A few weeks ago, ArenaNet started teasing the next Guild Wars 2 expansion with a daily drop of mysterious icons. For the community the implication was immediately obvious: New elite specializations are being added for each character class.
This should be a pretty major shakeup to buildcrafting. Each of the game's nine classes currently has three elite specs, each one changing the base class mechanic, as well as adding new traits and skills. As a result, the community has been eagerly speculating about who's getting what for this fourth round—attempting to match the teaser icons to the class. ArenaNet has been having fun with the mystery, even creating a chart for players to make their guesses—and there's been plenty of theorising among the game's players.
Today's announcement for Visions of Eternity, the MMO's sixth expansion, alas won't fully end that speculation, but it does give us a handful of screenshots hinting at what we'll get to play. Mesmers are getting some instrumental flair, Rangers are commanding birds, and Guardians have adopted a spooky affect. And in the expansion's trailer, we see that the Elementalist has adopted a fiery fox spirit.
The full list of new elite specs should arrive soon then, with a beta running on August 20 that will let players get their hands on the new equipment. I'm particularly interested to see what combat styles each spec will bring. The current roster of elite specs already does a pretty good job of covering the game's main roles—DPS, healer, and hybrids that dole out the two main boons that every party wants: Alacrity and Quickness. Every niche is covered, at least to some extent, so it will be revealing to see what deficiency these new specs will address.
Outside of buildcrafting, Visions of Eternity is taking players to the island of Castora to combat the threat of the Inquest—essentially Asuran mad scientists. That means a set of island-themed features, including:
- A new beachside Homestead plot
- A reworked Skimmer mount with new abilities
- A new legendary weapon, and—yes, they finally did it—legendary aquabreather
Homesteads—GW2's name for player housing—are also getting a new layout feature, which will let you save and share your house's layout with other players. I assume this feature will mostly be useful for swapping to the new beach plot without losing the work you've put into the current Janthir homestead. But it also sounds useful for creating and saving seasonal variations for your house—letting you quickly bring out your Halloween decorations each October.
The legendary aquabreather is especially funny to me. Guild Wars 2's underwater combat has been largely ignored since the game launched. Hell, most of my characters are still rocking a rare-tier aquabreather because there's never been a need to invest in underwater stats. And yet, I am absolutely going to chase this, partly because legendaries are a huge quality-of-life investment, able to be equipped on multiple characters at once. Mostly, though, because it's funny.
As usual, the launch of Visions of Eternity is just the first part of the expansion, launching with two new maps—the rest of the expansion rolling out in quarterly updates. This time ArenaNet says it's taken on board player feedback around the last expansion, which launched strong but suffered a significant dip in quality for its last two updates. This time around, the expansion's first major update will instead focus on quality-of-life features, letting the development team go harder on the second and third updates, with larger maps and longer story chapters. Today's press release also confirms that Visions of Eternity's later updates will add yet another raid, plus even more legendaries: a ring, an accessory and another weapon.
To be honest, ArenaNet had me with new elite specialisations. While the last couple of expansions added new weapon options for each class, nothing quite shakes up your builds like new class mechanics. Visions of Eternity will launch on October 28.
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