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.

The new trait system:

• The old trait system of events to gain them has been replaced with them automatically being provided each level after 10. The events have been merged into Utility skill slot points to ensure no content was lost. These will still help to teach players how to counter the various combat mechanics in game.
• The Diverse trait system will allow for many viable builds.
• They are working to ensure the problem in Guild Wars with too many options but only a few real builds is not repeated.
• Attribute points gained from the trait lines are bonuses and the real power comes from the minor and major traits themselves.
• You can customize classes to break the traditional molds. Mages that tank and Warriors that heal though they may not be as effective as other classes in those roles. Jon gave an example of a support healing warrior he plays using a trait that turns his utility shouts into area effect heals. While using a mace and shield to mitigate damage.

General game play information:

• Guild wars 2 a player is free to choose how they want to spend their time progressing their character.
• Water environments and combat is as flushed out as it is oh land but with about a quarter of the content.
• Pet AI like many things is not nearly done and will be worked on to ensure it is ready for release. As people has learned from the press CBT videos pets need a lot of work.
• There will be no ability to /duel people in guild wars 2. Instead you can utilize the fps style pvp game lobby and go to empty games with your friends to mess around.

While most of the information provided in this interview will not be new to those that are die hard fans, it is nice to see the continuity in development ideology from the various developers. I’m glad to see them not only talk about their triumphs but also what they see to be weaknesses and letting the community know they are working on it. It is the small weaknesses that developers often ignore that accumulate and end the games life. Hopefully ArenaNet will keep this energy and motivation well into the future. Ensuring the game is not only a success but more importantly it is FUN!

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 Hotbar Basics:

• Each player has five abilities based on their weapon choices.
• Each player has two weapon sets available at any given time. This can be any combination of dual wielding or two-handed weapons.
• Each player can swap weapon sets on the fly at the press of a button. This ability has a short cooldown during combat.
• Each player has access to one healing skill.
• Each player has access to three utility skills.
• Each player has access to one elite skill.

Right off the bat, each player has up to 10 abilities at any given time depending on your level; Elite and Utility skills open up at different levels. Not only that, you can swap your weapon set giving a player access to a total of 15 different skills to use at any given point.

We’re not done. The F1-F4 keys are dedicated to specific class mechanics that open up even more gameplay options.

The biggest exception to the “Hotbar Basics” is the Elementalist. The Elementalist is attuned to each of the four elements: Earth, Fire, Air and Water. Each weapon set the Elementalist has access to has a corresponding elemental skill set. What this means is if the Elementalist is wielding a staff, he has 5 Water skills, 5 Air skills etc. An Elementalist can swap attunement with the F1-F4 keys. Because of this, an Elementalist can only equip one weapon set at a time and their attunement swaps have a similar cooldown to other classes’ weapon swap.

If you haven’t thought it through yet, this means the Elementalist has access to 20 abilities before counting healing, elites or utility skills. They can cast a fire spell, swap, cast an air spell, swap, cast an earth spell and so forth; giving this class a very unique ability to create synergy through all their elements.

Other classes have other mechanics. For example, the Mesmer’s F1-F4 abilties do different things to their clones or phantasms. The Ranger controls their pet.

The Necromancer has another unique ability where they have abilities that build of “life force” and at any time you can press F1 and turn into a form that uses that “life fource” as a health bar. This form gives the player access to four new abilities. Once that life force bar is depleted the player his put back into their normal body again. This gives the Necromancer access to 19 different abilities including everything else.

The Engineer is similar to the Elementalist as they gain access to “kits” which open up even more abilities outside their weapon sets.

So as you can see, Guild Wars 2 is not as static as you might think. Guild Wars 1 players might miss the “deck creation” aspect of their class system but Guild Wars 2 does offer a lot of class building. There are many different utility skills and healing skills that have synergy with weapon sets that players can use to customize their build. And after all this, we still not have discussed the trait system, but that’s for another time.