Guild Wars 2

This is a skill based mmo. How does it compare with other traditional MMO’s? What is your preference?

It’s much more skill based in 1v1 or 2v2 compared with games like wow, however with 3v3 or more it’s just an aoe spammgame, no skill involved, unlike wow which is more skill based in larger scale battles compared with GW2, aoe’s in this game are just too powerfull.

Once gear capped – full exotic. What is your incentive to play? Do you miss that component that you find in other mmo’s?

Making it simple:
If you like only the carrot – Go to more traditional MMO’s. Will save you some trouble.

If you however like getting multiple sets to change builds and designing specfic types of characters (Support/tank/DPS/Condition/Etc) than this is your MMO. As once you hit 80 and get say full Tank P/T/V gear then you can swap and start to gear up a DPS based class. Then when you bored you can build a condition based character. The swap in variety will definitely spice up gameplay and the added knowledge that if you go away for a year and pick it back up you will not have to regrind all your sets. – This is all PvE specific.

As for SPvP it again depends on if you like the carrot. If not then there isn’t much here for you outside of WvW.

the last mmo i played was all about gear/ cash shop to the point that max level characters could easily 1 shot other max level characters (they’d do 2-7mil dmg a hit on an opponent with six hundred thousand hp (had to write that out because it was censored? )). you’d have scenarios where there’d be 10 or 12 players all trying to take down 1 person. it was a huge joke.

compared to that this is far better, although the way pvp is set up there isn’t as much 1v1 as i’d like. i miss having open world pvp where you could be attacked by anyone if you were flagged. made it interesting to pvp in every zone.

that said i like that pvp is fair in this game, although the wvwvw zerg gets old after a while.

I played wow for 7 years and I can honestly say I prefer not having to worry about gear. I love being able to go toe to toe with anyone in WvW and having a fighting chance.

There is plenty of incentive to play still. The main reason is: it’s actually fun. There is nothing forcing me to play so I actually want to play more. There are plenty of goals to work towards but I think my personal incentive is working towards cosmetic upgrades and bettering myself as a player instead of my gear.

Tiered gear was never an incentive for me to play. It was a punishment for me not playing. Being able to cap out my gear lets me relax a little and do what I want on that character, from WvWvW to exploration to dungeons. A gear cap encourages me to alt—something I love doing—and keeps me from having to schedule my free time around raiding (something I did for years in WoW.)

I’ve done the hardcore raid game for years, and I don’t enjoy it anymore. Even when I did deck myself out in epics, I didn’t get to enjoy it, because in a matter of months I’d have to upgrade it all over again. Tiered gear gives you an incentive to play in the same way a treadmill gives you an incentive to take another step.

I know it sounds heretical if you subscribe to the intransigent /v/ idea that “fun” is somehow an insufficient incentive to do something. I play GW2 because I can play whatever character I want, pursue whatever achievement I want, build how I want, gear up at my own pace and—most importantly—take a break for as long as I want without falling behind at all.

If I wanted a tiered gear system and a structured endgame revolving around an endless series of escalating raids, I’d play one of the hundred other MMOs on the market, from RIFT to DCUO. In fact, I already have. All of them, in fact.

Dead.7385:

Making it simple:
If you however like getting multiple sets to change builds and designing specfic types of characters (Support/tank/DPS/Condition/Etc) than this is your MMO. As once you hit 80 and get say full Tank P/T/V gear then you can swap and start to gear up a DPS based class. Then when you bored you can build a condition based character. The swap in variety will definitely spice up gameplay and the added knowledge that if you go away for a year and pick it back up you will not have to regrind all your sets. – This is all PvE specific.

Theres not a heck of a lot of skill in this game. Your limited in your actual pool of options of skills to use (15 for most classes or 45 for the elementalist). You cannot “set” builds, the game doesn’t remember what bulds your using and the concept of “tank” only really works if your foes don’t get the clue that your hitting them like a old man. Really your choices are “How do you want to DPS this guy” As AnEt has themselves pointed out there is no holy trinity…so the real question is..

How fast do you want to die. How fast do you want your opponent to die.

At the end of the day thats the game in a nutshell character design wise. Which in all fairness makes things fairly balanced except theres a few skills that are a bit off the mark at the moment.

Having Done MMO’s since UO to GW2 and most likely beyond I’ve played pretty much everything inbetween. If you like a abundance of simplicity then I recommend this game, if your looking for more challenge and complexity however I’d say keep looking. TSW for example uses a more complex character build system where you can comfortably play however you wish, there is some progression involved however but thats at your own option as theres a lot to do there.

