Gardenia said:
Not to start a flame war or anything, but I'm not going to prepurchase (or even preorder) this game. Why? I'll tell you;
The first Guild Wars was all about complexity, and adapting your skills and tactics to the situation, and the monsters you were going to be fighting. Are they using mostly fire based damage? Equip fire armour, and bring some skills that alleviate burning. Then perhaps you should bring some spells that target their mages, preferrably damaging them the more skills they use. Are they "fleshy" (as opposed to skeletons, wraiths and so on)? Perhaps some bleeding, disease and poison would be nice? Or perhaps they are melee only, and you should look into making their attacks miss.
With the right amount of preparation, and a good deal of ingenuity, you could complete an area in 10 minutes alone, whereas an 8-man party would spend 3 hours and perhaps even fail. The character level, armour and weapons were so easily maxed, that all you really could judge a person on, was how well they picked their skills, and how adept they were at using them.
Now what do we get?
"Do you want a sword, bow, hammer or a gun? OK, now go out there and hope you manage to dodge their attacks."
To me, it just seems like they dropped all the Magic the Gathering stuff from the game, and that was what really made Guild Wars shine for me. At least I don't have to spend 4000 hours on the sequel.
(and yes, I know that you can have 2 weapon sets, it still seems shallow and simplistic to me)
A few things.
First: Build Wars was terrible for most players, particularly new players, or players who insisted on playing a unique snowflake build even if it was a bad build. How often did you ask a player to ping their build, and it was some horrific Mo/R beastmaster with healing prayers and a bow? Choice is great, but when the vast majority of skill combinations are objectively terrible, why even have them? Particularly in an open-world game like GW2, I don't want an event to scale up as a result of some guy bringing the aforementioned terrible Mo/R build, dying or being useless, but making the event more challenging for me. The fixed weapon skills ensure that, at bare minimum, every player has 5 skills on their bar that work well together and focus them on at least one role.
Second: You're being incredibly simplistic when it comes to describing your choices prior to combat. You have your weapon selection (which makes an enormous difference in your playstyle), your secondary weapon, your heal, 3 utilities, and elite. Then, you have traits; if you've read through the trait list (which you probably haven't), you'd see that traits can dramatically change your build. A thief that drops a crippling caltrops every time they dodge is going to play differently than a thief who doesn't have that trait, for example. Then there are sigils and insignias, which offer plain stat bonuses or additional effects (like a % chance to summon a golem pet on critical hit).
Third: Combat is not just pushing buttons anymore. PvE in particular in GW1 was pretty darn similar to PvE in most other MMOs; you walk up to a group, aggro the group, and push your buttons in a rotation until all the red dots are dead. There are skill combos, yes, but there's really little else to worry about beyond "don't step in the fire"-style movement. GW2 PvE demands so much more than that, I assure you. You HAVE to dodge to stay alive. Players who stand there taking hits die quickly, particularly once you leave the beginner area. So while you may have more options in GW1 for ways in which you arrange your bar, once you get in combat you're not going to be doing pretty much the same thing for every mob.
TL;DR: there are far more choices in GW2 than there appear on paper, and you have far more MEANINGFUL choices in terms of how you build and play your character than you had in GW1, because the majority of choices you made in determining your build in GW1 were obvious once you understood the game. YMMV, but I really think you should take another look; the game is not nearly as simple as you think it is.[/quote
