Guild Wars 2 is a game I’ve been playing a hell of a lot recently, for a lot of different reasons.
Progression / Gearing
The GW2 community makes a lot of hay about it’s different gearing system to most ‘standard’ (i.e. WoW) MMOs. Personally I haven’t played enough other MMOs to guage the difference, but I quite like GW2’s approach. I’m working on Ascended (2nd tier) gear for one of my characters and it’s nice to have such a clear goal for my gameplay. I’m finding that’s what I like most about it, there’s a whole set of goals that are are very clear and defined, and if one feels too long/hard it’s easy as pie to break it down into sections.
The other nice thing is that the lowest tier (Exotic) is A) easy as pie to get. and B) enough for like 95% of the game. Makes it really easy to try other classes/playstyles. Speaking of which…
Build Diversity
I LOVE GW2’s build system. For context the only other MMO i’ve seriously got into was FFXIV (Another great game btw) which has, at least as far as I’m concerned, literally no build diversity. That game hands you a class and says ‘here’s what the class does’. By contrast, GW2’s talents, skills and weapons mean the same base class can generally fill any role, and the same elite spec (consider specs in WoW or Jobs in FFXIV) can usually do most of them in some way. For example, my current main, if you can call it that is a Scrapper. I’ve got him built to do DPS and provide some damage buffs to the rest of my party, but Scrappers can also build into full healers by equipping a different main weapon, or doing pure/selfish DPS just by equipping different skills. As someone who lovers to tinker and experiment and generally try bizarro builds, this side of the game really really appeals to me. Next step heal assassin here we come!
