Tales of Tyria‘s episode 36 goes over their experience with BWE2 including sPVP and other class issues.

The regular co-hosts have the night off this week, as Bridger invites 4 members of the Team Legacy Structured PvP team on the show to discuss the status of SPvP as of Beta Weekend Event #2. We talk overall impressions, responsivness, balance, builds, and much more.

Continue reading to watch the episode.

MMORPG.com has partnered with the Guild Wars 2 team for an exclusive Live Stream Q&A with Jon Peters at 10:00 a.m. PST (1:00 p.m. EST) about professions and traits in Guild Wars 2. We’ve compiled your questions to ask during the interview.

** UPDATE #2** The interview has been posted to youtube and added to this post.

PVP class balance:

• They believe utility is spread around evenly to all the classes, and the majority of current balancing is just playing the numbers game. AE’s he expects will be ineffective in pvp vs good players.
• To counter the healing all classes have, poison is a healing debuff. Through combos every class can get poison attached to their attacks. Necro and Thief have posion as base skills.

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?