From everything we've seen and read, combat in GW2 is
not a matter of "It's off CD, use it". Rather, the majority of the abilities have very specific mechanics or utilities built into them that are better used at opportune moments. For example, I can't see anyone realistically spamming the Guardian's wall skills just because they're off CD. Even the most damage-oriented profession (Thief) has skills that you wouldn't want to just mash because they're available.
If you're spamming abilities like "Hamstring" on a warrior (15 sec CD, causes 9 seconds of crippled condition) whenever they come up, you're missing the point. You want to inflict that condition when it benefits you, not just whenever the CD is up, because the effect is shorter than the recharge rate, making it impossible to keep that condition up at all times. Likewise, if you're using skills that knock enemies backwards, you could be knocking them
out of AOEs established by other players (we've seen videos of players doing that repeatedly and it makes them look like morons).
The "1 Spam" is an issue we've known about for a while. It can be set to auto-attack on-the-fly (it was as simple as right-clicking the icon) and will automatically execute chain attacks (for example, the Warrior's sword combo "Sever Artery > Gash > Final Thrust"). I'm not sure if it's been removed, but you had the ability to assign
any skill to auto-attack, not just the first. That may have changed as I can't find a more recent source for it (and I can't think of many instances where you'd want to).
I also seem to recall there being some talk of assigning the first attack to a mouse button, so instead of spamming "1", you'd be clicking to attack more like an action game. I can't find a source for this though, so some of you guys with more photographic memories (.... Jira...) can probably correct me.
We've known for a while now that the GW2 Dev team has been trying to move away from 'hit buttons' to more dynamic elements like movement and positioning. Hell, we've known that since April of 2010;
Eric Flannum said:
One of our priorities in developing Guild Wars 2 has been to make the simple act of moving around and interacting with the world an enjoyable experience for our players. We often refer to this as introducing "joy of movement" into the game. This means being able to jump and swim freely, but it also translates directly into combat.
To reinforce the importance of movement in the game, we want your character's position in combat to really matter. You'll see a lot of attacks in Guild Wars 2 that encourage and reward tactical player movement and positioning. (
Source)
You can't be paying full attention to your positioning, where other players are at, enemy telegraphs, environmental hazards, etc. if you're staring at icon timers spin around. That's one of the reasons the first 5 slots are determined by your weapons; you can learn what butttons do what and how long their cooldowns are because they're static. The first five attacks on the Greatsword you find at level 1 are the same five attacks on the Greatsword you use at 80. I would guess that the goal of such an approach is that players learn instinctively what buttons do what and how long their cooldowns are.
The best players will likely be the ones who know what option to use in the right place at the right time. How many videos have we seen where the end result of spamming is death? I've lost count.
If you ask me, "MMO-vets" are the opinions we should be
most critical of, as they represent years of the entrenched thinking that ANet is clearly trying to break away from. I'm not saying some random guys on Reddit are wrong, but that their opinion does not represent objective facts. It's a couple guys sharing their opinion (breaking NDA too, I might add), an opinion which veers into uncomfortably wrong I might add (they say Dodging is useless which we've seen repeatedly to be quite incorrect).
There's also the potential that this is just some guy making shit up, of course. It's not like we haven't had a ton of misinformation disseminated by fans of other MMOs already, even in this very thread. Grain of salt and all that.
