Weapons overview in Guild Wars 2

Hello this is Rolfson from MMO-Mechanics. Guild Wars 2 beta weekend starts today and I wanted to give you information on one of the biggest differences between Guild Wars 2 and other MMOs, weapons.

Weapons in Guild Wars 2 are unlike any system you’ve seen in an MMO before. Instead of the traditional role of skills being augmented by weapons that are simply there to look cool and boost your skills, Guild Wars 2 takes a whole new approach to the system. Half of your skills are based specifically on which weapon(s) you have equipped. The first 5 actions on your action bar are designated by what weapon you have equipped. For example, an Elementalist with a trident equipped will have access to an entirely different skillset than if they had a staff equipped. Not to mention that for elementalists, they have different elemental attunements that further differentiate the skills. So this new system leaves room for incredible amounts of skill customization, the likes of which you’ve never seen before!

Now let’s get into the gritty details. You finally downloaded the beta, make your character (ooh, that sexy Charr Mesmer!), and enter the game. After the tutorial, you’ll have one single weapon set. You equip it and, what? You don’t have all of that weapon’s set skills yet. You have to ‘level up’ each weapon set to unlock all of the skills available to that set. I’d recommend picking up all of the sets available to your class as soon as possible so that in your heroic venture across the world, you can level up all of your sets to have access to all of the skills as soon as possible. Of course, you’re going to find a set that you fall in love with and probably spend more time in that set than others. I’d still heavily suggest maxing out all of the sets though, as you may find other builds more useful as you progress through the levels.

We have a chart, provided by Arena.net, that shows the weapons available to each class here.

So what next? Well, as you’re leveling you may notice some quirks within each class specific to the weapon sets. As mentioned earlier, Elementalists have various attunements (earth, fire, air, water) that change the skills on each weapon, and you can do so in the middle of combat. However, you cannot change weapon sets in the middle of combat on your Elementalist. Other classes can switch out sets in combat for quick changes in skills which enables sweet combos and tricks. There is a cooldown for switching, negated only by a Warrior elite as far as we know now. You won’t be constantly switching back and forth to abuse certain skills because of the cooldown, although you will still be able to change over a couple times per fight for some nice variation and chains. This is where it comes in handy to have multiple weapon sets’ skills maxed out. The new weapon system adds a whole new dimension to Guild Wars 2 and I can’t wait to check it out. See you in Beta!

Reminder: MMO-Mechanics will be on the Fort Aspenwood server this weekend. You can read about joining us here.