31 liepos, 2024
Greetings, Tyrians! Gather around the fire and settle in as we chat with Andrew Gray and Joel Eckert, two of the designers working to bring you one of the newest features in Guild Wars 2®: Janthir Wilds™. Today, they’ll conjure a magical doorway and take us on a tour of Homesteads.
With the launch just a few weeks away, we’re excited to answer some essential questions that will help you on your journey to turn a plot of land into a home. In the next few weeks, be sure to check out our social media channels for inspiring homestead designs, and join us soon for a livestream where we’ll explore Homesteads even further. For now, we’ll be covering some of the general Homesteads information that you’ll need to know.
Q: How do I get my homestead?
A: The story of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds will introduce you to the plot of land that you will tend to and claim as your homestead.
Q: How do I access my homestead?
A: Once your homestead is unlocked, you’ll have access to a Summon Conjured Doorway Mastery skill. Any character on your account can conjure a doorway and simply step through into the homestead.
Q: Can friends visit my homestead?
A: Yes, you can invite your party members to your homestead via your conjured doorway. Players who are not in a party can use the door to request a party invitation from the door owner, and the owner interacting with the door will initiate the instance-transfer countdown. You can even give your visitors permission to help decorate your homestead!
Q: Can I return to my original location (the place I entered from) when I exit my homestead?
A: Yes, you’ll find a familiar instance exit button on the lower right of your screen that will return you to your previous location. This will even persist across sessions, so if you log out and log back in to your homestead to take advantage of the homestead’s resting bonus, upon logging back in, the instance exit button will return you to your last open-world location. This will not persist if you visit another instance, though.
Q: What can I unlock for my homestead?
A: As you progress your Homesteading Mastery, you’ll unlock more rooms within your homestead to decorate. You can also unlock improvements to your lumber mill, mine, and farm facilities. Because upgrades and spawns for your personal story home instance carry over to the homestead, you can also collect various gathering nodes, convenience features, and characters like the hungry cats.
And, finally, you can unlock decorations through the handiworker discipline, which is a refined, account-wide crafting ability.
Q: Can we control where unlocked nodes spawn?
A: Things like resource nodes, cats, and chests are placed in predetermined areas to ensure they all function properly.
Q: Where do homestead decorations come from?
A: Handiworker is the new crafting discipline that will be used to create decorations. New decorations are unlocked via Mastery points spent in the Homesteading Mastery line.
Q: Tell me more about handiwork, the new personal version of guild scribing.
A: Handiwork functions very similarly to scribing, but it is designed and balanced for a single player to be able to craft things on their own. There is a material cost for each copy of a decoration that you craft, but the prices for personal decorations via handiworker crafting are significantly lower.
Q: Why is handiworker crafting part of a Mastery line and not leveled like other crafting disciplines?
A: Since your homestead is account bound, we also wanted your handiworker crafting discipline to be account bound. We also wanted to create a stronger synergy between the content of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds and your homestead, so, rather than reaching higher levels of the crafting discipline by crafting more decorations inside your homestead, you’ll instead do so by playing the rest of the Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds content and earning regular experience points.
Q: How do I decorate my homestead?
A: A “Decorate” button on the heads-up display or the skill panel will activate decorating mode.
In this mode, players have access to various skills on the skill bar for placing new decorations, modifying already placed decorations, or removing decorations. Additionally, you can enter a flying mode that allows placement of items anywhere a player normally cannot reach.
We’ll be demonstrating homestead decoration live on Twitch this Friday, August 2, at noon PDT (UTC-7). Join us to catch the placement tools—which include a Toggle X-Ray Vision skill and flying mode—in action.
Q: How do the characters on my account interact with the homestead?
A: When you exit to the character selection screen while inside your homestead, the character you were playing will be visible in your homestead as an NPC while you play other characters. These NPC versions of your characters default to one of three predetermined locations in the homestead, based on whether they are soldiers who wear heavy armor, adventurers who wear medium armor, or scholars who wear light armor.
Soldiers are found around the main homestead structure and the entry area near the portal.
