Game Mechanics
GW2 has the same controls as your standard MMORPG, so you can jump in and go right away. But, instead of having a set of abilities for all your weapons, each weapon has its own set of abilities that cannot be changed. This can either be a good or a bad thing. It’s good in that it simplifies the whole battle system to which weapons you decide to equip; however it takes away a little from the customization as you can’t move around your main weapon abilities.
Later on, you can unlock the ability to switch between 2 weapon sets with the switching ability requiring a cool-down if activated during battle. Utility skills, which can be bought with skill points, add a little more battle system customization into the game. You also get to spec your character with traits, which give you some pretty cool passive abilities like boosts in power for certain weapons, toughness, power, reduced cool downs for certain weapons etc. Traits, much like WoW’s talent trees, provide you more customization. You cannot change the number of points you’ve put into each trait line, unless you reset your talents at a trainer; however, unlike talent trees, once you’ve put enough points into a trait line, you can actually pick and switch out which traits you want to activate from that line.
Another very convenient feature is in terms of storage. Remember in other MMORPGs when you’re inventory would get filled up you’d have to go find a vendor and sort through all your crap and figure out what to sell? In GW2, you can go up to any vendor and click a button called “Sell Junk” that… well… automatically sells all your junk. This means, no more sifting through your inventory to figure out what you want to get rid of and no more accidentally selling something you need and buying it back at a higher price. But if you do accidentally sell something you want, in GW2 you can just buy it back at the same price. Your bank is also shared across all your characters (sorry, no more bank alts). Instead, you have a separate tab in your bank where you can store all your crafting mats (up to 250 of every type of mat in the game!), and a button in your inventory window that you can click to automatically deposit all crafting mats to this tab from wherever you are. This means leveling is easier since you don’t have to constantly try to find a vendor or bank to empty your bags and you have so much more space to hoard loot. Crafting is easier since you end up collecting so many mats and there’s less heartache when needing to sacrifice items to make room for more loot… overall, a very convenient feature.
