User:Auron/gtagw

Guild Wars, right now, is a pretty bad game. The PvP content relies heavily on a balanced game, and ANet (for one reason or another) has been unable to provide real balance. The PvE content is dry as hell - after you've gone through each campaign once, the only thing left for you to do is grind. Even later expansions didn't really add anything new - whereas games like World of Warcraft got quests where you fly in dragons and raze villages or commandeer cannons and annihilate armies, GW just had the same old crap. And then dinosaurs and robots :/

Three years ago, however, Guild Wars was an entirely different game. It had fresh concepts, a new outlook on MMO gaming (where skill was more important than hours spent playing), and pretty good mechanics for different things that all came together as a cohesive product that got me hooked really quickly when I started, and kept me playing for a long time. Since I'm usually such a negative nancy in my posts, I'll list the positive stuff that made Guild Wars a fun and interesting game.

(These are in no particular order, just listed as they come to mind. Also, I compare GW to WoW and EQ2 as those are the only real competition on the market now, and WoW is easily the most successful MMO in history, so it's pretty safe to make comparisons.)

Prots
Protection prayers offer a really unique way to mitigate damage. In pretty much every game I've played, all healers do is... well, heal. If there's a tank, he gets the standard buffs, goes in and takes a bazillion damage, and healers spam spells on him to keep his red bar up. In any game, that's rather inefficient, but Guild Wars offered an amazing alternative - the ability to stop damage, in small or large chunks. The ability to stop damage from coming in, and thus saving you energy in the long run, made prots a great addition to the game.

Other games sometimes have "prots," but they're bad - one-dimensional and not thought through very well. WoW has this, but it's exactly like the old life sheath; it stops X amount of damage then fades. As we all know, life sheath was one of the shittier prots, and often mitigated less damage than a good SoA or Guardian. It also has this, a paladin ability much like shadow form, except obviously not maintainable (as even Blizzard realizes that maintainable invincibility is a Bad Thing™). Even that has its limits, and is honestly more of a "oh shit" button than a good prot in Guild Wars would be.

All in all, prots make playing support classes fun, and reward being good and watching the field with saving you a ton of energy that most people would have wasted on redbarring.

Energy management
Any caster in any game knows that when your mana runs out, you're useless. If you can't throw spells around, you can't heal or do damage or even escape from damage. Basically, you sit there in cloth armor and wand the bad guys for a pittance of what you usually do. Unfortunately, in most games, the only way to get around this is to waste money on potions and pop them constantly. In WoW and EQ2, your only option is just that - sit down after a battle and eat food, or drink rather expensive potions to restore your mana instantly (although WoW potions are quite strict, as you can only use one per battle and they have a 60 second cooldown).

What can you do in battle to stop yourself from losing energy in those games? Not cast. What the hell kind of solution is that, honestly? You're a caster, you should be able to cast pretty much as often as a warrior attacks. Even in WoW there are a few options to simply regain a certain amount of mana, but it mostly just delays the inevitable - running out of mana and sitting there like a bump on a log.

Guild Wars changed that. With attunements, Glyphs, and entire attributes devoted to regaining energy, a fascinating mechanic emerged: casters who could keep casting throughout an entire battle. This also presented the ability to play against that mechanic - if your team brought sufficient energy denial, the other team would have to struggle to perform at their best... but they still wouldn't automatically lose.

To balance casters, ANet curtailed caster damage to almost nothing. If Elementalists did damage on par with mages in WoW, yet could continuously cast throughout a battle, they would be a force to be reckoned with. In fact, imagine how imbalanced the game would be if they had an attribute devoted to dealing huge AoE damage without running out of energy. Oh... damn...

Anyway, E-management promoted casters to a higher level in gaming - one that required attentive play, yet rewarded the player with the opportunity to keep playing throughout the entire battle (without being a bump on the log for several minutes while regaining mana).

