The Mists tremble and warp as the impact of recent events permeates the beyond. The Astral Ward has named it a fractal incursion, as Tyria risks a deluge of malicious attacks from fractal recreations.
I am calling for your aid to stabilize the disturbance via the Fractals of the Mists in Lion's Arch. Let us meet there, and I will explain how we may avert this crisis.
—Mist Stranger
Surprise! Today we're introducing a brand-new bonus event called Fractal Incursion that will run until October 7 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific Time (UTC-7). This event is aimed at introducing new players to fractals and giving fractal veterans more rewards to seek, including an incredible pair of legendary gloves! We also have some updates for our new PvP game mode, Push.
The mysterious Mist Stranger calls for your aid with a plan formed alongside the Astral Ward to calm the Mists. Join them in Lion's Arch to embark on an adventure into the Fractals of the Mists and across Tyria! All of today's live content updates are free and accessible to all players regardless of expansion ownership. Let's dive in!
Introducing the Quickplay Beta
This event introduces a new way to play fractals called quickplay mode, which we're now beta testing with the community. Quickplay will automatically pair you with other adventurers and launch you into a curated list of scale 1 fractals. You can use this new feature when you're solo, in a full group, or in a partial group, and quickplay will do the rest!
Quickplay mode is accessed through the Fractal of the Mists (Initiate Scales 1–25) section of the Looking for Group panel or by clicking the red banner outside the fractal portal in Lion's Arch. The current set of fractals available for quickplay includes:
- Aetherblade
- Cliffside
- Deepstone
- Kinfall
- Molten Boss
- Molten Furnace
- Snowblind
- Uncategorized
- Urban Battleground
- Volcanic
The Mist Stranger will also assist players using the quickplay mode queue by helping to revive fallen adventurers and overcome environmental puzzles. For more information about this and some other changes to the fractals themselves, please refer to our full release notes for today's update.
Open-World Incursions
Enemies from the fractals are spilling into the open world! You'll need to safeguard Tyria from the Mists' creatures during these new events at the top of every hour in one of these zones: Snowden Drifts, Diessa Plateau, Kessex Hills, and Brisban Wildlands. Don't fret if you travel to the wrong zone, though—portals will appear in the others to lead you to where the problem is!
These events will award participants with achievement progress and a sampling of agony resistance infusions to assist heroes in preparing for more challenging fractals.
Fractally Amazing Rewards
[youtube_inline id=ef3W7pnOsiQ]
Participating in this month-long event can earn you significant rewards! The Fractal Incursion Champion achievement is only available during the event and offers players twenty-two different reward tiers. The final reward of this achievement chain is the Legendary Weapon Starter Key—Universal, which allows you to kickstart your progress toward any first-generation legendary weapon!
Other rewards include:
- A full set of rare-quality equipment for fresh level 80 characters.
- Exotic armor, weapons, and accessories, including the new Guild Captain's Cape.
- A new ascended accessory with agony resistance, the Fractal Sheriff's Star.
- Two Bag Slot Expansions and a 20-slot bag.
There's also a set of new achievements and rewards that are now permanent additions to the game. The Incursive Investigation achievements will guide you through the effort to stop the incursion attacks with a new section of the journey unlocking each week over the first three weeks of the event. The final reward for completing these achievements is the legendary Eikasia, Mists-Grasper gloves!
These gloves allow you to project a magical aura around the tip of whichever weapon you're wielding. Over time, you can earn all three armor weights of these gloves and a series of Agony Lens infusions that let you customize the color of Eikasia's glow on each weapon you wield!
Lastly, check the Wizard's Vault for some bonus objectives and new rewards, including 20 Lucent Crystal Vault Bags, 3 Mystic Coin Vault Bags, a Lesser Essence of Gold, and an Infinite Mist Omnipotion.
Push Is Launching Today!
Almost exactly a year ago today, we unveiled our plans to develop a new PvP mode alongside the community. After three beta events, countless changes based on player feedback, new map art, and new UI elements, we're finally launching Push out of beta and into full release. PvP players can hop into the game right now and play Push. This game mode is here to stay!
In our most recent beta, we collected some great feedback from you, and our team has implemented the following notable changes:
- Adjusted Mortal Contest and global healing reductions to reduce barrier support effectiveness.
- Changed the locations of secondary objectives and updated their interaction-point art.
- The visual effects for the center objective have been updated to better fit the setting.
- Interactable teleports have been added to increase the variety of map pathing.
- We've made some additional map adjustments, including the removal of ramps near player spawn points to avoid pregame griefing.
While Push is now live, we'll continue to monitor feedback and make adjustments to the game mode as needed to ensure it's as fun and competitive as possible. Thank you for your assistance in making Push come to life, and we'll see you in the Sunjiang Backstreets very soon!