In the ongoing slow drip of information about Guild Wars 2, today’s revelation is another profession to join the Elementalist and Warrior — the Ranger:

The ranger is a jack-of-all-trades and a master of them all as well, relying on his keen eye, steady hand, or the power of nature itself. A master of ranged combat, the ranger is capable of striking unwitting foes from a distance with his bow. With a stable of pets at his command, a ranger can adapt to his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses.

A ranger is accompanied by his pet, a loyal animal companion. Rangers charm pets and then bond with them. A ranger can have up to three pets at his call, but generally speaking, only one pet can be active at any time. Pets’ base health, armor, and damage are based on the level of the player that owns them.

My very first Guild Wars character was a ranger (Raphia Naon), so I’m happy to see his “descendents” will still be around in the 250-years-later continent of Tyria.

Update: PC Gamer‘s Tom Francis talks to Eric Flannum about the updated Ranger:

The Ranger is nature based, primarily a ranged attacker. Rangers are special because all Rangers have a pet. In your biography you will get to choose between three different pets that you can start with, and that varies between race. Then you can have up to three pets, and you go to a pet management screen to pull out any of the three that you want – provided that you’re not in combat. And so what we wanted to do is encourage Rangers to have up to three pets that they nurture and adventure with, and those three pets can be very different, purpose-wise.

So I can have maybe a bear who is good at tanking, or a snow leopard who’s a good damage pet, and then maybe a Moa bird who’s a good support pet, depending on the situation I’m in. So say I’m grouped with a bunch of Warriors and I really don’t need a bear to tank, I can pull out my snow leopard. If I wanted some support I could pull out the Moa. And so Rangers are designed to have those choices with their pets, where the pets fulfill very specific roles.

The pets automatically level to the level of the Ranger, so you don’t actually have to level pets. So if you get to level 50 and you want to go get a new type of pet, you don’t have to spend a bunch of time levelling that pet. The pet’s going to basically be effective.

And also, in that last paragraph, we learn that the level cap has been raised from 20 to (at least) 50. Also, unlike the trap mechanics in GW, traps have changed in that a Ranger can only have one trap active, and must be in the vicinity to keep it working (but it will continue to work as long as the Ranger stays in range). Spirits are also a larger part of the Ranger’s abilities, but still limited to a single spirit at a time.

Update the second: Rubi Bayer also reports on the Ranger’s abilities:

Let’s begin with what sort of pets are obtainable. “ A ranger has three active pet slots. Outside of combat, or through the use of utility skills, the ranger can swap their active pet. There are 12 different types of pets, including some terrestrial (spiders), some amphibious (lizards), and some aquatic (sharks).” Since pets from Elona and Cantha won’t be an option. ArenaNet has beefed up the selection in Tyria. “Within each type there are subtypes that can influence pets’ abilities. For example, a polar bear might have an Icy Roar, while a brown bear might have a Fearsome Roar.“

Yes. Sharks. You can tame a shark. While the idea of having a shark pet is awesome just on its own, the implications are even more exciting. First of all, you’ve got a pet that can accompany you in underwater combat. But since your faithful aquatic pet can’t go traipsing through the woods with you (sadly, it is not a landshark), rangers need a bit more variety available to them. This limitation is removed through the ability mentioned above, allowing rangers to have up to three pets “on call.” You can switch between your pets to adapt to your enemies or your surroundings as needed.

These changes should work to make playing the Ranger a better-balanced experience: over the last year or two, Rangers seem to have been trapped (sorry) into a few specialized functions, but generally aren’t as useful on mission and quest teams as other professions. Certainly they aren’t as welcome in pick-up groups as monks, elementalists or ritualists are.

Aha! My suspicions were correct: Guild Wars 2 will have no dedicated healing class. This is kinda significant to me, as my most successful character in Guild Wars is a monk: a healer. This change was somewhat telegraphed when they revealed the details of the Elementalist class last month, by having a skill slot that was only to be used for a healing skill or spell.

Simple systems like this, along with cross-profession combos, and the dedicated healing skill slot, help free players from the MMORPG shackles, and let us break the mold even more. We’re making players more self sufficient, but are also providing appealing ways for them to effortlessly work together to create a more inspired moment-to-moment experience. That is why Guild Wars 2 does not have a dedicated healing class.

Everyone take a deep breath. It’s going to be OK.

We have lots of people in our studio that enjoyed playing monks in Guild Wars 2 and healers in other games. We examined what it was about the healer archetypes that people really enjoyed, and we took a look at what it was about those archetypes that made the game less enjoyable. Then we created professions to appeal to those types of players.

Support players want to be able to say, “Remember that one time when I saved you from certain death?” They want to stand in the line of fire and block attacks. They want to surround their allies with a swirling dome of air that keeps enemy projectiles from passing through it. It’s not about clicking on a health bar and watching it go up, it’s about being there for your friends when they need you.

We’ll see. I admit that there are less-than-exciting aspects to running a healer, but one of the upsides is that you’re always in demand for missions and quests. For former schoolyard geeky team-rejects like me, this is a not inconsiderable benefit.