I think it’s only skill-based in spvp. The rest is button-mashing.

E.g., today I came upon 2 mesmers in WvW, on my pve-specced ranger. I killed them both. I know from spvp that I should have lost that fight, prob’ly without even killing one. Which makes me think they’re not 80s yet, and lost cuz of the stats difference.

I don’t find it more skill based than other MMOs. The difference is that GW2 is pure skill, where as in other MMOs it was a combination of skill and gear. GW2 may have dodge rolls, but other MMOs had a lot more skills and an auto attack. In GW2, if I want to kill someone, I only have to press 1 and watch how my character does nice dps. In previous games you always had some buffs to set up a burst, or some big cds to pop, or a hard rotation needed for max damage. Not just spam skill 1. So that counters all the skill gain that the dodge mechanic brings imo.

If you can remember to use 60+ hotkeys in that other game, you can be a gladiator. Here, it’s more simplistic but it all comes down to combinations of keys. In other MMOs you have a set rotation that almost never changes thus is not as deep as many like to tell you it is.

All I can say is GW2 combat is more akin to FPS with focus on fast paced battles which is fine by me.

Other MMOs is like playing in mud with dull, slow stand in one spot combat with severe button bloat just to make it seem like it’s super complex when it really isn’t; macros ftw!~

On the plus side in terms of skill:

- Is fast paced compared to most MMOs.
- Requires more movement (in PvE)
- You (as in DPSers) have to take more responsibility and can’t be bailed out by healers / tanks.
- Combo fields are an extra aspect.
- There is no gear advantage in structured PvP and it it is relatively fast to get exotic level gear in WvW.
- Skills will still fire out of range, thus other than the auto attack, are wasted.
- No macro system, though that won’t stop people using macors on theri Razor/Logitech gear, cough.. thieves…

On the negative side:

- The classes are comparatively simplistic, with fewer skills, less targettting / awareness of team mates, even engineer and ele.
- The classes are all bascially what are the lowest skill cap in MMOs (DPS), you are missing the two types of class that require the most awareness, most multitasking (especially in PvP) – healer & certain hybrid/support classes.
- There is very little resource management and what there is, is pretty easy (inititave/life force).
- You get an auto attack.
- The hot join PvP is dire in terms of skill, because they have used maps balanced for 5 man teams and stuck 8 man teams on them.
- The game is heavily balanced toward DPS /attack, which in part makes it play a bit like an FPS, except there is far less twitch, the only aiming is for AOE and they incuded faceroll stuff like automatic gap closers to target, so an FPS without the skill requirement.
- The extra movement aspect only occurs for PvE, in most MMOs if you stand around in PvP, you are dead on most classes.
- Becasue all classses are essentially DPS, the team play is very simpistic.

Overall (from a PvP perspective) I’d say it requires more than your bog standard DPS class in other MMOs, but there is nothing to compare with trying to heal or play a complex support / hybrid or even some tanks, you just don’t need the team awareness / multi tasking / constantly being focus fired, that you do for those sort of classes in GW2.

I don’t mind some of the game being ‘skill-based’ (PvP), but I wish it was less of a factor elsewhere (PvE). Challenge is fine, but the whole ‘action’ based twitch FPS feel is not enough for me.

I personally choose to invest in and support MMORPGs because of the imaginative and creative play opportunities they provide. I want to build my own unique avatar in a strange and fantastical world, then make decisions as if I were living that life, exploring how my character’s choices allow him to grow and develop in an engaging way. I want to interact with other inhabitants of that world in-character (both PC and NPC) and through emergent gameplay create entirely unexpected stories and adventures.

Skill-based play is in the opposite direction. It’s objective is to minimize character differences so the focus can be on the player at the keyboard, and rely upon the person’s real-world skills and ability level. That’s as valid a playstyle as any other, but tends to act against immersion and roleplaying if they are important to you.

I think a good analogy for skill based gameplay is competitive sports. Not every kid enjoys training all week to be the best footballer (particularly when physical attributes can definitely give unequal advantages). Some really get more enjoyment out of games and activities that stimulate their imagination. I’ve always been the latter.

oh i also like that dodge isn’t a stat. you actually do something.

Irulan.5762:

Once gear capped – full exotic. What is your incentive to play? Do you miss that component that you find in other mmo’s?

Considering I’ve had the game for a month and I’m only level 40 and have been putting in about 2-3 hours at each game session, I sure don’t miss anything from that other MMO.

This game is not that other MMO and will never be that…thank god.

