How The Old Republic can compete and beat Guild Wars 2

But looking from videos of Diablo 3 it looks stale, dumbed down, slow and boring. I have to say GW2 looks better.

It's a gameplay decision. Similar to an fps game's loadout or customising your deck in a card game, it's to impose a limit on what abilities you can use at once. How good you are doesn't rely on how many skills you have, but how you combine them.

Eh, yeah, the Diablo series isn't really known for it's amazing combat.

And learning how to combine 5 abilities does not take a long time. Learning how to combine 30 abilities takes longer but it also makes you as a player MUCH better than other people trying to do the same thing.
With a GCD based game there is a limit how good you can get with a very limited set of abilities unlike games like Starcraft 2 where the gameplay is simple but the skill level high because of actions per minute.

Lets face it, classes with few abilities for the hardcore gamer tends to get boring pretty fast. I like having lots of abilities to test and try out. I like forming my own playstyle. With 5 abilities that is never going to happen because you and everyone around you is going to learn spell rotations pretty fast. It also means you will be able to setup macros on your keyboard that executes a series of spells to maximize your dps or tanking potential.

No but when you for the first time ventured down the church and got a big fat dude named butcher after you it got exciting!

Or it's so you can tactically use a certain weapon, which in turn gives you different moves. Unlike hotkey MMOs where you're giving a very large amount of hotkey slots, which just floods your screen with a lot of abilities which you'll never really use. Having a crap tonne of abilities isn't always a good thing.

And learning how to combine 5 abilities does not take a long time. Learning how to combine 30 abilities takes longer but it also makes you as a player MUCH better than other people trying to do the same thing.
With a GCD based game there is a limit how good you can get with a very limited set of abilities unlike games like Starcraft 2 where the gameplay is simple but the skill level high because of actions per minute.

Lets face it, classes with few abilities for the hardcore gamer tends to get boring pretty fast. I like having lots of abilities to test and try out. I like forming my own playstyle. With 5 abilities that is never going to happen because you and everyone around you is going to learn spell rotations pretty fast. It also means you will be able to setup macros on your keyboard that executes a series of spells to maximize your dps or tanking potential.

And that's the type of game Guild Wars 2 is going to be in, skill based. Where you will choose your "loadout" and fight, you're not going to beat people purely because you can press all these skills, it's about dodging the right attacks, using your energy bar wisely and confirming hits on your target. Guild Wars 2 will not be a hotkey MMO, it will be a skill based action MMORPG.

Just like in the video you have no idea how the game interacts with the player. Break it down into parts and you will see you are playing a hotkey MMO.

And the thing you call skillbased with spell rotations we already have that in PVE raiding in WoW.