Guild Wars 2 Commando Profession Announced, Q&A

Who wants to fire arrows as a pathetic ranger or sift through sarcophagi as a corpse-loving necromancer when you can play as a one-man army capable of calling in predator air strikes? That’s the concept behind the commando, the latest profession to make its way into Guild Wars 2. How about a skills trailer?

And some more:

A master of the battlefield, this elite soldier is equally at home on the mean streets of Lion’s Arch, in the steamy Maguuma Jungle, or on the Orrian front. The multi-role commando is a combat medic, an infiltrator, and a tank. By land, sea, or air, the commando is a technological force to be reckoned with. Come get some.

Commandos have several different special skill types:

Grenades Sometimes you need to kill a whole lot of tangos fast. Grenades enable the commando to perform area-of-effect attacks with a variety of devastating results. From flashbangs that blind enemies to shrapnel bombs that apply bleeding, the commando has a grenade for every occasion.

Vehicles Vehicle skills act as the commando’s utility skills. A commando can opt for an armored personnel carrier (APC) or a tank for land travel, a helicopter for air travel, or a submarine for undersea travel. Each vehicle gives the commando three utility skills, ranging from depth charges on the submarine to flamethrowers on the APC.

The APC, tank, and helicopter can also carry allied passengers to maximize your firepower. Passengers acquire new skills based on their profession and their position in the vehicle. For example, an elementalist manning the tank’s main gun can fire flaming shells, while a necromancer riding shotgun in an APC can use the Corrupted Headlights ability to poison and blind foes caught in the beams.

Force Multipliers Commandos are one-man armies, but they don’t have to fight alone. Force multiplier skills let the commando call in helicopter gunships to take out a boss, rain death from above with Predator air strikes, or even request a danger close offshore naval bombardment.

To learn more about what is clearly going to be the game’s most desirable class, Games On Net has produced this Q&A with Eric Flannum:

games.on.net: If the Thief “steals” an item from the Commando, what does it take the form of? And is it possible for a thief to steal a vehicle, say a tank?

Eric: We want the thief steal mechanic to always feel like a change of pace and provide the thief with new tools that he usually doesn’t have access to. The list of things that the thief can steal from a commando in order of most common to least common is as follows: MRE, Grenade, Tank, Aircraft Carrier, and Nuclear Missile.