And if you notice that other MMO is now trying to copy GW2 up/down leveling system for events and PvP and even considering putting people in equal gear…

I like both. That is exactly why I am so sick of demands to turn GW2 into yet another copy of “that game”. GW2, with all its shortcomings, is a very different experience from most mmorpg. How do they compare? In my opinion, traditional MMO of cause require skill, some a lot, some a litte, but it is a different kind of skill. Coming up with build ideas, invest time in getting just the right equipment for your build, adjusting your character to specific quests. Some games are more enjoyable in that regard, eg DDO offers a lot of freedom in building your character. As far as I followed the Star Wars hype, that game pretty much forced people into a very narrow assortment of cookie cutters (I may be wrong here, so please don´t attack me over this ) and is the other end of the spectrum. Both kinds of plays can be enjoyable, hence I never have told anyone here to “go back to WoW, you suck” (though I played that game years back on a friend trial account for like 3 hours, wasn´t my kind of animal).

I would love a skill-based MMO. However, I feel GW2 falls short of this to an extent. The combat system is simultaneously too complicated (the rules governing when you miss and hit are opaque and seemingly arbitrary) and too simplistic (WvW matches always seem to come down to numbers and quickly descend into zergfests).

Or, to be more accurate, I feel it’s a skill-based MMO with a low skill ceiling. I’ll reconsider that position when I see youtube videos popping up of players demonstrating how they’re able to solo three competent enemy players at once in WvW using their superior skill! In any game with a decent skill ceiling, this calibre of player will emerge to inspire the rest of us.

Focksbot.6798:

I would love a skill-based MMO. However, I feel GW2 falls short of this to an extent. The combat system is simultaneously too complicated (the rules governing when you miss and hit are opaque and seemingly arbitrary) and too simplistic (WvW matches always seem to come down to numbers and quickly descend into zergfests).

Or, to be more accurate, I feel it’s a skill-based MMO with a low skill ceiling. I’ll reconsider that position when I see youtube videos popping up of players demonstrating how they’re able to solo three competent enemy players at once in WvW using their superior skill! In any game with a decent skill ceiling, this calibre of player will emerge to inspire the rest of us.

Agree.
When I started playing I was glad there was something extra to do during battle than just hitting and kiting. I hate kiting so I thought this style will be more to my liking. Boy, was I wrong !
I very quickly realized that this “new” dynamic thingy is almost all there is to fighting. It almost feels like “1,2,3, roll,1,2,3 roll, …”. I know there is more to GW2 combat, but I feel they simply put too much emphasis on dodge roll. If there was block and/or parry as well, I would be able to say there is a real skill needed here.
Also auto-attack and auto-target (you don’t need to face your target) being a part of combat takes a lot of skill requirement out of this system.
What we have so far is more of an acrobatic and fast-fingered action with very few options and it looks like bunch of frogs jumping and breathing fire.

skill based MMOs (like shooters) only mean the aimbots win while the legit players are cannon fodder to geeks spraying purple Mt Dew out of their nose and squeeling over vent.

I don’t really see games like GW2 in the skill based category because anyone can learn to hit keys 1-5 but it is a lot harder to do so while actively aiming and predicting projectile paths.

Irulan.5762:

Once gear capped – full exotic. What is your incentive to play? Do you miss that component that you find in other mmo’s?

Honor. Glory. Fame. Epicness. Hilarous Mishaps.

I have many reasons I still love playing GW2. That said, I do miss some of the progressions other MMOs had, but then again, not really. If materialism is what games are about these days, then I don’t think I want to have any part of that. I play games for fun, for the feeling of glory and the fame you can potentially gain. Sure, I might feel almighty getting the most uber l33t gear in the game and killing an entire group of enemies singlehandedly, but then what?

skill based gw2?? lol

LOL. Its not even close to skill based mmo, its not even mmo for that matter.

Imo there is a certain amount of skill involved, though that depends on which class/spec you are playing. I am currently working on a hammer guardian, and in that spec is certainly does take some training to get the “standard” attack chain optimized. Plus being aware of all the possibilities of every skill of every weapon combo and using it at the right moment takes time too, at least for me.

I too have played “that other game” for years as a hardcore raider, and I don’t miss much in regards to complexity. I only find myself wishing at times that some classes could have a 3rd weapon equipped to swap to. That would make things perfect for me

Plus I am an altoholic and have three chars at 80 now, with an engi at 66. Lots to do and figure out. I am taking my time gearing them all up in full exotics, that way I still have lots to do and plenty of reason to do more dungeon runs. I also have to admit that in this game looks for me are at least as important as stats are. Love the customizing options this game allows for.

Yes, if you can show your so-called skills in 5 seconds of a pvp match.