Guild Wars 2 - Combat

I pre-ordered Guild Wars 2 (GW2 from now on) at the behest of some friends who were eager for the game to be released. I'd read a couple things and watched a video or two about the game but for the most part I'd kept myself away from finding out too much info about the game prior to launch. It helped that the betas and stress-testing had been going on while I was out in Vegas doing the WSOP. I haven't been putting the massive hours into the game that some people have (apparently, a guy already hit the level cap two days after it came out) but I've played enough to be able to talk about the game. Even though I've played quite a few MMOs, most of my MMO experience is from World of Warcraft, so I'll be using it to make comparisons. I'll break things down into a series of posts regarding parts of the game I wish to discuss. This first post will be about combat.

Combat: The combat system is innovative and fun. Basically, each class has a choice from several weapons they can use and each weapon provides the character with up to five unique abilities. Two-handed weapons provide five abilities while one-handed weapons provide three abilities if being used as a main-hand and two abilities if being used as an off-hand. For example, as a Mesmer (the class I've been primarily playing) I can use a sword as a main-hand and group it with a pistol as an off-hand, or i can use a scepter as a main-hand and group it with a sword as an off-hand. In either case, the sword provides different abilities.

Once you hit a certain level (7 or 8 I believe) you're given the ability to swap your weapon set. This is where the combat gets even more interesting. You might choose one weapon based on ranged offensive abilities and another based on close-range defensive abilities or whatever. Combat becomes more of a management of cooldowns and choice of abilities to be used based on situation rather than being locked into a "rotation" like WoW used to be. Over the course of my time in WoW, it went from a rotation-based offense to a proc-based offense: Use ability X until ability Y procs, then use ability Y (A pigeon could be trained to play a mage in WoW using visual cues to get it to hit certain keys.)

Along with the weapon abilities, each class also has other class abilities that are trained and can be customized to your playstyle as well. Gone are the days of the "Holy Trinity" of Tank-Healer-DPS. All classes have at the bare minimum a self heal and the game is designed so that a person can't just stack healing abilities to become a dedicated healer. Tanking is gone as well instead replaced with giving each character the ability to dodge attacks and protect themselves with abilities. For example, as a Mesmer using a staff, I have an ability called "Chaos Armor" which provides me with buffs and debuffs to the thing hitting me if I start getting meleed.

All-in-all, the combat system is well planned and well executed and results in gameplay that is a blast. Going from a mage in WoW who more or less has to stand still and cast one spell over and over to do damage to being able to run and shoot and switch abilities on the fly is a welcome change.

My next post I'm going to cover the world of GW2 and what you can do in it.