WoW vs. Guild Wars, part 2

This post will focus entirely on the Guild Wars combat system.

As I said before, GW is very fast paced. I would say that, except for movement speed, everything happens roughly twice as fast as WoW. However, it has some elegant systems in place to prevent the stupid "person dies in 1 second" thing that can happen in WoW. First off, there are no instant cast abilities. Everything either has a cast time (even if it is as low as 1/4 second), or is tied to the next melee swing (think Heroic Strike). Second, almost everything has a cooldown (although a "long" cooldown is 30 seconds, and most CDs are around 4-10 seconds). The result is a very fast-paced game where things still happen at a manageable pace.

This isn't to say that insta-gibbing isn't possible, but it takes super-gimmicky teams with extreme coordination. Every big damage skill has to land within a window of just a few tenths of a second, otherwise a quick protective spirit (limits damage taken from one hit to 10% of max health) or reversal of fortune (the next hit heals you for the amount it would have damaged) will ruin your spike.

The net result is that most teams rely on steady pressure to prevail, trying to make the opposing monks run low on energy so that they can't afford to get off those clutch heals or prots. This can be done in a variety of ways: warrior/dervish/assassin trains putting obscene damage on a single target, with rapid target switches whenever their shadowstep cooldowns are up. Rangers/necromancers spreading health degen (think DoTs) over an entire team. Mesmers/Rangers sitting on enemy monks with their myriad of interrupts and shut down abilities. Mesmers using energy drains. Splitting your team into two parts so that the enemy is forced to do the same to counter you. And many, many more. Most teams will employ a variety of these tactics, as well as a myriad of counters so that their monks can stay chugging along.

Basically, killing people in GW takes a lot of teamwork and tactics. Player skill is the biggest deciding factor, with the RNG being almost negligable. Compared to well-timed mace stuns or windfury procs, GW is a nice breath of fresh air, where every single death seems preventable if only you and your team had played better.

Which brings me to another nice thing about GW's combat system: its predictability. There is no missing or resisting, and the only way to avoid attacks is through blocking (more like a dodge in WoW terms), which only comes through skills. There is also no spell pushback, and the only way to interrupt a spell is with an interrupt skill, or by inflicting the "dazed" condition, which causes all damage to interrupt casting. Crits aren't a major factor in damage output. Dispelling is always last in, first out. Basically, GW eliminates most of the frustrating randomness that plagues WoW.

There is also an almost total lack of CC. The only "true" CC is knockdowns, which last 2-4 seconds. They can be chained, but that requires several characters to be glued to the knockdown target, there is a limit on the reuse time of these chains, and it requires them to bring knockdown skills at the expense of other, higher damage abilities. The net result is that most characters with knockdowns will bring 1, or there will be a single character bringing a bunch of knockdowns (usually a hammer warrior).