Guild Wars: Factions…. meh
I’ve played the Guild Wars: Factions PvP preview, and I am not particularly impressed. The new ‘glass’ interface is very nice indeed, but that’s available in the original campaign anyway. The new classes are distinctly underwhelming.
When we heard ‘Assassin’ and ‘Dual Wield’ many people were no doubt hoping for a Diablo 2 Barbarian-type character holding a large sword in each hand, instead what we get is a rather crappy subset of the Warrior – instead of Adrenaline, skills rely on Energy and being used in the correct order. Don’t expect to be a major threat to anything sturdier than a Monk primary!
The Ritualist is just a rehash of the Necromancer’s Blood magic (hell, they didn’t even change the skill icon colours!) – made even worse by the fact that many skills have to be performed within a certain radius of a Spirit (you can create those too – although there’s a reason you will ever see a Ranger using them, namely they suck) to be any good.
I’ll probably still buy Factions, since the new areas will be fun to explore and hopefully there’ll be some new skills for the existing classes, but as for ArenaNet’s claim (at the time of the original Guild Wars release) that each addon would be, like Guild Wars itself, ‘comparable to any other top-tier game’, BS! I mean, they recycled the old Guild Wars music for crying out loud – it’s not just the recycled White Mantle uniforms that’ll make the Battle Isle seem familiar.
Guild Wars was so popular because it was original, fun to play, and wasn’t done lazily like so many other games. Guild Wars: Factions has none of these attributes.
February 10th, 2006 at 11:25 am
lol…its far better than u make it out 2 be!
the assassin have amazingly cool skills and the combos rock!
i dont c wot u got against it!
amazing all! well worth the buy even if u dont have the first guild wars!
February 10th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
Yeah, the combos are good, but they are really no different from the combos a Warrior has - for example, Gash is pretty rubbish unless you use Sever Artery beforehand.
I still think it’s worth buying - but I think you have to have the original Guild Wars to buy it (it’s an expansion campaign rather than a separate game) - I could be wrong on this though.
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:22 pm
The assassin sounds just like the rogue from WoW, and in the rogues case it can appear a weak character unless it is used properly where upon it can be really fun to play or just be a waste of time that you should have put into another character. If this is what your assassin is like then you should just persevere with it and try and get used to it, or ignore it and say each to his own.
If not then it didnt take very long to read this piece of uselessness so it can be forgotten just as quickly.
March 3rd, 2006 at 8:49 pm
The Assassin is (bearing in mind that NCSoft is most of the Diablo 2 team) most similar to Diablo 2’s Assassin, if that makes it any clearer. Not having played WoW, I don’t know how similar it is to the Rogue, but it certainly appears that the time taken to learn the mechanics and timing of the combos (which unlike, say, energy management as a primary monk, is not a ‘transferable skill’ that will help you with other characters) is execessive compared to the time required to learn the other classes. Even the Channeler doesn’t seem too much of a departure from the MECHANICS of the original Guild Wars - think a mix of Ranger Spirits, Necro minions and Well of Power.
Incidentally, I’ve found out (thanks GuildWiki) that Factions will actually be a standalone game - you don’t have to own the original Guild Wars to buy and play it (but if you already have a Guild Wars account you can link Factions to it)