Heresiarch Guild: tadzio - Viewing Profile - Heresiarch Guild

Hi guys it's been a while, who's still around? Anyway I thought I'd make a Guild Wars 2 thread as it is the next WoW-killer(harharhar). Hype aside this game does have a lot of unique and cool features to be excited about:

Removal of the Holy Trinity: This means no player to player assigning to the roles of tanking, healing, and dps. AHH! scary right? Well I think this is an awesome move on their part. If you're skeptical about this I suggest you watch this video which explains it very well and why the Holy Trinity sucks.


So instead of having a dedicated tank, healer, and dps, each class does a little of each at different times in a fight. A warrior can block attacks with his shield for a while, but then he'll start taking a bit of damage and might have to back off. So then the elementalist will step up and go into earth attunement and take the hits while the warrior heals himself up. That's just a simple example, it will be much more complex than that with the way certain classes actually are able to stop the damage intake as not all classes just have a mode where they can take hits like a tank.

Removal of the Quest-Grind Leveling System: That's right! No more questing to level! This doesn't mean it's going back to EQ1 days of mob grinding to level either. Instead of seeing a ! above an NPC's head, reading(or ignoring) a wall of text, then proceeding to slay 10 monsters standing around in a field, you go out and explore(helped by NPC's that tell you a general area to go if that's what you want) and stumble upon "Dynamic Events", which happen quite a lot in various areas around a given zone. These events will popup on a UI similar to quest tracking in WoW and will tell you, generally, a vague thing to do(IE "Help Farmer John") along with having a progress bar below that. Doing things to "Help Farmer John" might include killing off invading NPCs, putting out fires on his crops, or maybe defending cattle or something. Each thing you do to help him will add to the progress bar which means you can do what you want to do to help him. This might seem a bit lame if it were the end and the full extent of what you'll be doing during Dynamic Events, however most Dynamic Events are part of a chain which say after you help Farmer John you now bring the fight to the invading NPC's base and then you wipe them out there. There's something like over 1600 dynamic events with dynamic event chains as long as 8-10 different events. All these events also dynamically scale to the amount of players involved, making it, ideally, challenging for the people doing it no matter how many are involved. This obviously has some limits and they said that most events scale down to 1 person and up to 10-15 people. However there are some epic events that scale down to a minimum of 10 people and to a maximum of 100 people. See the Shatterer Event on youtube

Action-Game Style Combat: What this means is that there will be a focus on movement, ability placement(abilities that target the ground instead of directly a person or NPC, although there will still be some offensive direct targetting abilities), and the ability to roll-dodge. You can do things like cast while moving(a lot of abilities including melee ones will have a cast timer) and dodge enemy abilities. In addition a lot of the offensive and support abilities take advantage of this role that movement plays in the combat. Abilities that create an impassible wall, an impenetrable protective bubble, a passable but damaging wall(firewall), an impassable circle to trap enemies from all sides, as well as your usual knockbacks, pull fowards, slows, roots, and stuns(don't quote me on the stuns though I haven't seen a stun yet so far). There's also fear but it's not spammable and used as a short duration stun to create distance between you and the enemy as it runs you directly away from the caster not in random directions(thanks for that blizzard).

Removal of Gear Requirements to Raid: This one is huge and I will explain it as best as I can but you might want to look more into this one yourself as it isn't something I've been looking into as much, although I am very excited about it. PvE gear will get progressively better as you level up by increasing the stats on the gear, however once you hit the level cap of 80 you will quickly reach a power plateau and the stats will stop increasing. This means only the cosmetic appearance of gear will change as you defeat more and more of the raid content of the game. I personally love this change because now guilds wont have to worry about losing a fully geared raider and getting set back weeks to months because of it. Also newer guilds won't have to farm for weeks and weeks in order to have enough stats to take out the more challenging bosses. There won't be an extra 5 spell power on those awesome looking new shoulderpads of yours, but they're still awesome looking and ample of a bragging right in themselves. There will also be special titles for completing their raid content so that's another incentive. Everything I said here is true but there might be more to it and as I said you might want to look more into the "Power Plateau" if you're put off by this and not excited like I am.

Max Raid Size=5-man: Now this is under much debate with the GW2 followers because some people are saying that they don't even have any instanced raid content because they're the same size as a normal party and they don't officially name them "raids"(although even the lead dev has called them raids). These 5-man, highly scripted, instanced group boss fights requiring much more team work and giving the greatest rewards(if you don't want to call them raids) are called the "Explorable Mode" of each of their 8 dungeons. Different from their "Story Mode" of each dungeon which is a less difficult mode you do while leveling up. They are not different by having the same mobs/bosses but amped difficulty(see WoW normal to heroic mode dungeons), each mode has different bosses and maybe different trash mobs but who cares about trash really lol. In addition the "Explorable Mode" on each dungeon has 3 different paths to go down, like a 3 way fork in the road(hopefully done creatively not just a fork everytime but that would be ok too I guess). Your group votes on a way to go via the UI and the winning way decides the path. Each path is a separate dungeon in itself with different bosses/story. So if you do the math they have 8*3=24 5-man explorable mode(raid) dungeons at release. But yeah 5-man, which is 5 less than WoW's current "main" way of raiding(you CAN raid 25man but its like optional as you know). This is very cool in my opinion because now I can just gather up my friends and just raid with them and not have to carry a bunch of baddies like I did in Heresiarch(haha jk). And there will be big raid-size content, it will just be in the open world(see 10-100man epic dynamic events) but require a bit less coordination which in my mind is perfect because trying to get big groups of people to coordinate is a nightmare.