Adventurers are found on the far side of the river near the main homestead building, in a wilder area.
Scholars are found in and around a secluded cave away from the main homestead, which is perfect for concentrating.
If you approach any of these logged-out alternate characters, you can ask them to follow you and lead them elsewhere. When you’re ready for them to stay put again, you can ask them to stay, and they’ll stop following.
Q: Will all of the characters I leave in the homestead when I log out show up? Can I control which ones show up or disable them?
A: All characters left within the homestead when you log out will be visible when you’re playing other characters.
Q: Can we control the appearance and dyes of mounts in the stable? How are those chosen?
A: Mounts housed within the mount stable will have the same skin and dye settings used by the player character that is currently accessing the homestead. The skiff’s dye and skin are controlled by the same means.
Q: Will there be a livestream to show off Homesteads?
There will be a livestream! As we mentioned above, we’ll be showing off the design elements and finer details of the Homesteads feature on our Twitch channel, on August 2 at noon Pacific Time (UTC-7). We hope to see you there!
Prepurchasing any edition of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds before the expansion launches will grant you the “Homesteader” title, the Whispering Serpents Pauldrons skin, and a box with your choice of one Serpent’s Wrath weapon skin.
Visit the official store page for full details on the items included in the Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate editions.
GuildWars2.com Read More
30 liepos, 2024
The Festival of the Four Winds has arrived! This annual celebration, orchestrated by Her Royal Majesty Queen Jennah of Kryta, heralds the joy of summer with tons of excitement throughout Tyria. The festivities are in full swing across two locations—the Crown Pavilion in Divinity’s Reach and the Labyrinthine Cliffs—where players will be able to join in on the festivities until August 20.
Both the Labyrinthine Cliffs and the Crown Pavilion welcome adventurers of all levels, ensuring that even newcomers can dive into the festivities without hesitation. Read on for a rundown of the activities you can participate in during the festival and the rewards you can earn!
Where to Go
The Labyrinthine Cliffs can be accessed via Lion’s Arch, and the Crown Pavilion can be accessed in Divinity’s Reach. Check your in-game mail for an Invitation to the Festival of the Four Winds and double-click the item to teleport instantly to your desired location.
What to Do
When you enter the Labyrinthine Cliffs, you will arrive in a whole new area! This beautiful explorable zone is located on the Tyrian coast. You can navigate this map using the various aspect crystals: wind, sun, and lightning. There are activities all over the map, so keep your eyes peeled!
Experience the thrill of finding treasure with fellow players by participating in the treasure hunt meta-event, or try your hand at one of the races! The Skimmer Slalom and Flying Dolyak adventures will offer you the fun you need in this beachy location. There are also sky crystals all over the map that you can find to complete achievements.
If you decide to head to the Crown Pavilion, you will discover many other activities! Join other players in defeating the greatest enemies of Kryta in the Boss Blitz event. But worry not; these are not real beings. They are merely Queen Jennah’s watchknight soldiers.
Face off against the strongest individuals in Tyria. Talk to one of the fight managers to join the queue, and you will be transported to a one-versus-one arena—the Queen’s Gauntlet! Cheer on your friends or show off your skills to the world.
This year, you can also help the Zephyrites at the Labyrinthine Cliffs seaside by preparing for a treasure hunt! Fill water balloons at the shore and send them up to the upper docks by kite basket.
Rewards
As you take part in the festivities, you can progress the Annual Four Winds Customs meta-achievement to earn a new leg armor piece—Beach Trunks, perfect for some seashore fun! A new Sandswept weapon collection is also earnable by progressing the Annual Four Winds Customs meta-achievement and the weekly Four Winds Festivities achievement. You can locate these rewards in the achievement panel under Festivals.
Participate in various activities to earn festival tokens! Trade them at the festival rewards vendors in the Crown Pavilion and Labyrinthine Cliffs for exclusive items like the new Mini Sea Turtle, guild hall decorations, and much more! You can also look forward to the long-awaited Zephyrite short bow, torch, and warhorn, which can be found inside Blessings of the Four Winds containers. The Sun-Blessed versions of the weapons can be purchased from Zephyrite weapon enchanters.
