"Selling" Guild Wars 2

I've been talking to (and trying to recruit) several people lately about the awesome that is Guild Wars 2 and after 3 days of early access and 2 days of it being officially "launched" I wanted to make a quick write-up to cover some of the big points of it since I can't easily do that in the moment while making it as clearly understandable as I'd like. So, here are some of the points of the game that I find awesome and sorry for the wall of text. >.<


As far as MMOs go, I have a lot of experience in WoW, a couple of months' worth of TOR, Less than a week or two of DDO, STO, LOTRO and a few other that weren't even worth mentioning. I can't put EVE in the list because EVE is like no other MMO I've ever ever seen. So if/when I allude to "other MMOs", these are the titles that come to mind for me.

The first big point of GW2 is that it's not pay-to-play or free-to-play. It's a buy-to-play model with financial support to the creators coming in the form of buying gems in their online store. You can drop your cash at the counter, walk out with the game and never put another penny into it if you so choose. The gems, when bought, can either be traded for items in their Black Lion store, which can be vanity clothing, mini-pets, dyes, bonus-XP-for-an-hour consumables or other things, or they can be sold in-game.

The skill system is refreshing in that it hardly resembles other MMOs where you level up, train skills, select the skills for your action bar and then go out and use them. Instead, your primary skill slots (1-5) are dependent on what kind of weapon you have equipped. For example, on my rifle-wielding Charr Engineer, #4 is the greatly amusing Overcharged Shot which blasts your target away from you, as well as you away from your target, serving as both a distancing tactic and a break of immobilzation, crippled and chilled conditions. You initially start with only #1 active but as you kill your first enemies you start unlocking the next skills up to #5. It doesn't take too long to get all the way to #5 so it's hardly noticeable and each new unlock for that short time is a little "Whee!" moment.

Secondary skills (6-0) are more flexible than the per-weapon primaries. #6 is a healing slot where you start with a single healing skill with 2 more unlockable through the spending of skill points (which I'll get to in a minute). 7, 8 and 9 are the "main" secondary skill slots which you can populate with skills (unlocked also through the spending of skill points) that are divided into 3 tiers. Once you've unlocked 5 skills in the first tier, you open the second tier and once you've unlocked 5 there, you open the third tier. As a spiffy extra, depending on which secondary skills you equip, you also gain bonus skills on the F1-4 (maybe 5?) buttons. 0 is an elite skill slot and unlocked at level 30, which I haven't reach yet, so I can't say much on that, sadly.

Traits are the GW2 answer to Talents or Specializations, offering 5 different categories to spend Trait Points in, once you begin unlocking those at level 11. You gain a Trait Point each time you level up, like in WoW and TOR. However, rather than branches of passive additions and optional active skills, Traits are more linear and fewer in selection. For each point you put into a particular Trait branch, you gain an increase to 2 selected bonus stats (My Charr Engineer, from the 10 points in Explosives, receives +100 Power and +10% Condition Duration). Every 5 points also unlocks a new passive Trait and at the 10, 20 and 30 point marks, the unlocked Traits offer choices of which bonus you want sitting in that position. The 5-point Explosives Trait is Evasive Powder Keg (creates a bomb when you dodge) and my 10-point Explosives Trait is Shrapnel: Explosions have a 6% chance to cause bleeding. Other options I could have here are Acidic Elixirs (throw elixirs cause damage when they land), Forceful Explosives (larger explosion radius), Incendiary Powder (33% chance to burn for 2 secs on crit) among others.

The questing and leveling system, while sticking to the standard "gain XP to gain levels" architecture, also steps away from the familiar structure of quests leading to more quests in a quest log and astronomical requirements of XP as you gain higher levels. The only quest chain (that I have seen so far) is the "personal story" which is like TOR's class story system, though dialogue is set and lacks the BioWare branching options. They have departed from filling a quest log with kill and fetch chores and replaced that with Map Completion. Each zone has a number of Tasks, Wayponts, Points of Interest, Skill Challenges and Vistas. Each of these things you discover or complete grants XP much like the turning in of a quest in other MMOs.

