Guild Wars Mini-Interview #37

ArenaNet has answered another small batch of questions about Guild Wars, this time releasing the Q&A on the game’s official website in preparation for this weekend’s beta event. Check it out:

Q: There’s some concern about spending a lot of time with a roleplaying character and then finding that the profession choices aren’t exactly the right mix for the individual player. Is this something that will or can be addressed?

A: Players soon not this BWE, but soon will have the opportunity to change secondary professions. In addition to the experimentation that you’re allowed in Kingdom of Ascalon, where you can give every secondary profession a “trial run,” you can now amend your character after you have reached Ascension. This means that a character into whom you’ve invested a goodly amount of time will be one that can be changed, rather than started anew. You don’t need to recast, you can simply reconfigure by a method that is tied to the upper-level story of Guild Wars. It’s like doing a re-spec, but better.

Another nice thing, according to one of our game designers, James Phinney, is that when you do choose a new secondary profession, you will keep all the skills that you have acquired with your other choices. So, if you selected Elementalist as a secondary profession when you first created the character, then changed to a Mesmer secondary, if in the future you decide to revisit the Elementalist again, you’ll be stocked with all the skills that the character had on board before moving to that new profession.

The bottom line is that you could have a primary character who has experimented with all five available secondary professions. That character will likely have good stock of skills in each of those lines. In fact, that character could have every skill in each of the five available secondaries. The character then, in ways not yet to be revealed, will be able to shift to a different secondary and take advantage of a long history of roleplaying character development.