Team focus
Any game with a team is better than the same game without one. I'm a pretty big RPG fan, and while morrowind and oblivion were okay games, they will always be sub-par because the one-player bullshit is so limiting. Compare them to, say, Baldur's Gate, which is (still!) a vastly superior game because of its team-oriented play (and presence of a "storyline," at least when compared to Morrowind).

Guild Wars took a separate road entirely when it comes to class balance. They weren't concerned that a monk couldn't go through and kill every monster in the game. In WoW or EQ2 or something, you're on your own most of the time, so each class needs to be able to deal damage, kite damage, and heal damage taken. When you think about it, that makes the game pretty vanilla. But ANet threw that out and said "play with people or diaf." Even later, when they added heroes to help save a dying game, it didn't break too much - it just reinforced the whole "team game" concept.

In high-end PvP, people focus on one thing and do it very well. Some people are amazing monks, while others are beasts on war. If you get 8 people that are great at what they do, you've got yourself a competitive team. Other games make you wait until level 80 (or whatever max is) and then you start specializing - and even then, you're just a filler spot. "GLF DPS" means a mage or a hunter or a DK or even a shaman can join, and it doesn't really matter. You don't synergize at all with the rest of the team because the game is too simple for it, so people just take whatever they can find. In Guild Wars, that's simply not possible - winning with randomway is almost unheard of, and doing it on any competitive level is out of the question.

A big part of this is forcing players to choose 8 skills. Instead of being able to bring all 300 or whatnot of your class' skills, you need to pick what your specialty is. That kind of planning in advance (on top of playing the game well) makes Guild Wars a more complex MMO than any of the rest.

Skill over grind
This basically doesn't exist anymore. ANet forgot what they had planned for the game and threw this concept out the window, but it was an important one back when the game came out.

"In the beginning..." titles didn't exist. You did GvG because you liked it, because the game was competitive and fun at high level. When you got good enough and proved yourself in regional playoffs, you went to the World Championship and got a chance to win a gold trim. You didn't have to grind for it - you played to get better, not to raise some purple bar higher and higher.

For this reason, PvP characters existed - allowing a player to jump into the game at its highest level with literally no grind. As you did PvP, you got balth faction, which allowed you to unlock weapon mods (which largely didn't matter) and skills. But that happened pretty naturally, and you didn't find yourself killing monsters over and over or doing boring gopher quests to raise faction.

WoW has no PvP characters. You have to spend months grinding your character up to 80, then raid for weeks trying to get the best armor in the game to drop on a 0.2% chance, because if you don't have that armor, the other guy will have that much of an advantage over you. By the time you get to the 3v3 or 5v5 arenas, everyone is running the same shit with the same skills and same talent spec, so the only difference there is how much time you spent grinding for armor. Seriously. Skill is barely a factor, since equipment matters so damn much. It can hardly be considered PvP - it's just a contest of who has spent more hours playing the game.

Guild Wars didn't take to that. ANet allowed you to beat the prettiest-looking, most-hours-grinding PvE characters with the ugliest PvP ones simply through skill, and that is amazing. Hell, people in WoW mistake grind for skill all the time. "Instant level 80 characters? That takes no skill at all!"

Yeah, okay buddy.

Map travel
Many games have this in some form or another, but I've seen none make traveling as convenient as it is in Guild Wars. If guildies want to meet you with you to do a mission, you can all zone to it and go in. If you want to meet friends to give them items, you can zone to GH instantly and just hand it over. Basically, travel time is reduced to nothing, which makes even the most gophery gopher quests seem tame.

In WoW, you get a hearthstone, which takes you back to a pre-determined city, and it's on a 1-hour recharge. Imagine if you could only zone once every hour in Guild Wars? Sheesh. The rest of the time, you have to walk (or fly) everywhere, and that is a huge timesink. Flights take easily over 10 minutes, and riding takes even longer. As badass as mounts look, I much prefer teleportation. Being able to sit down and play the game is awesome, but games like WoW make you travel for half an hour before you can start playing at all :/

To be continued as I think of stuff.