08/20/2024—August 20 Release Notes
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Homesteads
Players can now obtain their own personal homestead by playing through the Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds storyline! Homesteads are an account-wide personal housing instance that provides you with an area of land and a permanent structure to cultivate, decorate, and share with your friends.
- Players with a homestead can place a conjured doorway in open-world maps, which they can use to bring their party into their homestead.
- All resource nodes (and cats!) unlocked in home instances will also be available in the homestead.
- A new account-wide handiworker crafting discipline is available, allowing players to craft decorations for their homestead.
- Unlocked mounts will appear in the homestead.
- Characters that were logged out while inside the homestead instance will visit the homestead as NPCs.
Land Spears
All professions can now use spears on land. This is unlocked via a WvW vendor purchase or by playing the first few chapters of the Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds story.
New Masteries
Homesteading
Once a homestead has been obtained, you will begin to master the crafting of homestead decorations without the need for a crafting discipline. As this mastery grows, your access to recipes and space to work in will increase, and you will gain bonuses within your homestead, such as rested experience and automated gathering of resources.
Lowland Kodan
As you meet the lowland kodan in the Janthir region, you will gain access to their techniques, such as learning to use the spear on dry land, gaining power from local honey, and harvesting resources more efficiently.
Warclaw
If you've not yet bonded with a warclaw, Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds will make doing so easier and allow you to use its skills outside of World vs. World. As you progress your Warclaw Mastery, it will become immune to falling damage, leap further into the air, and gain enhanced stamina regeneration, which is shared across all of your mounts.
Decorating (General)
A new hotkey has been added for entering and exiting decoration mode, and specialized skills are available while in decorating mode. You can change which set of these is displayed using three sub-mode buttons above your skill bar: Place New Decorations, Modify Existing Decorations, and Erase Decorations.
Place New Decorations
- Place: Begin placement by choosing a location on the ground to put the decoration, or by enabling the manipulator skills for more control over how the decoration is placed. If you use this skill before having chosen a decoration from your decorations inventory, it will open your decoration list to prompt you to do that first. If you're not using a manipulator skill to refine the placement, you can right-click to cancel placement. Otherwise, to cancel, press a different skill button or the Esc key (if you have an open panel, Esc will close it first). Also, if you're not using a manipulator, you can change the decoration's rotation by holding and dragging the mouse button when choosing the location to pivot the decoration around that point.
- Move: Once you begin placement, the Move skill becomes available; press it to activate a manipulator gizmo. Click and drag a manipulator axis to move the decoration along that axis, or drag one of the squares to move the decoration across the corresponding plane. Once you're done using the manipulator, you can change it to another type or press the Place skill again to finish placing the decoration.
- Rotate: Similar to Move, but the manipulator rotates the decoration. Click and drag a ring right or left to rotate the decoration around the corresponding axis. Hold Shift when you click the ring to drag it, and the rotation will snap to 45-degree increments. Pressing the skill again will toggle a spherical manipulator that you can click and drag to freely rotate the decoration in any direction.
- Scale: This works much like Rotate and Move and allows uniform changing of the decoration's scale. Drag any of the boxes to scale the decoration up and down. There are practical limits on how much a decoration can be scaled, and those may be specific to the decoration you're placing.
- Toggle Manipulator Alignment (Local/Global): While using one of the manipulators, you may use this skill to align the manipulator with either the map's coordinate system or with the decoration that's being placed.
Modify Existing Decorations
- Select Decoration to Modify: Once you have some decorations placed in the world, this skill lets you select one of them and refine its placement using the Move, Rotate, and Scale skills. After you're satisfied with the changes, press this skill again to confirm them.
Erase Decorations
Most of the erase skills are unchanged from the existing guild hall decoration system. You can target a single decoration to erase and return to storage, or you can erase all decorations within the radius of a small, medium, or large targeting cursor.
- Toggle X-Ray Vision: This skill helps in retrieving decorations that have been placed in unreachable or obscured locations, such as beneath the terrain. While X-Ray Vision is active, the targeting of erase skills can penetrate terrain and other obstacles. It's also useful for distinguishing decorations from the rest of the environment.
Common Decorating Skills
- Reset Scale and Rotation: This skill is available when placing or modifying a decoration. It will remove all rotation changes and restore the item's original scale.
- Use Last Scale and Rotation: This skill is available when placing or modifying a decoration. This matches the decoration's rotation and scale to that of the most recently placed decoration.
- Flying Mode: Toggles a flying movement mode to help you reach high places while decorating. Note that this counts as a skill, so using it will cancel any placement in progress.
- Select Decoration: Opens a list of decorations that are available for placing in the instance.
