If you’ve signed up for the Guild Wars 2 beta, you should of gotten an email saying to head over to Facebook and “Like” them for a look at an exclusive never-seen-before beta footage! Get a quick glimpse of some awesome WvW Siege gameplay. We’ve snagged a few shots of the video in case you can’t view the video.
Warriors appear to be the jack of all trades in Guild Wars 2 utilizing the largest variety of weapons. While ArenaNet has said that the ‘holy trinity’ is dead in Guild Wars 2, warrior does offer skill sets for mitigating or avoiding damage just like a tank in any other game. With that said the majority of skills warriors have in their arsenal are damage focused offering few debuffs. With the ability to swap between two weapon sets a warrior should never be caught off guard.
There has been one constant in MMOs for the last eight years. There have been casual MMOs, raiding MMOs, MMOs in space and MMOs in the future but, through them all, the Holy Trinity has been a constant. The concept of the tank, the healer and the DPS has been ingrained in our heads over years of constant use. When we face a boss, be it with four of our friends or nineteen of them, it has almost always been with a tank leading the way, a healer healing him and DPS killing the boss. Sure, there have been a few exceptions, the Shade of Aran from Karazhan being a notable exception, but the exceptions have been few and far between. The Trinity has always been there.
ZAM published an interview with Jon Peters today where they discussed general game play and the eSports side of things in regards to Guild Wars 2. Here are a few snippets we found interest, but make sure you read the full interview by following this link.
ZAM: Given Guild Wars’ renown as a competitive PvP-focused game, will there be any plans to extend that competitiveness to PvE encounters? Something like leaderboards for completing elite events and dungeons the fastest?
Jon: We did do some stuff like this in Guild Wars: Factions so it is something we do enjoy. However, there are no current plans for this.
ZAM: Speaking of competitive team-based PvP, eSports has been making a big push into the public sphere, with more players turning to streams to generate consistent revenue while playing in tournaments for the prestige and bigger cash prizes. Do you have any major plans to support eSports gaming in Guild Wars 2 that you can share?
Jon: Absolutely. We consider it to be one of the primary goals of Guild Wars 2 competitive PvP to make it into an eSport. We plan to have daily tournaments, monthly tourneys and a yearly world championship. I can’t give out tons of details on these yet, but I just wanted you guys to know that we plan to have these things and support them.
Unlike most other classes in Guild Wars 2, elementalist does not get the ability to swap weapons during combat. Instead they must choose which of the four elemental energies to wield as their tools of destruction. This leads to a large selection of skills in their arsenal. Most of which can be used on the run as few require you to remain still.
Elementalist with water is one of the few classes that offers healing to their allies. Even though the holy trinity has been done away with in Guild Wars 2, healing roles may still be needed it seems. Other than the little healing water to offer, elementalist appears to be mostly focused on damage. Not much in the way of control or buffs can be found for most of the weapons.
Whether you need to off load your wares on the auction house, craft goods, or maybe just blow off steam in a drunken brawl you will find yourself in one of the many cities Tyria has to offer. Gamebreaker.tv contributor Mike B. gave us some of the highest quality semi-guided tours of the three cities available for the press event.
Usually we find that one city becomes the main hub and the rest accumulate dust as players neglect them only visiting when absolutely forced. In Guild Wars 2 each city will offer their own reason for visiting be it unique events or arena’s to do battle with your mini-pets. That is once you get over how alive and thriving they all seem to be.
In an effort to help those who might be confused with the trinity-free class system Arenanet has employed, we’ve created a easy reference guide to how weapons and roles (offensive, defensive, and support) breakdown. We have broken down, class by class, each weapon and assigned it a Defensive, Offensive, Healing and Support “theme” to them. While most healing weapons can be considered Support, we’ve split Healing and Support apart. Many of these weapons can be called something else because a lot of them do damage, support and other controlling effects. We assigned weapons certain categories based on an overall theme and not something hard coded into the class.
Many of these suggestions are mere interpretations; for example a Warrior with a Hammer is not a “tank”. The Hammer has many controlling abilities like knock downs, knock backs, cripples and weakens. We consider controlling type weapons as “Defensive”. The “Healing” label is not exactly a healer as you would expect in a DIKU-based MMO like Rift or TOR. The Guardian “Heal” weapon has some defensive and offensive characteristics that might label it as support, but we thought it was important to show which weapon sets allowed for ally healing.
NOTE: This chart only looks at weapon sets and not healing, utility or elite skills. A new chart will follow showing those skills separately. Source for this material can be found in the GW2Wiki which sources most of the recent February Beta Event.
Today, Jon Peters, Game Designer for Arenanet, published a new dev blog titled, “Play Your Way – Jon Peters on Traits and Attributes“. This fantastic blog details all the stats in the game and most importantly the Trait System. The trait system in Guild Wars 2 is exactly what the talent system is in WOW, Rift or TOR.
Elementalist
Each class gets five trait lines that augment a certain segment of a class’s abilities. For example, the elementalist is broken down into, if you can guess, Elements (as seen above). Water has healing capabilities while Fire does more damage. Each trait line has 30 points, it consists of 3 minor traits and 3 major traits. These do all sorts of different things that augment your character. If you want to dive deep into the Warrior Discipline tree, check out the dev blog.
Speccing out your character can determine your play style from offense to defense or support.
Originally posted by Colin Johanson (Source)
Just wanted to pop in and clarify a little bit:There are:
Renown Hearts (by Anthony Ordon on KillTenRats)
http://www.killtenrats.com/2012/01/20/gw2-just-play/
Meta-Events: (See halfway down by Devon Carver)
http://www.arena.net/blog/beta-development-update
Dynamic Events, Personal Story, Dungeons, etc.
