Guild Wars 2

So i just got a hold of this game after taking a long break from MMO’s. I have been having fun playing around with a couple of classes, but the thing which has me quite puzzled is the seeming lack of options for my character. I do not mean build options, but options to actually do within combat. I get what, 5 regularly usable abilities, 1 of which is an auto attack?

I understand that the utility abilities are there, but each of those has like a 30 second or higher CD so those are more blow them when you have them rather than reliably engaging options. At first this did not bother me, as I assumed the weapon swap would at least give me another chunk of abilities, but upon unlocking it I realized that it had a substantial cooldown. Within the average fight I can only swap once or twice, so it feels like a swap, blow cooldowns, swap, blow cooldowns engagement rather than anything highly interactive. Am I missing something? Is all I have to look forward to for the next 70 levels are a couple of utility slots? This game was marketed as the “PVP Esport”, but to me it seems rather hollow at the moment. Thanks for any advice or suggestions.

Dodging, positioning, skill use at the right time, stun breakers, etc. There’s lots of intricacies to the combat. Killing a mob that stands there and tank your hits obviously wouldn’t tell you that much about the combat.

Do know that, in light of recent events, GW2 is really not what it was advertised to be. sPvP lacked many of the things that it needed to make it a proper e-sport, and “gear progression” is slowly being added in despite the fact that it was advertised as something that would never be in the game.

I like that it doesn’t have more buttons, no more staring at my action bar and timers like an idiot, I can actually enjoy the game.

You might want to try an elementalist. Their attunement switching means they basically have 4 weapons, not 2.

Though I have to ask: Of the games with lots of options, how many of the options were something you held back till you needed it, and how many were ones you spammed ?
Because utilities in GW2 are mainly things you hold back until you need them. Especially elites.

Then you need to consider your position. In GW2, if you’re standing still your either casting something which requires you to be stationary, you have enemies preventing you moving, or you’re doing it wrong.

i actually like the lack of buttons. makes you have to pick and choose depending on how you play rather than just be able to bind every single ability to whatever you want. makes you think or something.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

You might want to try an elementalist. Their attunement switching means they basically have 4 weapons, not 2.

Though I have to ask: Of the games with lots of options, how many of the options were something you held back till you needed it, and how many were ones you spammed ?
Because utilities in GW2 are mainly things you hold back until you need them. Especially elites.

Then you need to consider your position. In GW2, if you’re standing still your either casting something which requires you to be stationary, you have enemies preventing you moving, or you’re doing it wrong.

Regarding attunement swapping, d/d is very heavy on rotating between the different attunements and using only the abilities you need (and usually requires your skill build to have a large amount in arcane). Other weapons (e.g. staff) can stand better in one attunement. Some builds save the utility skills for emergencies while others you use them constantly (e.g. signet builds have you constantly using the signets and swapping attunements only when you need the utility of the particular element).

So the answer is, if you want a profession that you can make do a wide variety of things go elementalist. Just be careful as you can end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Im fooling around with an elementalist now and it does seem a good bit more interesting. I guess i was just wondering why all the professions were not set up this way. Having 4 abilities is great for dota, but in dota there are just so many other things going on aside from combat. It was just a strange feeling fooling around on my level 10 thief and feeling as if I already understood my “rotation”, and that it would not become more complicated aside from a couple utilities for the remainder of the game.

It works better with some classes and some weapons than others.

An example: Greatsword on a Warrior has skills with low cooldowns and high general (ie: Not situational) usefulness – and it’s also a highly mobile weapon where positioning and timing tend to be important. The 2 skill is one of the highest damage skills in the game and has an incredibly short cooldown, but you need a motionless enemy to use it and it leaves you open. 3 is both a high-damage skill, a targeted (linear) AoE, a mobility skill, and a combo finisher. 4 is a ranged Cripple, and 5 is a faster-than-Swiftness charge with a single high-damage hit at the end.
In contrast, something like Sword and Shield gets really boring in PvE, because skills 2 and 3 on a Sword are only useful to get you in close to an enemy, and then to keep them from getting away, 4 on a Shield is a short stun that isn’t very useful unless you actually use it to interrupt a powerful attack, and 5 on a Shield is actively worse for you unless you’re using it to block some heavy incoming damage (you can’t attack while it’s in effect).

