Guild Wars 2: Pew Pew Clang Boom

Now that they've released the second profession and some more combat-related information, I wanted to talk a bit about combat. I'll also be doing a post filled with guesses about the remaining professions, because wild guessing is fun!

Quick diversion first: for those of you non-existent readers who haven't checked it out yet: Guild Wars 2 Official Site, from which you can also get to their blog, which sometimes has extra details, and where they also do a link roundup of official interviews and write-ups by game and MMO sites.

One of the things they're trying to do with combat is make it more dynamic, involving both strategy and tactics, without in any way reducing the ability for casual players to be able to jump in and play. It's always a hard balancing act between making your content truly casual and solo-friendly while still offering enough challenge for the experienced (and, in some cases, jaded) members of your audience.

To some extent they're keeping the flexible, choose-your-skills method of play from the first game, but they're making four significant changes: 1) Your weapon and off-hand choice (or just weapon in the case of two-handed weapons) determines the first half of your skill bar (five skills) 2) Of the five remaning slots, one must be a heal (of some sort), and one can only be used for an elite skill, 3) Each profession will apparently have some method of swapping currently active skills during combat, and you can also swap equipped weapons, skills, traits and so forth (from what they've said, basically your entire build) outside combat, and 4) They are replacing the old profession-based attribute system with a trait (bonus) and more regularized attribute system a la other MMOs.

There's no details yet on the attributes, but from how they explained it, it sounds like it's more your typical strength/intelligence/dexterity style attributes. There may be some attributes that are only useful to certain professions, but we'll have to wait to find that out.

Weapon and off-hand choice determining skills is a big move. While there were always skills that would only work with certain weapons (bow attacks, for instance, obviously require a bow), you could easily work up a build that let your warrior use a bow, or your ranger use a hammer, or your ritualist use a sword and shield. Individual professions now have a list of possible main-hand and off-hand choices (or the choice of a two-handed weapon), and each of those choices has a fixed set of skills; three for a main-hand weapon, two for an off-hand item, five for a two-handed weapon. A sword as a main hand weapon, for instance, explicitly enables the same skills for any warrior, although another profession would get a different set of skills. (There's a set of standard skills associated with each weapon, although it's a little unclear on whether or not these are ever alterable as they mentioned something about learning weapon skills.)

This allows them to make the entry of a new player a little easier, by making sure they'll always have a few useful skills that work well together. At the same time, it means that a more experienced player with a sound grasp of strategy and tactics can easily pick the most effective of these in combination with all the optional skill choices. And since you now will be able to swap weapons freely between combats, the flexibility is pretty high.

For elementalists, rather than hot-swapping equipped weapons during combat, they'll be able to change which of the four elements they're attuned to, giving them a total of twenty skills available per weapon set. This means is that the same staff that gives you five fire skills also will give you five water skills if you change to your water attunement. They get a total of five different weapon or weapon/off-hand combinations, each of which has a different set of skills, some of which are close-range, some medium, and some long.

Warriors, on the other hand, get two weapon sets to hot-swap between during combat, and while that seems on the face of it to offer only 10 skills, one of those can be (may always be?) a set of three chainable skills (i.e., use the first skill successfully, and it temporarily changes it to a second, and then third, related skill), while another will be a skill that builds up power over time and can be used at four distinct levels of power, which also brings the total number of different(ish) weapon skills to twenty per weapon/off-hand combo (or, if you really don't agree that a higher-powered version of a skill should be counted differently, 17). They also get a whopping nineteen possible weapon or weapon/off-hand choices; with enough inventory space, they could even potentially carry all of those at once, although presumably few people would go that far, instead sticking to a couple alternates. And, unusually (though it's not unheard of), they get two distance weapons: a longbow that comes with at least one very good nuking attack, and a rifle suitable for picking off those running targets.

The trait system sounds interesting. They are saying there will be roughly a hundred traits per profession, which at first seems an almost bewildering array of choices, but each one will give a bonus to one specific thing, and may only be applicable to certain skill and/or weapon choices. Some examples they gave were the ability for warriors to raise the number of allies affected by their shout buffs, or to increase the crit chance on the Final Thrust sword skill, or for elementalists to add a trait that heals the allies near an enemy they hit with the Water Trident skill. Those latter two are fairly specific, which should help narrow down the choices somewhat, and obviously you wouldn't take the first trait if your build had no shouts in it. While I suspect that skilled and experienced gamers will find it easier to figure out the optimal trait builds, even a newish player should be able to figure out which ones are likely to do some good.

So, where do strategy and tactics come in? Well, strategy is really covered by the above: it involves weapon and off-hand choices (and thus a large number of one's skill choices), optional skill choices, and traits (and if they're changeable, attributes). That's the planning stage, "What do I need to tackle this group of enemies?"... or, if you don't want to be constantly swapping around traits and weapons, "What's the best general-purpose build for this area we're in?"

Tactics involves the on-the-spot decisions. Should a warrior continue their chained skill or swap weapons to swat the mob attacking his squishier party-mate with a knockback? Should an elementalist stick to air for some single-target spiking, or swap to earth for its focus on defense? The changeable elementalist attunements and the ability for warriors to hot-swap weapons without having to worry about whether you've allocated enough power to fire spells or axe attacks allows you to make mid-battle decisions about what's most important for you and your party at that moment. People who can master those tactics will undoubtedly be able to more speedily dispatch enemies, but even in the case of a less tactically-minded player, a certain amount of flexibility should be helpful.

In addition to those considerations, they've mentioned a few times that positioning and movement will be important. One solid example we have is the use of the elementalist's Phoenix spell: it launches a fiery bird towards one's foes, and moves through the group following your own movement, then is re-absorbed by the elementalist for a self-heal. There's been some hints that attacking from behind or flanking a mob may give bonuses as well, and there will presumably be a certain amount of dodging possible.

Beyond the flexibility of solo players, there will be some effects that can be gotten by combining at least two players' skills. The example they seem to like best: an elementalist lays down a wall of fire to harm advancing foes, and a second player with a bow fires through the wall, setting their arrows on fire on their way to the target, boosting damage. They've suggested that in general, any ranged weapon combined with any elementalist wall or similar area spell will have this effect, and melee weapons may also be able to take advantage of such spells. Other combinations are definitely possible, although no one's sure what those are yet.

And that doesn't even get into the topic of environmental weapons, such as using a siege weapon, picking up the wooden planks that fall from an enemy, stealing a drake egg from its nest, or just picking up a simple rock. Each of these items will provide you with a set of temporary weapon skills, which may vary from profession to profession. We really don't know yet how extensive this system is (or how useful it will be), but it sounds very intriguing.

All in all it sounds as if there will be an engaging combat mechanic that neither bars newbies nor bores experienced players. Assuming it's all implemented as well as it sounds, combat should be extremely fun to participate in.