Re: Guild Wars
I have the original Guildwars plus the Nightfall expansion. I have never played WoW.
Things I like about GW.
No monthly fee.
Doesn't feel like a grind. Like someone else said you hit the level 20 cap fairly quick. After that, it is all about skills. Also, you don't have to be online for 4-5 hours to feel like you've accomplished something, you can get stuff done to progress thru the game with just an hour or two a day.
Each prof has about 100 or so skills. You also have a secondary prof with 100 or so skills.
Each prof has 4 attributes, 1 of these is a primary attribute and can only be used if your character has that prof as his main profession, not secondary.
The catch is you can only take 8 skills with you at once. So it is all about finding skills that really work well together. A lot of the fun is discovering new builds and new ways skills interact.
Everything starts in towns. Where you form a party, either all human controlled, all AI controlled, or a mix. There may be 100 or more human players in each town. Once you form a party, you leave town to the explorable areas. In explorable areas, it is only your party and enemies as well NPC characters. SO you dont see random people running all over. It gives the game more of a feeling that you are actually doing something to progress the storyline.
Each chapter of guild wars has a definate storyline, that you follow, but you can still explore all around the world.
The ability to use AI controlled players is nice, suppose your in some remote town and the right class isn't available to team up with you, you can have the AI take the roll. Also, for some AI characters, you can set their skill bars to really compliment yours to get some combinations you may not have with strictly human players.
Another benefit of AI players is the game can be as multiplayer as you want.
As with any MMORG, there is farming if you want, super high end areas that are very difficult, etc.
PVP
I don't PVP much, I prefer PVE. there is no PVP in the PVE area, so you dont have random people attacking you. Instead there are PVP arenas.
Again, I think the no monthly fee is pretty huge. If you don't feel like playing for a while, you don't feel obligated to play.
Like WoW, there are guilds you can join. Some focus on PVE, some PVP, some both. The guild system is pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
Check out guildwarsguru.com or guildwiki.org for more info.
Send me a PM on twoplustwo if you need some help in game to get started.
Edit to add example of attribute system:
Say your class is a monk.
monk has 4 attributes. divine favor (boosts other attributes), healing, protection, smiting. You have enough points at lvl 20 to max out 2 of these, and raise another 1 or 2 levels.
so even in the monk class, you have decisions on what kind of monk to make. A healing monk boosted with divine favor, a protection monk boosted with divine favor, a healing & protection monk, etc. Then you have to pick which skills fit best. So a lot of thought goes into it from a tactical standpoint. (This may be same as WoW, but like I said, I've never played it.)
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