Guild Wars 2

After being a gw1 veteran, and finally playing gw2, does anybody else feel that one of the areas this game is lacking is skill choice? in the previous game there was a myriad of skills, ensuring a person could not predict what another person would use. Now with weapon skills dictating one half of your skill bar, and a very small pool of skills dictating the other i feel some of the fun which came with guild wars has been lost as we cant be creative with build construction. I feel each weapon should have its own skill pool to choose from, and that there should be a greater variety of utility and elite skills available to each profession, with a mind to maintaining the individuality of each profession in the same way gw1 managed to pull off. What are your views on the subject?

Some people like to counter with the argument that many of the skills in GW1 were either duplicates or useless and never used. But even taking the bad and duplicated skills into account, I still think there was a far greater variety in GW1 that allowed a lot of unique and fun build options that GW2 lacks.

Skills are disappointing, yes, but you just have to accept it’s a different game.

“Play how we want you to play” is pretty much the new motto and it definitely applies when it comes to skills.

Even though PvP has turned out to be a spectacular failure in this game, it is a major focus of development. It seems they’re afraid of including more skills into the game as the more choice the player has, the harder it is to balance the game. Combine this with their poor balancing abilities and lengthy periods between balance patches (twice a year), the safe thing to do is to have as few skills as possible.

Looks like a marketing decision, with promise of new weapons and more specialization lines, you will have to pay for that privilege. The rest who don’t want to buy HoT will be stuck playing this stripped down model we have presently.

The Diversity thats still capable within the current system is continually underminded by the fact that the game’s entire design is a straight forward DPS race. This makes dodging both its greatest asset, but also its biggest enemy due to its inherent power as a defense mechanism. The entire Zerks meta exists because dodging allows for complete damage avoidance, negating the need for any type scalable damage mitigation. The mobs are also designed around dodging, commonly having slow, but high damage attacks; to punish players for failing a dodge then making them more difficult to fight . Take into account the universally poor healing coefficients, and its no surprise that Sustain as a strategy is ineffective in PvE. So if all the defensive stats don’t scale effectively, and offense scales incredibly well, where would you want to focus all that?

The only place everything is properly taken into account would be WvW. PvP suffers from the fact that active defenses and condition controls are insanely powerful, and there are too few players to diversify builds beyond the key roles needed for the game modes. WvW on the other hand is a pure numbers game. Here active defenses are noticeably weaker, and damage sources can easily reach towards a hundred or more when 2 zergs unleash all those AOEs. In this environment, you need defense just as much as offense; but unlike sPvP you can spread the requirements across 10s of players to get a net effective group. Front liners with high defense, leveraging the high power of CCs, to mid liners and flankers to add pressure and damage, and back line laying down AOE damage and support. Build Diversity is practically a requirement here, as you need all these element working in concert to outplay the opposition.

I’m mainly talking about Tiers 2, 3 and 4. I don’t know the state of T1, but I’ve heard they don’t partake in group fights… and the other tiers, including parts of T4, are too unorganized to actually get a large fight happening.

The ages old comparison between GW1 and GW2. If you actually went and compared the amount of choice in both games, you will be surprised by the amount of skill choice GW2 has. Of course many people do the comparison in an unfair way, like comparing only utility slot skills with all GW1 skills, which is unreasonable. GW2 has way more going to it than GW1 ever had.

To start, in GW1 you could only use 8 locked skills, the amount of choice in GW2 is way higher. In GW1 chain skills took slots in your skillbar, in GW2 they don’t. Lots of auto attacks are actually chains, giving access to a huge variety of skills, skills that in GW1 you had to make room for in your limited bar.

Also, in GW2, there are loads of skills that give you access to completely new skills, like Transform skills, banners, conjured weapons, engineer kits etc. There are also many skills that change in functionality once you activate them, like spirit weapons and signets. There are also a lot of skills that change their functionality based on the traits chosen. Unlike GW1, traits can change skills in GW2, and not only tweak their damage/effect. They can add extra abilities to existing skills too. There are also skills that you don’t have to deal with in GW2, like pet skills. As a Ranger in GW1 you had to have those pet skills on your skillbar and take space, in GW2 they activate on their own.

