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.

Character Customization

Character creation in Guild Wars 2 is much like any other game. You pick a race, gender, profession, and then you play around with hairstyles and skin tones etc. What’s different in GW2 is that you may also choose the color scheme of the gear you start with. Choose from an assortment of dye colors, and up to three colors per item slot, to find your ideal combination. The cool thing about the dye system is that the dye will transfer to every new piece of gear you equip, so you automatically don’t need to worry about the “clown effect”.

Spend as much time as you like getting your equipment looking sharp, however, don’t worry about permanence. In Guild Wars 2 you can change the dye colors of your gear wherever you are, whenever you want. There is a little dye dropper icon in your Hero Sheet, where you can undo or redye your gear’s colors to your heart’s content. If you get a new piece of gear, and the colors you chose during character creation look terrible, you can change it right away!

Opening Up Your Weapon Skills

When you start off in Guild Wars 2, you will be equipped with a default weapon based on class, and only have access to the first skill, in the “1″ slot. As you kill enemies with your weapon, you gain experience towards unlocking the next skill. This is the case any time you equip a new weapon type for the first time. You have access to skill 1 at first, you then unlock skill 2, then 3, and so on.

Once you gain access to weapon swapping, a great way to quickly unlock new skills is to fight creatures with your fully unlocked weapon set, but right before they die, switch your weapons. You don’t need to fight a creature start to finish with the new weapon to unlock its skills, you just need to be wielding it when it dies.

Special Case: For Elementalists, you need to be attuned to the Element you want to unlock the weapon skill for. For engineers, unlocking weapon skills is only necessary for wielded weapons. Kits that replace your weapon skills, such as Flamethrower, do not need to be unlocked.

Weapon Skill Previews

If you’re also curious about which weapons you can wield and what they do, the answer is very simple. In your Hero window, under the Skills and Traits tab, you’ll see your Weapon Skills. Here you can preview all of the weapons available to your class, and all of the skills associated with them.

Buying New Weapons

Once you’re finished with the initial tutorial area, you might want to wield and unlock a different weapon. In each starting area, you will find merchants close by, displayed as different colored dots on your minimap. You might not have enough coin to buy a weapon right away, however, if you complete your first story quest (green icon/text) you should have enough to buy a new weapon. Refer back to your Skills tab to help you choose.

Weapon Pro-Tip: For any profession that can wield a Greatsword, we recommend you buy one as soon as possible!

How to Level Fast

Guild Wars 2, or rather Tyria, is a beautiful world that is very worthy of exploring and experiencing organically. Because there are no “side quests” in the game like traditional, modern DIKU MMORPGs like WOW, RIFT and TOR, it’s very easy to get lost in just experiencing the world, and flowing from event to event. However, we know there are many people out there that just love to level FAST.

Here are a few things you should know. As you progress through each map, you’ll find NPCs with a telescope icon above their head. When you talk to these guys, they will preview the local Renown Hearts nearby. This will give you a quick look at what you can do within the area. These hearts represent “Public Quests”, where there is a certain objective that you need to complete nearby the heart on the map. These can only be completed once, and reward players with currency and experience. Often, other local events will occur near the hearts, allowing you to complete the heart and event at the same time. Your character’s story quests will often draw you near these areas as well.

So, what’s the best way to level, if leveling is your only concern? Story quest -> complete hearts -> do events as much as possible along the way. This is assuming you’re not PVPing at the same time!

Down-Leveling and How It Helps

If you find yourself walking into a lower level area, you will notice that your level will lower to match the content around you. This has many benefits, since it allows you to experience all content at a certain power level, and gain appropriate rewards for doing so. If you find yourself underleveled in your progression path, you can always explore other lower level areas that you might not have done (eg. other racial starting zones) and get caught up.

This also allows you to play with friends if you managed to outlevel them!

Level 80 Character Previews and Utility Skill Testing

As you might know, Guild Wars 2 boosts your character’s level for competing in PVP. By entering The Mists, your character is boosted to level 80, giving you full access to all of your skills, elites and trait points. In the Mists you can play around with builds and check out different skills. Before spending skill points on utilities, you can test them out first in The Mists!

Combat Tips and Tricks

Combat is a little different as well. While you can tab target and attack Mobs traditionally, your attacks will hit whatever is in the way. If you are targeting something in the distance, but there is a melee mob in front of you, your ranged attacks will hit the melee mob first. Many attacks are frontal attacks too, for example, greatsword attacks often hit 2-4 targets at the same time.

