Warriors, traits, and combat chatter: Massively's interview with the Guild Wars 2 Lead Designer

Yesterday's update to the Guild Wars 2 site brought news that made a lot of fans very happy: confirmation of the warrior class as well as the introduction of the traits system for Guild Wars 2. As always, once ArenaNet decides to give out information, they do it right. We got screenshots, wallpapers, video, and pages of detailed information on this new class and concept.

We at Massively -- just like the rest of the Guild Wars 2 community -- were thrilled at the news and had plenty of questions about the new information. Lead Designer Eric Flannum generously spent some time answering those questions (and evading our sneaky attempts to wrangle a third class reveal.)

He had some very interesting things to say, so follow along after the jump for our exclusive interview!

Massively: Will traits be available right from the beginning, or will you need to advance a bit before you are able to augment your skills and attributes in that way?

Eric Flannum: Traits are not available immediately. We have a lot of new concepts in the game and we didn't want to overload new players with too many systems at once. Because of this we tend to introduce different systems gradually over the first few levels. Traits are actually the last major system to be introduced and come into play at about level 15. This of course is subject to change as we test the game and see how people are adapting to and learning our various game systems.

Ben mentioned that you can "respec at will outside of combat," but also referred to an "alternate weapon for switching in combat." Can you elaborate on when weapons, skills, attributes, and traits can and can't be changed?

I believe Ben was referring to the second weapon set that most professions have access to in combat. A character may have as many as two weapon sets if their profession allows and switch between them with a simple hotkey/button press. To change things such as which weapons are equipped in your weapon sets, armor, skills, and traits a player must be out of combat. A player is out of combat if they haven't used a skill or been attacked for a short period of time.

Will there be separate PvP and PvE versions of traits, like we have now?

Eric: For our competitive PvP we'll have different versions of both skills and traits as needed for balance. We may even disallow certain skills and traits if that proves necessary as well.

The warrior's warhorn offhand is a new item, but seems similar to the Shining Blade War Horn, a new item from Royal Gifts in Guild Wars. Do they have a similar function?

A warhorn is simply an offhand weapon so what it does is different in the hands of different professions. Some professions use the horn solely to buff allies while others have found more aggressive uses for it. I know some players have been curious about torches which are also simply offhand weapons that certain professions can utilize.

The warrior's ability to use ranged weapons such as longbows and rifles seems to indicate a ranger/warrior combination. Can we expect a separate ranger-like class, or is this an intentional consolidation?

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a ranger profession in Guild Wars 2 at this time (nice try). I can say a few things about warriors and ranged weapons. We want every weapon that a profession can equip to be a valid choice for that profession. That means that if I choose to, I could make a warrior that does nothing but stand back and rain fiery arrows or rifle shot upon my enemies. It would take an unusual build of traits, attributes, and skills to maximize the effectiveness of such a tactic but is definitely possible (Longbow warriors are very popular in the office PvP meta game at the moment).

The warrior and elementalist videos both showed our heroes quipping as they dispatched their foes, and there's been quite a bit of curiosity about those one-liners. Is there a specific trigger for them such as a related skill, or are they random? Will players have the ability to turn them off if they prefer?

The combat chatter that you hear triggers based off of certain criteria such as stunning a foe, lifting a heavy object, leveling up, entering combat, etc... There are limits put on it to make certain it doesn't happen too often and players always have the option to disable it if they want.

Thanks for you time, Eric!