Essentially, in the current system, one’s play style does not change past level 10. This means players are playing the exact same characters from levels 10 – 80.
(Note: I picked level 10 because that’s the approximate level when I maxed all my weapon skills)
As well, utility skills add little to no customization aside from very few. Playing a Ranged DPS Ranger, I simply have 2 buffs (Quickening Zephyr and the Bleeding active) with Lightning Reflexes and Rampage as One. However, these skills do nothing to actually change my play style, and many of my attempted “builds” have had a similar feeling. .
This is 100% why me and my friends stopped playing GW2. I played as a warrior so i even had the most options avaliable to me and should have bee the last class to complain about weapon choices, but the fact is i found myself using the almost the same skills in almost the same exact order every time.
Naturally there are some skills for each class that just arent going to be popular or overly useful in 99% of situations and there are those that everyone is going to gravitate towards. This creates a few problems:
a) my character is not unique – find me a warrior that doesnt use crit damage/condition damage build with a rifle.
b) the same problem also applies to utility skills – people are generally going to pick the buffs or the hard CC and theres only handful of the utility skills that just naturally lend themselves to the masses – again not unique
c) repetitive – 7→6→3→2→auto attacks→5 rinse repeat and occasionally heal or use elite skill.
d) once a skill is learned it cannot be improved, it is simply unlocked, then no further progression can be made.
I actually like that ANet has tied skills to weapons (main/off hand) and it wouldnt bother me even keep the method of unlocking new skills the same, just by passively getting last hits on mobs for the first few levels. But to have all my left side skills complete by level 10 and not be able to improve the damage or cooldown or CC timing on any of my skills. Unacceptable. Why not introduce a basic 1-10 (or 1-50 or 1-100) tier system of those skills. I cant play for 70 levels and not get the chance to explore a deep skill tree. Essentially we get 3 utilities (minus heal and elite) to interchange – and most of the best ones are obvious and can be attained by mid 20s – which obviously cant compensate for approx 70 levels worth of no skill tree exploration. Doing this wouldnt cause balancing issues in PvP either, you simply just max everyone out as per usual.
Slightly off topic from your point but still in regards to character progression from 10-80 in addition, the equipment has been far too stale. Lvl 50 armour that aesthetically is identical to lvl 1 armour??? Seriosuly ANet? I cant think of what this acheives? Is the intention to give gamers a sense of nostalgia about their early starting days in Queensdale? I was lucky enough to loot enough cash to buy tier 2 cultural armour which looks amazing, but pre lvl 60 forget about it my character looked no different to lvl 5’s 20’s 40’s 80’s. Again ill bang on about uniqueness and customisation there, but also where is the sense of progress?
Ill refrain from banging on about PvP too much, but again it ties into my point on uniqueness. I had good games where i made lots of kills, but i never really got a sense of my role in a battle or the meta strategy involved in a one on one fight, a 2v2 skirmish or a full blown 8v8 team fight. PvP is undoubtedly a cluster-****. I Spam all skills not on CD, hit dodge whenever possible, drop aoe in central locations, respawn after inevitable being killed by the other team skill spamming me.
Overall I have to say im disappointed because my standards were so high. ANet delivered on many levels including Music, environmental art, skills being tied to weapons, Decent attempt at some dynamic events (some r epic some are repetitive), redcued grindy feel, personal storyline in an MMO, reduced backtracking/NPC quest giving. But to pretty much miss out on 95% of the skill tree exploration, aesthetics and customisation of armour/weapons and building genuine PvP meta-game, for me it is too much missing in what should be the fundamentals for a game of this magnitude and hype.
Its clear the game is immaculately built, but its such a shame more effort wasnt put into the core areas to make them more enjoyable. Its all looks great but its just not fun enough