Guild Wars 2: Profession Speculation (Part 1: Intro)

♫ Anticipation... anticipation... it's making me wait. ♫

One of the unfortunate side-effects of following a game's development is that it can take a very long time for confirmed information to start being released by the developers. And those wily bastards, knowing it will keep people paying attention, often release things such as concept art, or little dribs and drabs of information with no details. Naturally, this leads to a great deal of speculation in the community about the game, which is just what they want. I've seen a fair amount of this, and have my own to boreentertain you with.


Let's start with the confirmed information:

• There will be eight total professions at launch time.
• They are split into the scholar, adventurer, and soldier types. All we are certain about regarding those types is they will have light, medium, and heavy armor respectively, although there are probably certain assumptions about the categories that will be reasonably close to the reality. (More on this below.)
• There are three scholar professions. One of those is the elementalist. There are three adventurer professions. None have been confirmed yet. There are two soldier professions. One of these is the warrior.
• Every profession will have a specific set of weapons and off-hand items they can use. Some professions will be able to wield a second weapon in their off-hand instead. There are six one-handed weapons: axe, dagger, mace, pistol, scepter, and sword; six two-handed weapons: greatsword, hammer, longbow, rifle, shortbow, and staff; and four off-hand items: focus, shield, torch, warhorn.
• There will be at least one profession that can use both guns and bows, at least one that can only use bows, and at least one that can only use guns. We have no information on how often the other weapons are used in what combination.
• Some professions are (retooled) versions of the original game's professions, while others may combine professions, and still others be entirely new. We have no idea to what extent any of that is true, since the two they've chosen to release so far actually both are reworked.
• Every profession is meant to have a unique style of play, although to what degree that's true is currently unjudgeable.
• There is no dedicated healing profession, but there is a dedicated support profession. Protection (as in the GW1 Monk's attribute) will still be used in some fashion.
• There will be a profession that specializes in (or at least heavily uses) environmental weaponry.

That's it for confirmed information, although there've been some off-hand comments and reading between the lines which allow for what I'd call reasonable assumptions that will probably be fairly close. That still makes the following speculation, but it makes it speculation with some information to back it up.

• Typically in MMOs, light-armor classes (GW2's scholars) are considered backline characters; they avoid being in the thick of combat and generally have ranged attacks. In this case, however, we do know that elementalists will have a choice of close, medium, and long-range attacks, so it's not quite that straight-forward. However, it would probably be reasonable to say that scholars will have ranged skills available, and methods of self-defense to allow them to avoid or hinder enemies who close with them. Light armor users are typically magic- rather than weapon-using classes, although I would not rule out the possibility of a hybrid or even a long-range ranged-weapon user.
• Medium-armor classes (GW2's adventurers), on the other hand, tend to be weapon-users whose trade-off is defense for... well, a number of things, really. This is where you tend to find your pet-using classes (though not always), your long-range weapon users, hit-and-run fighters with a lot of varied effects added on to their attacks (such as poison or bleeding), or sometimes your hybrid magic/weapon users. It's a good bet one of these will be a ranger type, probably with the ability to use pets. Not only is there concept art that heavily suggests it, but in the Races of Tyria video, there's a norn with a bow and a pet, reminiscent of the first game's ranger.
• Heavy-armor classes (GW 2's soldiers) tend to be weapon-users as well, although some are hybrids. This is where you find your tanks, but also where you find your paladin or some clerics (support plus either tanking or DPS) or some close-range DPS types, usually melee. In this case, we know the warrior will be weapon DPS-heavy with some ability for party support, which looks to mainly be offensive support. What the other soldier profession will be is the source of a great deal of speculation.
• It's fairly likely that mesmers will make a return, although they may be heavily altered and despite their former light-armor status, may even get shunted up to adventurer. (See next post for more on this.) The two reasons for thinking they'll return in some fashion are a) the presence of some character concept art strongly resembling a mesmer in fashion and in the colour used (because all the professions in GW1 had a colour associated with them and so far GW2 seems to be keeping this tradition), and b) the fact that, while they are not exactly a unique class in function, they are both less usual and very iconic of the game in many people's opinion.

And since this is already starting to look long, let's split this here. Part 2 will be speculation about scholar types.