Guild Wars 2 Preview

[RedFeather1975]

Nice to hear that resists and the RNG are a minimized factor in GW2 as it's one of the things that annoys me most about RPGs.

Me too. I have grown to hate RNG influencing anything in online games. In GW1 it was essentially non-existent, but in GW2 the ugly mug of RNG has managed to pop up in certain runes and sigils used to augment gear.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rune
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil
If endgame in any way relies on simply min/maxing RNG builds, then I will be pissed.

And as for resists. The closest thing to it during my fiddling with PvE, was when certain NPCs were doing something that is part of a special entrance or exit, like a guy jumps down from the rafters and boasts that he's going to steal your family heirloom. Then they do get immunity to damage until they are done flapping their gums.

 

[Skyy High]

In my experience with WoW, you simply did not have the abilities to survive against and kill anything about 3-5 levels above you. The fight was absolutely impossible, regardless of your spec, because the monsters would resist your CC and their attacks were unavoidable in any way, and they'd inevitably win the shin-kicking contest.

Someone who never played a warlock. (I know other classes could do this as well, but warlock's the one that comes to mind for having videos made of soloing instances and elite quests intended for 3-5 players in BC.)

People get down on WoW for being casual and easy to play. That's true - it has a very low skill-cap for someone to enjoy playing the game. That's not to say it lacked players who could basically break the game doing things most couldn't or weren't intended to do.

It sounds like both games actually share the same conditions for failure: if you attack something bigger and meaner than you, and then you just stand there and trade attacks with it, you're going to die. If you use the abilities available to you to their utmost, you can tackle much tougher opponents than the stats suggest should be possible. It's overused, but when being wielded accurately, this is exactly what the term "learn to play" is meant to describe.

That said? Nice to hear that resists and the RNG are a minimized factor in GW2 as it's one of the things that annoys me most about RPGs. Of course, there's still probably the issue of lag making your dodges end up being not as effective as it looks like they are (I've "dodged" things in Vindictus only to have it hit me anyway...from five feet away), but that's a different kind of RNG you have to deal with in online games anyway. Can't really hold that against the game unless it's significantly worse than it should be. Sounds like a nice change of pace for RPG combat, though I have to think it means "boss" type enemies are going to have whomping unavoidable attacks to compensate, otherwise you'd have entire teams of thieves or whatever squishy damage class doing things they're not "supposed" to be able to do by their players just never getting hit by anything, ever.

You're right, I never played warlock, I have no idea what they were capable of. I played a mage (and a little of a hunter), for about 3 months or so, and my experience didn't change much during the general leveling content over that entire period. Fights consisted of using my skills on rotation (it helps that most of my damage skills were also snares, gogo Frost line), using the occasional blink as an "oh shit" button if I aggroed too many foes. Against ranged foes, it basically didn't matter what I did; I had one interrupt, but there was zero information that I saw to tell me if it was worth interrupting a skill or not, so most of the time I ignored it and just did my same rotation. Context was only barely important in any fight I experienced in the open world.

I played GW2 for a weekend, and in just that tiny amount of time, I found cool ways to use and combine my skills that made me much more effective than if I had just been using them in a rotation. I'm sure that my time with WoW is minuscule compared to the really good players who can break the game over their knee, but I think that 3 months of shin-kicking vs. a weekend of thought-provoking action speak for themselves.

Regarding dodge "RNG": dodge also makes you invulnerable for a half second, so if you're slightly out of sync with the server position-wise it still does a good job of protecting you.

@RedFeather: The sigil and rune RNG in GW2 is tiny compared to the RNG we had in GW1. Sigils and runes proc occasional (mostly small) effects, and they're all limited by timers that govern how often, at maximum, they can proc. They're not going to decide if you live or die, at least not terribly often. GW1 RNG, on the other hand, was all over the place: almost every single block skill in the game gave you a % chance to block. Yeah, they still needed to be skillfully used, but with (for example) Guardian up you still had a non-negligible chance of getting hit with a full chain of attacks from a warrior or assassin and dying miserably. Then you had the incredibly important half cast time / half skill recharge weapon sets that were used by every caster in the game, which only proc-ed 40% of the time (roughly). One of those could turn a skill from interrupt-bait to interrupt-proof, randomly. It could also effectively double the number of condition or hex removals on your bar, randomly. I never really minded the RNG, because I thought that it averaged out pretty nicely over the course of a match, but to claim that GW2 has more RNG is just ignoring how many effects triggered randomly in GW1.

 

[RedFeather1975]

@RedFeather: The sigil and rune RNG in GW2 is tiny compared to the RNG we had in GW1. Sigils and runes proc occasional (mostly small) effects, and they're all limited by timers that govern how often, at maximum, they can proc. They're not going to decide if you live or die, at least not terribly often. GW1 RNG, on the other hand, was all over the place: almost every single block skill in the game gave you a % chance to block. Yeah, they still needed to be skillfully used, but with (for example) Guardian up you still had a non-negligible chance of getting hit with a full chain of attacks from a warrior or assassin and dying miserably. Then you had the incredibly important half cast time / half skill recharge weapon sets that were used by every caster in the game, which only proc-ed 40% of the time (roughly). One of those could turn a skill from interrupt-bait to interrupt-proof, randomly. It could also effectively double the number of condition or hex removals on your bar, randomly. I never really minded the RNG, because I thought that it averaged out pretty nicely over the course of a match, but to claim that GW2 has more RNG is just ignoring how many effects triggered randomly in GW1.