I do acknowledge the truth in the comic that accompanied the article:

Click on thumbnail to enlarge

Update: Interview with GW2 Lead Designer Eric Flannum (whose name is spelled in a couple of different ways in the article . . . perhaps a translation/transliteration issue, as Dieses Interview gibt es natürlich auch auf Deutsch).

Update the second: PC Gamer summarizes the healing and dying changes:

The tank stands in the front. The healer stands at the back. The damage dealers stand in the middle. So it has been for generations. Guild Wars 2 is making the latest and greatest effort to change that, PC Gamer can reveal, following an exclusive interview with game designer Jon Peters and lead designer Eric Flannum of ArenaNet. The biggest changes? Tanks are gone, healers are gone, the Death Penalty is gone, and you can still kick some arse while you’re lying on yours.

The nice folks who published Guild Wars five years ago are now preparing Guild Wars 2 for release . . . sometime. No firm release date has yet been revealed. This week, however, has seen a lot of new information released about the upcoming game, including:

• Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto by Mike O’Brien, one of the company founders.
  “So if you love MMORPGs, you should check out Guild Wars 2. But if you hate traditional MMORPGs, then you should really check out Guild Wars 2. Because, like Guild Wars before it, GW2 doesn’t fall into the traps of traditional MMORPGs. It doesn’t suck your life away and force you onto a grinding treadmill; it doesn’t make you spend hours preparing to have fun rather than just having fun; and of course, it doesn’t have a monthly fee.”
• The first confirmed profession in GW2, the Elementalist. One of the eight professions in the new game (there are ten in GW, so we’re definitely losing at least two of the current ones). Victor’s favourite GW character is his Elementalist. He’s looking forward to finding how the character class has been changed in the new game.
• Some quite substantial changes to the combat system from what we’re used to in GW: Combat, Part 1: Skills and Combat, Part 2: Weapons, Professions and Races. It sounds like the changes are going to make the combat experience a whole lot more interesting (possibly harder to master, but definitely more interesting).
• Five Years in Tyria by James Phinney, a brief tribute to GW on its fifth anniversary.

An interview with some of the developers for Guild Wars 2:

IncGamers recently sat down with Guild Wars 2’s lead designer, Eric Flannum, and fellow designers Curtis Johnson, Jon Peters and Ree Soesbee to talk about the upcoming MMO and answer some of our burning questions.

We talk about the game’s lore, the community, changes to game mechanics, PvP and more. Check it out below:

The most recent trailer showed us GW2’s five races. Does each race have unique abilities, and how important will they be when choosing a character?

Eric Flannum: Each of the five races has unique skills available to them. Our philosophy behind the design of these racial skills is that they are slightly weaker than equivalent skills determined by profession. While they may be less powerful, the racial skills capture the flavor of each race and provide additional options for the player. For example, a human playing a profession that normally doesn’t have a good way of dealing with conditions could take the “Prayer to Kormyr” racial skill, which removes a condition but is a fair bit weaker than comparable skills provided by a profession specializing in condition removal. By doing this, we hope to give the various races access to skills that make them feel unique without making them overpowered when played as a particular profession.

[. . .]

What have you learned from GW1 in terms of management of an online community and about how to structure a game in general?

Eric Flannum: After releasing three full games and an expansion, we’ve learned a lot about community management and game structure. For example, one of the things that seemed like a great idea to us when we first started making GW1 was the unified server for all players. On the surface this seems preferable since it allows people the greatest amount of flexibility when playing with their friends. In practice it means that player community is much harder to build. When playing in a world with hundreds of thousands of players you hardly ever encounter the same people on a regular basis (our heavy use of instancing also had a huge effect on this). Some players also use the large number of players as an excuse to act in a rude manner, knowing that they can’t really gain a negative reputation or ever have to be held accountable by the community for their actions. Of course, breaking things into different servers isn’t magically going to make these issues go away or solve all of our problems, but online games are ultimately all about player communities. Anything we can do to foster healthy and active player communities is a big win for us.

Given the problems I’ve had communicating with other players when they’re not in-game, I’m happy to hear this:

Curtis Johnson: When we made GW1 we knew that guilds and community were essential parts of the online role play experience, so we made it easy to start a guild very early in the game and for players to keep those relationships going by including all their characters in the same guilds. For Guild Wars 2 we’re keeping that same focus on early connections. We’re making it easy to keep all your characters in one guild, but for GW2 we decided that more friends means more fun, so it will be possible to have different characters in different guilds. We also wanted to give guilds more common purpose, so we’re including guild achievements, and placement in the world including guilds holding keeps in World vs World. We also want to make it easier to stay connected with your guild mates, so we’re introducing features like a guild calendar to make meeting and coordinating across time zones easier, and participating in guild chat from any web browser so you can stay in touch even when you can’t play.

I’m certainly looking forward to the as-yet-undetermined release date for Guild Wars 2. I resisted getting into the original Guild Wars, despite Victor’s strong enthusiasm for the game, but I eventually gave in . . . and I’m still playing it several hours per week now.

Here’s the new trailer. It certainly looks attractive, but you can’t tell much about game mechanics from the cinematics.

I’m hoping that they’ll retain the “flavour” of gameplay in the original, while still bringing the game up to the current state of the art in other areas. Call me an optimist . . .