanics and what have you. A number of people gave some helpful suggestions in this light.

Just a few minutes ago I completed the achievement Froglicker with some people at the finish of Verdant Brink. I was running Helly’s build over on the Ranger forums if you’re interested in that.

Immediately following this I teleported to Auric Basin, hoping to see some people to tag up with. While I was doing this I noticed a few things that really haven’t stood out to me before. I suspect the older the gamer you are the less this probably was noticed by you as well. For newer games you probably haven’t noticed it at all.

The thing I’m thinking about is Weapons Mechanics.

In older games and even many new ones you choose the type of women you are going to use. In doing this you’re pretty locked-in to that class that way with that weapon. Frankly, it’s horrible. It’s not because of that experience itself, but rather because once you’re in that sort of game you’re also in for that sort one-way trip. The older the game the harder it was to “respec”… ie Re-specialize.

It never occurred to me the weapon swap and skills 123 being main hand, 45, being off hand are actually the same idea without the absurd amounts of gold or rare-item required to respect in older games. In Dark Age of Camelot you had to kill a dragon for a chance at a respec-stone. A dragon. There was just one per realm (world-nation). It took as much as 170 people to kill some of these.

Tonight while playing the Druid this really hit home with me when I blitzed my way into a bunch of veteran frog archers thinking, “Yeah! I will just absorb the damage, heal up, blitz them some more and win!” I’m a firm believer that dying a lot is educational… >_>.
So, I was getting closer and closer to doing this when I suddenly realized… “You know what you are doing?” I thought about, reflected on far too much time trying this very same tactic in some very retro mmos and having seen it turn out much worse.

What was I doing? I wasn’t understanding I have just two weapons. Oh sure, my tactic was eventually going to work, but that’s not really why I was throwing myself again and again to my death. Something had been bugging me while I was doing it and I’d been sorting it out. What was bugging me was this absence in realization.

All this time, three years of playing, I never really processed I never once had to spend a penny to equip nor swap a weapon. Not once. In this tiny realization lies a whole field of genius in the Guild Wars 2 development.

I was using a Longbow and a Staff. Effectively this made me some sort of Blitz DPS/Secondary Healer. I’d had this experience before! It was like playing a Bard in Dark Age of Camelot. Either you were going to be some sort of Mesmer-like Song spinning demon that dazed and blinded people (joke for some people) or you were going to be a very good secondary healer. It was one or the other.
Same thing with Druid Longbow/Staff. You’re going to put out awesome upfront damage, but then suffer long cool downs. In reality you’re real effectiveness is endurance. You keep a lot of people alive or naggingly refuse to die.
Unless you’re stupid (sad kindly). In which case you’re throwing yourself at a bunch of frogs that you know will kill you trying to grasp all the reasons just precisely why this doesn’t work and then what this tells you about Druid’s offensive, defensive, and crowd-control mechanics.

In summary:
Guild Wars 2 is very much the classical MMO the way we wanted them about 15 years ago. It lacks some of their luster yet. Zones are still pretty small. Even the new ones, but the verticality brings them much closer.
Classes really are several specializations masked by being one class type. This is so well done you can miss it entirely.
This goes a long way into saying we really aren’t short on a lot of skills or abilities, but rather that we’re short on being left to sort out whether they apply or not.
In Dark Age of Camelot I believe you had either 12 or 16 skills you could fit to your screen. You rarely used that many. About 8 most of the time.
In World of Warcraft there are 60 skills you can fit on your screen, all at once and visible, but you’re physically only capable of pressing just eight again before the global-cool down shuts you off from pressing more.
Also, a lot of your abilities that WOULD be on your skill bar are masked by something as simple as double-tapping to evade or pressing space bar to glide.

Just something to think about when saying this game is short on something here or there. The devs have implemented years worth of requests from many MMOs so well we just aren’t picking up on it because for us in this game it was a natural, fully formed mechanic.

Eirdyne.9843:

In older games and even many new ones you choose the type of women you are going to use.

What kind of games are we talking about?!

Eirdyne.9843:

In older games and even many new ones you choose the type of women you are going to use.

That Freudian slip though

Aww, cafard beat me to it.

Eirdyne.9843:

It never occurred to me the weapon swap and skills 123 being main hand, 45, being off hand are actually the same idea without the absurd amounts of gold or rare-item required to respect in older games. In Dark Age of Camelot you had to kill a dragon for a chance at a respec-stone. A dragon. There was just one per realm (world-nation). It took as much as 170 people to kill some of these.

Meanwhile, in the original Guild Wars you could change your attributes and skills freely.

Unlike in GW2, gear had little to no impact on your build. So, while going from a Power-based build to a condition-based build in GW2 often restricts you due to your gear, constricting building variety and suggesting to people that they shouldn’t really change their builds (especially after they get ascended gear), the original GW had none of that.

In fact, in the original GW we were not restricted nearly as much as we are in GW2 – instead of skills being placed in the skill bar for ourselves, we could place them as we wanted (other than only having a single elite skill).

Plus, we could equip two professions at once; and once you had unlocked a second profession, you could change between the second professions you had unlocked freely. At one moment you could be a Mesmer using warrior skills with Illusionary Weapon, and in the next you could be a Mesmer using Fast Casting to quickly cast a lot of monk skills – without spending a single copper, without having any kind of grind, with just the time it took to teleport to an outpost (which, for the records, was free, unlike using a waypoint in GW2).

And, of course, we had far, FAR more skills. Three years after the original GW, a Mesmer had more or less 130 skills, and that’s ignoring the PvE only skills; considering how we could use far more combinations than in GW2’s rigid system, plus all skills from a secondary profession, now THAT was build diversity.

In comparison, GW2 is simply, well, meh.