- Stop Decorating: Puts away the decoration skills and restores your combat skill bar.
The Decorations panel has been updated with the following features, which are saved per decoration mode (homesteads, guild halls, and guild arenas):
- A Favorites category of up to 16 decorations.
- A Recently Placed category, which tracks the last 8 decorations placed by the player.
- Filtering options for decorations and categories.
- Categories will remain expanded or collapsed when closing and reopening the Decorations panel.
Decorating (Guild Halls)
- Decorating in guild halls has been updated with the new Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds decorating capabilities.
- The size and shape of interaction boundaries on interactable decorations has been changed.
- A slight rotation change of up to a degree may be noticeable in the placement of some large guild hall decorations.
- The Kournan Brazier guild hall decoration now correctly has a flame.
- Attempting to place a decoration in an invalid location will now highlight the decoration in red. Previously, this functionality only worked in the Gilded Hollow guild hall.
- Entering decoration mode while in the guild arena will now allow direct placement of arena decorations, without needing to interact with the Arena Obstacles Coordinator.
Wizard's Vault
The Wizard's Vault's inventory has been updated for the new season! Last season's unique rewards are now available in the Legacy tab.
This season's new, unique rewards now require Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds ownership to purchase. Legacy rewards will continue to require their associated expansion.
Objective Updates
- New special objectives for the season have been added, and more will appear over the course of the season, including special objectives associated with bonus events and festivals.
- New daily and weekly objectives have been added for adventuring in the Janthir region, as well as the Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure release "The Midnight King."
Inventory Updates
- A new item type in the Wizard's Vault this season, the Falling Star Quest License, invites players on a short adventure in the newly available Janthir region. Your efforts will be rewarded with an ascended spear and gloves, as well as a series of achievements to track the quest's progress.
- Legendary Starter Kit—Set 5 is now available, containing two new weapon kits and two returning weapon kits.
World Polish
- Fixed an issue that caused Kryptis rifts to spawn too slowly in certain areas of Thunderhead Peaks.
- The beach resort at Southsun Cove will no longer automatically transform players into an armorless state. For guests wishing to take a swim, a nearby tent has been repurposed as a changing area.
- Skywatch Archipelago: Fixed an issue that prevented shrine guardian chests 32, 33, 34, and 35 from being properly tracked for progress in the Rise and Shrine achievement.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the water bucket near the Aid Fort Salma renown heart from being accessible.
- Fixed an issue that prevented the Envious Reprieve achievement from granting progress.
Relics
Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds relics will need to be unlocked before they are selectable options for a legendary relic.
New relics have been added:
- Relic of the Claw: When you disable an enemy, gain a strike damage bonus for a duration.
- Relic of Sorrow: After using an elite skill, create an area that destroys missiles and heals and reduces incoming damage for allies.
- Relic of the Blightbringer: Build stacks when inflicting poison on an enemy. At 5 stacks, the next time you inflict poison also inflicts a burst of poison, weakness, and cripple on nearby enemies.
- Relic of the Stormsinger: After using a movement skill, your next attack performs a chain-lightning strike.
- Relic of Atrocity: Your lifesteal damage and lifesteal healing is increased.
- Relic of Rivers: Gain alacrity and regeneration when you dodge.
World vs. World
The warclaw has received updates to its skills with the release of Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds:
- Sniff will now identify damaged and destroyed gates and walls for players.
- Chain Pull can now also be attached to walls and will apply Weakened Frame, an effect similar to Structural Vulnerability.
- Lance now has 2 charges.
Additionally, the warclaw will now be unlocked for any player who enters WvW if they own Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire or Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns. Players who have previously completed the warclaw collection to unlock the mount will receive a War Machine Weapon Skin Selection and WvW skirmish tickets in their mail upon logging in.
The increased stamina and Warclaw's Blessing have been removed from the Warclaw Mastery ability line and are now inherent benefits to owning the warclaw in WvW. Finally, the WvW ability point costs to fill out the WvW Warclaw Mastery line have been greatly reduced.
Gem Store Improvements
The following changes have been made to categories and tabs in the Gem Store to aid in item searchability and to fix an issue that caused text to overlap under certain circumstances:
- The Toys tab is now named Novelties.
- The Mounts category and Skiff Skins category have been merged into the Mounts and Skiffs category under the Style tab.
- The Jade Bot Skins category, Emotes category, and Fishing Rod Skins category have been merged into the Miscellaneous category under the Style tab.
Profession and General Updates
For all updates regarding General and Profession changes please visit the official Guild Wars 2 forums here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/149475-game-update-notes-august-20-2024/