where did you hear that GW2 is free?
:hmm:
and if you think the skill sets and classes are the same--I'e, tank/dps/heals--then you either did not play GW2, or played it very poorly, as this does not exist (unlike every other MMO out there). There is little actual casting, as skills can be activated on the fly, and they must be.
and correct me if I'm wrong, but DAoC is more like ~4 or 5 years old, not 10+
And sincerely, originality isn't in itself the end of all things.
Stuff can be original and bad or badly executed.
MMORPGs have quests, Shoots have you aiming guns and shoot at people, RTS have you controlling units (and most building them first), flight sims have people piloting planes, etc.
Still that doesn't make all shooters the same game or the flight sims all good or all bad.
Guild Wars 2 main original points are more related to no player fighting for resources in pve that allows easy teaming, a departure from the established trinity combat, how their servers work, down leveling, cutting big parcels of the grind (that they already done in GW1 as well).
Other stuff are evolutions from previously seen systems, but Anet is working on GW2 since 2007 and they were already toying with dynamic events then, to the point someone found the "centaur attacking the fort and conquering it" scenario on the original GW dat file.
Had Anet done like so many other studios and released a WoW clone with a single departure like dynamic events as it sell point, instead of all the changes, maybe they would have been released before games like Rift, Warhammer online or SWTOR.
It still is a fantasy MMORPG though.