Guild Wars 2 will be launching its third expansion, End of Dragons, later today and there’s plenty of reasons to be excited if you’re a current, returning or new player. The new update contains a massive list of new features, and we’re exploring which we’re excited for the most!
New Story, Maps and Metas
When an MMORPG like Guild Wars 2 that treats its world, lore and characters with respect, put out new story content, I always gravitate toward that first, because I enjoy seeing the narrative evolve and what part I’m playing in it, so I’ll have to say the story content this expansion is what I’m looking forward to the most, which I hope has a ton of new exciting boss fight encounters and cinematic cut-scenes. From all the previews and stuff we’ve seen recently, there’s hints that EoD will probably wrap up the Dragon saga and whatever happens with the story in EoD, I think the pay-off will be earned and deserved due to how much time we’ve spent with some of these characters and their arcs through all the Living World Episodes and the previous two expansions. And I mean come on its Cantha, so we should expect some really cool story-lines with characters old and new, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the conclusion of this expansion will shape the future of Tyria, even possibly giving us a teaser of what’s to come narratively for the future of Guild Wars 2.
New Elite Specializations
Story content aside, I’m always excited when we get new Elite Specializations for our classes, because it offers us hours of fun tinkering with new builds, and challenging the established meta, which has become stagnant somewhat, so I’m looking forward to decking out my army of alts with these new specs, which should be a challenge. In 2021 we’ve had a few beta weeks where we got to test all the new elite specializations, and of course, some were more OP than others, which will get balanced out over time, but there are a few fun ones that I can definitely see myself playing long term.
The Mechanist for Engineers is probably the most fun out of everything I’ve tried because of that Jade Robot pet, followed by the Harbinger, Virtuoso and Willbender. It’s still too early to say which specs will be meta defining for other game modes like PvP or WvW, so I suggest not caring about that for the time being, and just play whatever is fun for you at launch.
Fishing
As for other new features I’m looking forward to, definitely fishing and skiffing. Every GW2 expansion so far has introduced huge gameplay mechanic additions, like Gliding in Heart of Thorns and Mounts in Path of Fire, and with End of Dragons , besides the new two-seater mount and the Jade Bot companion with its quality of life features, fishing and boating are interesting additions by themselves, simply because we’ve not had social activities of this kind in-game previously, especially fishing, which in the world of MMORPGs, one would consider it normal to have that activity from the very beginning of the game’s life.
Therefore, with fishing appearing in Guild Wars 2 some 10 years after launch should be interesting, I want to see how it plays, what the progression is like, and is it a viable activity for making gold, and gathering important materials that could help with the new legendaries, collections and so on. Skiffing or boating is something that looks to complement fishing, and look GW2 has large bodies of water all over the game-world, so these two go hand-in-hand.
