The Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Event is nearly here! Gamers from around the world will finally get their hands on the game for the very first time. If you’re reading this, you are a GW2 Junkie, and you’re looking for an edge. We want to share with you a few tips that will help you navigate your way around Arenanet’s masterpiece of a game. Some of the systems in Guild Wars 2, such as leveling, combat and skill gains, are very different from what most players might expect. So, instead of spending precious time figuring out the new systems, we’re here to help you get through the learning curve as fast as possible, and get you to tearing down walls in the Mists of World vs. World.

Keep reading for a full range of tips from character customization, to learning what your profession can do.

Hello fellow Junkies!

When we attended PAX East last weekend we happened to get a few cards that gave us beta codes to use for this weekend! Now, there really is no need to be jealous, because we’re not bragging. On those cards, they gave us extra codes to give to our friends. To get a shot of taking home a code for this weekend’s beta, make sure to follow us on twitter and give us a shout-out, “Hey @GWars2Junkies, I want to get into #GuildWars2 Beta Weekend!“.

We’ll select winners at random, but also making sure you have enough time to download the game and get started!

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!

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.

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.

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?

The MMORPG genre is growing faster now than ever before. From Everquest to World of Warcraft, Warcraft to Age of Conan, and in 2011 we saw two major titles released in Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic. With the clock beginning to tick in 2012, there are multiple AAA titles scheduled to be released, but nothing grabs our attention more than Guild Wars 2. With the massive success of it’s predecessor, our expectations are sky high.

Last year we got our hands on the game at PAX Prime, and all we can say is that our expectations aren’t high enough!

Congratulations to Arena Net as they take the prize of Voodoo Extreme’s Most Anticipated Game of 2012. Runners up included Diablo 3, DOTA 2, Mechwarrior Online and Firefall.

We here at Guild Wars 2 Junkies believe that Guild Wars 2 will be a smashing success. We can’t wait for it to be released!

NowGamer.com takes a closer look at why Guild Wars 2 can be a perfect 10. In their review, they discuss why Guild Wars 2 is different; discussing dynamic content, skill-based positional combat, PVP, and more. Here’s is just a quick taste of what NowGamer is saying about Guild Wars 2.

The quests of MMOs have been a running joke for a long time now, resorting to typical fetch quests and ‘kill 10 boars’ style of objectives. Needless to say, that’s worn a little thin now.

So here to save the day is ArenaNet, who has decided to cut out those irritating quests for something a bit more fluid. Dynamic, you could say.

What it means is that objectives are activated by a series of unknown requirements – from speaking to a certain NPC, finding a certain item or just visiting an area at a specific time of day.

This spawns a chain of events that act as quests yet, regardless of outcome, keep offering a new objective to work for – enemy goblins may well capture a fort after ‘failing’ one event, but that just opens the new objective to free it once again. There’s a lot of longevity here, and could well be the element that gets the most praise from critics.

Read the full article over at NowGamer.com.

Eric Flannum, Lead Game Designer for Guild Wars 2, gives us an end of the year update:

Hey, there! It’s time for another update on some of the new things we’ve been working on. Jon and I have a lot to talk about this time, so I’ll get started with our achievement system before I hand things over to Mr. Peters, who’ll talk about some more subtle combat refinements as well as recent changes to the thief.

We’ve spoken about and even shown achievements briefly in the past; however, we’ve never really spoken in much depth about the system.

The first thing you’ll need to know is that there are now three different types of achievements located in your achievement panel. First, there is what we refer to as just “achievements.” You’re probably familiar with these: they tend to be similar to the achievements in the original Guild Wars and many other games, which means they tend toward things that are difficult or time consuming to achieve. These types of achievements are designed to reward long-term progress and are all account based. They include things like the Centaur Slayer achievement, which tracks how many centaurs you’ve killed, as well as achievements specific to each of the different story arcs. Achievements encompass all aspects of the game from WvW to PvE to PvP, and even noncombat activities, such as trading and leisure games. Each achievement is divided into tiers, and every tier you complete awards you with achievement points. As your achievement points accumulate, they are reflected in your account’s achievement score. This score is easily viewable in both the friends and guild panels and is an easy way for you to compare your overall level of achievement progress with your friends and guild mates.

Follow the link above for the full update.

Mechanics

Weapons
A mesmer can use a variety of magical, ranged, and melee weapons, including:

Main Hand: Sword, Scepter
Off Hand: Focus, Pistol, Sword, Torch
Two-Handed: Staff, Greatsword
Confused Condition
The mesmer introduces a new condition to our set called confusion. An enemy with confusion on them takes damage each time they activate a skill. This condition stacks in intensity, so the more confusion an enemy has, the greater the damage.

Shattering
The mesmer has special abilities that can shatter illusions. Shattering will destroy all illusions and create a secondary effect. There are four different shatter skills:

Mind Wrack—Destroys your illusions and does damage to opponents near them.
Cry of Frustration—Destroys your illusions and gives the confused condition to nearby foes.
Diversion—Destroys your illusions and stuns nearby foes.
Reflection—Destroys your illusions and places a barrier around the mesmer, which reflects enemy projectiles.