With Warrior, you’re also making a decision that can affect this: If you equip two melee weapons, then you’re rarely going to be waiting for skills to come off cooldown, but you’re going to have to deal with not being able to really do much of anything in a melee-unfriendly situation.

Elementalist (with any weapon) rarely runs into cooldown-itis, because a competently played one switches between elements constantly. Individual skills have fairly high cooldowns (mostly), but you’re cycling through 20 at any given time, in addition to whatever utilities you carry.
Engineer can be largely the same way, with the kits that they can equip. Both classes trade the ability to equip and swap between two weapons for innate class mechanics that allow you to effectively have up to 3-4 sets of 1-5 skills.

Thief is another different one, in that your weapon skills don’t have cooldowns, but you do have a shallow/quick-regenerating resource pool to choose skills from.

In general, though (Thief excepted), it’s a matter of getting very accustomed to swapping between two weapon types (or kits or attunements) on the fly, so that you’re rarely looking at a bar where every useful option is on cooldown. Again, how much of an issue it is varies a lot by class and weapon type, but there’s usually a useful, active playstyle you can find no matter your class.

The system could use some form of expanded customization, for sure, but for the most part, you have to think of it as sort of akin to an action game, where your attacks don’t really change from beginning to end, but you get better at being more and more precise and accurate with their proper usage.

After playing some pvp I once again feel like I am playing Dota, not an MMO. I guess that might be okay though…

BuffaloMan, for one it’s a game that wants and needs you to actually take note of the stuff happening in the world as opposed to stuff happening on the UI and to react to it accordingly. And without the need of an extra hand, that is

And then… at least from my experience as a Ranger, I found it quite nice how my playstyle did not mainly evolve through getting new abilities, but through me thinking about how to effectively use the arsenal at my disposal. In numbers, what once was a

3 2 1 rinserepeat of tedious lameness

went to

4 5 swap 3 2 1 8 swap 0 7 3 1 5 of awesome buttkicking :D

(fun game: Guess my loadout;)

I was the same way OP, at first I thought to myself, uhm, just these skills? That will get boring!

It has yet to get boring and I have 2 level 80 characters. Once you level up and realize that certain fights require different traits (you can respec your traits as much as you want) or different weapons or different utility skills then you’ll see the value in it.

Just like the guy who said he went from mashing 3, 2, 1 to more advanced rotations, my playstyle has evolved the more I used that weapon. I also try different main/OH combos to see what those skills do and in what situations they can be useful.

It’s different than games where you have 50+ skills on your screen, most of which are seldom used, they are just on the screen in case you ever needed to use them.

I played WoW pretty heavy in Arena and raiding and I can tell you that at any given time I’m not using more than 10-15 skills in an encounter. Everything else is just fluff that gets rarely used. Heck even in Aion you don’t use more than 10-15 skills regularly.

GW2 gives you 10 skills to use regularly (9 if you exclude elites cause of CD) with the ability to swap weapon sets for an additional 5.

Honestly think about all of the different skills you ACTUALLY used on a regular basis during action and tell me it’s more than what I said. In all other MMOs you have your rotation skills and then you have your secondary buffs/dispels/heals, that’s it. All that other stuff is an after thought.

Don’t let the number of buttons fool you.

Many skills have multiple uses. There are the chain skills, which are three skills loaded onto one button with the requirement that you use them in order. Then there are skills like Mesmer’s Temporal Curtain which is a speed buff, a cripple, a AoE pull, and can be traited to be a projectile reflect. It’s also a combo field so that when followed up with another skill you can get four different results out of it.

So even with your ten skills, you have a lot more than ten abilities. Add weapon swapping to that (for all but two professions) and you have five more skills, followed by the adddition of profession skills, which can range from one four additional abilities.

If you want a lot of options, Elementalist or Engineer are probably your go-to professions. Elementalist attunement swapping has already been explained above, giving you twenty five skills to play with.

Engineer has kits, which give you an entirely new set of 1-5 skills when each one is equipped, while leaving a utility on your “toolbelt”. You could go kit crazy, equipping four in your 6-10 slots, leaving you with 30 different skills you can play with at once.