Guild Wars 2 Preview

Atomic Gamer is offering a preview for Guild Wars 2 based on the latest and last beta weekend event, and seem to have mostly positive thoughts on it. Here’s a snippet:

On the topic of gear: players’ success in combat in Guild Wars 2 is much less dependent on the items you have than Blizzard’s games are. The PvP arena systems actually have a system of completely unified gear and skill unlocks, making it an entirely even playing field. The World vs World system, however, is not, although everyone does get boosted up to level 80 along with basic 80-ish stats for whatever gear they’re wearing – but those actually at level 80 with end-game gear will have an advantage with better unlocked skills, gear, and such. The result here is that if you want a fair game, play the arena-type smaller matches, and if you want to take advantage of having good loot, play in the WvW games.

Otherwise, the skill and ability system – where each weapon you equip has its own set of abilities based on your class – further makes this game just a little more tactical and interesting without dumping three-dozen buttons onto a ton of action bars for you to place all over the screen. You’ve got five abilities derived from your weapon choice, a self-heal ability, and then a few class-based skills you choose from a selection of a couple dozen that hopefully work with your weapon-based skills. You can’t switch weapons while in combat, so it’s important to pick the weapon that allows you to put the debuffs and damage on enemies that synergizes with the other people around you. (Yes, there are combo-type things you can do, but the most powerful ones come when you put a specific condition/debuff on an enemy and then another player does some kind of finisher that takes advantage of that state.)

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The final thing I want to talk about from a combat perspective is the abolition of the tank-healer-DPS system. While some classes can tank better than others and every class has some kind of way to heal others, each player is expected to get out of danger (there is a dodge system that works very well for this) and heal up on their own. Luckily, things like threat management aren’t such a big deal here, so switching tanks on big enemies is pretty easy – plus, enemy behavior is not so that it’s constantly chasing around the guy with the most threat on a list. It’s more about enemies spreading out damage and dropping additional monsters on everyone, forcing everyone to make some kind of spread-out effort with a little less Ventrilo-powered coordination required in order to win. The other part of this is that when you go down, you can fight your way back to your feet in a Borderlands-style Rally system, but other players can also click on you and help you up, too – this allows for a system that actually encourages the kind of in-combat player resurrection that other MMORPGs have gone to great lengths to stop.