Despite everything so glorious about GW2, quite literally everything; combat is just so darn awkward in this game, it’s like it doesn’t know whether or not it wants to be tab target or action combat.
I love the jumping puzzles, I love the exploration, I love the art and animation, I love the story, I love the music, I &^%$ing love the immersion, I love the holiday events, I love how questing works (DE’s + Hearts), I love vistas, I love the trading post, I love the achievements and daily achievements, I love scaling my level down to zones, I love that there’s no power creep…
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I love GW2 to bits but I hate, hate, hate, haaaaaate the combat so much:
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- dodging isn’t used for dodging it’s used for prolonged kiting including MELEE classes: kitten!?
- attack sequences have no sense of timing in their animation so it’s difficult to feel the beat of an incoming attack which leads everyone to resort to kiting
- attacks come in high frequency with such a high rate of damage that being in melee is something you cannot do for more than a few seconds
- going to ground means nothing, when fighting normal mobs you’ll kill it and get back up, against champions you’ll always die ergo this mechanic adds no depth to these encounters
- there’s no distribution of responsibility to the individual when going to ground as the party MUST take care of you when you’re down, which makes you feel useless when this happens in a boss fight
- the trinity was removed without a reason or a rework to HOW monsters attack us, we’re put in situations where we’re constantly beat on where our CD’s run out very quickly and the champions will continue to kill us with no reliable way for the party or the individual to stop the champion from directly attacking us
OR
- the champion is melee and we all kite with no danger what so ever, if it’s ranged then face tank absolutely everything after CDs and it becomes a game of musical chairs of who gets to go down on the ground next do nothing and contribute nothing
OR
- everyone specced something tanky and we ignore all mechanics and heal through everything. You can remove dedicated healing, but someone is always getting mauled in the face: you can’t remove dedicated tanking, the party could tank together by rotating aggro through each player or simply have a tank who tanks
- why isn’t there a spec for dodging or blocking, i.e. you can spec into blocking so the yellow meter allows you to block temporarily rather than dodge allowing a straight up melee class that stays in melee
- lock on ranged champions: WHAT. THE. %^@#. Lock on ranged attacks in general make no sense, is this game tab target or action combat? Pick kitten
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I left a month after GW2 came out and really wanted to hold on, I still do but the combat kicks me out of the game every time I play it. I was hoping by now there would be word on where the combat in the game will be heading but so far there hasn’t been and I’m really sad about this. :(