How much can an Elementalist heal? How much more effective are they with combination fields and finishers? How much does gear and compassion (water magic trait points) contribute? Is it worth it to sink points into water magic to improve healing?

Check out the answers to all these questions in GW2 Results Episode 3. And check out ‘Hamburger Hill’ near the end to watch 15 vs. 40+ out in the open!

Keep reading to watch the latest episode.

The stress test yesterday yielded some great PVP videos and today we’re noting TOPvP with some great commentary regarding his elementalist and engineer builds. Check them out after the break.

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!

Key Binds and Hotbars

In GW2 the basic layout consists of five weapon skills, one heal skill, three utility skills, one elite skill. These slots are universal across all eight professions. Where things differ is how your profession skills are mapped to your Function Keys, F1 through F4. For example, a Mesmer has four “shatter” abilities tied to their F1 through F4 keys that manipulate their illusions. A Necromancer, on the other hand, uses only the F1 key to swap in and out of their Death Shroud.

When you factor in profession skills and your basic keys, you now possess 11 to 14 possible keybinds that you will have to manipulate. However, there is one more key you have to remember: Weapon Swapping! The ~ key operates as your weapon swap key. If you’re not familiar with how this works, every profession, except the Engineer and Elementalist, has the ability to equip two sets of weapons on their character sheet. When you swap your weapon sets, the weapon skills on your hotbar are instantly swapped out for your new set and places the weapon swap key on cooldown.

Special Note: The Elementalist’s profession skills gives them the ability to swap between all four attunements: Air, Fire, Water and Earth. Each attunement gives the Elementalist five separate abilities for the weapon set they are wielding. So in essence, the Elementalist gets twenty skills per weapon set. In the case of the Engineer, they also only can equip one weapon set. However, Engineers place “kits” in their utility skill slots. When these skills are slotted, it places special abilities in their F1-F4 class slots. When activating the utility skill slot, it replaces your weapons skill slots instantly (like swapping weapons) giving you access to five new weapon skills.

With all that being said, each player will only have to maintain 12 to 15 keybinds. This is an amazing reduction from many AAA MMORPG games where you end up key mapping 1-5 and ~, Alt/Ctrl/Shift 1-5 and ~, R, F, Z, C, Q, E F1-F14 etc. In a game that will have a huge focus on competitive PVP, the less keys that you have to memorize, the better. And unless you’re a hardcore, pro-player, the less keys you have to be aware of, the more you can keep your mind focused on the game at hand. This usually leads to a better play experience! Gone are the days of have five rows of hotbars cluttering up your screen.

Weapon Swapping and Skill Availability

Now that we’ve covered keybinds, let’s discuss what effect Weapon Swapping has on the skills classes have available at any given time. Before we get to class specific instances, lets take a look at the basic principals that rule every profession with the exception of the Engineer and Elementalist. We already know that everyone gets one elite skill, three utility skills and one heal skill. With Weapon Swapping, you will also have access to ten different weapon skills. So, ignoring for the moment profession skills, everyone has access to 15 different abilities at any given time. This gives the player a larger variety of skills to use at any given time. The one limiting factor is the cooldown of Weapon Swap. While it is short, it does prevent a player from switching weapons back and forth, so weapon swapping during combat will require decent timing in any combat scenario.

Now let’s take a brief look at each profession and see what they can do.

The Ranger

The Ranger’s profession skills are tied to their pets. Your F1 through F4 keys are tied to manipulating your companion and should be familiar to anyone who has played a pet class in any other MMORPG.

The Ranger makes use of all four keys:

• F1: Attack
• F2: Pet Specific Ability
• F3: Passive/Aggressive toggle
• F4: Pet Swap

The interesting factor here is that Rangers are able to swap pets just like they can swap weapons. Given this, the Ranger has to maintain the standard 15 skills, the F1-F4 Abilities, and due to pet swapping, the F2 ability has 2 potential abilities. This gives the Ranger 20 potential abilities they have access to, depending on pet/weapon swap cooldowns. One has to note however, the Ranger does have access to certain Utility Skills that have a secondary abilitiess (see: Spirits).

