Guild Wars 2

Cantha was the more asian styled themed. However I would not like to see a katana in game at all especially not as a completely separate weapon type. I enjoy my fantasy games with straight swords or fantasy oriented curved weapons (like the charr and sylvari swords) If anything it would simply be a reskin of a one handed sword or greatsword. Which would look silly.

It depends on what your doing.

In dungeons: You will either have to deal with playing ranged or load up on toughness and vitality at the cost of damage. Trash mobs do insane amounts of damage in this game and have far too much hp to just simply be focused down. Melee is a sever disadvantage when it comes to dungeons because of this and you would probably be better off with a bow or gun, then you might be able to see an enemies attack before it instagibs you.

In pvp: The easiest solution is to play structured, the lower play limit makes it much easier for a melee based character to survive and still be a large threat. In WvW your options are more limited. My suggestion would simply to be to use hit and run tactics while defending (for instance as a greatsword guardian I would leap off a wall and proc my flame virtue and start spinning in the middle of the enemy lines with whirling wrath before running back inside the base while on cd). When attacking be extremely mindful of the AoE indicators (the red circles) and try to stay with the main body of the group with traveling. Charging to the front is the fastest way to get destroyed.

Overall I agree with you, melee in this game feels underpowered when it comes down to it, in dungeons being in close proximity to enemies and dealing even a half decent amount of damage pulls too much aggro, (which is bad considering the trash is more deadly than the bosses) and in pvp we can simply get nuked down too fast by an aoefest. Perhaps it something Anet is looking into.

As far as I know it is impossible to obtain the armor for other factions besides your own. If you want the other armor order armor sets you will need to start a new character under that faction.

I completely agree with the description of the dungeon as a massacre. My first run through AC took forever. The mobs simply have too much health and too much damage combined. Even with the rest of the trash cc’d or locked down the one everyone is focusing takes far too many hits and the enemies who are active are able to do too much damage with little to no warning prior. For instance the ascalonian rangers are able to summon a spike trap that will nearly kill me (as a guardian wering heavy armor and with points invested in toughness) instantly. I keep hearing about how much player skill and dodging affects the dungeons, but as of yet all my deaths have been due to an unavoidable situation. Should we be THIS outclassed by run of the mill ghosts? Should we truly be this weak in comparison to the foes we are fighting? I feel that the hp of the enemies in dungeons should be lowered (by just a bit), bosses are fine but should we really have to focus this much effort into killing the normal enemies? Hell we can’t even see an opponents health bar deplete unless more than one player is fighting them at once. I don’t want dungeons to be easy, but I don’t want to feel like I am walking into suicide mission either.

I don’t even want to discuss the terrible experience that was AC exploration mode.