Guild Wars 2

One of the best, and most refreshing things in GW1 is that enemies used the same skills that the players used. This was a really big thing. You’d have games like WoW where the only enemy skills vaguely similar to the players was the projectile animation of an autoattack.

The game started off with enemies using a basic skillset that had little to no synergy. As the game progressed, enemies’ stats surpassed the players, and their skill pools became more complex. Often different enemies of the same family will have a core theme in their skillsets and synergized with each other with deadly efficiency.

Not only does this provide a refreshing challenge everytime a player meets new enemies, it sometimes even provides inspirations for team builds for the players. This culminated in what I think was the best ‘expansion’ of all (in terms of enemies); Winds of Chaos. Enemies were able to use abilities from two classes allowing for ridiculously powerful and innovative combinations.

Fast forward to GW2. What do we have? Svanirs? Chill attacks. Dredge? Occasional knockdown. Flame legion? Burning. The homogenized nature of the enemies doesn’t provide for interesting encounters. Even if we got 1000 skills to work with, nothing challenges the player to go into more complex attacks over auto attack.

‘I swung a sword. I swung a sword again. Hey! I swung it again.’ This.