Big Announcements! Exclusive Talk With Guild Wars 2 Designers

Ranger Downed Skill: Lick Wounds
Very quickly after the first real scoop of the interview surfaces! One of the as of yet unannounced Ranger abilities will be called “Lick Wounds”. Jon Peters describes it like this:

“One of the Ranger’s Downed Skills that we haven’t talked about yet is a skill where you can tell your pet to come to come up to you and revive you, it’s currently called “Lick Wounds”. He goes on to emphasize that “One of the most effective ways of reviving when you are downed is having your ranger pet alive.”

Professions
Eric explains that Guild Wars 2 professions will be a nice mix between what Guild Wars 1 fans already know and some new professions. All the professions will seem and feel very powerful and the two are glad to hear that the Ranger does sound like a strong class in Jonathan’s ears.

Byebye Grinding!
The second big announcement from the interview is that the design team is trying to keep Guild Wars 2 away from a grindfest.

When Jonathan asks how easy GW2 will be to get into Eric answers:
“We don’t want people to feel like they are grinding. We want you to always feel like you are making some sort of progress.” Eric seems to throw a little punch at World of Warcraft when he goes on to say there will be no: “Raiding, and going through 20 dungeons looking for that one rare drop that you have to fight with other players over. You know, spending hours and hours and hours grinding to get gear to make you competitive with people your level. We want a reasonable amount of playtime to make you competitive.” oh snap!

Pet Shark!
When talking about pets it becomes clear that you can have pet Sharks in Guild Wars! How cool is that! The aquatic areas  seems to be quite important in the game and as such there will be several aquatic pets next to terrestrial and Amphibian creatures divided in 12 families of tamable pets.

The days of launching a half finishes MMO are over? Haleluja!
The next big announcement that Eric and Peter make is that they believe the days of launching an MMO with lots of bugs and lack of polish and then patching it up afterwards are over:

“The days of, you know, releasing an MMO sort of broken and then patching it up are sort of gone.” They go on to say “We don’t think that’s an option for us. We think we’ve got to get this game right at launch.”

Great to see that they are so confident!

Hear the rest of this exclusive and revealing interview in the video section right here on OnRPG!