Whoever said that race makes no difference had clearly never heard of Guild Wars 2. Tonight I’m going to give you an overview based on the wiki and various press coverage from the beta and tell you what the deal is with the racial elite skills we’ve now gotten to see previews of. Before we start, you can find a pretty comprehensive listing of all of the different videos and articles from this beta here on Guru. Additionally, since I have fourty-whatever of you following me on Tumblr and this gets seen by people not on Tumblr, please let me know what you want to read. Curious about a part of the game and want to see it given some attention? Think you know about something but want to see another in-depth view taken on it? Click the “Got A Question/Request?” button on the right and let me know! Seriously, it’ll only take you a few seconds of your time to give me your request, and then you’ll get a major post to read about it. Anyways, onto the skills!

Racial Skills Overview

So, every race is going to have their own skills. Some of these are going to be elite, and some of them are going to be elites, and some of them are going to be other slot skills. This weekend, we got to see ten of the elite skills we’re going to have access to. Now, every race has a different number, but they’re all themed somehow with the race. There are a few other skills listed on the wiki have been named, mentioned, or otherwise hinted at here and there, but this weekend we only got to see ten of the elites.

Charr Skills

Let’s start with the charr first. Judging by the usage this weekend, I’d say the charr thusfar have the most powerful, least balanced skills at the moment. Granted, we’re in beta. These things are going to get played with here and there. But let’s look at the skills. They’re all themed with the charr and their culture and technology.

Warband Support

So, Warband Support is pretty similar to the thief elite Thieves Guild or one of the human skills we’ll get to. It summons a couple ally NPCs to help you kick some tail. The allies are going to vary based on your legion that you pick at character creation. They don’t last very long, but they each put out a respectable amount of damage with their attacks.

Artillery Barrage

This is easily the most powerful racial elite we saw over the weekend. It’s a ground-targetted AoE with a very wide radius. Within the area, shells blast down out of the sky and cause MASSIVE damage with each it. This one’s definitely going to end up getting nerfed for balance reasons. I hope. Also, I’m going to go with Yogscast on this one and rename it Charrtillery Barrage.

Charrzooka

This one isn’t me or Yogscast playing around with the name. It’s actually called Charrzooka. This is my favorite skill we saw by far. This puts a charrzooka in your hands that replaces your weapon bar and has limited ammo (15 rounds, some skills use more than one).  The skills you get let you shoot a rocket, shoot random spray of rockets, shoot a heat-seeking rocket at the foe, shoot a rocket into the ground and knock you and nearby enemies back (think engineer’s Jump Shot), or rapidly fire rockets at your foe. This does a good amount of damage too, but nothing compared to Charrtillery Barrage.

Human Skills

So where the charr skills are based around their warbands and technology, the human skills are based around the six gods. They’re just as varied as the charr skills, but not as powerful thusfar. 

Hounds of Balthazar

So this one is my favorite human skill. You get two little fiery dog pets that help you out, kind of like Warband Support only cooler. They look a little too reminiscent of WoW corehound pets in my opinion, but maybe that’s just me. Either way, these jump into the fight with you. Literally. They leap at their target and explode with fire and roast things. They don’t last all that long, but they put out while you’ve got them.

Reaper of Grenth

Now this one was very underwhelming. It gives you a black aura of undeath that works at melee range. It poisons and cripples nearby foes, making it good for melee but not as good for ranged characters.

Avatar of Melandru

This one is the coolest looking of the human elites, I think. You turn into an enormous tree thing. If you’ve seen the ranger spirits, it kinda looks like an enormous one of those that isn’t ethereal-looking. It replaces your skill bar as well with a basic attack, condition removal for nearby allies, roots nearby enemies, and lets you summon an AoE healing circle for allies. It’s definitely the most party support oriented racial elite we’ve seen thus far.

Norn Skills

Now, the norn have four skills this time around, but one of them is very unfinished and doesn’t have icons yet at all. Much like the human skills are devoted to the six gods, these are devoted to the four Spirits of the Wild. Each skills lets you take the were-form of the spirit. It’s pretty cool looking, except for Raven. Were-ravens look really weird.

