Guild Wars 2 Previews
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The Necromancer, like many of the professions in Guild Wars 2, can approach battle in a number of ways. Not only can she fight with melee weapons but she can also dispense sinister spells from afar. These attacks cause traditional damage and also inflict numerous conditions on enemies, including "bleeding" which rips away at health and "cripple" which slows aggressors down.
These status-inducing attacks fling from the Necromancer so readily her enemies rarely have a chance to breathe. Only when confronted with multiple attackers at once does the Necromancer face danger. Which is why she summons worms and wraiths from the underworld to assist her in battle.
From the beginning the Necromancer's default healing ability comes in the form of a summoned "Blood Fiend," which saps enemy health and feeds it into the Necromancer. Once this skill activates, it's replaced by another skill that allows her to sacrifice the Blood Fiend for a boost in health. After gaining experience, the Necromancer has access to other minions, including a pair of smaller, faster creatures and a ranged flesh worm.
And the second coming from PC Gamer and focused on the game's dungeons:
Because player progression isn't tied to specific loot drops, Guild Wars 2 can encourage playstyles that would be considered exploits in other MMOs. This gives players much more freedom to experiment, and with that freedom comes a greater sense of improvisation and teamwork. It can feel very chaotic, but the penalty for death is low enough that it's easy to recover from mistakes quickly. Players who enjoy meticulously planning their pulls will be disappointed at least on the lower difficulties but the pace of the action and feeling of freedom is, to my mind, worth the tradeoff.
Creating room for both disaster and valour is one thing: keeping players going back to the same dungeons once they've figured them out is another. ArenaNet's answer, as ever, is to add more variability to the mix. Every dungeon also includes random events, similar to the open world. During a run, it's possible that a wall will collapse revealing an angry troll, or burrowing monsters will break through to the surface and need to be beaten back. These encounters are designed to keep players on their toes: having a plan is great, but you also need to be ready to fight a boss at any time.
(We're going for a sense of exploration) explains game designer Colin Johanson. (You don't repeat the pattern to defeat it over and over again. The moment when traditional MMOs get a lot of fun is when a couple of people in your party die that you didn't expect to die, or when something goes wrong. That's when the game gets exciting that's when you have to think and react. I think those are the best moments in games, when you're reacting to things you didn't expect, or when you have to change on the fly.)
