As I talked about in yesterday’s post, we were essentially in a holding pattern waiting for the announcement to drop for Guild Wars 2 Expansion 5. This sort of leaked out in drips and drabs throughout Monday and Tuesday morning, and then finally landed with the trailer showing up officially on YouTube around 11 am CDT. The leaks seemed to be entirely correct, most of which came from a Polish magazine article that jumped the embargo. I gotta say right off the bat, I don’t love that the expansion does not follow the X of Y naming scheme. It should have been “Wilds of Janthir” but pushing that eye twitch aside… I freaking love the logo. I especially love the animated version that shows up in the trailer. Mostly JW is going to be an awful abbreviation and I am scared of what the community at large is going to call it.
The trailer is super good, however, and I gotta say that they nailed the features of this expansion. I will elaborate on those in a bit. A hype trailer needs to evoke a sense of mystery and make you want to dive into that expansion. It also needs to tease enough features to begin you daydreaming about each of them, and I think this trailer nails that in spades. We got enough of a sketch of the plot to hold us over until the expansion drops in August. I think it is interesting that we saw Caithe and I kinda wonder if each of these micro expansions is going to essentially feature one or two characters that we know from the dragon cycle while introducing characters to new or lesser-known characters. I thought it was cool that we are apparently going to be running around with Malice Swordshadow and Countess Anise again… which should be a hilarious combination. Anise is legitimately one of my favorite characters in Guild Wars 2.
First up… let’s talk about my favorite expansion for the feature. PVE Warclaws are a great idea and I admit that I have found myself riding one around on more than one occasion because “Battle Cat” is a strong desire for anyone who grew up with MOTU. More than this though I feel like this is going to be awesome for players who want to dip their toes into the World vs World game mode. WvW without a Warclaw is sort of miserable. We all did it and we all limped along behind the mass of players trying to collect all of the bits we needed to finally craft ours. This is going to flatten that curve significantly and make it much easier for folks to get started into the fun side of that game mode. Few things feel cooler than riding in a clump of players thundering across the plains on their Warclaws. I would love to see this mount take up a similar role to the Siege Turtle in PVE combat of helping to break down objective obstacles.
Next up we have the Homestead… which honestly I thought was maybe a bit of hopium. ANet has already said that our home instance nodes are going to transfer to this system, which I hope means that we can maybe place them in a single area for efficiency’s sake. More than that I am hoping that we will be able to earn resources for our new “home” instance. I am assuming this is going to essentially be a baby version of the Guild Halls which hopefully means we got a good deal of control over the placement of cosmetic items. It would be cool if these had a similar evolving system that uses the Scribe tradeskill to upgrade your home. From a profit standpoint, this should unlock all sorts of things on the Gem Store for players to buy for their “player housing”. This is a cash cow in other games and I cannot see it being anything but that here as well. I am hoping all of the trophies that you can earn for your Guild Hall, can be placed in your player house as well.
Probably the piece I am the least excited about is the addition of a new weapon for each class. I never really liked using spears in underwater combat, because melee underwater felt like ass. However, it does seem like they are playing heavily with the definition of what a spear can be based on the varied class-specific animations that they show off. Like I am assuming that the charging wolf slash thing has to be a Ranger-specific ability for example. We will have to see how this shakes out in the long run, but as someone commented on Mastodon yesterday… we’ve not really had good spear skins for a decade now so there is going to have to be a lot of catching up cosmetic-wise to rival the feel of other weapons.
As far as the zone look and feel goes… I am getting DEEP Grizzly Hills vibes not just in the types of terrain but also the musical choices of the trailer. I am hoping this was absolutely intended because that is still one of my favorite zones to spend time in while roaming around Northrend in World of Warcraft. I love that we are getting more Kodan goodness… or in this case “Bearkin”. I love me some Stoic BearBois and am ready to help them out. I am hoping this also means we have Quaggan however… because the symbiotic relationship between those two races in the Shiverpeak Mountains is always something I have loved. It feels like there is going to be a lot of verticality to these zones which should be really fun for Skyscale riders, but less fun for pretty much everyone else that has not gone through either process of unlocking that mount. I am amped to see what the zone metas might look like in these areas… because really at the end of the day that is the “special sauce” of Guild Wars 2 that no one has managed to capture.
I am super happy that the team seems to have been able to nail the yearly cadence as the new expansion is dropping on August 20th. The preorders are up with $25 for the Standard edition and $50 for the Deluxe edition which comes with a set of tentacle monster themed unlimited use gathering tools, an extra character slot, and some sort of special table that we will be able to use in our homestead. As always there is a $75 Ultimate Edition available which essentially comes with $50 worth of Gems for the cash shop allowing you to basically get those for half price. I gotta be honest if you are new to the game that $75 pack is probably worth it because you can then turn around and use those 4000 gems to unlock various living world content which is essentially like their own expansions. A set of infinite gathering tools is roughly $30 worth of gems so even there… you are getting a pretty good deal by bumping up from the $25 Standard to the $50 Deluxe. I am probably way more free with spending money on Guild Wars 2 since it does not have any sort of recurring subscription fee.
You will notice that I did not mention raids, and honestly… that is mostly because I have yet to do ANY of the previous seven “wings” as the community refers to them. Maybe at some point, I will get into that, but for now, I don’t have enough friends playing regularly and at times I could participate in order to embark upon that system. Maybe my new found boldness from Pandaria Remix will translate to Guild Wars 2 and I will actually start using my damned Catmander tag. Even without taking Raiding into account and the announcement of some sort of new PVP Game mode… there is more than enough here to make me exceptionally hyped.
Have you been following the Janthir Wilds announcement? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below.
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