A Mesmer Update — GuildWars

Are­naNet, the com­pa­ny behind Guild­Wars, has been work­ing on a fol­lowup game enti­tled Guild­Wars 2. It has been an open ques­tion whether one of the orig­i­nal pro­fes­sions, Mes­mers, (the one I like the best and the one most rel­e­vant to this blog) would be car­ried over to Guild­Wars 2. To this date, four  orig­i­nal pro­fes­sions (War­rior, Ranger, Ele­men­tal­ist and Necro­mancer) have been announced, as has one new pro­fes­sion (Guardian) but no offi­cial word on the Mes­mer pro­fes­sion so far.

But although it may not be offi­cial­ly con­firmed by Are­naNet but a num­ber of clues have emerged to sug­gest that this will, indeed be the case. And I am a hap­py pup­py to hear it.

Talk­Tyr­ia, a GW and GW2 fan­site, has a new arti­cle enti­tled ‘Hyp­no­tized, Mes­mer­ized … By What the Fans Believe’ that presents a num­ber of facts to sup­port this sug­ges­tion. They include the fact that the first GW2 nov­el, “Ghosts of Ascalon” by Jeff Grubb and Matt For­beck, and the sec­ond nov­el, “Edge of Des­tiny” by J. Robert King, both men­tion Mes­mers; that a major char­ac­ter in the game sto­ry­line, Queen Jen­nah of the human realm of Ascalon, is a Mes­mer (pret­ty handy for a Queen to be able to manip­u­late the minds and will of her sub­jects) and that Jeff Grubb him­self has stat­ed that:

Peo­ple will, who play a rit­u­al­ist or a mes­mer or a necro­mancer or any of the old, old char­ac­ters, will feel like they have a home some­where in Guild Wars 2.

Anoth­er fan site, GuildWars2Guru, also has a post which col­lects infor­ma­tion about the Mes­mer pro­fes­sion, here. It does into much more detail from the sec­ond nov­el about how Queen Jen­nah uses her Mes­mer abil­i­ties. Now I real­ize that what lit­er­ary char­ac­ters can do and what the play­er char­ac­ters will be able to do are not like­ly to be the same, but just the fact that she that she is a Mes­mer is a wel­come sign.

So I am now look­ing for­ward to GW2 and explor­ing the abil­i­ties of anoth­er Mes­mer char­ac­ter, prob­a­bly a Syl­vari (a new race that was born from plants) just because I think they look cool. And, of course, Mes­mers are always cool.

Adden­da: I don’t know what his exact title is, but Jeff Grubb is also the head per­son direct­ing the plot devel­op­ment for Guild­Wars 2. Jeff used to be with TSR (the peo­ple who pub­lished Dun­geons & Drag­ons) and was the line edi­tor for their immense­ly pop­u­lar Drag­onlance series and also worked on the (also) immense­ly pop­u­lar For­got­ten Realms prod­uct line. And he was one of Dun­geon Mas­ters I ran with back in my days at Purdue.