Once again, a game with really great combat ( just like Dragon Nest, Vindictus, and TERA ) does something to annoy me.
I joined GW2 because I'm a competitive player. But as I keep playing, I'm noticing that there really is no strategy involved in this game. There's nothing you really have to do other than just hit keys on your keyboard and zerg stuff. Even in the smaller scale PvP matches, where it's like 10v10, I hate the fact that I don't need my teammates and that they don't need me.
Check this out: I can heal myself as a Thief. On what planet can thieves HEAL??? As a matter of fact, I think every class can heal themselves. Not only that, no one actually dies instantly - you get this short period of time where you're on the ground and you get another chance to heal yourself ( remember, any class can do this ), smack people away, teleport away, make yourself invisible, etc. While this is a unique system, it's actually too forgiving.
GW2 made the classes too jack-of-all-trade-ish. As a thief, I'm not just limited to daggers - I can equip swords, bows, and guns as well ( and heal myself as I mentioned earlier ). This is cute and all, but as I said before, it kind of makes my teammates less necessary because if there's a situation where I need a ranged attacker, all I have to do is switch my equipment around and voila - I'm attacking from long range. I don't need a mage or hunter around to do it, and vice versa ( a hunter doesn't need me around if he needs someone to do melee DPS, he can just toggle his weapons and instantly he's got a sword or axe equipped ).
Now while I EXTREMELY prefer GW2's combat over the clunky feel of WoWs, I have to say that I'm a fan of the "DPS, Tank, Healer" route as opposed to GW2s "everyone does everything" style. I want everyone to have one role - one special thing that makes you say "I need this guy on my team". I'd also like for combat to be less forgiving. Everyone should not have a heal and then have 4 skills they can use after they die to make them come back to life.
WvW is what I expected - one big zerg fest. Who wins the fight isn't based on who has the best positioning or who has a balanced variety of classes - it's whoever has the largest amount of people at that time. You basically just beat the crap out of people, pushing them back all the way until you get to a gate, then you smack the gate ( which is made out of wood by the way, so I'm not sure why it's so durable ) for about 10 minutes and then you claim that area. Rinse and repeat.
Don't get me wrong - GW2 isn't a bad game. It's just that every game does something wrong and these are the few aspects of GW2 that bug me. The fact that these are the only complaints I have about the game shows how good it is - I'm usually able to come up with 5-10 reasons on why a game sucks. I'd say if you're into large scale PvP and zerging people with friends, go for it, but if you want a really strategic PvP game where you really have to put some tactical thought into what you do, you might want to opt for a MOBA game ( DotA 2, LoL, etc. ). I just went into the game with the expectation that it would end up being a bit more skill-based than your average MMO and it just wasn't.
ID:986260
 Sep 23 2012, 4:30 am
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Sep 23 2012, 4:49 am
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Avainer1
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Discuss GW2 on BYOND.
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Someone can't afford the game.
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Maybe 2 weeks from now. I spent enough money out of this check already.
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GW2 beta just turned every single dream I had to ashes.
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What did you make of Guild Wars 1 then?
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If you're talking to me, I never played GW1.
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Then I can probably see why "everyone has a heal" is an unusual concept. It's a fairly core mechanic in the first game, but doesn't tend to make a party healer a useless concept by any means.
The way it tended to work in the first game was you'd have a party of 8, and for any decently difficult mission, you required 2 monks. One for healing, and one for protection spells. Each person had their own healing as well, but it was really more of a last ditch thing. If one of those monks died, your team usually crumpled pretty fast. Early game for Guild Wars 2 doesn't especially require that in a party, or even parties in general to progress the story. That route is your casual play-through. The jack of all trades aspect actually doesn't hold in Guild Wars 2 anymore than it did in Guild Wars 1, I've found. For a given role (interrupt enemy spell-casters / healers for example), most classes have skills to do the job. However, only 2 or maybe 3 classes can actually do it repeatedly and consistently over a period of time to satisfactorily fulfill that role in the team. The upshot is basically this: If you have a bunch of guys for a team and a preferred strategy, but one of the roles isn't explicitly covered by the party, you can sometimes make do. Your team won't crumple in a massive heap, but you're in for a tougher time than had you got someone more spec'd for the job. It lets you just pick up and go into the action more, without so much of a wait around for the ideal setup. | |
EmpirezTeam wrote:
Someone can't afford the game. HA. And why are you playing theif? They're the worst healers. They can get away from combat quickly now but they're the worst to try to recover in the midst of battle. | |
Presumably because he wanted to play a Thief.
