Originally Posted by
Lucky_
First of all, nothing of my previous post has been properly addressed so far. We see mostly "herp derp, everyone is ranged". Which means that everyone will be forced to play ranged, regardless of class, for a large amount of time, as well as massively hamstring melee gameplay for those who like it. This also in no way addresses the classic reason why GW1 axed mob kiting: the situation where mob (or in many cases multiple mobs at once) break off and run for nearest pile of more mobs to call for help. It caused a lot of wipes, and when you are playing for a while, deep into the level and just get wiped because you miss one runner, and this happens a lot, you will get pissed at the game. It's just a bad design to have a frustrating element like this.
Specifically, it's fun for a first few times. Annoying but tolerable for a while after. And after a while, it just starts to piss people off royally.
Please note: this is not some hypothetical bullshit. This is what actually happened to the company making this game, and they took note and mostly nerfed/removed this mechanic from the game back then.
This was actually done by making a very clear distinction between PvP and PvE for melee: in PvE, you were mostly unmolested and allowed to do damage. In PvP you spent majority of time blinded (90% miss chance with all attacks) or shut down in other ways. In fact, most of the balanced build GvG games were a war between a two pairs of blindbot elementalist blinding warriors, mesmer on warrior's side trying to divert blinding flash (surge). Other pair was monk/midliner drawing/removing conditions from warrior and mesmer on opponents side trying to divert his draw/remove conditions skill.
Note how warrior was in no way part in this metamatch. That's how warrior played in GW1 - you were basically a melee pusher tank carried by your condition remover. Without him, you were worthless. This was one of the most frustrating aspects of playing a physical damage class in GW1 in organised PvP, and why most of the balanced vs balanced games with 2 good guilds you wouldn't see a single kill until victory or death on either side in spite of both trying to spike every 20-30 seconds.
For the record, the PvE mobs with blinding skills like blinding flash were regarded as some of the most annoying in the game by players at large, especially when backed by mobs with heals. They had computer reflexes when it came to spamming flash the moment blind was removed, and generally took ages to kill with physical attacks. It wasn't HARD - it was just time consuming. And of course there was always "blind and run into next pile of mobs" moment to really piss the player already getting pissed by seeing "miss miss" above his head from blindness.
To generalise: PvE was fairly (shutdown)condition-free environment, and PvP generally a condition-heavy environment, people didn't bring a lot of condition removal skills along (remember, 8 skill limit per character). For a basic sword warrior for example, you're have a res signet (1), a damage stance (2), a run speed stance (3), attack skills (4,5,6,7) and self heal skill (8). There isn't much room there without sacrificing either damage or utility in a major way. This was similar for most other character classes as well.
All in all, it was a really, really shitty mechanic and it was scrapped because of it. While it's possible that arenanet folks have either forgotten this experience, or have something else in store for us that they haven't shown to negate it, having mobs kite players will very likely end up feeling like stepping on that same old annoying rake yet again for veteran players. Not a hard mechanic, just one that causes a lot of annoying and meaningless wipes.