You know that stuff!
In the beta weekend, there were generally 2 or more large meta dynamic event chains in each of the maps available. These meta event chains are made up of usually in the ballpark of 5-20+ events chaining and branching in various different directions. They stand out because even if no events are currently running, you’ll see unique UI for them that tells you the state of the world as a result of the events that occurred in the area.
Meta events generally have the largest amount of world impact of any event chains, making large sweeping changes to huge chunks of a map in the world. Dynamic events have varying impact from small (new merchant who sells stuff) to massive (explosions!!) depending on the scope and important of the event.
You’ll find the early part of the game tends to be a bit easier to help guide people into the game and not overwhelm them at first. There are optional much harder areas available in those maps for folks looking for larger challenges, and group events even in the starter maps as well designed to be a larger challenge. As you progress through the game, you’ll encounter more and more meta events, group events, and the difficulty ramps up. Along the way, you’ll encounter more events that have larger branches along their failure chains as well.
Also a bonus tip, after any dynamic event (or event chain) it’s always a good idea to follow the key NPC’s or investigate the area after the event has been completed. If you don’t run off, you’ll often times find they build new buildings, setup stores, build defenses, kick off new events (after some dialogue), repair broken things, build siege weapons, change the weather, have new spawns appear/change, and more as a result of dynamic events concluding.
The range of affect on each events varies on a case by case basis, if you get the rabbits out of the melon field the farmers daughter opens a store and sells watermelon and lucky rabbits feet. If you participate in the meta event chain to drive into centaur lands near Beetletun, you open up merchants who find centaur weapons and sell them, conquer centaur lands causing centaurs to stop spawning in the area, open up safe paths for caravans to travel to Beetletun and more!
It’s always good to look around after an event and see what happened, there is often more than on first glance you’d think.
Hope that helps a bit,
Colin
In a tweet today\ from the folks at Arenanet, we get a confirmation that the next beta event will be sometime in the end of March, just a month away.
With the help of Guild Wars 2 Guru’s community memeber carralpha, we now have a sliced up map of Guild Wars 2′s world map and where you should expect to go for each level range.
1-15: Zones adjacent to all major cities (there are 4 since Rata Sum and the Grove seem to share a zone for this)
15-25: Kessex Hills, west of Kessex Hills, west of Wayfarer Foothills and north of Plains of Ashford
25-35: Gendarran Fields
30-40: South of Blazeridge Steppes (this doesn’t seem right position-wise but that’s what I seem to see), Timberline Falls
35-45: Valley Headland
40-50: East of Timberline Falls, Blazeridge Steppes
50-60: NW of Blazeridge Steppes, south of Timberline Falls
55-65: Sparkfly Fen
60: Island SW of Lion’s Arch
60-70: The zone with the volcano SW of Ancient Dwarflands, Regrown Flame
70-75: NE Orr
70-80?: Northernmost Shiverpeaks zone (with the big lake)
75-80: NW Orr
80: W Orr
One observation that you can take from this new information, is that there appears to be only three max-level areas and only one of those three seem to be 80 only. What kind of activities do you think we’ll find in these areas and will there be enough things to do to keep the PVE players happy? Or are there some areas missing from this account? This size of the world map points to a lot of room for expansion.
Over the course of 48 hours, Arenanet has gathered over one million beta signups. Recently posted on their Facebook page, the developers linked a live dashboard to watch the numbers tick up (the dashboard won’t load right away, give it time). Check it out and watch the numbers move.
This goes to show the massive popularity with GW2.
Today, Mike Ferguson, a Systems Designer for Arenanet, did an AMA on Reddit and we’ve brought you the transcript. For the full Reddit thread, you can find it here.
Mike Ferguson:
Hey folks, please try to keep question as short and simple as possible, I want to answer as many questions as possible and the longer the questions are, the less I can answer. I can only type so fast 
Mike Ferguson, a Systems Desginer for Guild Wars 2, published a developer’s blog with many community based question regarding WvW. There were a myriad of topics he discussed including siege engines, bonuses and more. The most interesting mechanic he discussed was Server Transfers:
Server Transfers
Some of our more astute fans asked about the complications involved with switching servers and how it would interact with world bonuses. Every account has a home server where your characters are created. You can only fight for your home world in WvW. You can visit other servers, and while you are visiting, you still get the world bonus from your home world instead of the bonus for the world you are visiting. If you switch your home server, you lose the bonus from your previous home world and are not eligible for the bonus for your new server at least until the beginning of the next battle for the Mists. We may extend this disqualification into the next match or possibly even longer to discourage people from switching servers right before a battle ends in order to get an awesome bonus. You will have to pay a fee to change your home server (price undetermined), and that will also discourage people from server hopping to chase world bonuses.
Also, if you want to ask Mike Ferguson any questions, he’s hosting an AMA in several hours (9am PST) on Reddit.
With last weekend’s major media coverage of Guild Wars 2 there are many people just now starting to pay attention. There are a lot of questions out there of how the game works, how it’s played and what makes it different. Luckily for you, we here at Guild Wars Junkies are paying attention and are here to help you figure everything out. The one question we want to tackle is how abilities and class mechanics are available to you at any given point. In games like WOW, TOR and Rift, players are used to having multiple hotbars with a myriad of abilities readily available to you. How does it work in Guild Wars 2? All the videos you’ve seen showed you a single hotbar at the bottom of the screen and not much else. Are you concerned that there aren’t many options and things might get stale?
LET'S GET SOCIAL