Frost and Fire Living Story conclusion, big new PVP features, new WvW changes, skill balances, mechanic changes, and lots more stuff. Follow the ArenaNet logo link at the bottom for the full details, or come read them in our forums and join in with the cheering/booing/confusion/appreciation with the rest of us!
Abbreviated headings:
Retribution is here!
LIVING STORY
Flame & Frost: Retribution
Molten Weapons Facility
Achievements
NEW FEATURES AND CONTENT
Structured Player vs. Player
World vs. World
Guild Content
BALANCE, BUG-FIXING, POLISH
General
Dungeons
Fractals
Personal Story
Items
Profession Skills
Structured Player vs. Player
World vs. World
BLACK LION TRADING COMPANY GEM STORE
New Items and Promotions
Improvements
Bug Fixes
ArenaNet has released some short videos to help introduce the beta versions of Custom Arenas and Spectator Mode which will be in the April 30th update. (Also, scroll down a little for some developer comments about these new features and Leaderboards, SAB and a few other things including a great parody SAB achievement guide.)
Custom Arenas:
Spectator Mode:
Looks pretty polished to me. You’ll see below there are some things they are already thinking of adding. Come to the forum and tell us what you think of shoutcasting or any other features you’d like to see added to these new features!
John Corpening, our PvP team coordinator, is in the first vid. I’m in the second vid. Jon Peters, also a design lead, also does a lot of help w/ PvP and balance. Hope that clears it up!
If you don’t want people to see your builds, just disable spec mode when setting your Custom Arena parameters. Source.
Other notes: Leaderboards and Trial Accounts. Trial accounts will be removed from the leaderboards, but if you upgrade your trial account to a full game, then your trial account activity will be retained and count toward your account’s leaderboard activity (if you link the full game to your trial account. Per Martin Kerstein.
The actual April 30th update is what will make SAB disappear. It is not going away at a set time. Source.
Speaking of SAB, you have to check out the following fan made parody achievement guide video. I thought it started off a little slow, but around the 3 minute mark, it starts creating GW2 comedy gold! Amazing work ZoCks!
Lastly, here are links to some of our most recent GWOnline created content. Hope you find them interesting and you can just click the forum link after each feature if you want to comment or see discussion about the topics. The 10 Tips link in particular has some great follow up posts by our members.
GuildWars2Guru.com held a State of the Game on Friday with Jonathan Sharp & Karl McLain from Anet focusing on the tPVP changes in the April 30th update.Click here to watch the 120 minute video on Youtube. (They started late, so the link skips about 1:35 of not much happening.) Great stuff about changes to signets, Warriors, traits for a few different professions, WvW and PVE effect split for Retaliation and Confusion and lots more. This will be a big balance update too. To give the meta time to settle down there will not be many balance changes for the May patch; they will be focusing on bug fixes instead.
There will be Wiki Maintenance (GW1 & GW2) on May 8th from 4pm to midnite UTC (9am to 5pm Pacific). For the first two hours of the maintenance, both English wikis will be unavailable, then in read only mode for the rest of the time. All non-English GW2 wikis will be read only during the entire duration. They will be upgrading to MediaWiki version 1.20.4
Gamersbook is giving away copies of Guild Wars 2 and some TteSPORTS gaming peripherals. While the first copy of the game is being awarded today, they have 4 more copies being awarded throughout May and after that some nice gaming peripherals. There are a few steps to take, but hey, free stuff! Click here to see the rules and to enter.
Laura Vk, Loes Schubert, and Kelsey Hendriks have done some amazing cosplay costume work and put it up on Laura Vk’s Facebook page. Amazing amount of detail, you should really check it out.
See you all in game and don’t forget that Super Adventure Box goes away with the April 30 patch in just a couple days and while the full version of World 2 should be out in a few months (ie. “when it’s done”), there’s a good chance the World 1 skins won’t be coming back any time soon.
Southsun Cove – Warm sun, sandy beaches, exotic wildlife*, and new adventures.
I create the opportunity for learning, so that I can keep improving. I do that by seeking ways to challenge myself on specific gameplay skills. Here’s 10 ways you can use to keep learning too.
10 Trigger combos
You can trigger combos by yourself on many professions by using a skill that creates a combo field, then using a skill that triggers it. Self-triggered combos is a good way to learn and practice which of your own skills are what part of a combo. Sometimes, you can combo skills differently to trigger different effects like defensive or offensive effects. Once you learn that, expand your combo knowledge by triggering combos with other players either by triggering their fields, or by setting up fields where they will naturally trigger them.
