Yakubs wrote on Aug 23, 2012, 15:36:
I think people who claim the combat is a massive improvement over WoW and the like are high/delusional. It's very similar. You DO click on your target and use a skill rotation. Yeah, you can dodge around too but, sorry, that's not interesting. That's a twitch mechanic. Yes, there is no dedicated healer which can be good but it doesn't change the fact that you're playing a mini-game revolving around cooldown management where in many cases you spend more time staring at the interface than the game world.

The skill system is lame too. When I hit level 5 and saw that I was now able to pick from a list of 15 skills, I was happy. Then I read the description of each skill and facepalmed. Half of them are clearly useless except MAYBE in rare situations, the other half are simple variations of skills you already have. Every class has like 100 skills and they're all a variation of: Do X damage and/or apply Y status effect.

This ad-hoc party-based system is interesting in theory but in their execution it's kind of dumb. It's not so much an ad-hoc party system, rather it's an ad-hoc ARMY system. An event appears on the map and suddenly you're just a face in the crowd as 100 players all swarm a single giant enemy or a group of enemies and proceed to spam everything they've got.

If "apply Y status effect" skills aren't boring enough, they're even further devalued by the fact that you're debuffing an enemy along with 100 other people. The list of debuffs on each monster is so long you can't even see them all and you certainly have no earthly clue if you contributed anything at all to the fight, beyond the fact that you just spent 5 minutes pounding your keyboard and particle effects were emitted from your avatar.

PvP is standard fare for these games. The only "innovation" is that you're increased to max level and given top-level gear upon joining the fight. Which is terrible because any attachment you had to your character is now completely gone. Now you're just playing a multiplayer action game with classes, like Team Fortress 2 or something, not an MMORPG.