Making PVP an Even Playing Field: When you join PVP you're put at max level with all abilites and the same quality of gear(except World vs World vs World PVP where you just get max level/abilities, see below for explanation). No more stupid gear farming in PVP to be able to have a fighting chance. PVP fights are based on skill alone(assuming they do their best to class balance). Pretty simple concept but WoW probably never even thought about it because of their hell-bent reliance on the "Carrot on a Stick" gear grind associated with PVP.

other pvp choices: They broke PVP into 2 catagories which are Structured and World vs World vs World(WvWvW).

Structured PVP is also broken into casual and competitive. Casual structured PVP will be based on a lobby system where you can join a server with an opening and you will play games continuously on that server until you or everybody else decides to leave. This is in the style of a lot of FPS games where you can just join instantly and leave whenever you want. Awesome for casual play. Competitive structured PVP(I'm not 100% sure on this but I think, and it makes sense to do this) will have a Queue system, a Ladder, and a ELO ranking system. Hopefully this will be done similar to League of Legends where they put you in games with people of similar ELO and also divide between solo queue'ing and team queues. Not entirely sure on the details of competitive pvp but what I am sure of is all of structured pvp, both casual and competitive, will be Conquest style game maps(capture/defend nodes, see Arathi Basin) ranging from 1v1 to 10v10. Besides the typical node capture/defend objective there will be secondary obective(s) in each map. Currently the only map they have showed was a 5v5 map with 3 nodes and a secondary objective to use a Trebuche(long range seige weapon). This weapon that both teams get are powerful AE damage dealers(plus knockback effect) that can reach a lot of the map and can destroy parts of the map to open up different pathways. These Trebuches are a strategic move, as they take away a team member while using them, can be destroyed/repaired but then it distracts you/the enemy from the primary objective. This adds a bit of a different strategy to the same old Arathi Basin mode.

World vs World vs World PVP. They haven't released a demo of World vs World vs World PVP but here's what I know so far. World vs World vs World PVP is available instantly anytime to you, also casual friendly, and it takes place on a map where there are many objectives that range from requiring a lot of people to a small group to maybe some solo stuff. The battle is fought alongside everyone in your server that choose to fight in it and is 3 way, meaning you are fighting 2 different other servers. Many Dark Age of Camelot fans will be happy with this as 3-way battles are often really fun because you can choose to team up with a server and take out the other one. The winner, which is chosen after a 2 week period, gets a server buff or some sort. This is all I really know about WvWvW PVP and obviously it doesn't answer everything but it sounds really cool so far.

some other things worth mentioning:

• player's own "Personal Story" which is a series of quests seperate(mostly) from the outside world in instances. This will have choices to make in it that will effect it's story and outcome(same concept as some recent single player RPGs have, see Dragon Age). This is not solo-exclusive content as you can have your friend tag along but they can't make any decisions for you. As well if they're on the same part of the personal story as you(IE same race and made the same choices previously) they can choose to use your choices made in the personal story at the end or not to and go back and it do the way they want to.
  
• player's personal "home" instance, so like player housing but "is directly influenced by choices made in the character's Personal Story"
  
• You can level up in all PVP and PVE content
  
• Alternate currency to money for gear buying purposes. It's called Karma and it is received by doing dynamic events and maybe other things(not 100% sure on other ways to get it
  
• 10 skills/abilities on you bar at one time. First 5 are weapon skills based on what weapon you are holding and most classes can switch between 2 different sets in combat instantly. Skill number 6 is your class specific healing spell. Skill 7-9 are chosen by you from a pool of class/race based skills. Skill 10 is an elite skill chosen by you from a pool of elite skills based on your class or race. Certain classes get more abilities available to them in combat because of certain class mechanics. Elementalists for example has a class specific mechanic that allows them to swap between 4 elemental attunements, each attunement giving them 5 different weapon-based skills for each attunement. So the elementalist has access to 20 weapon based skills but as a result can't swap weapons in combat.
  
• They tried their best to make underwater combat cool and not unfun places with no content. When you enter water you get special water-only weapons (harpoons, spears) and water only abilities that make sense for underwater combat. The elementalist won't be shooting out fireballs underwater but instead his fire spells will be boiling, hot steamy abilities;). Also many of these abilities take advantage of the fact you are fighting with the Z-axis and involve sinking/floating to the surface as well as AE's being columns. You also have unlimited breath bar, don't move slower than land, and can dodge as well. They have said that a good deal of dynamic events happen underwater and it kinda sounds fun actually. I like WoW's new underwater zone and these guys took it to the next level.
  
• No auto-attack, although any skill/ability can be set to automatically keep firing off provided it's off cooldown and you're not doing another ability.
  
• 5 races, one faction(yay no getting ganked while leveling in the world)
  
• 8 classes: Elementalist, Warrior, Ranger, Necromancer, Guardian, Thief, Engineer, and an unreleased class.
  
• oh yeah the 5 races are: Asura, Charr, Human, Norn, Sylvari. See race trailer on youtube
  
• Set 250 years after the original Guild Wars.
  
• Buy-to-Play meaning one time purchase of probably $50-60 and no subscription fees
  
• There will be a cash shop but no buy-to-win items in it, only cosmetic

So yeah that's a lot of the main amazing points of this game. Some people say it's the next coming of MMORPG and I personally can't wait to play it. They haven't set a release date for it, but they are currently in a friends and family Alpha turning into a friends and family closed beta sometime by the end of this year. So most people think it's coming Q1-Q2 of 2012.

Here are some other links for some more info:
Guild Wars 2 Official Site: http://www.guildwars2.com/en/
Guild Wars 2 Wiki: http://wiki.guildwar.../wiki/Main_Page
Guild Wars 2 Guru, a fan site(I think?) that has forums where devs sometimes post on: http://www.guildwars2guru.com/

And the Guild Wars 2 teaser trailer