The Necromancer

The Necromancer’s profession skill is the Death Shroud. Many of the Necromancer’s abilities leach Life Force which fills up a pool. At any point, you can activate your Death Shroud (F1 Key) and enter in a new form. This form then gives you access to four different abilities using the 1-4 Keys. The Death Shroud lasts as long as your Life Force pool which depletes over time and also acts as a second health pool. Once empty, or you leave Death Shroud by pressing F1 a second time, you are then reverted back to your original form and your Death Shroud key goes on cooldown.

The Necromancer makes use of only the F1 Key:

• F1: Toggle Death Shroud

Because of your new form the Necromancer has access to four new abilities, so when including your standard 15 skills, the Necromancer has access to 20 potential abilities. The Necromancer summons minions via Utility Skills. All minions have a abilities that you can access via the utility skill button.

The Thief

The Thief is a much simpler profession, as it does not have as many abilities as the Necromancer or Ranger. The Thief’s profession skill is Steal. Steal teleports you to your target and “steals” an ability from them. This ability is not NPC specific, but comes from a list of abilities pre-prescribed for Steal. Once you Steal from a target, the F1 key becomes the key you use to activate that stolen ability. After using the ability, your Steal ability goes on cooldown.

The Thief makes use of only the F1 Key:

• F1: Steal

Because of the Thief’s profession skill, the Thief has access to only 16 potential abilities if you combine the double function of the F1 key with it’s Steal and Ability.

The Mesmer

The Mesmer is an interesting profession where you have abilities that create illusions of yourself to fight against your foes. The Mesmer makes use of all four Function keys. Each of the F1 through F4 keys “shatters” your illusions creating various effects and destroying those illusions in the process.

The Mesmer makes use of the F1 through F4 Keys:

• F1: Shatter Illusions, causing damage
• F2: Shatter Illusions, causing confusion
• F3: Shatter Illusions, dazing opponents
• F4: Shatter Illusions, gain distortion (Mesmer specific defensive boon)

With the inclusion of the 15 standard standard abilities, the Mesmer has up to 19 abilities at any given moment. Each individual shatter has it’s own cooldown.

The Guardian

The Guardian has a professions specific abilities called Virtues. These Virtues fill up the F1 through F3 keys. Each Virtue has a passive effect and an active effect. When you activate a Virtue it goes on cooldown and the passive benefit is removed for that short duration.

The Guardian makes use of the F1 through F3 keys:

• F1: Burn foes with your every fifth attack. Activate: Nearby allies set foes on fire with their next attacks
• F2: Regenerate health. Activate: Remove conditions and regenerate nearby allies
• F3: Every 30 seconds you gain an aegis that blocks the next attack. Activate: Grant Aegis to nearby allies

With your standard 15 skills, the Guardian has a total of 18 different abilities to use at any given point. The Guardian also has access to utility skills that operate much like the Necromancer’s minions where they have secondary functions.

The Warrior

The Warrior has a series of skills called “Burst Skills” which take up the F1 key. Each attack a Warrior executes builds up adrenaline and fills up a pool. Your burst skill will vary depending on the weapon you are wielding at the time. The burst skills will become more powerful doing additional damage or conditions depending on the level of your adrenaline.

The Warrior makes use of the F1 key:

• F1: Burst Skill

Because the burst skill is weapon-dependent, this means that the Warrior has access to two burst skills because of weapon swapping. With this, the warrior has a total of 17 different abilities to use dependent on weapon swap cooldown at any given point.

The Engineer

As you already know, the Engineer is a very unique profession in Guild Wars 2. The F1 through F4 keys will vary depending on your healing and utility skill layout. The engineer utility and healing skills will vary between kits, turrets and elixirs along with other gadgets. When an engineer equips a kit in their utility slot (flamethrower, grenades, mines, bombs, elixir gun, healing and tool kits) they will alter their Function keys along with their weapon skill loadout.

For example: If an Engineer equips the bomb kit in their first utility slot two things happen. First, their F2 button becomes a special ability; in this case Big Ole Bomb. Second, their weapon skill loadout changes to five new abilities. Pressing the utility skill again switch your bomb kit back to your original weapon loadout.

