Well thank you for being respectful, and I agree with the punctuation issue, it only seems to suffer when I allow myself to become overly emotionally invested in a given topic. That said I’ll try to be concise here.
Heavy Armor feeling sluggish
It’s just that; it feels sluggish. I know they might have objectively the same overall movement speed, but it doesn’t feel that. This is actually a problem that norn players are very familiar with because it is built into their race selection. Partly it is an animation issue, and partly it is a size issue. When you have two characters moving the exact same speed, but one is small like an asura or a light armor wearer, and the other is large like a norn or heavy armor wearer, the heavier one will always feel slower simply because in order to keep up the smaller/lighter character will have more exaggerated animations and a longer stride, making them feel faster.
Mages are too flashy
Basically all that needs to be said; I don’t like all the flash. It is entirely personal preference, but there it is. Flash is built into most MMO magic users, and I don’t like flash. Not much else to say there, although I am willing to make exceptions for certain types of mages (who sadly don’t exist here).
The ranger and my old play-style
In a word; preparations. You imply you played a ranger in the original Guild Wars, so I guess I don’t need to tell you what those were. For those who don’t know but may be reading this; a preparation was a ranger skill type that could be activated to temporarily alter all ranger attacks, and could have drastic effects on how the profession played. I loved them, and loved finding new ways to use them to dial my builds up to eleven, as the saying goes. Sadly those skills don’t exist here, with the closest equivalent being the thief’s venoms.
This was partly why I chose the thief as my first character, but I soon realized that venoms were only a pale imitation of what preparations were. Venoms only apply a condition or two to your next few attacks, preparations were so much more than that. Preparations could turn single attacks into AOEs, they could make single strikes hit for multiple damage “ticks,” they could do extra damage based on the boons you have or strip boons from your targets. They could make your arrows explode into AOEs if blocked, or never miss. They were, at least to me, incredible. And Guild Wars 2 has nothing like them.
The thief sucks
Nothing to say about stealth aside from the fact that as a huge fan of stealth games, I find the concept of hitting a button and turning invisible an insult to the word stealth. As far as my preference for ranged combat…wait until you get to the point when you don’t have enough initiative to down any random mob without spamming the auto-attack for a minute and a half, and then realize that the only way to keep your initiative up is to invest at least fifteen points into Trickery, take a specific major adept trait, and spam steal whenever it comes off cool down. Have fun not being able to use a ranged build.
Engineer is getting boring and frustrating
Believe it or not the reason I feel in love with the engineer is those kits I’ve been complaining about lately. I loved the versatility I got from them, built my character around their use. I have a kit/elixir build for PvE that is fantastic, and I have no real complaints about it. Well, except that I’ve been using that exact build for the last fifty levels and it is getting more than a little old and repetitive. I’ve spent the better part of the last four months pestering Arena Net about fixing the cosmetic issues with kits, like hobo sacks and not being able to display our hard earned weapons skins, and now I just don’t give a kitten anymore.
I realized that Arena Net was never going to address those issues, so I decided, since I really do want to experience this fabled “cosmetic progression” and perhaps go for a legendary one day, that I would just change my build. Loose the kits and try something else, maybe even see that Mystic Rifle I forged our of boredom or those achievement pistols I was so excited to unlock. Then I realized just how dependent the engineer truly was on kits. Yeah I had mentioned it before, complained about it, but I wasn’t really prepared for it. So now…yeah; I am sick of kits and yet the profession is so closely tied to them that I can’t just stop using them. Frustrating is an understatement.
