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IGN: Guild Wars 2: Playing the Guardian

Zosimus

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IGN has an article touching upon my profession of choice I am starting out with when GW2 is released is the Guardian. Yes I am a huge fan of the Guardian profession.



Great article and we here at Guild Wars 2 Stratics like to thank IGN for having this great article up especially for all us Guardian profession fans.


Link: Guild Wars 2: Playing the Guardian - PC Preview at IGN


For the click link impaired:

Guild Wars 2: Playing the Guardian

A support profession with some serious offensive skills.

February 27, 2012February 28, 2012February 28, 2012




You might think playing a supporting role in an MMO sounds boring. Maybe you'll activate a few group buffs to boost your friends' critical chance or armor rating and then generally keep your distance to avoid capturing the attention of the enemy and stay alive. Guild Wars 2's Guardian profession has several skills that benefit a group, but the way they're designed means the play style is far from boring.

Like the rest of Guild Wars 2's professions, your active weapon determines your available skills. With a one-handed sword, the Guardian can teleport to a target to deal damage and blindness as well as block projectiles. With a Mace in hand the Guardian can slam a magical symbol into the ground under his feet, which deals damage to surrounding enemies and heals allies, as well as trigger a counter-attack move that temporarily reduces the damage taken by allies. The Greatsword, a two-handed weapon with five associated skills, can be tossed at enemies and opens up the ability to jump attack. It also allows the Guardian to spin around in a whirlwind and fire magical bolts in all directions, as well as inscribe a symbol into the ground that damages enemies and coats allies in damage reflection.

[youtube]r7Muztvrcdc&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Across multiple skill sets, the Guardian's damaging skills are interwoven with support abilities, meaning he needs to be very active in combat to take full advantage of his protective bonuses. Off-hand items like the focus and shield add a few more defensive abilities, including a bubble that explodes if it isn't destroyed by enemies first, and a larger magic dome that knocks back enemies and absorbs projectiles.

On top of the Guardian's weapon-based skills are Virtues, magical effects that boost the profession's effectiveness in combat. The virtues affect only the Guardian when left alone, but by activating them, their effects are temporarily shared with friends. So if you want to give everyone in your group fire damage, provide health regeneration and enhanced damage blocking, you can. The catch is that after the shared buff ends, the Virtue becomes inaccessible until after an ensuring cooldown timer expires. For example, normally Virtue of Justice gives the Guardian additional fire damage every few attacks. If it's activated, everyone gets fire damage. But after that, the fire damage buff is locked out entirely until after the Virtue of Justice's cooldown. After that, the effect reactivates on the Guardian, and it's again shareable.

Stack all these weapon skills up with the Virtues and it's already a complex, satisfying system. Add in all the slot skills you can learn as you level along with Guild Wars 2's trait system, and there's a whole lot the Guardian can do. Check out the embedded video to see a low level Guardian in combat.

ArenaNet's MMO sequel is in beta testing right now, and is expected to launch sometime in 2012. As soon as the beta is again opened to press, you can expect more coverage on IGN.
 
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