We look forward to seeing you at the festival!
GuildWars2.com Read More
24 liepos, 2024
Hello, Tyrians!
We are less than a month away from the launch of Guild Wars 2®: Janthir Wilds™, and while there’s plenty to be excited about for the August 20 release, players can also look forward to the newest raid and Convergence going live in our first major update in November. You will be able to explore a mysterious mountain region, and as you ascend the mountain, you’ll face off against opponents who won’t go down without a fight. Players will also get to choose how to encounter these fights, in either a 50-player Convergence event or a 10-player raid wing—our first new raid in five years!
Our team is currently hard at work developing this new raid, so while we can’t share all the details yet, we can provide an overview of what to expect and explain why we are reintroducing raids, along with some insight into what players can hope for in the future!
The Return of Raiding
In the past, raids were self-contained instances with their own stories, built for 10-player groups. Our goal with the upcoming raid is to allow players to experience the story in a way that works best for them. The raid will be integrated into the main storyline, and players who might be hesitant to join a raid group will be able to enjoy their own personal narrative. The 50-player version is built as a Convergence, similar in structure to those found in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure™. Those participating in the 10-player raid will find the story to be more heroic, with a focus on the formidable enemies they face rather than the NPCs involved in the narrative.
While there will be some differences between the 50-player and 10-player versions, the team has recognized the importance of maintaining a sense of continuity between both experiences. We look forward to watching players discover and master these mechanics in each setting.
With the introduction of our new raid encounter, some of you might be wondering if we will continue to create raids in the future. The short answer is “maybe.” Raids require a significant amount of development resources, but only a small subset of players engage with the 10-player group instanced content, which is part of the reason it has been five years since our last one. This new raid serves as a test to see how we can support raids moving forward.
Originally, we attempted to solve the cost problem with raids through Strike Missions, a new game mode designed to be a bridge between players and raids. This time, instead of trying to give players “bridge” content in the hope that it leads them to raids, we’re just giving them the raid content from the start in the form those interested in it really want. Players who want a 10-player, instanced, mechanics-heavy version can play that, and the players who prefer a large-scale, open-world experience with fewer barriers to entry can also experience the content that way.
Meanwhile, integrating raid content into the story lets us fit its development into our annual release schedule. We aim to extend story assets to support raids and gauge players’ reactions to raids that have been integrated into the story.
Sometime after the raid’s release in November, its challenge mode will become available. Additionally, players participating in the 10-player raid can anticipate a legendary mode, offering a highly coveted purple title.
Convergences in Janthir Wilds
The kodan cubs huddle closely around the village’s Claw, their eyes wide with awe and excitement as he begins to recount a harrowing tale. It’s a story of bravery and strategy, in which a band of fifty fearless Tyrians embarked on a daring mission as they ascended the mountain. As the tale unfolds and you take up the challenge in this encounter, you will find a strong ally in your warclaw mount, which will aid in this new adventure!
Listen closely as the village’s Claw weaves the narrative—each encounter promises unexpected challenges and thrilling surprises.
During your encounters with these enemies, you might observe a noticeable shift in difficulty compared to what you experienced in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure. We’ve fine-tuned these bosses to present a more advanced challenge than in previous Convergences, necessitating coordinated efforts from all party members to secure victory.
Completing Convergences in Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds will award players with essences that can be used to craft legendary gear. And, yes, these essences will be compatible with the legendary Obsidian armor available in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure, as well as the new legendary spear and legendary backpack arriving in the quarterly updates for Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds. Essences from Convergences will be renamed “rift essences” (with three rarities) to streamline the rewards.
We hope you enjoyed hearing about some of the post-launch content coming to Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds. We’ll see you in Tyria!
Prepurchasing any edition of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds before the expansion launches will grant you the “Homesteader” title, the Whispering Serpents Pauldrons skin, and a box with your choice of one Serpent’s Wrath weapon skin.
Visit the official store page for full details on the items included in the Standard, Deluxe, and Ultimate editions.
GuildWars2.com Read More
