Guild Wars 2 Review as it Happens
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Here's an excerpt on combat:
Combat in the human tutorial feels fast and punchy, even if I'm just whacking centaurs. This area is well-paced, particularly the way it bottlenecks new players around the bridge during the defense sequence. As more new players show up, the centaur waves grow it feels dramatic, and that's important in someone's first thirty minutes.
I won't spoil it, but the human tutorial boss is brilliantly staged. This is (or could be) raid-level stuff, and it's a great big advertisement for the rest of the game. (YOU ARE GOING TO GET TO FIGHT LOTS OF RIDICULOUS MONSTERS), it cries. It's on the rest of the game to live up to it.
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I've played a lot of GW2 already over the course of several press and beta events, but there are still aspects of the combat system that are just now starting to click. One of my shield abilities allows me to hunker down and shrug off hits for three seconds, but it's channeled and locks out all of my other abilities as well as movement. Initially I thought that this was designed to keep you alive while your healing skills cool down, but having played with it it's more of an active block: you use it to avoid major incoming attacks without dodge-rolling and getting out of position. I'd been thinking of it solely in terms of numbers the amount mitigated, when I can use it, etc rather than twitch skill.
I'm starting to see where the depth is, and how pro players will set themselves apart but I'm not totally convinced yet that the game does enough to explain this. There's a new tutorial button, and helpful pop-up tooltips appear every time you encounter a new feature but at the moment it feels like it'll be down to the community to say (hey, you should be dodging more) or (this is how you get the best use out of those abilities.) MMO communities have been great at this in the past, but it'd be a shame if people miss out on the best bits of the combat system simply because they don't ask for help.