Saying that GW1 has tons more choice than GW2 isn’t exactly true. The choice is there in GW2, it just comes in packages, you select this weapon and gives you these skills, fill this specialization and get these traits, take up that banner and get those skills etc while in GW1 you can select from a multitude of skills and mix & max them.

Gw1 wins no doubt the game even had cosmetic skills and complete sets of skills while Gw2 has neither.

Should a Well using Necro have access to an elite Well?
Should a Mesmer who uses Phantasms have a heal and elite Phantasm and Clone?

MM have a minion for every slot and Spirit Rangers also have a spirit for every slot though this isn’t the case for all the class or skills and for that reason in addition to the fact that elites had a more important role in gw1 I find the skills in Gw2 lacking…

I didn’t even mention underwater combat as that would make Gw1 the winner hands down as we can’t even use a good deal of our skills under water. Look at the golem for instance.

It’s a good thing you’re not mentioning underwater combat, because GW1’s underwater combat was clearly superior to GW2’s.

That said, the real issue GW1 had was that you had to type in an emote every time you wanted to jump. That made mountain goating my way through Shards of Orr kind of repetitive…

This has come up quite a few times before but it’s difficult to make a straight-forward comparison.

GW1 has more skills, but you only had your 8 skills and auto-attack. There was nothing comparable to GW2’s traits, or profession mechanics (F1-4), or things like the engineer kits, and weapon swap didn’t change your skills.

For example my GW1 ranger/ele build includes skills to add poison damage, extra damage when I use fire attacks, heal/res my pet and resurrect allies. That’s half my bar taken up with things that in GW2 are either traits or automatic effects.

So from my perspective I get a lot more options with GW2. But for other builds or playstyles it is more limited.

Basically it’s just different. I find as far as the mechanics go it’s easier to think of the two as different games rather than trying to compare them.

narwhalsbend.7059:

Skills are disappointing, yes, but you just have to accept it’s a different game.

I’m a bit late to respond to you but I must. It is a different game yes, but the fact that it is named “Guild Wars” 2 very clearly implies that it should have elements resembling it’s earlier version. Essentially, Guild Wars 2, by name, implies being an improvement on Guild Wars 1. There is no excuse to the game succeeding Guild Wars 1 to have slacked on improving skill and profession combination diversity. Instead, they removed all the elements that made Guild Wars 1 successful such as: sidekicks, numerous amounts of skills, secondary professions, 4 vs 4 death match etc.

It been a little bit, but don’t skill stay same per class in gw1 who use the same weapon. Like as a Ranger in gw2, a short-bow gives 5 skill, but a thief would not only have 5 different skills, but also short bow attack, will bonce to a close by enemy. Or a warrior great sword, close range, to Mesear great-sword, distance attack. Seem we get far more difference, and if you don’t worry about meta game like some do, you build how you want and have fun.

Zelulose.8695:

narwhalsbend.7059:

Skills are disappointing, yes, but you just have to accept it’s a different game.

I’m a bit late to respond to you but I must. It is a different game yes, but the fact that it is named “Guild Wars” 2 very clearly implies that it should have elements resembling it’s earlier version. Essentially, Guild Wars 2, by name, implies being an improvement on Guild Wars 1. There is no excuse to the game succeeding Guild Wars 1 to have slacked on improving skill and profession combination diversity. Instead, they removed all the elements that made Guild Wars 1 successful such as: sidekicks, numerous amounts of skills, secondary professions, 4 vs 4 death match etc.

Mechanics change between games. Compare Dragon Age: Origins to DA2 or Inquisition, any of the Elder Scrolls games, The Witcher games, even the various DnD games which are all based on the same rule books have different skill systems.

Admittedly I could probably pick one game in each of those series which I prefer and say all the rest should have used the same system, or better yet pick bits of each I like and say they should have combined them in the way I like. But another person would make different choices.

It’s just one of those things you learn to live with if you play multiple RPGs. Or games generally.

And yet oddly enough I’ve been able to maintain the same basic theme to my main character across almost every RPG I’ve played for the past 15 years or so. Sure I pick different classes, and sometimes have to give up aspects (really bothers me that in Dragon Age games non-mages can’t use any magical abilities for example) but the general design and playstyle is the same, regardless of how the mechanics are laid out.