Guild Wars 2 September 2014 Feature Pack (I)

The September 2014 Feature Pack is bringing exciting additions to Guild Wars 2!

1.      PVP

Standard Enemy Models—A visual change. It can help players to more consistently identify and react to enemy skills. It consists of a human model, a weapon set, and a set of armor per profession and gender. The looks of each profession are put together, which make it visually distinct from other professions. If you’ve played much PvP, you may have noticed that races in this game can have widely varying animations for the same skill. In competitive play, this can make it hard to accurately anticipate and react to opponents. Now the solution of Standard Enemy Models gives another story.

Armor & Reward Track—PvP-exclusive armors: the Glorious armor and Glorious Hero’s armor. The Glorious Hero’s set is a top-tier reward for certain competitive tournaments. The Glorious Armor set is something all players are able to earn. As such, all players have the opportunity to obtain the Glorious armor set from a repeatable Glorious Armor Reward Track that will arrive with the feature pack.

2.      Balance changes

Elementalist—Build diversity will be promoted on utility skills, for example, the fire and air storms from the Glyph of Storms will now apply conditions of their own. Works will be done on some of the new grandmaster traits that currently don’t have enough of a payoff or are too difficult to use, the Tornado and Fiery Greatsword elite skills, too.

Engineer—Improvements will be on lesser-used kits and several non-kitutilities so that there are some changes to a few of your elixirs that will give them a bit more functionality, like Elixir R. Likewise, the gadgets will have a more defined purpose and a clear use after updating.

Guardian—Some of the less popular utility skills will be improved and build diversity in both support and offense will be opened up. For instance, Spirit Bow’s command ability will now heal in a targeted area rather than just around the bow itself. The guardian’s elite skills are also adjusted. So are the tomes.

Mesmer—multiple traits, utility skills, weapon skills, and illusions will all be improved. For example, improve some of the new grandmaster traits upon their original implementation; alter the scepter a bit to push it more toward the condition role we would like it to have, etc.

Necromancer—Their survivability through utilities and traits as well as improving the overall effectiveness of their melee and skirmishing weapons are the focus.You’ll see that the dagger auto-attack will now hit two targets, while the axe’s animations have been tuned to be more fluid. Along with weapon skill updates, your utility skills have been updated to provide more survivability over time.

Ranger—Signet of the Beastmaster will be replaced by a new trait entitled Predator’s Onslaught. With this change, Signet of the Beastmaster’s effects will be rolled into the baseline signet skills. Several Beastmastery traits will be updated to remove pet specificity, allowing you to choose which pets you’d like to use rather than the traits themselves requiring a specific family. Along with these improvements are a few weapon skills to improve their base functionality and responsiveness.

Thief—Improvements will be upon the new grandmaster traits that were recently added and increasing the overall value of a few other traits through small tweaks. For example, Venomous Aura will now use your own stats rather than your allies’, so if you’re a master of condition damage, your shared venoms will be more effective than ever. As with the necromancer, you’ll be seeing increases to the number of targets that your dagger auto-attacks can strike. Additionally, a small range increase for pistol attacks when using the Ricochet trait will be introduced.

Warrior—How the warrior uses and loses adrenaline will be adjusted so that it’s lost if you miss with a burst ability as well as draining slowly when you exit combat. Also the greatsword’s adrenaline burstability to be a cleaving, execution-style attack will be more fitting for the weapon. Updating multiple skills and traits, increasing and decreasing some adrenaline-gain abilities, and addressing multiple traits to have better effects are all in the list too.

For more, please stay tuned.