Wanted to give you a quick heads up on a handful of notes relevant to Heart of Thorns launch in a few days:
Guild Missions: Week 1
With the new guild mission system (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-mission-changes-and-improvements/), missions each week are randomly generated. There is a toggle you can use to allow your guild to select between PvE, PvP, WvW guild missions, or a mix of all three for more diverse guilds. When you make a change to the toggle, it’ll go into effect during the next week of missions. We’ve defaulted all guilds to the mix of all three mission options for week one, which means every guild will have the mix of missions option selected for week one.
The random roll for this week already happened and we’re seeing on our internal servers that week ones missions rolled a mix of PvP and WvW missions for the first three mission slots that guilds have unlocked once you’re able to access the expansion (as you unlock deeper into your guild hall, you’ll be able to unlock more mission slots). We wanted to make sure everyone knew this information ahead of time.
Combat Visibility
One change you’ll notice when the expansion goes live – a number of FX for skills have changed. We’ve tried to cut back some of the visual noise of some of the “noisiest” skills to make it easier to see what’s going on in combat with multiple players/mobs on screen. We’ve also made some skill FX end much faster to align with the length their actual combat effect happens in the world – previously some FX lingered much longer than the actual outcome of the skills combat interaction would occur. This is also to help make it easier to see what’s going on in combat.
Fractal Dungeon Leaderboards
Back when we announced all the updates to Fractals for Heart of Thorns – the announce blog also discussed more information coming before HoT about leaderboards for Fractals. Our team of folks working on Fractal dungeons kept iterating on this concept and ultimately we have decided to make it something more involved (re: exciting) than our original plans which will extend our development a bit more. This also means you’ll be able to earn the new fractal backpack precursor, but a few of the components for the new legendary will come with this expanded future fractals feature.
As always, we’ll discuss features once they’re far enough along to share development details on; our Fractal Dungeon team will be back with more updates about this and other plans for Fractal Dungeons in the future: when it’s ready™.
Engineer Profession Icon
We’ve had some issues over the years with folks being able to tell the difference between the Engineer and Elementalist profession icons, in particular when they are shrunk down to smaller sizes for party UI. This became even more apparent when we began testing our updated large squad UI. As a result, we’re going to be changing the engineer icon to better differentiate between the two. We’ve also done a bit of re-work to better differentiate the icons between Scrapper, Tempest, Engineer and Elementalist.
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