I started seeing excitement about this late 2011, as Guild Wars 2 started to do its road show, demoing it at various conferences. However, a purely cooldown based system like GW2 basically creates the same thing. 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.Įnergy (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. 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. Hopefully it's obvious how this forces smart use of skills and not just whack-a-mole whatever's off cooldown.Īs 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".
Another might launch you forward while leaving a trail of fire in your wake. 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".įor example, one spell may have a blind effect which causes your enemy's next attack to miss. The difference in GW2 is that there are very few spells that just do pure damage. 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. My Engineer was dual pistol and rifle swap and that seemed ok yesterday, though. well, I loved leveling from 1-7, but 8-12 was really hard, as neither pistols nor daggers seemed to cut it. 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. 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). 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. Mesmer I still love, but it was last added and worst balanced, so haven't played much since the first beta. 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). 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). 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. That said, I like combat in GW2 MUCH better than WoW and its wall of skills you never use. 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). 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.
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. They had to drop the secondary classes because it was too hard to play balance.
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