In the case of your Healing Skill, your healing skill slot activates the skill, and also puts it’s affect in the F1 slot.

Turrets are also deployed in similar fashion. Equipping a turret in the second utility slot, now allows you to activate the turret with the F3 Key. All turrets have an “overload” feature; once deployed, the turret’s utility skill slot becomes a secondary ability for your turret. In the example of the Healing Turret, it deploys a large spray of healing to all nearby allies. In addition, once deployed, your F3 key changes to a secondary function that will allow you to explode your turret.

Engineers make use of all four Function Keys:

• F1: Healing Skill special function
• F2: Turrets, Kit special function, etc.
• F3: Turrets, Kit special function, etc.
• F4: Turrets, Kit special function, etc.

Engineer maximum abilities will vary with builds. For example, an Engineer that uses up to three Kits has access to 5 Weapon Skills (not 10 due to only one weapon set), and then 5 for each Kit which gives you a total of 20 Weapon Skills, 1 Healing, 3 Utility, 1 Eliete and F1-F4 for a grand total of 29. This can vary sharply if you use other utility skills or turrets.

Summation: Turrets offer 3 functions, Deployment, Explosion and Overload. Kits offer 7 functions each, Equip/Unequip, 5 Weapon Skills, Function-Key Ability.

The Elementalist

The Elementalist probably has the most abilities (with the exception of a heavy kit Engineer build) in it’s arsenal out of all the professions. Though it has the most abilities, it’s mechanism are not as confusion on the surface as the Engineer’s. The Elementalist can only equip one weapon set, and does not have access to the weapon swap feature. Instead the Elementalist’s Function Keys, F1-F4, allow the player to swap between all four attunements, each one having it’s own separate cooldown. What this means is that an Elementalist has four separate weapon loadouts per weapon.

The Elementalist makes use of the F1 through F4 keys.

• F1: Fire
• F2: Water
• F3: Air
• F4: Earth

Each Elementalist has access to 20 Weapon Skills, 1 Healing, 1 Elite and 3 Utility skills, for a grand total of 25 abilities. We do not count attunement swapping as an ability to be counted towards this total.

As you can see, the majority of the professions do not require you to have a specialized user interface just to house all of your abilities. In comparison, if GW2 were to have hotbars like you find in other games, you would only be filling up two of them instead for 4 or 5. Often enough, many of GW2′s utility skills are passive and don’t require constant monitoring. Many weapon skills and utility skills often have 30 seconds or longer cooldowns that make them situational rather that abilities you would work into a standard rotation.

Check out more beta coverage from Rock Paper Shotgun as they give you their general over view of the game itself.

Being awesome from the start, give or take a quick tutorial, was just the beginning. As a Guild Wars 2 Elementalist, you’re constantly firing off huge spells from whichever element you want. There’s no mana bar to slow you down, only each individual spell’s cooldowns – and they’re incredibly short. Lightning surge from your fingertips? 10 seconds. Drop huge flaming meteors from the sky? 40 seconds. Your basic elemental attacks would be a ‘proper’ skill in most other MMOs, and you have four of them depending on what you’re attuned to. Many skills alter as a result of this attunement, which you can change whenever you want, including in battle. Just for fun, even the very act of swapping this does something, like a flame blast, seismic wave, or healing splash of water. I don’t know if everyone gets it so good, but I can say this: I have never played a more badass mage in an MMO. And I have played many, many mages.

Hands On: A Long Weekend With Guild Wars 2

Some time today the first public yet still closed beta test begins. Many people will get their first hands on the game for the first time. Keep in mind that this is still a closed beta test and a very important and possibly heavily enforced rule is that this is still under NDA.

Earlier this month ArenaNet hosted another event for select media sites. Lucky for us many high quality videos were released showing nearly every aspect. Following this event we featured class spotlights with some select videos giving as much detail about the class as possible. In case you missed them or perhaps you were not selected for this beta event and you still need a Guild Wars 2 fix, check them out.

