Good Morning Folks! I feel like it is important for me to take a brief moment to marvel at just how damned active the Guild Wars 2 community is. This was a screenshot of me waiting on Shadow Behemoth to spawn in Queensdale at like 6:30 this morning. By the time the event spawned, there were even more folks that had shown up. Granted this event happens to be on the weekly wizard chores that reset yesterday morning, but still… it is pretty freaking impressive. It doesn’t really matter what event I happen to show up for, this is pretty much the same story everywhere. Granted if you are trying to show up last minute you might get shunted off to an overflow map where there is not quite the critical mass of warm bodies, but by showing up early you are almost certain to find this kind of outcome.
Today is kind of an important day for Guild Wars 2. Last week they dropped a teaser trailer that set the GW2 pundits aflame with possibilities. This will be the second release in their new expansion model that promises something smaller in scope but delivered in a more reliable cadence for a cheaper price. With Secrets of the Obscure, they managed to land the release cadence of a new expansion and all of its relevant patches landing within a single year. At some point today we will see the full announcement of this next expansion… which they are calling their 5th but I quibble a bit with their numbering. I am guessing they are not referring to Icebrood Saga as an expansion, which would then make this the 5th as per their advertising. If you count living world seasons as expansions it would be something like the 12th.
I am not fully caught up on Secrets of the Obscure because in Guild Wars 2 terms I am woefully behind on pretty much everything. I’ve been doing my wizard chores and had to spend down some of the currency recently to buy some more mystic clovers. My focus has largely been on trying to regenerate my legendary materials enough to the point of being able to craft The Juggernaut, which is a weapon I have wanted since I first started playing Guild Wars 2. Mostly a lot of it is just going to be spending a few hundred gold, but clovers are one of those things that feels rough to brute force. I also need to spend some more time in World vs World and farm up another Gift of Battle.
The major time commitment is going to be doing another 100% Tyria world completion. When you do a full exploration of the old world you get two Gift of Exploration. So the last two Legendary weapons that I crafted, Bolt and Frostfang, ate those up. I did my last full world exploration on my Necromancer when I was leveling that, but I was technically closer to it on my original Warrior character. That is sitting at 91% currently and while we recorded the podcast on Saturday night I attempted to knock out some progress. This was only minimally successful as I got sidetracked by a group of folks doing champion rifts. Guild Wars 2 is pretty much a constant distraction engine.
Anyway, there has been a heck of a lot of discussion in the Guild Wars 2 community about what the teaser trailer the other day might mean. There is a lot of hopium surrounding a return to raiding… which I am not sure is super likely given how few players tend to engage in raiding. Since I personally have not raided in the game, my own brand of hopium is placed elsewhere. What I would love to see is some sort of meaningful rework of the “home instance” to turn it into proper player housing. I would love to see this tied into some sort of a progression system so that you can earn items for your home instance with others that traditionally lived on the gem store being available through bundles on the astral store. I have purchased some items from my home instance through world vendors and a few from the cash shop, but it feels like a woeful mess. I would love to see some measure of agency added to this system because for now… I always go to Rata Sum because it is the most efficiently laid out.
As I am sitting here writing this blog post, I happen to look over at Mastodon and notice a conversation going on between two Guild Wars 2 folks about how they are going to abbreviate the new expansion. This is coming from Reddit so take it with a giant bucket of salt but… apparently at some point the account page seemed to be leaking information about the new expansion including logo and name. So in theory, if this is true the next expansion will be called Janthir Wilds, which honestly makes a lot of sense given that is an area of the map we have not explored and one that has been clearly delineated for a bit.
So in theory we should then have a reason to start seeing zones popping up to the north of Divinity’s Reach. I wonder if they will be free floating as it were, or if they will connect back up to zones like Lake Doric. However, it seems like there is not a really good place in Doric to put a zone boundary. My guess is it will be a disconnected region as we have with some of the other expansion areas and that we will either arrive initially by boat or airship. Whatever the case I am looking forward to the announcement at some point today. I don’t believe there is any sort of an official announcement stream, so I guess I will be watching news sources for when the press release drops.
What are you expecting from Expansion 5? Drop me a line below.