Tasks are the game's equivalent of quests but rather than talk to a quest giver, go kill 10 boars, return to the quest giver and then go back to where you just were to kill 10 Pikachus, Tasks take the form of events. You can start events yourself or you can happen upon them as you approach the area. There is no necessity to party with the event-starting player in order to gain credit so long as you contribute, there is no "tagging" of mobs.

Waypoints are places you can walk up to and unlock which grant you the ability to quick-travel to that point at any time in the future for a small fee. No more taking the flight path to Undercity and running all the way out to Brill and then to the northern coast to hunt murlocs.

Points of Interest are pretty simple, they're just areas you can find, get credit for it on your Map Completion and get a free, (usually) easy chunk of XP.

Skill Challenges are places where you typically talk to an NPC, fight them, defeat them and earn a spendable skill point. There are also a few that are in the form of fighting past a group of monsters and "communing" with the Skill Challenge point. Finish the Challenge, earn a skill point, earn XP.

Vistas are the GW answer to TOR's Holocrons. Some are fairly easy to find and get to, some require fun jumping puzzles. Once reached, rather than granting a little +2 Endurance bonus or whatever, you get treated to a nifty pan-out cinematic camera that will show you geographical features, nearby ruins or whatever else and then another free smack of XP.

Another key feature to GW2 is level scaling, which ensures an "at level" difficulty for any zone you go to, as well as proportionate XP gains so you never have to settle for super-wimpified XP rewards if you decide to go back to lower-level areas.

The Crafting system is like a mixture of WoW and Skyrim where rather than a point per craft, you earn experience toward the next level of your crafting profession. Farming mats is simple enough as there are no set gathering professions and nodes are player-specific. No more getting beat to that copper vein by a Flight Form druid with the 310% speed unlocked. Buy a Mining Pick, Logging Axe and Harvesting Sickle, equip them in their respective slots and stop at any and every gathering node you come across. Each gathered resources take a point off of your gathering tool until they're depleted at which point you just equip the next one and go on and higher level gathering nodes require higher level gathering tools. Took a little while for me to get used to this point, but it's easy enough now.

Weapon Swapping is a spiffy feature as well. Engineers and Elementalists don't have access to this because they have Kits and Attunements respectively, but the other classes can equip 2 sets of weapons and then swap freely between them at any time. As an Engineer, my equivalent to this is Kits. I swap back and forth between my rifle and my Bomb Kit so much it's just second nature to me now. And freaking excellent.

Underwater combat, which I was expecting to be as big a pain in the ass as it was for that entire zone in Cataclysm, is actually much more tolerable here. Like with weapon/Kit swapping, once you go underwater, you automatically equip your underwater weapon which replaces your primary skills with underwater combat skills.

Checking newly-acquired loot for upgrade-ness is much easier than in WoW. If a stat on the item is higher than what you currently have equipped, the stat will be green. If it's lower, it'll be red and same will be white. Items that you can equip will show up in a frame right on your character window so you don't have to look through every slot in your bags to find the loot that you just picked up in the middle of 300 other trash items. Speaking of trash items, nifty Sell Trash button while at vendors.

The Holy Trinity of tank, healer, DPSx3 is absent. Each class has their #6 slot dedicated to healing, there are other ways a player can take on a healing role through skills and whatnot but for the most part, you learn your class, you play well, you don't have to worry about the Trinity. My 15-minute elite spider fight the other night, 75% of which was just me vs. the spider, can attest to that.

PvP is... Well. Fuck PvP.

That's all I can think of at the moment with a barking puppy wanting to go outside and a Batman ready for naptime. If I come up with anything else, I'll probably add it in here at the end and smack a note on Facebook about it. For any who do pick up the game, you can add Krotukk.2105 to your friends list and I'm on the Anvil Rock server.