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Guild Wars 2 Release Date Announced
New submitter Woldry writes "After five years in development, Guild Wars 2 has been given a launch date: August 28, 2012. ArenaNet's aim is to provide 'a living, breathing online world that challenges convention, that's designed for fun instead of grind.' There's a beta weekend planned for July 20-22 for those who have pre-purchased the game (and for those who have gotten legitimate beta keys in advance)."
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a good write-up of some hands-on time during one of the earlier beta weekends, saying, 'Time after time, Guild Wars 2 impressed me with just how carefully no, how smartly everything has been thought out. Those things that annoy us in other games are simply banished here.'
Unlike WoW, when this game sucks my boyfriend in, I'll actually be there playing with him. :D
I have the hiccups.
Thats one of the things I liked about the original GuildWars - I could fill my party up with NPC and not have to deal with other people if I wanted to be anti-social. At other times I could get all my friends along too (before they left for LOTRO)
I know you were going for a funny mod, but while they didn't actually remove everyone, they made them at least much less painful. You can mute chat and just about ignore everyone if you so desire, but even then they're more helpful than harmful. There's basically no way for an idiot to troll or block you from progressing. Anything they do at the very least helps them, in almost all cases also helps you.
It's a brilliant system and one which removes much of the pain out of MMOs.
They had to drop the secondary classes because it was too hard to play balance. In fact, now your weapon dictates your first 5 skills (out of, eventually, 10) and the skills on the weapons have to be unlocked first. This was, IMO, the only grind in the game though - I'd go back to a noob area, kill 40 weak monsters (10 for each skill on the weapon), and then return to harder areas. I did unlock quite a few weapons (and shields and offhands) - my goal for the betas was more to fiddle with play styles, classes, races, etc and see what I liked best, so I went more "broad than long" (highest level I attained in 3 betas was 22/80, and I played a LOT - probably would be 50 if I stuck to a single character).
That said, I like combat in GW2 MUCH better than WoW and its wall of skills you never use. Elementalists don't really become fun until about level 12, however, but then are really fun, especially with a fully unlocked staff or wand/offhand and three skills (haven't gotten slots 4 or elite unlocked yet), or even daggers. They do look like they are wearing trashy bridal dresses, though (some people say hooker, but no hooker I've ever seen dressed like that - and yes, I used to see lots of hookers in one shitty neighborhood I lived in - I also was a working musician paying about $197/mo in rent). I had a blast playing an Engineer in the stress test yesterday and I didn't think I would like that class at all (level 1-9 with no deaths or fight for life was a first for me in any of the betas). Mesmer I still love, but it was last added and worst balanced, so haven't played much since the first beta. Created and deleted a ranger because pet AI was dumb and wanted to try other classes - rangers were favored by my guild yesterday and seem to be well liked now. Guardian was broken by a major change in the last beta, but wasn't too bad from L1-L5 (I deleted a bunch of characters since I only have 5 slots and wanted to try all 8 classes). Warrior can hit really hard, though I've played that least (level 3 - this is my TODO for beta 3), leaving that up to a guildie that loves warrior. Thief... well, I loved leveling from 1-7, but 8-12 was really hard, as neither pistols nor daggers seemed to cut it. My Engineer was dual pistol and rifle swap and that seemed ok yesterday, though. Necromancer was fun, but I decided at level 5 to save that one to focus on after release, though I may play him some more next beta.
Elementalists do not have a weapon swap, due to their attunement mechanic. 4 attunements with 5 skills apiece = 20 skills, compared to standard classes who just have a weapon swap with 5 skills apiece for 10 skills. If eles also had a weapon swap, they'd have 40 weapon skills which would be obviously overpowered.
The difference in GW2 is that there are very few spells that just do pure damage. Most have secondary and sometimes very powerful effects attached to them, which means you will want to use them wisely and not just "as soon as your cooldown timer clears".
For example, one spell may have a blind effect which causes your enemy's next attack to miss. Another may have a knockdown effect. Another might launch you forward while leaving a trail of fire in your wake. Hopefully it's obvious how this forces smart use of skills and not just whack-a-mole whatever's off cooldown.
As a side note, I find mana to be a very bad resource system (large pool, slow/cumbersome to regenerate) and it seems to have stuck around only because it's "traditional". It is essentially unlimited in the short-term, and has a hard limit in the long-term, which means that in the heat of battle, you might as well not have a resource unless you are engaged in very long fights. And if you do run out of mana, it's a very unfun mechanic since there's basically nothing you can do except sit there and reflect on your character's poor life decisions that led to this point.
Energy (small pool, fast-regenerating resource) seems like a much more interesting resource for forcing resource management, as it forces smart, controlled skill usage and heavily prohibits button mashing. However, a purely cooldown based system like GW2 basically creates the same thing.