Thanks for helping me understand it won't be worse. I honestly wasn't aware there was that much RNG in GW1. I played a mesmer almost exclusively. I barely touched on anything outside of interrupts and e-denial. Stuff that landed 100% if the target simply met the activation condition. The only RNG I could think of when I posted my last post was 'wanding'. lol

Speaking of wanding, I'm so glad GW2 got rid of basic weapon auto-attacks. I like how a mesmer with a scepter has a completely different auto-atack then an elementalist with a scepter.

 

[Skyy High]

@RedFeather: The sigil and rune RNG in GW2 is tiny compared to the RNG we had in GW1. Sigils and runes proc occasional (mostly small) effects, and they're all limited by timers that govern how often, at maximum, they can proc. They're not going to decide if you live or die, at least not terribly often. GW1 RNG, on the other hand, was all over the place: almost every single block skill in the game gave you a % chance to block. Yeah, they still needed to be skillfully used, but with (for example) Guardian up you still had a non-negligible chance of getting hit with a full chain of attacks from a warrior or assassin and dying miserably. Then you had the incredibly important half cast time / half skill recharge weapon sets that were used by every caster in the game, which only proc-ed 40% of the time (roughly). One of those could turn a skill from interrupt-bait to interrupt-proof, randomly. It could also effectively double the number of condition or hex removals on your bar, randomly. I never really minded the RNG, because I thought that it averaged out pretty nicely over the course of a match, but to claim that GW2 has more RNG is just ignoring how many effects triggered randomly in GW1.

Thanks for helping me understand it won't be worse. I honestly wasn't aware there was that much RNG in GW1. I played a mesmer almost exclusively. I barely touched on anything outside of interrupts and e-denial. Stuff that landed 100% if the target simply met the activation condition. The only RNG I could think of when I posted my last post was 'wanding'. lol

Speaking of wanding, I'm so glad GW2 got rid of basic weapon auto-attacks. I like how a mesmer with a scepter has a completely different auto-atack then an elementalist with a scepter.

You're right, skills-wise, you won't see much RNG for most classes. The monk probably has the most, because they have most of the enchantments that make you block. Every blocking stance in the game (like the Mesmer's Distortion) is based on percent chance, though. And "under the hood", so to speak, there's a lot of it going on. Every wand and scepter you ever owned had a % chance modifier on it.

Making the autoattack into a real skill (it's still an autoattack, but it can *do* something) is a little feature I'm happy about as well.

 

[Keava]

*snipped to save space*

While true that Guild Wars had and still has a bit more complexity and planning behind skill loadout's, there are meta builds that just make it all moot point really.

TheWay aka The State of the Heroes build by The Blackness pretty much lets you beat whole game with it and you won't be required to swap any skills at all (tho it does help for some specific fights like Great Destroyer for eg.). Sure it took a while to figure those builds out and there is still room for unorthodox play that can be efficient, but in the end, no matter how bloated/complex your system is, there will be meta-build that is just so good it makes other builds obsolete.

In Gw2 most of the building effort goes into Traits however and those, while much more straightforward with their bonuses and effect on character, do offer a degree of variety and change the approach a lot. Even with the limited skill count playing a WellMancer (Focusing on Wells mostly) is different than MM (not as obscenely powerful as GW1s but still can get the job done) and ConditionMancer is completely different animal altogether and that's pretty much just trait/utility builds. Add to that different weapons (Mark focus on staff, life leeching builds based around daggers, more direct damage on axes or condition synergy with scepter) and you are able to come up with quite varied tactics.

Give it some time and I'm sure GW2's meta game will grow. It's just currently people are kind of playing blindly and not really paying attention to the minor details while in GW1 it was much more obvious whenever you went for MM or SS.

 

[Araman]

Which server are Escapists playing on? As Themis has been my MMO community home since the Crossroads of Dereth days, wondering if any of the old schoolers are playing this game and grouping up somewhere...

 

[wackyzacky]

This looks fantastic. I WANT... NOW!! I can't wait to give it a go. Hopefully, it'll be as good, if not better than the original Guild Wars.

 

[Skyy High]

This looks fantastic. I WANT... NOW!! I can't wait to give it a go. Hopefully, it'll be as good, if not better than the original Guild Wars.

There was a stress test going on yesterday for everyone who pre-purchased the game. It's over now though. As for it being the same or better than GW1, it really depends on what you liked (or disliked) about the original, and what you expect going into the sequel.

@Xiado: yes, those are guns. They're really on the same power level as bows, however.

 

[DeMorquist]

Did he just say this game has a Borderlands Fight or Die system for being downed?


Holy

Snap!

Also...no tagging...just a brofist of killing things...