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King_LiOnZ wrote:
And why are you playing theif? In every game I go for whichever class moves the fastest. | |
I see. I just prefer PvP where each person is really needed - because you get more satisfaction out of PvP that way. Not sure if that makes sense, but take a BG from WoW for instance - healers can make or break a BG. My team loves it when I log in because they know I'm going to keep them alive all throughout the game, but in GW2, there's less of that. If someone is missing, it's more-so "it's all good, I can do it myself" rather than "crap, the hunter is gone, I don't know how we're going to make it without him".
When classes are that crucial, it makes for more strategic and satisfying gameplay, while GW2s style is more geared toward a more casual audience I assume. It seems like they did everything in their power to pamper players rather than making them think and form tactics to win. As I said before, WvW is just mindless zerging and even in the small-scale fights there are moments where everyone bunches up at one capture point and just facerolls each other. If it wasn't for the fact that the combat was so fluid and smacking a gate for 10 minutes is somewhat entertaining, I might not be able to tolerate the game. The best moments I've had in GW2 were 1v1s or 1v2s. For example I was escorting those little animal things that carry around supplies, and two Charr dudes or w/e they're called things came out of who knows where and started smacking me. I knocked down one of them but didn't have enough HP to beat the 2nd and just poofed away to safety. Who knows what happened to the poor little pack mule. They probably roasted him over a campfire, but back to the point: it was one of the only moments in GW2 where I actually had to think about what I was doing as opposed to just bashing the keys. | |
Which is a little curious, as I find I get one of your described moments every 30 minutes of play. Possibly though, I expect that and it was fairly normal for me in Guild Wars 1 also.
The "each person is really needed" thing happens in Guild Wars 1 and 2. In 1, it happened in Guild Battles mostly, higher tiered PvP, and higher level missions. For Guild Wars 2, I've only seen it in Dungeons so far. What Guild Wars doesn't do but WoW seems to revel in, is mad stats and skill skewing for different classes. What Guild Wars offers instead is the sense of "there's more than one way to skin a cat". Team PvP strategies in Guild Wars 1 were very very varied, some were rather gimmicky, others were just bizarre, and usually 3 different team builds were "dominant" at any given time among higher guilds. World v World is to me, a complete mess. If you want to break the mob mentality in there, you need to go in as a group (like say ... a guild team, as the game mode was designed to encourage). Currently that's not happening for many worlds, and it'll take a while for guilds to bond enough for that to happen. The top worlds at the moment unsurprisingly have strong team guilds. The main difference in play-style between WoW and Guild Wars I've found was not casual versus hardcore strategic. I think you're comparing early game Guild Wars against mid/end game WoW a bit there. The difference I found was how prescriptive the adopted strategies were. Both games have a very quick turning point in a fight at the end-game stage, where if something's gone wrong, your team eats dirt in about a minute or two, tops. In WoW, it seemed to me that once that point was reached, you were doomed, basically. Your options involved either a frantic attempt to bring the dead member(s) back, probably at the cost of your own life, or bailing. It didn't seem to matter about team skill much of the time, you couldn't pull the situation back in those 2 final minutes. In Guild Wars, a split-second change of strategy by key members, or if you're lucky, the team as a whole, could pull the situation back. A resurrect is 5 seconds, but that's 5 seconds your monk isn't healing/protecting, or other party member isn't doing their thing and is standing there like a lemon. So someone needs to cover them, and possibly their role, for that time. Not to mention, try not to die a death themselves. As you are outnumbered 2 to 1 by higher level enemies in Guild Wars as standard, and the AI doesn't obey tanking logic at all, it's a trick. But ... definitely doable, and very rewarding when done right. | |