After spending most of last week recovering from a particularly nasty bout of sickness, I thought it’d be a good idea to bring together all the snippets of Guild Wars 2 news that have sprung forth from PAX Prime.

First up and the biggest two announcements were undoubtedly the launch date and raids. Although we’ve only seen a snippet of raids, I have to say that what was shown in the PAX trailer looks particularly good. With one raid and three wings making it into Heart of Thorns, there should undoubtedly be plenty there to challenge even the most hardcore guilds. As for the launch date, Mike O’Brien during his presentation confirmed there would only be two more Beta weekends between now and launch and what worries me out of all of this is the fact that the Druid (Ranger) and Forge (Engineer) elite specializations will have so little testing time. Let’s hope they’re last because they’re the most polished.

If those two items wasn’t big enough news, Mike O’Brien also revealed that Guild Wars 2 - the core game - would be free to play with immediate effect. Although there are some restrictions, such as being unable to map chat or enter World versus World until you’re level 60, their impact on new players will be negligible and I’d have to say it’s one of the fairest free to play rulesets I’ve ever seen. Instantly Guild Wars 2 has become the best Buy to Play and Free to Play MMOG on the market. I’ll be publishing my thoughts on the game going Free to Play a little later.

Next up and over on the new Heart of Thorns website, there’s a whole host of new information. Legendary armor will be added to Guild Wars 2, obtainable through raiding.

As part of rewards for raids, we're introducing legendary armor. Conquering raid content will earn you the pieces to build legendary precursor armors, which can be forged into legendary heavy, medium, and light armor sets. Like legendary weapons, these pieces will have the same stats as ascended armor; you'll be able to change the armor stats out of combat and dazzle your friends with your sense of style, but you won't have a statistical edge. Endless tiers of gear grind to stay raid relevant have no place in Guild Wars 2.

There is also loads of new images of information regarding Guild Halls and the fact there will be a new crafting profession called the Scribe.

Scribes hold a uniquely selfless role within the guild community. Although there are items scribes can craft for themselves, they bend most of their talents to crafting items for their guilds. Much more than simple writers and notetakers, they are skilled in every aspect of composition, from mixing inks to bookbinding. They’re also able to inscribe complex magical diagrams and incantations that can harness raw aether to fabricate useful tools for your guild.

Oh and 175 unique decorations for your Guild Hall doesn’t sound too shabby either.

When the new website went live the image for the elite specializations was also added and accidently, the Druid concept art was revealed. With the full image here. Here’s hoping it’s a sign we’ll get the Druid this week.

Someone over on Reddit was also awesome enough to pull together a list of all the features coming to Guild Wars 2 thanks to Heart of Thorns. Pretty awesome.

  • 4 maps, some containing 3 "biomes" - all containing many new events
  • New races of npcs and monsters
  • Repeatable adventures with leaderboards
  • Map bonus reward system
  • 1 profession
  • 9 specializations
  • New Personal Story
  • Living World releases including Living Story S3
  • 2 new armor sets per weight (from the open world)
  • 5 weapon sets
  • Legendary armor
  • New legendary weapon set
  • Legendary back pieces
  • 60 new item skins, miniatures and more
  • 7 mastery tracks with 39 tiers
  • 1 raid with 3 wings
  • 2 Guild Halls with 6 core buildings and over 175 decorations including a customizable PvP arena
  • New guild armor and weapon sets
  • New PvP gamemode with new map
  • Guild teams and leaderboards
  • PvP leagues
  • 10 New PvP reward tracks
  • New WvW borderland
  • New fractal system, rewards and 50 more levels
  • Plenty of other smaller features and updates

As a couple of last little bits, I tweeted Roy Cronacher who’s in charge of the Revenant and he confirmed Mallyx would be seeing some changes very shortly. Finally, the eSports League have, for the first time, implemented a new set of rules for sPvP as intervention against broken builds and Runes after a team of 5 Elementalists romped through qualifying.

If I hear any other news this week, I’ll let you know.


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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