A comprehensive two-dimensional gas metal arc welding (GMAW) model was developed to take into account all the interactive events in the gas metal arc welding process, including the arc plasma, melting of the electrode, droplet formation, detachment, transfer, and impingement onto the workpiece, and the weld-pool dynamics and weld formation. The comprehensive GMAW model tracks the free surface using the volume of fluid method and directly modeled the coupling effects between the arc domain and the metal domain, thus eliminating the need to assign boundary conditions at the interface. A thorough investigation of the plasma arc characteristics was conducted to study its effects on the dynamic process of droplet formation, detachment, impingement, and weld-pool formation. It was found that the droplet transfer and the deformed electrode and weld-pool surfaces significantly influence the transient distributions of current density, arc temperature, and arc pressure, which in turn affect the droplet formation, droplet transfer, and weld-pool dynamics.