The ZAM staff continues its in-depth coverage of the upcoming sequel by delving into the mechanics and reasoning behind the game's battle mechanics.

ZAM: Are these combos always associated with tools? Or are they two weapon sorts of skills? How does someone actually begin a combo?

Cartwright: We’re still really playing around with it. Y’know, it might be the case where we do end up finding that we need some set rules with the combo system, but we’re really still working on it and iterating it. We always try to think big and then back off.

Peters: And with the cross profession combos, we’re really trying to do things that are always really visual and really obvious. Of course, there are other less obvious combos, like dropping an AoE to knock down an opponent to assist your allies. But we do try to make many of the combos very visually explicit – if you see a giant AoE cloud and you shoot something through it, you expect something to happen.

Cartwright: We also have some loose categories of combos too. For example, the fire wall and arrow combo might be in the “throw something through the AoE because it’s going to get cooler” set of combos. So, in the game, you’ll just know what to do when you see the combo goes out there. You won’t need to look at a chart to figure out the best skill to use with a particular combo.

ZAM: But could you do something like that where a group essentially specs out their characters to have the best combos available?

Cartwright: Definitely. We’re certainly going to have a depth of complexity there, because when we think something might be too simple, it’s really easy to add elements to the game.

I mean, it’s a constant juggling act between balance, number of build options, and everything else we have to factor in. It’s all about finding that sweet spot. Luckily, we have 200 employees now who can constantly get back to us and let us know if we’ve done something cool or really dumb. It makes for a very iterative sort of environment.

It’s like all the questions that you’re asking… we’re asking ourselves the same questions and trying to answer them.

Peters: Our ability to create things and then iterate them so much faster really creates a much more cohesive system for us.

ZAM: Environmental weapons sound awesome. Can you tell us a bit more about them?

Cartwright: I’ve always thought of those weapons as a blast back to games like Double Dragon or Final Fight. You could be randomly wandering around the world and suddenly you’d pick up a whip or a knife and you’d be stronger for it. And that’s really what we were shooting for in GW2. We wanted people to be running around and all of a sudden see that object out in the play field and say “Ohhhhh….a rock!”

On top of that, we’ve made it so that many of the environmental weapons react differently depending on what class picks them up. Since you’re already running around with a pretty badass weapon to begin with, we had to make sure that the rock (or whatever) you picked up was absolutely awesome. That sort of idea, again, allows us to come up with all sorts of different combinations between the classes and the environmental weapons.

It also allows for different types of gameplay. We might have a really hard encounter in the game, but all we’d need to do to even the score is drop some environmental weapons out there for the players to pick up and use.

ZAM: That concludes this segment of our combat and skills interview with the Guild Wars 2 team. Check back in a few days for the conclusion of our interview! And check out all the new screens and concept art that have been added to the Guild Wars 2 Gallery.