Crafting so far in Guild Wars 2 seems to be a fairly basic system. You create the base component items, then place them in the final craft window and if your items can make something it lets you know. To me It feels like it’s unneeded clicking, the bane of crafters. Keep in mind that this is still beta and hopefully the system will get some major work before launch. If anything I’d suggest removing the two weapon component clicks into one item. Instead of making a dagger hilt and blade, how about just a stat-less dagger. Then take your dagger and the inscription to make the actual magic Dagger of Noob Slaying.

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.

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.

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!

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.