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).
The Death Knight Post
One of the most hotly anticipated additions in WotLK is the first hero class, the Death Knight. Here are my thoughts after playing around with one for a bit:
First off, blizzard has really gone out of their way to make DKs as cool as possible. Not only do you get a cool blue glow for your character's eyes, but both the starting DK armor and the blues that it gets upgraded to look better than most tier sets:
But there's more to it than just looks. The starting zone for deathknights is some of the best work blizzard has ever done. There is a seamless usage of separate instances to change the area of "EPL" that the starting quests take place in as your character progresses through a seriously kickass story. For the first time in WoW, you can actually see the world progress as you move through it. I don't want to give away too much for fear of spoiling anything, but the amount of lore packed into that one zone is amazing. The "hero class" monkier is fully deserved.
As for playstyle, the death knight has thus far been a lot less interesting than I had hoped. Blizzard has decided against allowing players to change the runes on their blades, instead sticking with 2 of each. The result is that each spec uses almost the exact same ability rotation, with spec differentiation coming almost entirely through passive abilities and runic power abilities. Perhaps I've been spolied by the massive playstyle differences of my druid and paladin, but right now it feels like every spec is pretty much the same (even to the point that some talents are copied with only slight alterations across trees). Overall, I've been pretty underwhelmed by how the deathknight plays. The class as a whole still feels very incomplete (a sentiment echoed by a guildmate who's currently level 76 on his DK), which is probably to be expected at this point I suppose.
However, many of the abilities are still very fun. Death Grip especially is probably one of my top 3 most entertaining abilities, and I can see it being extremely powerful in arena PvP, being able to yank an opponent into a very bad position could win games pretty easily. Ghouls and corpse explosion are also really cool, and the amount of diseases you can throw up on a target is fun from a "look at all the numbers" point of view.
When WotLK goes live, I would highly reccomend that everyone make a death knight, if only to experience the starting area. But as for myself, I don't see a deathknight main in my future, both my paladin and my druid are a lot more fun.
First off, blizzard has really gone out of their way to make DKs as cool as possible. Not only do you get a cool blue glow for your character's eyes, but both the starting DK armor and the blues that it gets upgraded to look better than most tier sets:
But there's more to it than just looks. The starting zone for deathknights is some of the best work blizzard has ever done. There is a seamless usage of separate instances to change the area of "EPL" that the starting quests take place in as your character progresses through a seriously kickass story. For the first time in WoW, you can actually see the world progress as you move through it. I don't want to give away too much for fear of spoiling anything, but the amount of lore packed into that one zone is amazing. The "hero class" monkier is fully deserved.As for playstyle, the death knight has thus far been a lot less interesting than I had hoped. Blizzard has decided against allowing players to change the runes on their blades, instead sticking with 2 of each. The result is that each spec uses almost the exact same ability rotation, with spec differentiation coming almost entirely through passive abilities and runic power abilities. Perhaps I've been spolied by the massive playstyle differences of my druid and paladin, but right now it feels like every spec is pretty much the same (even to the point that some talents are copied with only slight alterations across trees). Overall, I've been pretty underwhelmed by how the deathknight plays. The class as a whole still feels very incomplete (a sentiment echoed by a guildmate who's currently level 76 on his DK), which is probably to be expected at this point I suppose.
However, many of the abilities are still very fun. Death Grip especially is probably one of my top 3 most entertaining abilities, and I can see it being extremely powerful in arena PvP, being able to yank an opponent into a very bad position could win games pretty easily. Ghouls and corpse explosion are also really cool, and the amount of diseases you can throw up on a target is fun from a "look at all the numbers" point of view.
When WotLK goes live, I would highly reccomend that everyone make a death knight, if only to experience the starting area. But as for myself, I don't see a deathknight main in my future, both my paladin and my druid are a lot more fun.
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