14 DAY TRIAL // Guild Wars 2 will not base its combat mechanics on the traditional tanking, healing and damage-per-second combination that is present in most current massively multiplayer online role playing games. According to Jon Peters, one of the game's designers, his team's intention is to really change some of the familiar MMO tropes and focus the game on the fun.
One of his blog posts on the Guild Wars 2 official site states that death will be treated very differently by the title's developers. “Rather than being presented with immediate failure, when a player loses all of their health in Guild Wars 2, they are put into ‘downed mode,’” writes Peters. “In this mode, the player has a number of downed skills they can use to target enemies and fight for a chance to survive. A downed player can still be attacked, which will send them into a defeated state, leaving them to either wait for an ally to resurrect them or to resurrect at a waypoint.”
The downed skills are abilities that can support the party or even defeat the enemy in solo play. When an enemy is killed from a downed state, the player rallies instantly, without any need for reviving. Furthermore, every type of character, regardless of level or profession, can revive a downed or defeated ally at any point. Players can also choose to get back in the game at a previous waypoint they discovered in the world, by paying a small sum of gold.
In addition to all this, Guild Wars 2 will not have dedicated healers. Support will be handled differently, with various skills or cross-profession combinations of abilities allowing for more flexibility. Also, this removes the long waits that incomplete parties of players must endure for a specific character class that plagues most MMOs even to this date. The approach to tanking also changes a lot, being replaced by the control skills available, again, to most of the classes in the game.
Damage will also be reliant in cross-profession combos, allowing players to string together the effects of some of their abilities at a time. One example is firing a bow through a wizard's wall of fire, setting the arrows on fire and increasing the damage they deal. Guild Wars 2 will be released sometime at the beginning of 2011 exclusively for the PC.