You can likewise take some time to learn how to combine skill effects. Breaking armors is good just before doing high dps. Or snaring is good before hitting those large AoE’s.
We will be taking down the commerce system for maintenance at 5:00 AM PDT (12:00 UTC) on April 24th for 3 hours. The following systems will be affected by this maintenance:
Gem Purchasing
Buy Guild Wars 2
So load up on those gems now before it’s too late! Or…I guess… you can just wait for the maintenance to be over. Yeah, that would work too….
The Flame and Frost page has been updated with highlights of the April 30, 2013, update information.
The standouts are a new Dungeon to tell the final part of the Flame and Frost Living Story, and Custom Arenas and Spectator Mode for the sPVP players.
…you come into my house on the day they release this update, and you uh ask me to do murder, for money.
The new dungeon will feature only one path, and ArenaNet has tried to set the difficulty level between that of the Story and Explorable modes in regular dungeons. However, like the Flame and Frost Living Story, it won’t be in the game forever, so you’ll want to get in there before it’s gone.
They are rolling out Beta versions of the Custom Arenas and Spectator Mode this month too. Initially, only a small group of people will be able to create their own Custom Arenas. Everyone, however, will be able to play in them and use Spectator Mode. Just go to the Mists to check them out.
If that wasn’t enough, there are new WvW abilities, new Guild Mission content, skill balance and more. Check it out and them come to the forums and tell us what you think!
The Super Adventure Box was a such a neat idea for 1 April and there’s a new update from Matthew Oswald, ArenaNet’s Cinematics team lead, who discusses the process they went through to create the retro styled trailer.
There is more to Super Adventure Box than meats the eye though, they decided to create a 16-bit platform adventure called Rytlock’s Critter Rampage to make the video feel authentic. The game was created by cinematic artist Delly Sartika and it’s actually playable now in your browser on this page.
The team have been busy this week on incgamers.com, it’s been pretty hectic thanks to embargoes lifting and also preparing for the week ahead’s content. So what did we get up to? Here’s your weekly recap.
IncGamers Podcast #110Â - Discuss the origins of Batman: Arkham Origins, reminisce about LucasArts and rechristen Peter Molyneux “Senator America.” In games, we’ve played Defiance, ShootMania and more
Also, this week we are planning a Marvel Heroes beta key giveaway which will be open to PALs as part of our new priority access for site supporters. Hopefully we will have more details on that in a couple of days but keep your eye on the main incgamers.com site for updates on that.
Regina Buenaobra, as most of you know, is the community manager at ArenaNet and there’s a nice interview with here online here in which discusses her role at the company and of course Guild Wars 2.
Given the behind the scenes access Regina has, being part of ArenaNet, we were wondering how much, if at all, it has changed her perspective of the game and if she had familiarized with the content pre-launch.
I think working in the company gives me insight into design decisions, and being a community manager gives me insight into how those decisions may be perceived or received by fans. Because of those two factors, we’re often able to have responses in mind or are able to give the development team a heads-up about these issues.
The Community Team was already familiar with the game before launch. In preparation for showing the game at various conventions, we got acquainted with the content. In some cases we had to give presentations, so it was important to have a good working knowledge of the game. I mentioned earlier about the all-company play sessions; we had a lot of those before launch, and we still have them to familiarize ourselves with the new content and to provide feedback to the teams working on upcoming content.
A quick heads-up that the Flame & Frost: Retribution page is now live on the official site.
In secret foundries deep beneath the Shiverpeaks, the Molten Alliance forges deadly new weaponry that combine the fiery power of the Flame Legion with the iron might of the dredge. There, Alliance weapon smiths test their creations on innocent captives, perfecting their cruel technology until it is ready to unleash on all of Tyria.
In the last chapter of the Flame and Frost series, you’ll strike at the heart of the Molten Alliance with your comrades Rox the charr and the norn Braham. Take the battle into the enemy’s weapons facilities and defeat a final hybrid menace unlike any Tyria has ever seen!
So how are you doing on the Leaderboards? The Leaderboards are now live and you can view them on this page now where you can find the PvE, PvP, and WvW rankings. The top five are shown but you can browse through the list.
I found out that sPvP wasn’t some minigame that pokes some fun at the latest WoW playable race in a juiced up sequel of the game Plants vs Zombies…
Instead, I got another monthly done in maybe 4-5 hours of play on my first real try playing sPvP, and I am close to getting it done again. Not too shabby for a sPvP noob.
