WoW PvP vs GW2 PvP

An interesting post from Sylvari Specialist



1.) No adaptation: In WoW, every single spec is well known with miniscule diversity. 3 specs per class, and only a handful of them actually work for PvP. You don't have to adapt to what players are doing, play long enough and you'll understand everything with no unpredictability except for player skill - which, for me, is still entirely predictable. With GW2, there are a million different builds and specs, making it impossible to know exactly how someone is going to play. Sure, there will be popular builds, but from what I've seen It looks like alot of builds will be viable. Plus there's the factor of swapping out different weapons, which makes for a whole new dimension of unpredictability. You'll have to adapt quickly to each persons build and figure out a way to take them down.

2.) No Healers: Everyone has their own opinion of healers - I personally despise them. Worst thing to happen to gaming. In GW2, every bit of damage done is important, and every single way you can avoid damage is crucial! You don't have a healer behind you with infinite resource keeping you full on health so you don't have to be defensive. Players tend to get lazy with healers at their backs. The danger of death is right around the corner, what will you do to avoid it? You have to be smart, and you have to play your conditions and abilities correctly.

3.) Lack of Stunlocks: In WoW, it wasn't about adapting to situation to situation with different debuffs and buffs, you just wait for all your cooldowns to be down at a certain point, and then LOCK someone down until they die. If they trinket out of your bursty combo, you would simply wait for all your CC's to be available again. This is especially true for matches with healers. No huge stunlocks in GW2 means you can't use your failsafe stunlock to destroy somebody. There's imobilizes, there's stuns, but none of them (in my experience) that last incredible amounts of time that make you a sitting duck to be destroyed.

4.) The Focus on Conditions/Boons: In GW2, everything about is about reacting to certain conditions and boons - especially necromancer! It's not about just smashing 1, 2, and 3 over and over until someone dies, it's about using your cooldowns effectively when your target is at their weakest state - or their strongest! You need to hit them hard when they have vunerability, or poison them when they're low on health, or immobilize them if they've got swiftness! The possibilities and combinations are infinite.

5.) Dodging: This is self-explanatory. It adds a whole new level of depth to the combat, and since it's shared between every single class it makes the PvP more balanced.

6.) Ability Aiming: This is where a ton of skill comes in. What with WoW, you just spam - oh saaay - Mortal Strike over and over and over while you're running toward your enemy, and it won't go off until you're close enough to them. There's no risk of accidentally waisting a precious ability. I can't tell you how much it turned the battle when I messed up a big ability by aiming it incorrectly, or using it when out of range. That just doesn't happen in WoW, the only thing you have to aim is ground targetted spells.

7.) Lack of Global Cooldowns: For me this is huge. I have a natural ability to think very quickly and react accordingly, but global cooldowns slow me down to no end. I've died far too often in WoW from global cooldowns restricting me. Now for a game like WoW, it's obviously needed or else a Warrior could smack down all of his abilities in 1 go around, but for GW2 just about everything has a cast time, negating the global cooldown. As long as my brain can think it, I can hit whatever button I want when I want. Having a gobal cooldown is just much worse than having a cast time on most abilities - that's how I see it.