Weapons- I think the weapons sets are fine. I like the fact that its based on cooler skins = more $ instead of more power. The introduction of perfect salvage kits fixed most problems for me and I’m fine buying perfect ods and building the perfect weapon set for each build.

Armor- Armor restriction here is a turn-off for me. I think that any character should be able to wear any kind of armor they feel like. Like Julian said just give me different spec alterations to go with it, heavey armor=slower casting time and so on.

Instancing- I beleive instancing is only good if people who meet in a common area can share current quests. I love playing AoC and finding some poor soul trying to kill a tough boss and being able to help. Felt like real life! After some time we’d have a band of random advenurers riding around and killing thing together. I felt sad when it was time to break up. In GW sometimes I’m relieved to leave a group and get the chest cause it took so long to assemble the group in the first place.

Freedom of Movement- Big huge plus here! Needs to be more like TES:Oblivion where can ride anywhere you want. Also being able to enter buildings would be nice.

Level Cap- I never understood the purpose of a level cap. Why even have one? Perhaps someone could explain to me. Perhaps having no cap would be good. Like if original GW’s had no cap then a character you’ve played for 4 years would be like level 467. It wouldnt make you more powerful but every who sees you would know youve been around. The respect factor would be great.

You guys are telling me to abandon the vertical rat race not because it’s vertical but because it’s a grindy race, at the same time that I’m being told to embrace the horizontal search for upgrades, skins and little cosmetic thingies that for some magical pixie dust reason apparently is not a race or a grind.

Does not compute much does it?

Freedom of Appearance: Disagree. It’s immersion-breaking to see mages wearing plate mail, not to mention makes it much harder to pick out particular classes on the battlefield.

Freedom of Allegiance: Agree/disagree. Account-wide guild membership removes the retarded process of having to invite all your alts to the guild, and to have more than half of the guild roster as really being some dude’s alts (especially consider how often people roll PvP characters in Guild Wars). It’s quite difficult to keep track of the names of everyone’s alts etc. On the other hand, it would be nice to be part of multiple guilds. However, you’d have to have a restriction that you need to be in a guild for XX duration before being able to play league GvG matches.

Freedom of Choice in Equipment: When you say something like this, I wonder why you’re playing Guild Wars at all. First of all, if you want to grind and get some weapon that does 20% more damage than the weapon I have access to, then you’re playing the wrong game, please go back to WoW.

Secondly, Guild Wars is one of few games where you are able to customize the skins for your weapons completely independently of the stats, giving you *ultimate freedom of choice*, instead of forcing you to take an ugly weapon because you like its stats, or forcing you to take a weapon with subpar stats because it looks good.

Thirdly, your points about Green weapons are moot. They are not the “high end” weapons, they are meant to be easily achievable, nice looking, max stats weapons. Inscribable weapons of the same stats will cost you more to put together, but will potentially look much cooler and can have stat combinations that the green weapons can’t. What exactly is wrong with that?

Freedom from Trade: Yes, agree, auction houses are good. However, other games can actually learn something from the trading system in Guild Wars, which is that there is a price guideline set by the NPC’s according to supply and demand, to prevent people from inflating prices randomly.

Freedom of Speech: I… can not comprehend what you are talking about when you say “fix the chat system”. Guild Wars has the most hands down user-friendly, intuitive chat interface of any online game that I have played. In regards to the example you gave, yes, they could introduce one more tab to be *really* local…. or you could just PM whoever you wanted to talk to, or talk in team chat, or guild chat, or alliance chat.

And in response to one of your comments, what game are you comparing Guild Wars to when you say that it has needless layers of complexity? The fact that you don’t need a spreadsheet to optimize your damage, and that there are only 8 skills on your skill bar to manage at one time, and the condition system which minimizes the number of stupid icons that people have to remember the function of, etc, seem to make it a lot easier in my book than other games such as, say, WoW. Now, it could stand to be made simpler still – namely by removing all the useless skills. But compared to other MMO’s? I think not.

In Age of Conan, gear did not matter except for visuals.

But, thanks to the rants and raves of the whiners wanting gear to mean something, AoC will soon become World of Conan Warcraft, thanks to NEEDING specific gear to get through levels, and the constant gear grind…plus combat was physically slowed down to accommodate this thus getting the whole WAR vibe..in a REAL TIME COMBAT system? Stupid.

I will always appreciate what Guild Wars has done, and I consider it a killer online game in it’s own right, and way better than any other MMO on the market.

Cheers

Come on now.

You are raising very good points and they’re all well taken, but I do take exception to this: “It sounds like your the kind of guy that likes to get his epic lewt of noobslaying, with a 0.001% drop rate via endless raiding and then go berserk in arenas.” because that’s way far from the truth.

And I’m not even saying I don’t like horizontal progression, but what I am saying is that I dislike -this- horizontal progression because I feel it’s largely cosmetic and overspecialized. That doesn’t make a me a fan of vertical or a Diku-head or anything of the sort because I don’t think it’s either GW’s way of doing things -or- Diku. It’s not a XOR.

More thoughts when I finish waking up in a few hours :)

PvP builds can be primarily pressure or spike. However, a really good pressure build will have the ability to spike, which means that several conditions will be spread around the team. When you can see that the opposing team is having a hard time keeping over 50% health, then you can call a spike to take down a good target.

Skills have been reworked significantly over the course of the game so as to keep the PvP balanced, especially with both the introduction of new skills into the game via the new chapters and the inventiveness of the players. Previously, any PvP skill adjustment affected PvE. This sometimes made PvE areas extremely difficult, especially if an underused skill received a buff. Now, though, there’s more separation between PvE and PvP versions of the skills.

GW2 will supposedly use fewer skills for PvP, which will greatly simplify the problem of balancing the skills. This will be a good thing, I believe, but hopefully we’ll see similar kinds of inventiveness with respect to the builds of both characters and teams.

It sounds like your the kind of guy that likes to get his epic lewt of noobslaying, with a 0.001% drop rate via endless raiding and then go berserk in arenas. If that’s the case, then you are playing the wrong game. Guild Wars has rare drops but it’s all about the skins, not the stats. This makes grinding for cool gear ‘optional’, which is a huge positive in my option.

The only thing I agree with in your post is the trade stuff. Guild Wars really sux in the equipment trade department, which is something I really hope they change in GW2.