• Necromancer
• Ranger
• Engineer
• Mesmer
• Thief
• Warrior
• Elementalist
• Guardian

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.

Guild Wars 2 is turning this supposition on its ear.  Gone are the typical threat mechanics.  Gone are the days of healers standing in the back and spamming their heals.  Gone are the days of only certain classes or specs doing damage to the boss.  In Guild Wars 2 there are no taunts to keep aggro off of other classes, there are no targetable healing spells and every profession is expected to DPS.  The question now becomes: how will the average MMO player handle this change?

Like many GW2 fans, I have spent the better part of the last week watching videos from the Press Beta.  I have watched the WvW videos, the Profession videos and the Dynamic Event videos.   But I have paid special attention to the Catacombs of Ascalon videos.  Its not that I am more excited for the instances than the rest, to the contrary I am much more excited for the WvW content, but because I believe that the instance content will be the biggest shock for MMO players.  For most MMO players the lack of the Trinity will be a total and complete shock, even if they know about it in advance.

In many ways, what I saw in some of the videos and what I believe will happen when the game releases remind me of the ‘Stages of Grief” that psychologist use to explain how people deal with the loss of a loved one.  No, I am not comparing the loss of the Trinity to the loss of a loved one but I do think that it will hit some players hard.

The first thing I see happening is confusion.  Players will rush into the first instance and wander why their Warrior can’t hold aggro.  They will wander why everyone is dying so quickly.  They will not dodge and they will forget to use their self-heals.  They will run around in circles, screaming like a little girl, and wander why this big, bad monster is attacking their Elementalist instead of beating on the big, mean warrior in plate armor.

I expect mass chaos for the first few days and weeks of GW2.  The strategies we have all come to know, after years of gaming, will not work in GW2.  Instead of taunts, we must dodge.  Instead of expecting heals, we must heal ourselves.  New strategies will have to be worked out and new mindsets put in place.  This will take time.

Even after the community starts to understand how GWs works, there will be some players that will be in denial. In one of the videos I watched over the weekend, there was a Guardian that constantly stated in chat that he would tank the mobs while the rest DPS’d them down.  Even after it was obvious that this would not work he continued to attempt it.

I expect a lot of this.  There will be a player who will insist that the Warrior or Guardian in his group carry a shield and tank.  There will be a player that will insist that the elementalist stay in ‘heal spec’ and heal.  And, yes, there will be players who get mad and yell at group mates when they refuse to do it his way.  Denial will be rampant and the old mindset will rear its ugly head often.

The next stage will be one of two things; anger or acceptance.  Many players will just not be able to handle the loss of the Trinity.  These will be players who cannot fathom a boss fight without a tank, a tank without a healer and a boss dying without dedicated DPS.  Very soon after release you will see these players on GW2 and MMO forums complaining about the lack of the Trinity.  Only they will mask what they are truly angry about and instead call the game ‘EZ Mode’.  They will lament the loss of the Trinity and rage against the lack of raids.  Forums will be rife with these people as they take out their anger on the game and the community.

For the rest of us, we will learn to adapt.  We will recognize the loss of the Trinity for what it is; a new challenge.  Many of us will find the new system refreshing and less constraining than the Trinity and we will rejoice because of it.  We will find the fact that we do not have to spam general chat for a tank and healer something to be excited about.  But most of all, we will play the game and ignore those who can’t stand the loss of the Trinity.

The release of GW2 will be an exciting time, not only because its a new game but because its a new way of doing things.  The Trinity is dead; long live GW2.

Unlike most other classes in Guild Wars 2, elementalist does not get the ability to swap weapons during combat. Instead they must choose which of the four elemental energies to wield as their tools of destruction. This leads to a large selection of skills in their arsenal. Most of which can be used on the run as few require you to remain still.

Elementalist with water is one of the few classes that offers healing to their allies. Even though the holy trinity has been done away with in Guild Wars 2, healing roles may still be needed it seems. Other than the little healing water to offer, elementalist appears to be mostly focused on damage. Not much in the way of control or buffs can be found for most of the weapons.

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.