Every game out there attracts hardcore fans and the inevitable fan-art. Most of the time you see some erotic orc making out with a night elf and you can’t hit the back button fast enough. However in this case, Youtube user Keegan Larwin, put together a really fun and well done Live Action movie-short with a Mesmer battling an Elementalist. High definition and tons of special effects, you can’t help but smile when you watch this movie.
Keep reading after the break for the movie.
How much can an Elementalist heal? How much more effective are they with combination fields and finishers? How much does gear and compassion (water magic trait points) contribute? Is it worth it to sink points into water magic to improve healing?
Check out the answers to all these questions in GW2 Results Episode 3. And check out ‘Hamburger Hill’ near the end to watch 15 vs. 40+ out in the open!
Keep reading to watch the latest episode.
The stress test yesterday yielded some great PVP videos and today we’re noting TOPvP with some great commentary regarding his elementalist and engineer builds. Check them out after the break.
One of the more unique design elements of Guild Wars 2 is the way skills are set up in the game. There have been countless blogs and articles describing the skill system and how it relates your Hotbar layout, but it also one of the biggest misconceptions about the game. So let’s clear it up now. People who’ve played games like Everquest 2, World of Warcraft, RIFT and Star Wars: The Old Republic are used to looking at multiple hotbars full of skills and abilities that do a large variety of things. In Guild Wars 2 this is greatly reduced and you don’t have to be a master pianist to manipulate your character.
If you want to know all about keybinds, weapon swapping and individual profession skills keep reading!
Check out more beta coverage from Rock Paper Shotgun as they give you their general over view of the game itself.
Being awesome from the start, give or take a quick tutorial, was just the beginning. As a Guild Wars 2 Elementalist, you’re constantly firing off huge spells from whichever element you want. There’s no mana bar to slow you down, only each individual spell’s cooldowns – and they’re incredibly short. Lightning surge from your fingertips? 10 seconds. Drop huge flaming meteors from the sky? 40 seconds. Your basic elemental attacks would be a ‘proper’ skill in most other MMOs, and you have four of them depending on what you’re attuned to. Many skills alter as a result of this attunement, which you can change whenever you want, including in battle. Just for fun, even the very act of swapping this does something, like a flame blast, seismic wave, or healing splash of water. I don’t know if everyone gets it so good, but I can say this: I have never played a more badass mage in an MMO. And I have played many, many mages.
Some time today the first public yet still closed beta test begins. Many people will get their first hands on the game for the first time. Keep in mind that this is still a closed beta test and a very important and possibly heavily enforced rule is that this is still under NDA.
Earlier this month ArenaNet hosted another event for select media sites. Lucky for us many high quality videos were released showing nearly every aspect. Following this event we featured class spotlights with some select videos giving as much detail about the class as possible. In case you missed them or perhaps you were not selected for this beta event and you still need a Guild Wars 2 fix, check them out.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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