Guild Wars 2

I started in GW2 but have recently been playing GW1. It’s mostly out of; interest in the history of Mesmers, curiosity and a desire to win that neat dragon sword.

Along the way, I have seen some interesting differences.

From a relatively new player’s perspective, I wondered where all the dodges and other physical skills were. It felt weird at first. Now I’m coming to realize that it’s about management, rather than reaction speed.

That makes a huge difference. I think ANET could benefit by bringing some of that style back. The play in GW1 feels much more skill based. It’s not about how fast you can hit that mouse button, in fact spamming will get you killed quick.

How can that be accomplished? I think longer and more intricate keypress combinations are not a good approach. It feeds right back into the physical mode.

Interrupt in GW2 has great potential, but it’s hampered by the speed things happen.

The recent condi buff is a step toward more skill and less “press 2” style play.

So my suggestion is this; Make the windows for both interrupt and block larger. Make skills have a casting time, so that they can be interrupted. This will make those two play methods more workable. It will also force players to consider wether to use a skill or not and when. This is already in the current game to an extent.
With the long cast time, I need to be cautious when I cast my [Signet of Humility]. The target may become obscured or invisible or otherwise unavailable ( or I might be interrupted ) by the time my cast is done.

Welcome to the world of everyone who loved the mesmer from GW1 and was disappointed to the max. with the GW2 version of it.

I don’t think interrupts as such will ever become as great as they used to be in GW1, Anet does not seem to want people to be punished for what they do. People hate to be interrupted anyway and in this pvp we can’t have that. This was made apparent by the whole “OMG i get stunned by that mesmer” whine from last month.

I agree, we would benefit from those things you proposed and i’m also still missing hexes as a mechanic. But this game here is a dumbed-down version of that game there and nothing we say here will change that.

ideally the game would look like you described, but anet’s new whimsy is instant cast skills, so the newly introduced fast paced skillfull damage EVASION oriented gameplay suffers.

I did try playing sword/sword and scepter/sword using the blocks and evades to proc clones and phants.

It kinda worked. The problem with this approach is that there’s really only one trait for Mesmer that works on evade, [Mental Defense], and it has a 20 second internal cooldown.

GW2 seems to strongly favor physical skills over cerebral. In my opinion, that’s sad.