Tactics do matter more, and that's something I like about GW, but I'm disappointed that what they said about the "level treadmill" being eliminated turned out to be rubbish. It still feels like a treadmill. Less so than other MM games (if you even consider it to be the same type of game), but it does.
I agree, Garoad. I was sorely disappointed as well. The only difference I can see in the way GW does experience vs. other RPG's is that in GW, killing monsters gives you a lot less experience than quests do, whereas in other games it's about equal. That doesn't "eliminate the treadmill" at all. It just shifts its gears. It forces you to either spend a LOT more time killing things or else to constantly seek out new quests. Obviously the latter is what they had in mind, but the average quest takes so long anyway, you might as well just enter & exit the North Gate all day long and kill that first group of big scorpion thingies a million bazillion times until you turn green.
Speaking of entering & exiting town, the most annoying aspect of the game for me is that reset button that gets pressed every time you cross a border. They really dropped the ball on that. Instead of monsters respawning naturally after a certain amount of time, they only respawn if and when you enter and exit a region. That's rediculous. With GW's setup of each party having its own instance of the game, it would be easy as pie to make sure that things feel realistic by having monsters spawn randomly instead of being in the same place every time, and then once you kill them, have them stay gone until such time as it would "feel" right to encounter them again. But instead, you end up fighting your way half way across the world to get to that one town that has that one guy that makes that one special magic potion that some sick little kid needs so his daddy can give you your precious 300 measily experience points, only to have to fight the exact same monsters all over again in reverse order the whole way back. I'm really suprised that former Blizzard employees could be so clueless about making sure a game envokes a sense of accomplishment.
The game's only real saving grace as far as I'm concerned is the fact that it's free to play. Since I'm not terribly fond of it, I can just fire it up once in a while and not have to waste money every month whether I play or not. For that reason alone, I hope the GW's flaws (of which there are many) are not enough of a turn-off for most people to stop the game from doing well commercially. There's a lot riding on this. Eyes from all over the industry are watching this thing. If it's a hit, we'll likely see a great many more free MMORPG's. If it flops, we probably won't see another one for a long, long time.
What really erks me though is that I paid the extra $30 for the collector's edition because I figured, "Oh, what the hell, it comes with a headset, and I don't have a headset. Headsets tend to cost around $30 anyway, and I get a nice art book to boot." Well, the "high quality noise cancelling headset" is absolute garbage. It barely fits an adult size head, and it's not USB. It's ancient technology that in the year 2005 still has a mic plug and a headphone plug on it, both of which are only about 3 inches from the Y splitter thingy in the cord. That's all well & good if your headphone jack is in the back, right next to your mic jack, but what about the millions of people in the world like me who have a Dell? You see, Dell's headphone jacks are in the front, and I doubt they're the only ones who do it this way. So, I either have to cut this sucker so I can seperate the 2 plugs to reach around the computer, or I have to buy an extension cord. I'm starting to wonder if "high quality noise cancelling" was a play at semantics. Of course it's noise cancelling if you can't plug it in to hear it.
On a positive note, I was so pleased to see the Mesmer as a character class. I don't know if it's coincidence or not, but I proposed an almost identical character on the DiabloII.net forums four or five years ago in a discussion about what new characters we'd like to see in the then upcoming expansion pack, which was to feature two new as yet undisclosed characters. My version was called "Illusionist," not "Mesmer," and some of the powers were a little different, but overall it's almost exactly the same. I remember it got quite a favorible response, more so than most. So let's see, GW is made by former Diablo people, I pitched a character idea on Diablo forums, GW has an almost identical character. Coincidence? I guess we'll never know. All I can say is mine would have looked better, more like Mysterio meets The Phantasm than GW's theater magician/Liberace hybrid.
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Can't wait to meet you in game!