UPDATE*** Guild Wars 2 - OPEN BETA - Reviews/Reactions

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It's hard to feel like you're missing out with the lack of dedicated healing in this game. The role of a dedicated healer is simply not necessary. What's great is that this doesn't make the game feel like some desperate struggle to survive -- at least not in any negative sense. In fact, in the time it took me to level from 11 to 13 on my front-line Warrior (doing only in-world events without any personal story) I never had to use my self-heal. I was able to be smart about how I handled engaging enemies and there was enough support from my teammates to keep me from resorting to my healing skill.

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Given that, you don't really have a game where everybody's their own healer -- you have a game where healers are unnecessary because combat rewards intelligent play and there's an incredibly well-designed system of boons across every profession's skills.

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Skills and Items

As you may know, the skills in Guild Wars 2 are determined by what item you have in your hand, combined with what class you're playing. So a Thief with a pistol will have different skills than a Mesmer with that same pistol. In addition, you can combine weapons in each hand for skill combos. So for my most beloved Mesmer, I had a scepter in one hand and a pistol in the other. This combination gave me the Illusionary Duelist skill in slot 4, which creates an illusion (clone) of my character that unloads duel pistols on the enemies. Taking that pistol away and adding a one-handed sword gives me an Illusionary Swordsman skill that works very similarly.

With each weapon you wield, you start off with just one skill, but using that item more often will eventually open up more and more skills on your bar. You can actually see the percentage of progression towards that next skill evolve as you use that weapon more often. So you can become proficient with a sword, but when you find an axe with better stats and switch to that, you're starting with one skill for that axe until you unlock the rest. This also applies to which hand you use, as well. You'll need to unlock main-hand and off-hand skills on each weapon where that's available, which then unlocks it on every weapon of that type for that particular character. If that sounds complicated, it's not really. But it is exciting for the completionists among us.

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So, I have a Demon's Souls-esque conception in my head of a system where you could feasibly become so skilled at the "mechanics" of combat that you could simply avoid taking significant damage. Rather than, you know, how badly you are hurt being determined by a random number generator and your damage mitigation scores.

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This was once generally considered a good idea in MMOs, with World of Warcraft even having weapon skills at one point. Players just saw it as a pointless grind, though. It was kind of annoying in a game like Final Fantasy XI to have to fight the same enemies to level up your battleaxe skill that you did to level up your sword and shield skills, since your chance to hit scaled with skill level.

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Freauxzen

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I found GW the most enjoyable as being able to create your own character, not aesthetics, but Builds.

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I hope they maintain this as it kept me interested far longer than the others did. NO gear grinding, just build manipulation to counter enemy attacks and areas.

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