PAX East: Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns Preview .

Away from the beaten path of the PAX show floor I was able to meet with Colin Johanson, Game Director of Guild Wars 2 and Isaiah Cartwright, Lead Designer to talk about their upcoming expansion, Heart of Thorns. It’s not your traditional expansion where you often see a raise in the level cap, existing content becomes old, stale and trivial, and people are tasked with starting anew with acquiring new skills, gear, weapons, and materials to return to their former glory. It promises a more horizontal approach to character progression with class specializations and a mastery system. New maps that impress you with their verticality and require a different method of transportation, a new profession and specializations and so much more.

The demo that we played through was set at the beginning of the expansion where Season Two left off. The Pact fleet that the player character is a part of is sabotaged by the main antagonist Mordremoth, one of the many elder dragon that have awoken and are terrorizing the world of Tyria. The survivors now know that an existing playable race, the Sylvari once came from Mordremoth and it is using it’s influence of the mind and plants to turn them against their allies. Although I wasn’t able to experience it, Isaiah promised that players that play as a Sylvari will have a different experience than players who play as the other races. With key member of the Pact being captured, the surviving Pact members try to muster a defense.

As you can imagine everyone is very distrustful of the Sylvari and lo and behold one of the senior officer is a Sylvari and a great squabble breaks out of how to proceed after the devastating attack, which admittedly isn’t the best thing to do in an area full of lush plant life that the Elder Dragon controls in the heart of the Maguuma jungle. One of the new improvements you’ll see early on is that outside of scripted cutscenes your character will engage in banter as you progress in the missions as opposed to being a silent protagonist while other NPCs moved the story along. Since the player character is the second-in-command you have the opportunity of putting your foot down and making a decision on the spot with everyone falling in line.

I played as a Human female Revenant the new heavy armored profession being introduced with the expansion. It relies on a variety of weapons and calling on ancient heroes from the Mists, an ancient land that exists between worlds to augment their abilities to aid them in battle. Each spirit you call on allows you to augment your character in a variety of ways. For example, if you call on Jalis Ironhammer, the legendary dwarf king your character will be able to withstand a lot more punishment while being able to dish out sustained damage with a number of point blank AoE abilities. Also unique to the Revenant is it’s resource bar. The bar starts off at 50% and will slowly build up to 100% when you are in combat with abilities and utility skills using up the resource either by draining it over time or by a fixed amount. The kicker to the resource bar is that when you call on other spirits it will default back to 50% no matter where it currently is. This encourages players to swap between spirits as they use their skills similar to how most players swap weapons on the other professions.

In the demo we decided to assist the Sylvari commander with rescuing some of the captured troops and attempt to shore up a position from which we could work from to defend ourselves against the elder dragon and it’s minions. With a hammer equipped we went to work on the corrupted plants and sylvari blocking our way. The hammer, a weapon in which invokes the idea that it’s meant to be used up close and personal. The Revenant uses it to channel magic through it and use it as a ranged weapon. It still retains some of the familiar elements you expect from a Hammer. A few skills cover a lot of terrain such as the Coalescence of Ruin skill that would do damage in a huge line in front of the revenant, the further away the enemy was the more damage it did or Drop the Hammer, a ranged AoE ability that damages and knockdown enemies.

As we cleared the area we stumbled upon further improvements to the AI. Enemies with now a better suite of abilities to deal with the various play styles of players. As a ranged class, the enemy repeated tossed an expanding AoE at our character in an attempt to draw us close and keep us on our feet. They have also changes how the defiance works in the game. Currently bosses have stacks of defiance which prevents them from being crowd controlled by the players and players have to work together to bring those stacks down before a boss is vulnerable. The problem with the current system is when you are in a big open world battle the number of defiance stacks a boss acquires can be staggering and it’s extremely difficult to collaborate on a well timed CC.

The way it functions in the expansion is that bosses now have a defiance bar and it works similar to a health bar. When a boss is about to perform a powerful ability the bar turns blue indicating the boss is susceptible to CC abilities. If players deplete that bar down to zero it will have a significant impact on the boss. In our case, as we rounded up the demo we fought the Legendary Wyvern. As we fought the creature periodically it would attempt to fly into the air where it would then lay swathes of fire on the ground to hamper players below. If players worked together to deplete the defiance bar instead of taking off the boss will be stunned for a few seconds mitigating the would be damage everyone would take it they allowed it flight.

Rounding up the PvE demo they went into length about the mastery system and specializations. The mastery system open up account wide unlocks for your characters and they can range from learning the language of other races to unlock hidden paths and gain entry into certain area to unlocking gliders that will assist the player in traversing the maguuma jungle. The mastery replaces the experience bar when players reach level 80 and players can decide what they want to unlock with their mastery points. Along side the mastery system, player will also be able to utilize specializations within their professions. An example given was the Druid specialization for the Ranger which allowed them to wield a staff and perform more nature oriented magical attacks as opposed to using a traditional bow or sword. With these two systems the developer promises that players who enjoying progressing their characters will have plenty to look forward to and unlock as they play the expansion.

Lastly, I was shown their new PvP mode, Stronghold. It’s a 5 versus 5 team based map that borrows a few elements found in todays MOBAs. The overall goal of this mode is to eliminate the lord found in the enemies base. There are two lanes leading to each other’s bases, one is designed as defense or offense for each time and players much organized themselves to defend and attack at the same time. With this new mode, Arena Net is looking to allow people to play different roles than normal. A player can escort attacking NPCs to key objectives to gain a foothold while attack or supplying their defensive armaments to hire NPCs to repel attackers. Each team will have opportunities to summon a Hero for their team. Heros were described to me as super weapons that can turn the tide if it they get into the enemies base they can cause catastrophic damage as they will their ultimate ability to deal a percentage of health to all enemies in the room including the lord. They hope with this map it will open up a variety of ways to play, encourage different profession builds, have people try different roles while keeping the focus on PvP.

Heart of Thorns is shaping up to be a hefty expansion. Bringing in new areas, new ways of transportation, new enemies, new NPC races and with additions such as the mastery system and specializations there will be plenty to explore, learn and master. They also didn’t forget the small details. Mechanic changes for Defiance, improved AI, and improved storytelling within the game help ArenaNet take Guild Wars 2 to the next level. They are also preparing beta test. The test will have no NDA and If you want to be considered all you have to do is be signed up for their newsletter.