Guild Wars 2

Well the problem with the skills in this game is that the system is not built versatile enough to have that much skill diversity. The permutations of what skills can be created with the current mechanics of the game have been exponentially reduced because of the simplification and reduction of skill characteristics. In GW1, mesmers had very few skills that did direct damage. In GW2, probably 90% of skills are damage+something else, usually a condition or boon. Punishing damage is all lumped into the “confusion” condition so you don’t even need to look at who you are attacking to use it because it’s equally useful against every class. In fact, almost all the skills in this game are equally useful against everyone in the game. The whole foundation is just built to be spammy.

Despite what most people on this forum may say, this game will not last without an overhaul in pvp gameplay. Pvp is what sustained GW1 through all its expansions, so the dumbing down of the pvp gameplay in GW2 may ruin this title.

I’ve been a big fan of GW1 since its beta. What it implemented ingeniously was its pvp oriented gameplay. Unfortunately, GW2 lost almost every aspect of design brilliance present in GW1.

GW2 gameplay feels like an incredibly stripped down version of GW1. Whereas GW1 required every skill cast to be perfectly timed to have the greatest effect, in GW2, it’s more like an endless casting cycle. Without anything like energy to limit casting, enough available skills to never be frozen in cooldown, and with very few skills that even need to be timed for the greatest effect, the game becomes a mashy beat em’ up nightmare. It also doesn’t help that you cannot see activation times on yourself, your allies, or your enemies.

Also, I find it strange that fully customizable skill bars were removed for balance purposes when it was the fully customizable skill bars in GW1 that kept classes balanced. In GW1, each class had enough skills to choose from to counter most other builds in the game. And if that class could not, they could simply use a secondary class’s skill to do that. How GW2 currently is is if there is an imbalance in overall class skills, the weaker class is just screwed with the skills they have. That combined with the “rolenessless” of this game (making everyone effectively the same role), and the removal of a lot of unique skill characteristics from GW1 by having a combined “condition” and “boon” system, makes for an extremely homogenized game where everyone is pretty much the same and if they are not, there is an imbalance.

In the end, the draw to this game is not the large scale WvWvW, it’s the smaller skirmishes where it’s a game of strategy rather than swarm or be swarmed.

Here’s what GW2 needs to do:

• Allow weapon skill customization including replacement of the autoattack skill. There should be a list of weapon skills to choose from for each weapon instead of having half the bar being forced upon the player.
• Show activation times, not sure why that was removed in the first place.
• Assuming energy is already too late to implement, have some kind of repercussion for mindlessly cycling through skills. Seeing someone casting for a while should have a “crap, I better interrupt them” effect. Have longer activation times for skills and have distinctly greater and more diverse effects for skills with longer activation times.
• Remove dodge. I know this is not going to be done, but dodging removes the positional advantage of the attacker which renders being in the right spot at the right time much less advantageous. Like a lot of the changes made to this game, it “mellows out” the gameplay by removing a “checkmate” kind of finality when someone is out of position.
• The “Downed” system needs to be adjusted at least for pvp. This is also a “mellowing out” gameplay change except it just unnecessarily draws out the gameplay for both the downed player and the attacker. If I’m downed and manage to kill the other guy, even I feel cheated. As of now, I’d rather just die when I have no hp.

cosmatman.9306:

have you been keeping track of how many ‘why does this cost silver’ threads there are?

-why do we have to pay for waypoints
-why do we get repair bills
-why do we have to pay a tax for the TP

People ask those questions all the time, and i believe a lot of people also ask for those things to just be free. Do we just want to make everything free, and put the sink in one place for a huge chunk of gold? or do we spread it out across a lot of things and just make it cost a little bit?

Respeccing shouldn’t be one of them. It limits gameplay options in a game where character builds are already way too homogenous.