Big changes coming to Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2, approaching the one-year anniversary of its release on August 28, is looking to keep things fresh. They're not content with just adding the Living World content and new PvP features that they have. Fractals aren't enough either. No, ArenaNet is going to be bringing lots of new changes to the game in an effort to keep interest and gain new players.

Guild Wars 2 creative director Colin Johanson of ArenaNet revealed a ton of changes coming to the game. The blog post on the Guild Wars 2 site talked about progressions, crafting, new skills, rewards and magic find.

Less about gear, more about skills/traits

As far as progression is concerned, ArenaNet doesn't want Guild Wars 2 to get caught in a pattern of adding another tier of gear every three months, which would invalidate the gear you worked hard for. Instead, ArenaNet will be regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession. After unlocking these skills and traits, it should allow for even more diverse characters and builds. In conjunction with this, there will be more options and content to earn skill points. This should encourage players to try different challenges and content. Don't worry about these new skills be overpowered; the new skills and traits will be balanced to compliment the ones already in the game.

Rewards!

Another main focus is on rewards. Champions will each always drop a guaranteed reward box for any player that qualifies for a reward from a boss. Chests will contain crafting materials, skill points, unique skins and more. Let's not forget about dungeons. Players will receive bonus gold as a reward for each dungeon path they complete each day. This should encourage players to play a wider array of dungeons, as the bonus gold won't apply to playing the same dungeon path twice in a day. For crafting rewards, you'll earn crafting materials in WvW for capturing towers, camps and keeps, while in the Living World, you'll get them for killing giant world bosses, completing jumping puzzles, finishing guild missions, and other activities.

Magic Find items being removed

A change that I'm most excited for is the change to Magic Find. If you're like me, you hate when someone is running a dungeon with you and instead of wearing their best gear, they're wearing magic find gear to get better loot. To fix this, magic find is being removed entirely as an item stat. Instead, it is becoming an account stat that improves the odds of rare drops for all your characters.

The way you improve your account magic find is through the account achievement reward system, as well as consumable items found in the game. As your account magic find increases, more consumables will be needed to raise it even higher. More details will be coming later on how they plan to replace the current magic find items. You'll also be able to acquire account magic find consumables from salvaging fine and masterwork items.

Crafting to 500

That brings us to crafting. All crafting professions are increasing to 500 points. Once at 500, crafters will be able to make ascended weapons and armor. A new tier of crafting materials become available to you, which are made by combining lower tier mats. To keep the game economy in balance and maintain item rarity, this new tier will be time-constrained; each item can only be crafted once per day.

If you don't enjoy crafting but want this ascended weapons and armor, these items will also be able to be found as rare drops from different locations around the world. All ascended weapons and armor will be account-bound.

A bright future

Those are just some of the changes on the way, all of which have given me a renewed vigor in Guild Wars 2. To read about other changes coming to Legendary items, PvP, WvW and more, read the complete blog post HERE.

You can follow Senior Editor Lance Liebl on Twitter @Lance_GZ. He likes talking sports, video games, movies, and the stupidity of celebrities. Email at LLiebl@GameZone.com

[Guild Wars 2]