Leaning heavily towards a noble human warrior, at this moment in time:
> Warrior because I've been dabbling in a lot of other MMOs to fill time (my HoM is complete), and when I play solo in them to 2 qualities I enjoy most are melee & toughness...
>> Melee because lots of monsters tend to rush you, and I don't much enjoy snaring (never liked snares for some reason) and/or retreating in combat.
>> Heavy armor because of aforementioned melee fighting, where I don't usually enjoy classes who have to use stealth mechanics or use an unchanging 'uber melee DPS combo!" over & over.
... And while I greatly look forward to playing GW2 socially, I will 100% definitely want to explore every distant nook & cranny too. ^_^
> Humans because they have the best looking guys so far, and I'm shallow like that.
I do like their lore too of course, but looks are their ace in the hole.
> Noble because at the convention their personal story featured a flirty scoundrel - see earlier comment re: shallow. ^_^
I could definitely be swayed by the 2nd soldier profession though, or an adventurer/scholar with static minions ala the GW1 ritualist; I adore necromancers, but experience in pretty much all games (including GW1) shows that it's not wise to rely on pets that trail after you to tank for you when playing solo.
Not ruling out the sylvari or norn, but realistically they are unlikely to challenge humans unless the sylvari have males who look rather more like those in the art book or the norn have males with wildly slimmer frames available in character creation.
Re: WoW-syndrome
I can't say it will bother me at all if launch day brings an avalanche of human soldiers (which I suspect is quite likely), as I start my main characters picturing them 5 years from now!
Edited, Dec 12th 2010 7:26pm by Vulturion