MMORPG.com has partnered with the Guild Wars 2 team for an exclusive Live Stream Q&A with Jon Peters at 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) about professions and traits in Guild Wars 2. We’ve compiled your questions to ask during the interview.

** UPDATE #2** The interview has been posted to youtube and added to this post.

PVP class balance:

• They believe utility is spread around evenly to all the classes, and the majority of current balancing is just playing the numbers game. AE’s he expects will be ineffective in pvp vs good players.
• To counter the healing all classes have, poison is a healing debuff. Through combos every class can get poison attached to their attacks. Necro and Thief have posion as base skills.

Colin Johanson said the engineer is “our answer to James Bond” because of the gadgets and skills available. At first glance it would appear the engineer has the least amount of options and tools since it has access to only 3 weapon types and does not have the ability to swap them. That is until you look at the utility skills. This is where the bread and butter of the class is at; turrets, special weapons, and gadgets galore. Out of all of the classes in Guild Wars 2, having only 3 utility skills looks like it will lead to plenty of frustration, with so many interesting choices. Flame thrower, glue gun, and several different turrets to choose from makes the engineer seem more like Spy vs Spy than Mr. Bond.

Mesmer was the last class released for Guild Wars 2 and it is one of the more unique options on Tyria. Unlike most of the other classes mesmer has less focus on damage. Instead nearly every spell that mesmer has available offers some kind of boon, detriment, or combo effect. With the ability to buff and debuff so effectively as well as providing support mesmer will be a sought after class for pvp. The ability to stealth your team or set up a portal into a keep seem extremely powerful.

Unique to mesmer are the dumb fire illusion pets. These pets only attack your current target and the weapon you are using will determine what skills they use. You can use your illusions to complete combos increasing damage or adding more effects to the attack. With the ability to swap weapons it looks like the mesmer will be one of the more complicated classes to master at near max effectiveness.

Big News today! As you’ve read, pre-purchases will begin April 10th for Guild Wars 2 which gives you access to all the beta events and a 3 day Head Start. If you follow the link you’ll find a list of all the different goodies you get with the Collector’s Edition. With this information coming out now, we know that release is just around the corner. There is something different in the language of this offer though that stood out to us; they are using the term pre-purchase rather than pre-order.

From 10th April, players can pre-purchase the Guild Wars 2 Collector’s, Digital Deluxe or Standard Editions from buy.guildwars2.com or select retailers. All players that pre-purchase Guild Wars 2 will be given access to all upcoming beta events and will be given head start access prior to release. Follow the link for more information about this and our incredible Collector’s Edition!

The thief class in Guild Wars 2 appears to be one of the more complicated classes in the game. It is the only one with a limited resource pool for its’ primary skills and none of them have cool downs. This could give them the potential for the massive burst damage the class historically offers. Granted the lack of a cool down on skills will make it easy to spam the wrong attack. Also the thief’s third attack option changes based on what off hand weapon you have, unlike any of the other classes. While in the short duration stealth the game uses, the primary attack changes into what appears to be a high damage attack. Even though thief has one of the more limited selections of weapons available, the synergy between main and off hand seems to make up for it.

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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

• Fire Magic: Power and Expertise.
• Air Magic: Precision and Prowess.
• Earth Magic: Toughness and Malice.
• Water Magic: Vitality and Compassion.
• Arcane Power: Concentration and Intelligence.

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)

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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.