So I decided that even though I’m probably resubscribing to WoW when Cataclysm comes out, barring any new evil from the RealID system, I remain uninterested in endgame, and realized we really don’t have anything to DO in WoW right now that we haven’t already done three times. So I’m leaving my account disabled until Cataclysm, the loss of my subscription a kind of punishment for the shit Blizzard tried to pull on us all last week.

And it’s sad, but that event broke my tie to Blizzard, and I honestly don’t see myself playing Cataclysm much longer than it takes to explore the new redesigned leveling content. I really have no interest or intention in raiding against Deathwing, despite Blizzard finally giving me the freedom to do so in a 10-man without being a second-class player.

Until then, my fiance and I needed a new game to play together in the nights after I get home from work. We were talking about all the awesome upcoming MMOs that aren’t coming out until next year, and when we were talking about how awesome Guild Wars 2 was looking, he remembered that he used to play Guild Wars, back before I got my new powerbook 5 years ago and convinced him to come play WoW with me. Literally the only reason why he came to play WoW with me rather than me going to play Guild Wars with him was because I was a mac gamer at the time, and WoW was the only MMO that would run on a mac.

So rather than recover his account from all the draconian security measures NCSoft has implemented in the past 5 years, we both bought the Guild Wars trilogy, main game plus two expansions for only $40 (when the main game alone costs $20 and each expansion costs $30 if purchased individually), free to play after that point with no subscription cost ever. If I get bored with it next week, I can come back 3 years from now and log on again.

And I have to say, my mental image of Guild Wars was rather like Everquest 2: it was pre-WoW, and not as successful, so it had to be inferior. But from what I’ve seen (up to level 4 so far) this game has amazingly gorgeous graphics, and has a lot of UI conveniences that I would have to install mods for in WoW, or things that I could never do in WoW. Being able to turn off display of my helm, or choose to display it only when I’m in town? The accuracy of my spells having a lot to do with my distance and relative elevation from the target? If there’s a hill between me and my target, my fireball will run into the hill instead of just flying right through it? Now that’s crazy talk.

The party system IS a little annoying, I admit. It’s partly because my fiance’s antivirus would disconnect him from the game every time he loaded into a new zone, and whenever he logged back on, he’d be in the nearest city instead of simply loading back into the zone I was in. It isn’t possible to join someone’s party unless they’re in the same instance of the same city that you are, and it isn’t possible to fast travel when in a group, so whenever that happened, I’d have to teleport back to the city, make sure we were both in the same instance, invite him to my party again, and then we’d both have to walk from there to our quest location a second time.

I love how there are quests that want me to pick up a heavy object and carry it somewhere, and this object does not go into my bag, and actually slows down my movement speed and prevents me from attacking as long as my hands are occupied. And how when we’re partied, only one of us actually has to pick up the quest item that the NPC wants us to recover — because there’s only one of them! “Find my missing flute” she says. In WoW, one person would pick up the flute, and then the other person would wait for it to respawn, and then pick up their copy of it. In Guild Wars, because each area is instanced just for your party, you can have one person carry the quest item back to the NPC and then you all get credit for it. My eyes open wide and I say “ooooh, so realistic!”

There isn’t a crafting system, and there isn’t an auction house. I find this to be freeing more than anything else. You don’t feel like you’re required to level up a crafting skill just because it’s there. Without crafting, there’s very little you’d actually want to purchase from other players, so there’s no need for an auction house. Thinking back on it, I feel that Champions Online would have probably been a stronger game if it HADN’T had an auction house. That game did have crafting, but I found enough stuff to level it myself from quests and drops, so there was no reason to want to buy anything from other players. But you know, WoW has an auction house, our game needs to have one too!

I especially love the class mechanics. Being able to have a main class and a sub-class, and have TONS of skills for each one is great. I like that I’m only allowed to have 8 skills at a time, and I can rearrange them to whatever I want for free whenever I’m in a town. The game is balanced around me NOT having access to the dozens of niche skills my class can learn at the same time, while making the mere act of choosing which skills I want to bring with me be an interesting decision. I love how my main class has one attribute that is more open-ended to benefit whatever my subclass is as well, such as the elementalist’s larger mana pool.

I played an Elementalist (mage) for a bit when I was checking out the game, but I eventually got bored of the fireball spam and settled on a Necromancer/Monk, or Necromonk as I like to call her. Largely because the dances are class-specific and the only female dance I actually liked was the Necromancer’s Thriller dance, and also I like having the option of being a healer. With 10 total classes, each main/sub class combination is like a class of its own, some with multiple builds of skills and attributes you can switch out. There are 90 different combinations, almost all of them viable and specialized for certain things. Some combinations are great for PvP, but suck at PvE. Some of them are great for solo grinding, but terrible in groups. Hell, you can make a combination whose only purpose is being a mana battery.

This whole game feels really quite innovative, and then I remember that it’s been out longer than WoW has. And that I’ll never have to feel guilty any more, like I do in WoW, where I feel like I’m wasting my subscription if I’m not playing — there’s no hassle of trying to decide if I want to play next week and canceling my account if I don’t, and then going to the trouble to resubscribe when I do feel like playing. It’s always there. If there’s a stretch of time when I don’t really feel like playing, or if I’m working so much overtime that I don’t have time, I can just… not play.

WoW’s answer to people not wanting to play through the leveling content every time they want to make a new alt is to simply make that leveling content more fun. Guild Wars’ answer is to simply let you skip that content if you want. With all the different combinations and only 8 character slots, I don’t blame them. I can see myself deleting and creating new level 20 alts all over the place just to mess around with different combos.

A lot of people don’t like the free-to-play model, saying that it encourages the developers to make the game less fun if you’re not buying things from the cash shop. Well I say the subscription model has a similar problem — it convinces the devs to draw out every bit of content as long as possible, make you do the same daily quest every day for two weeks to get a single piece of gear, so that you’ll keep subscribing. I still haven’t figured out ArenaNet’s deal. How do they make so much money? They don’t have a cash shop, they’re staying afloat by sheer box sales alone. That just… makes them want to make the game as fun as possible, so that people will tell their friends about it and buy more boxes? I haven’t heard anything about people having multiple accounts… I’m still not sure what the downside is here.

I ask my fiance why he stopped playing Guild Wars to play WoW with me, and he says “because I love you.” And that’s the most important thing, really.

I think I’m more excited about Guild Wars 2 than Cataclysm now. Especially since their touted “complete talent revamp” has me saying “meh, that’s the same talent we have now, boring” over and over — and my pally partner is extremely upset that the thing he gets at level 10 is the shield throw ability, and his Ardent Defender is now an active ability that can only be used below 35% health. Thanks for unveiling those, Blizzard. My interest in your expansion is less and less with every passing day.