I do love quick notes.
Enjoy!
Yes, it’s an MMO, so you will have to kill stuff, help people, collect junk. It’s unavoidable. However, ArenaNet has improved the formula quite a bit by:
(1) Making it feel alive. Stuff happens whether you are there or not, whether you participate or not. This may not seem important, but it makes the world feel alive, and makes the whole combat very fresh and dynamic.
You all heard ArenaNet saying that they nuked the trinity. No more tanking, no more dedicated healer… I guess they needed to keep the nuker so they could nuke the trinity. Well, what of those who like me loved to play healer? So I made as best as I could a dedicated healer, and gave that a try.
I picked Engineer as my Charr profession. And yes, I made my Charr black-and-white striped if you must know. I choose the Engineer because that gave her access to many healing skills.
Rotation guide for noobs (edited from the official GW2 Wiki).
In fact, it’s harder to come up with weapon skill examples that should be spammed on recharge.
The following is based on my PvE experience, but of course applies even more to PvP. I’ll talk mostly about Mesmers and Engineers because I played those two professions the most, but I have found the same general principles to apply across all professions with very rare exceptions.
It seems that the trait system is complicated enough for the min-max crowd to sweat over it for a long time. Meanwhile, here’s a handy guide for the rest of us.
The big 5: Each profession have 5 trait lines, which can be roughly described as pressure, criticals, defense, healing/support, and profession-specific. Each boosts 2 attributes that are most closely linked to how that given profession fulfills this role. For example, for all professions the pressure trait line increases power and condition duration, except for guardian which increases power and boon duration. However, as guardians rely on boons more for damage, this is understandable. Likewise, the elementalists’s four first trait lines are fire (pressure), air (criticals), earth (defense) and water (healing/support), with the fifth tied to arcane and attunement swapping. So if you remember pressure, criticals, defense, healing/support, and profession-specific, it should be easy to see where you need to invest your attribute points.
Mesmer Concept Art
Previously, I wrote up an initial synthesis of what was known about the mesmer profession then. With the closed beta weekend, a lot of new information has emerged giving the community a much deeper inside look into the workings of the illusionist. Another round of synthesis is necessary.
Now before we start, I just wanted to say that this article is not meant to be an all authoritative source of truth. It is merely an article written out of passion for the profession, meant to start a discussion among the many arm-chair mesmers (for this is all we can be at this time) out there in the community. With that in mind, let us dig deep into the details and just focus on the different land-based weapon sets!
As with other professions, each weapon wielded by the mesmer contains a certain theme. Recognizing these themes can help putting together a build that will ultimately match a player’s preferred play-style.
The ArenaNet developer blog has received more love this evening and this time John Peters talks about traits and attributes. If you are wanting to learn about these key character components I suggest you read this as John breaks everything down rather nicely.
Having a little bit of difficulty wrapping your head around the Guild Wars 2 skill system? Fear it will be too simplified compared to the Guild Wars 1 “build wars”? YouTuber WoodenPotatoes does an excellent job out of explaining the differences between Guild Wars 1 and 2, and why the changes should be to the better for the players.
When the thief was announced, people originally thought it was a very similar profession to the ranger. Their combat styles do show similarities, but do not be mistaken, these are very different professions. In my opinion, the ranger is more similar to the necromancer, and the thief is more similar to the mesmer. Nevertheless, many of you are probably deciding between the two, and I hope the current column can help make your choice clearer.
250 seems to have changed the mesmer a lot. He has a lot more visual effects for one, so that foes and allies alike can see he’s doing *something*. He’s also decided to move the names of spells to new unrelated spells, just to confuse us… ah yes, mesmers like to do that.
But has the mesmer gameplay really changed? I will argue that it hasn’t, really, and will provide examples of parallels.
If you’re thinking about playing melee, there are a few good options. If you plan, however, to stay in the frontlines, you are probably debating between the warrior or the guardian. Both feature many melee weapons, good survival value, and the highest armor in the game. Here, we compare and contrast the two on damage, control, and support.
A Guild Wars 2 podcast (see link in roundup below) played devil’s advocate trying to list possible reasons why Guild Wars 2 might fail. One was that players will figure out what the best builds are, and how to make the trinity work. They used the guardian as a tank in their example (which they then pointed out was an unfortunate example). However, the point remains… what if there is an optimal way to play the trinity, and Guild Wars 2 end up being like that…
Weapon bar for the Guardian
I’ve been looking at the Guardian skills… And I’ve been seeing some patterns in the weapon skills. A quick look at the Elementalist supports these patterns, and I suspect the same patterns are also present in the other professions.
These patterns help understand not only how the gameplay will be like, but also what kind of design decisions went behind these decisions and why.
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