Bear Form

So this is the classic norn skill everyone knows and remembers from GW. The norn become the Bear. The form takes over your main skill bar, though the list of skills thusfar is incredibly incomplete, unfinished, and not worth putting in here while they’re not done. But, the bear form makes you a bit tougher and a lot bigger.

Wolf Form

This is just like Bear Form, except that it turns you into a half-norn-half-wolf creature. The wolf form is supposed to be a bit more agile than the bear form, but again this is all very incomplete.

Raven Form

I can’t take this skill seriously. The form you take when you use this skill just looks ridiculous. I’m really hoping they play with it more by the time we go live or hopefully by the next beta. You turn into some half-raven-half-man creature and attack things again.

Snow Leopard Form

This one is the least finished. Neither the skill itself nor the weapon bar skills have icons. This one possibly looks the coolest. If you’ve ever played Elder Scrolls, think about the Khajit with a bit more mass to them. It looks like a white, spotted, muscular Khajit. The coolest thing about this one is they’re putting some stealth into it.

Anyway, that’s all we’ve seen thusfar in the beta. Sorry for no posting yesterday; it was a very busy day. Remember to send me your post requests!

So for tonight’s nightly video, here’s Mike B letting us know what to expect from him this time around. I’m most excited for his coverage simply because he probably is one of the best out there in terms of player skill and knowledge combined. Oh, he also talks about his computer, which is cool for tech nerds.

Hey guys! So, everyone knows this weekend was the beta. Well, 12 hours ago the NDA let the press start putting up their stuff, and it’s been coming all day. So, while everyone is still getting their videos up, I’m going to go ahead and talk about what they were able to see in the beta. Quick disclaimer, I wasn’t in the beta. I’m not breaching any sort of NDA on this. I’ve just been looking over everything that’s been going up and getting the best gist I could out of everything.

PvP, PvE, and WvW Content

So, they were basically given the same content to play with. Asura and sylvari were both still hidden from us. As far as I can tell so far, content still stopped at about level 30. Ascalon Catacombs was still, as far as I know, the only dungeon we’ve seen. They did, as I understand, change up some mechanics and some of what’s in there. The WvW maps are still the same WvW maps, but we know they’re not adding more. In Structured PvP, though, we got a new map called Forest of Niflhel.

Other Changes and New Stuff

It should be obvious, since it’s beta, that a lot of the numbers assigned to things have been changed. Also, microtransaction items should have probably been in there, but I’m willing to bet they won’t be able to talk about them. The biggest new thing we’re seeing now today are some of the new racial elites available to the norn, humans, and charr. Some of these are really cool, and I’ll talk about them in another post. Some skills have new icons (or have them to begin with), and a lot of the traits were redone. A lot of skills were moved around or combined here and there. The biggest thing is we’ve gotten a lot better, more in-depth look at some of the other features we saw last time, and that’s what I’m going to talk about for the rest of this article.

Guild Wars’ Guild System

I wasn’t really happy last beta with the amount of coverage we really got on everything you can do with the guild system, but Guild Wars Online got a really nice video up for us this time around; click the source link at the bottom of the page. Their commentary is in Spanish, but for those of you who only speak language, the client is in English so you can read everything. Anyway, we got a good look at all of the influence expenditures, how being in multiple guilds works, and my biggest thing: setting up ranks. 

One Character, Lots of Guilds

We’ve known about this for a while, but you can actually be in more than one guild in GW2 on one character. The way it works is that in your guild pane, there’s a button at the bottom that lets you pick click which guild you want to look at. They appear in a list with a different button beside each that lets you leave or represent that guild, as you can only show one at a time. Once you pick a guild to look at, you open up to the rest of the pane.

The Main Pane

So the main pane for the guild shows you various things. At first, you’re looking at the activity history. You can have it show everything, just influence changes, message of the day updates, and upgrades. It also shows you upgrades currently researching, current influence, and the message of the day.

