I’m having great fun discovering the weapons and builds system in Guild Wars 2. Like with GW1 you have a very limited active ability set (often likened to the hand of 7 cards in Magic the Gathering). You can swap and change your set whenever you are out of combat, also you can swap weapons (or elemental attunements for elementalists) during combat to add even greater variety.
This really helps to give depth to the gameplay and adds to the feeling of dynamism in combat. So far on my mesmer I have a staff-spec with a lot of ‘stand and nuke’ spells including some area of effect blasts. I also have a two handed sword ‘single target and on the move’ spec. These two specs play very differently, however it’s not just an either or choice here. In more complex and frantic dynamic events I find myself using both. Standing still laying down AoE barriers of pain to kill or at least slow the waves of enemies charging towards us. If some break through and threaten me I can switch to 2h sword blast them backwards/ teleport backwards myself and focus fire the threat. I can then switch back to my staff to carry on the same tactic. It’s a really interesting gameplay style, where you have not only combos of abilities but also potential combos of specs to play with during combat.
I was a bit sceptical about tying half the abilities to weapons when the system was first announced by ArenaNet. I’d played warrior a bit in GW1 and didn’t really find it that exciting to have so many weapon specific abilities. But in actual play and with the ability to swap weapon sets during combat I find it adds a lot of tactical depth to combat.
Reblogged this on Gigable – Tech Blog.