Guild Wars 2 Q&A

GameSpot caught up with ArenaNet designers Jon Peters and Isaiah Cartwright for a three-page Q&A about the newly unveiled Guardian profession in Guild Wars 2.

GS: Can you comment on the abilities of the guardian as a solo class for players who either don’t have time to meet up with friends or just happen to be logging in at odd hours? Is this one of the better soloing professions, or is there even such a thing in Guild Wars 2? Is the idea in the sequel to encourage players to group or to let them run solo with any profession?

JP: Because of the character’s profession mechanics, he works really well in groups, but he can also summon weapons for battle and use virtues in combat. So, that gives him options to do battle even if no other group members are around. Also, there are a lot of other non-player characters to interact with throughout the game, so even outside of a group, the guardian can interact with a lot of characters. I’d say whether he’s going solo or grouped really just changes what he fights. Specifically, the guardian is really good at fighting slow-hitting, powerful bad guys since his aegis ability periodically absorbs an incoming hit; this lets him do really well when he takes on an enemy with a slower rate of attack. If he’s by himself, he can take on these more-powerful, slower foes, like Guild Wars 2’s ettins. So in a solo situation, that’s more what you’d do. But in a group, you can take on some bigger enemies and support your party instead. So, as is the case with a lot of Guild Wars 2’s classes, you can solo and you can group–you’d just be changing up exactly what kind of enemies you’d be fighting at any given time. For example, with a more-fragile elementalist, you probably won’t want to take on an ettin since he can survive some of your magical powers and strike back. With that class, you’d probably want to take on groups of smaller enemies that you can blow up with your area-based spells. But when it comes to that kind of thing, it really just comes down to changing your tactics.

Guardians are, like pretty much all of Guild Wars 2’s professions, balanced to be good when played solo and good to have in a group but not needed in a group. We’re trying to remove the traditional tank, healer, damage-per-second roles you see in most massively multiplayer online games and let players have more versatility in what they can do.differentiating themselves not by their profession’s roles but by their own personal playing styles. As a result, no individual profession in Guild Wars 2 is “necessary.” Everyone has their own way of doing things, but every profession can resurrect fallen comrades. Every profession has healing skills, and those healing skills are the most efficient way to keep them alive. Every profession has the ability to swap between different sets of abilities.

IC: And I think what really differentiates the classes from each other is the way characters have certain specialties in the types of enemies they’re most effective against. Again, the guardian specializes in taking on slow, powerful enemies, while other classes can deal better with other types of enemies. Warriors are a bit more versatile and can equip bows to start dealing ranged damage or use a melee weapon to damage a single target, whereas a guardian may have trouble with a horde of small enemies. That’s really one of the things this class brings to the table, though if you don’t have one in the party, that’ll still be OK since there are other ways to deal with big, slow enemies.