Lord Tirian said:
However, since I'm not that familiar with Guild Wars (only tested the first Guild Wars product, never the expansions), you anybody give a basic run-down, besides the primary/secondary class-system.
Or even better, could you (hong) explain what you mean by 4E and GW similarities? I'm curious!
I'm not hong, but I've noticed some interesting similarities.
The defender/striker thing, which I know a lot of people are worried will be similar to WoW's tank/DPS thing, makes me think of the warrior and assassin classes in Guild Wars. GW warriors are highly durable, generally the hardest characters to kill, and
also the premier damage-dealers of the game, except for the occasional times when you want a big area-of-effect attack. Their weaknesses are that they can be disabled via status effects (e.g., blindness) and debuffs if they move too far from the team's healer and get out of range of the curing spells, and that they have to be right up next to an enemy to hurt it. So warriors end up being a team's front line, but their ability to affect back-line enemies is somewhat limited - if they start charging the enemy's healer, everyone can see what they're trying, and they can be countered.
Now, the assassin class is also a melee-based damage dealer, but with much less durability. They're not much harder to kill than the spellcasters. And while they can deal "burst" damage on par with a warrior's, their ability to deal damage consistently over the course of a fight is much less. But, they have skills that let them teleport to a targeted enemy. If you're not careful, an assassin can cross the battlefield almost instantly and kill one of your armorless spellcasters very quickly.
My guess/hope is that the defender/striker dichotomy will be like that. D&D4 fighters (and other defender classes) will be as good as or better than rogues at dealing damage, but they'll pretty much have to fight whichever enemy comes to the front to fight them. They can't move past the enemy warriors to hit the evil wizard without eating some AoO's, or whatever mechanic 4e uses to discourage people from doing that sort of thing. Rogues won't deal
more damage than fighters, but they'll have abilities like tumbling through threatened areas that let them get to where their damage can do the most good.
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe D&D4 will feature fighters who stand around in their armor yelling insults at the monsters, causing them to ignore the rogue who's slicing them to pieces. But I think that's an unnecessarily pessimistic view. ^_^
Wait, I was going to talk about more similarities than just that one, wasn't I? Well, let's see. Warriors in GW play very differently depending on which weapon they use, while still filling more or less the same role on a team. Most abilities are somewhere between at-will and per-encounter, consuming a resource that you start each fight with a certain amount of and regain throughout the fight at a modest rate. There are support classes that have tactically interesting and highly active roles in combat. Spellcasters can use their wands and staves to zap enemies without spending any resources. Encounters (non-PVP ones) often use multiple types of enemies that work together in interesting ways. Many fights are set up with significant terrain features and things to do besides just hacking away at the enemy.
It's mainly the roles stuff that makes me think of Guild Wars; the rest is mostly superficial, I think. GW does a good job of having a variety of classes performing different but useful roles on a team, each interesting to play in its own way, without any one being strictly necessary. D&D could do worse than to take some ideas from that.
)
The more we mention it, the more we're getting spam for it....
