Its been a super busy few days for Guild Wars 2. At TwitchCon ArenaNet were on stream throughout the entire weekend and they made a boat load of announcements. In case you missed it, the blog post is here. At the moment I’m going to reserve all judgement until I’ve played it this weekend but overall, I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen so far. If nothing else, it certainly looks like an elite specialization that will finally allow me to swap out my greatsword, whilst gaining some much needed survivability.

Next on the list is the enhanced squad UI. Its long overdue and much needed. Players with commander tags will be able to create squads of up to 50 players, that can be split into 15 sub groups. For World versus World or Raiding, it’s going to make organising parties so much easier. With flexible permissions and the ability to hand leadership to others when you leave a squad, I can hear a thousand guild leaders breath a sigh of relief.

Following on from that, this week sees the roll out of Guild Chat, a new live stream service that started yesterday and ends on Thursday. It intends to cover the below and you can watch the first episode here.

Tuesday, September 29

  • Guild Initiative Headquarters
  • Expeditions
  • Guild main panel
  • New guild mission panel
  • Guild mission changes
  • PvP missions
  • WvW missions

Wednesday, September 30

  • The Lost Precipice guild hall
  • Resource management
  • Building upgrades in your guild hall

Thursday, October 1

  • The scribe crafting discipline
  • Assembling guild items
  • Decorating your guild hall
  • Arenas

I have to say that Guild Halls look absolutely amazing and I’d seriously recommend everyone to watch the Guild Chat video. It also sounds as though smaller guilds might actually be able to gain their Guild Mission upgrades at a reasonable rate (I loathe the current system rewarding zerg guilds).

Other than the above, a new patch arrived yesterday and made some changes to profession balance. The biggest adjustments were undoubtedly to the elementalist with the reduction in Icebow’s potency but they also received some hefty nerfs in other areas (notably vigor gain and burning application). On top of that the pistol thief saw a damage buff (though I’m not convinced it’ll really fix anything with that weapon set) and the ranger some nice tweaks under the hood, especially to some traits. There’s no news yet on whether or not the pet will ever be adjusted.

Finally and in the event you happened to be without internet all week, the launch trailer for Heart of Thorns was officially unveiled. Pretty good, right?


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Guild Wars 2 Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 21, 2016

About The Author

Lewis is a long standing journalist, who freelances to a variety of outlets.

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