Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns expansion pack announced
Today on stage at PAX South, ArenaNet president O'Brien capped off weeks of teases with an official announcement of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, the first expansion to the MMORPG which launched in 2012.
The expansion is centered around the mysterious depths of the Maguuma Jungle, where players are to hunt the recently awakened Elder Dragon Mordremoth. O'Brien first announced that level cap increases and more gear tiers is not what one should expect Heart of Thorns. Instead, players will find new and challenging content.
Guild Wars 2 game director Colin Johanson then came on stage to go into some details about the new features in the expansion. Heart of Thorns boasts the fullest an most detailed maps of the game divided into three distinct zone types: the jungle floor, roots, and canopy. A new PvE Mastery progression system is in place and by exploring through the zones, overcoming challenges and defeating bosses, players can get mastery points to perform new tasks - like hang gliding or riding gusts of wind to traverse the jungle.
Mastery points can also be used in various crafting collections, allowing easier ways to obtain precursors needed to forge new legendary weapons. Gaining new Mastery abilities will improve your chance to survive the various perils of the Maguuma Jungle.
The next major feature in Heart of Thorns are new Specializations, allowing players to tailor their classes to evolve to more unique classes. Rangers can now become druids, allowing them to wield staffs and gain new healing and other druidic abilities. Necromancers can gain the ability wield greatswords as a sort of dark knight. More specializations will be revealed at a later date.
The new profession in Heart of Thorns is the Revenant, a class teased in Living World updates that can channel and control the powers of the Mist. It is a heavy armor profession that can also channel the abilities of legends into his own arsenal.
For PvP players, 'world versus world' is one of the most popular PvP modes, and Heart of Thorns introduces a new WvW Borderland map into the rotation. Holding various keeps will change the environment or otherwise grant bonuses so for your team . For competitive PvP, Heart of Thorns introduces a brand new mode called Stronghold, which Johanson explained as an evolution of a similar mode found in the original Guild Wars. Guild Teams are members of guilds that can rank on leaderboards in competitive PvP.
The final new feature in Heart of Thorns are the return of Guild Halls, acting as a hub for your social community.
More information can be found at the official website. Right now the expansion has not been announced a release window.
