Janthir Wilds

Janthir Wilds Announcement

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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.

Landspear Dreams

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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.