Evasion is also a key strategy when in combat. You can dodge attacks by just moving around enemies, so stay mobile. You also have an actual dodge. Double tap a directional key to roll in that direction and actively evade attacks. Be warned, you have an endurance bar that will deplete when you dodge.

Much like any other MMORPG, Line of Sight is important. You can use this to your advantage to block attacks and get out of the way of damage, particularly ranged attacks.

These tips should get you over the learning curve and destroying your enemies faster than otherwise possible! If you have any other tips that you’ve found after this coming weekend, come back and put them in the comments for everyone else to see.

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.

Over the last 10-15 years players have seen little evolution in MMORPGs.  Classes, combat, and quest systems generally are extremely similar even across the usual sub-genres; fantasy, sci-fi, and horror.  Due to  most releases up to this point reusing the same foundations with slightly different graphics the  experience playing them is nearly identical across the board.  This is partially why every game is called a “WoW clone”  even though World of Warcraft was an Everquest clone which was a DIKU mud clone and so on.  Guild Wars 2 seems to be trying to break the mold in many ways, most notably the dynamic event system at the heart of their game.

Dynamic events are not something new that ArenaNet has come up with.  One of the earliest iterations of dynamic events was found in eq2.   Mini events such as the “Lost Merchant” would spawn taking a few waves of trash, a boss, followed by the merchant selling you useless junk which players quickly ignored.  The most recent and a larger scale dynamic system can be found in Rift.  Rift showcases their system with the invasions and rifts found throughout the game except again you have little reason to do them and they have no impact on the world around you.  If a quest hub gets taken over wait a few minutes and the large group of planar mobs poof, giving you back your  hub.

In Guild Wars 2 the system will actually change the world.

Originally posted by Eric Flannun (Source)

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… In a typical kill X quest I would walk up to the commander of the fortress and he’d have an exclamation mark over his head. I’d click on him and he would present me with text describing how evil and foul the undead in the swamp are and how if they are not dealt with they will overrun his fortress. I accept this task and head to the swamp. It is likely that I now have “Kill 10 zombies” as a quest objective. I enter the swamp, see zombies and start killing them. After killing 10 I decide to head back to the fortress and turn in my quest. If I hadn’t done the quest what would have happened? Would the zombies have attacked? Are they still going to attack? I killed 10 of them but there are still more of them out there, doesn’t that matter? This is the experience provided by the typical kill X quest.

In Guild Wars 2, let’s take the same set up and apply it to a dynamic event. As I approach the fortress the commander runs up to me and says out loud for everyone in the area to hear that there are zombies in the local swamp, they are building up to attack his fort and someone had better do something. I head to the swamp and notice that the usual wildlife is gone, having been slain by the zombie horde (you actually get to see this happen as the event starts) when I enter the event radius I have the objective of “Cull the Zombie Horde” followed by a percentage indicating how much of the horde remains and a timer. I start killing zombies as the timer counts down. If I and any other adventurers in the area can cull the horde down to 0% before time expires then the remaining zombies will flee and disaster has been averted. I’ll automatically receive a reward, the fortress remains safe and the original wildlife will return to the swamp. If I fail to cull the horde and the timer reaches zero then the zombies will all shamble out of the swamp and attack the fortress. I have failed the event but now a new event presents itself where I can defend the fortress from the horde. If the fortress is overrun it will remain occupied by zombies until cleared, a valuable travel point will be lost, merchants and other NPC’s will be unavailable. My act of killing the zombies actually protected the fortress with the consequence of possibly losing the fortress when I failed the event…

This is exciting news which will bring much needed immersion to the MMO genre.  While other studios have been scared to impact a gamers experience in a negative way, AernaNet is embracing it.  Is having to save a town from the evil zombies before you can use the merchants all that negative?  The idea of having an actual impact on the world around you is something that most gamers have been looking for.  Gamers want to be apart of a growing, living, and evolving game world. This is a fairly big promise to the community looking to play the game.  The good news is that you can see the dynamic system in videos from last years conventions.  This is not something they are hoping makes it into the game before launch. It’s already there waiting for players to get pulled into the world.

A problem with the event system is that it seem to be static content that has static triggers.  When listening to developers talking about the system that is how it has been presented.  Are there events that are not not geographically tied?  Will leveling an alt of the same race be a different experience than it was with the first character?  Is true dynamic content actually viable?  With over 1500 events in game the answer to these questions hopefully is ‘yes’.

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.