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!

Totalbiscuit is back again and this time he’s showing us Thief gameplay with a focus on the world’s dynamic events.

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.

The thief class in Guild Wars 2 appears to be one of the more complicated classes in the game. It is the only one with a limited resource pool for its’ primary skills and none of them have cool downs. This could give them the potential for the massive burst damage the class historically offers. Granted the lack of a cool down on skills will make it easy to spam the wrong attack. Also the thief’s third attack option changes based on what off hand weapon you have, unlike any of the other classes. While in the short duration stealth the game uses, the primary attack changes into what appears to be a high damage attack. Even though thief has one of the more limited selections of weapons available, the synergy between main and off hand seems to make up for it.

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.