The Roster Pane

When you look at the roster pane, it shows considerably more detailed information at once than most other games. Now, because there was select press in this beta, like the last one, real names of the players online are shown in the guild. In our version, it’ll show the name of the person in the guild, much like it does in the current version of Guild Wars. It then also shows the character you’re on in parentheses, kind of backwards from the current Guild Wars. It’s interesting to see this way that all of your characters will be added to every guild with the aliasing. Either way, it then shows you where they are and what server they’re on. I’m assuming this is due to cross-server visiting rather than guilds being able to spread out across servers, but I’ve been wrong before. After location and server, it shows your profession and level, which are both standard. Lastly, it shows your crafting disciplines, which is nice to have on the main roster page. At the end, there’s one other thing which I can’t quite tell from the video, but I’m going to guess that it’s something for showing how many activities you’ve completed to earn influence for your guild.

Upgrades

The third pane is for upgrades. Now, I’m not going to list all of the upgrades on here as there are a lot of them and you can see them in that video. But, you can sort through the various types of upgrades available. At the same time, all of the upgrades you can research are shown at the top, with the ones your guild cannot yet research are shown at the bottom in ascending level of required level. They also appear to sort in order of cost. So, for example, Guild Armorer Contract (costs 500) appears above Research Politics Level 3 (costs 5000), but both of them appear above Contract Asuran Outsourcing, which costs 200 but requires Politics 3.

Ranks and Permissions

The last tab is the one that made me the happiest. It shows you each guild rank and the permissions they all have, so everyone in the guild can see this instead of just the leader. In the video, GWO shows us how simple it is to create a guild out of nowhere and how to create new ranks. You simply push the new rank button, pick a symbol, and give it a name. It’s a lot easier to manage than the guild system of WoW (in my opinion) and a far cry better than that of GW where you can’t even play with this stuff. Some of the different permissions are very obvious, like the ability to the guild emblem, spend influence on upgrades, and withdraw or deposit from the guild stash and treasure trove. The ones I didn’t know about and like are the ability to let other people edit ranks aside from just the leader. I also liked that you can choose who can or cannot claim or unclaim keeps in WvW. I thought it was interesting that there’s a rank permission for displaying the guild emblem. I can see this as being a cool way of distinguishing recruits from people who’ve made it into the guild by allowing them to display the guild colors. You can also pick where new members start, so you can actually have somewhere down for them to go.

Summary

Anyway, that’s basically the guild system as we see it right now. I personally really love the UI for it. It’s not clunky by any means, but it still manages to provide a lot of information at the same time. I like the amount of control you get over the guild. As a former guild leader in WoW, I always felt it was such a hassle to deal with playing with the ranks. It was just really clunky feeling and incredibly tedious. I personally think GW2’s system is much better when first starting as well as editing things in retrospect.

Here’s another nice episode of GuildCast in its entirety for you to watch!  This is the first one after the beta talking about everything.  On a side note, Elisabeth is adorable when she gets all excited talking about the game.

Here’s a nice little treat.  Gamebreaker TV posted the video of the final event of the press beta a few weeks ago, and I’m now having success in posting their videos!  So, here’s a little bit of testing with graphics and bombarding the living crap out of everyone with all the spell effects they could.

So in the post-beta blog, we were told about exploration puzzles to complete.  Here’s one of them from TotalBiscuit.

For a nightly video, here’s some PvP from TapRepeatedly in the Battle For Khylo playing as a necromancer.

Tonight’s Nightly Video is TotalBiscuit showing off intro cinematics from each of the three races and how they vary based on your character creation choices.

Nightly video to make up for last night, here’s Yogscast some warrior gameplay and a look at mining.  Sorry for being delinquent, was trying to hurry and get in bed at a good time last night after the Dub V Dub post.

So tonight’s nightly video is a new video from the beta (they’re still rolling in) of the Ascalon Catacombs dungeon.  Mike B’s did a great video.  Curse did… subpar videos.  See how this one from ZAM checks out against the others!