So I haven’t played Guild Wars 2 since it originally came out in fall of 2012. I played for about a month, then I started a telecommute job which meant I was only home on weekends, and I just didn’t want to commit my limited time to it. Fast forward to summer of 2014 and I decided, what the hell, I’ll update the game, login, and see what’s what.
As luck would have it, I logged in right when ArenaNet pushed out the “Season 2” storyline. This means that, apparently, I missed Season 1 and can’t do it >_< whoops.
Well, what I really wanted to talk about were the changes between when I last played around launch and the game as it is now.
First, I may be remembering this wrong, but I believe daily quests used to be all mandatory in order to earn the daily chest reward. Now, there are 8 categories and you only need to do 5 of them to get the chest. This is really nice since it feels less like you have to “go out of your way” to accomplish a task and rather just do whatever you want to do, then go finish off whatever you’re close to completing when you’re done. Likewise, the monthly quest is now completing 4 tasks rather than an entire, huge list of them. Of course, for both cases, you can complete more quests than are necessary, which just gives you more achievement points and experience.
One of the new features I love is that they improved that temporary rank advancement in World vs. World, where you can only perform certain actions if you’re a certain rank. They replaced it with a system similar to Paragon levels in Diablo 3; you now earn WvW experience and levels. Every level gives you 1 WvW skill point, which can be used to earn cool passive bonuses in WvW, such as decreased damage from guards, increased damage when using siege weapons, increased supply capacity, etc. There is much more incentive to continue doing WvW now. Other WvW changes include getting rid of the Orbs of Power from the borderlands maps and replacing them with 5 zone control points; they’re fairly spread out and you lose control if no one is in the circle, so to earn the bonus for that borderland, you need at least 3 people to capture 3 of the 5 points. This is nicer compared to having the orbs defended in a keep, which means if one realm loses their keep and orb, it’s that much harder to get it back.
Guilds seem to have gotten some cool new features, like Guild Missions, Guild Puzzles, Guild Bounties. Since my guild is just RL friends and no one but me has signed in for months, I doubt I’ll get to see them unless I join another guild, haha. Not to mention that the Guild Puzzles apparently require at least 6 people in order to do it.
Last, a lot more items were added to the collection bank, such as Mystic Coins and Globs of Ectoplasm, which definitely helps save a ton of bank space!
Well, I’m not sure how long I’ll be playing this time, but I’m planning to finish off my thief’s personal story (apparently I stopped at lvl 32 for some reason; I vaguely recall leveling up purely from WvW and exploration >.>), doing the Season 2 story, and continuing to pretend I’m working on a legendary weapon. Yes, you need 250 of each of the 8 different tier 6 crafting materials. Yes, I totally have like 200 items combined across all 8 materials :O
simplephobia 