Good Morning Folks! Last night I wrapped the Janthir Wilds main story and this morning I am going to talk about some of my impressions. Some of this discussion will probably get into spoilers, so I am giving you all a proper warning now. So once I got past some of my early complaints about pacing and story being gated by mastery tracks… the flow of the content went fairly smoothly. There were several “fill the bar” moments that I still do not love… and will continue not to love for eternity… but the story instances themselves were pretty great. After Secrets of the Obscure, this really feels like a return to peak ANet and I would put this up there with some of my favorite content like End of Dragons, Living World Season 3, and Living World Season 4.
The challenge is however that we only got what is effectively the first chapter of a story that is going to be doled out over the next year in three more chunks. The first half of Icebrood Saga was amazing… but the hamfisted reliance on Dragon Response Missions to tell the rest of the story essentially ruined the entire experience. Basically, I am saying that I have a lot of hope for where we are going… but that there is also plenty of time for it to be fumbled completely. I largely enjoyed the first content drop for Secrets of the Obscure but pretty much hated it once we entered Nayos. I am hoping that they can keep up the pace and gravitas of the story that is laid out before us, because there are a lot more characters now that I already care about than I did in SOTO.
A huge chunk of the story revolves around us mentoring Poised Arrow, aka “Poky” the son of the current Lowland Kodan Claw Stoic Alder. He is very much the role of the brash young warrior who wants to prove himself… and the story beats at times feel DANGEROUSLY close to how our relationship started out with Braham. The key difference is however that “Poky” has a loving family, and while he is missing his mother greatly… he has a surrogate mother figure whom he has bonded with. As a result, this leads to someone who can be reasoned with in ways that we never seemed capable of reasoning with Braham, and is not necessarily driven by an overwhelming sense of angst but more a drive to find ways that he can help his people. I admit I’ve grown fond of the “cub” during this expansion and am hoping that he joins our larger entourage. It is however making me miss the rest of my team greatly, and I am hoping at some point there is a “getting the band back together” sequence in our future.
Right now we have two maps, both of which are gorgeous and feature a ton of content… some of which are fairly well hidden like the Bee hive that I highlighted at the top of this post. I’ve completed exploration of both of them and gotten doodads for crafting legendary items at some point. There is a thick density of events, and a lot of them are champion-level mobs that take a decent-sized group to drop them. I do wonder how this content will age as time goes on and the quantity of players dwindles. No content in Guild Wars 2 ever truly feels dead, but there are definitely less popular areas. For example, it is pretty hard to get a Gyala Delve meta going these days, and the last several Dragon’s End runs I have attempted have failed.
Speaking of failing content, the centerpiece of this expansion is your battle with two Titans: Greer the Blightbringer and Decima the Stormsinger. When you get into Janthir Syntri there is a world event that fires off every two hours as a “storm” arrives and Greer attacks from the SouthWestern corner of the map and Decima from the NorthEastern corner. One of these is MUCH harder than the other… and I keep throwing myself at Greer in part because I know as ranged that melee is largely useless there… and it is also the one with significantly lower turnout. I feel like this fight needs to be tuned a bit because right now I have participated in three attempts… all of which with Commanders leading the charge… and all three have failed miserably. I feel like this is a lesson that ANet has not learned yet… and should stop listening to the most tryhard voices in the crowd and realize that Open World content is Casual content. Wasting fifteen minutes of your time failing an event is fun for no one.
It is also a bit of a harsh contrast to how these fights feel in story missions. You’ve “defeated” both Greer and Decima at this point and both of the fights were largely you going through the motions and coming out a winner on the other side. I am not necessarily saying that the World Boss version should be an absolute cakewalk… but if warm bodies show up and participate it should fall over like most of the other World Bosses do currently. Guild Wars 2 has a massive identity crisis because playing the game like you would literally any other MMORPG, means you are also putting out one-tenth of the damage output of the highest damage player. That gap should not be that wide… but it is because playing Guild Wars 2 means you are expected to do some unintuitive things regularly for the sake of optimization. This is the next major bridge that the game needs to reconcile because the chasm is too wide at this point between the haves and have-nots.
Last night I also completed the Falling Star questline, which is a new sort of thing that ANet is trying. Essentially you buy the Falling Star Quest License from the Wizard’s Vault for 1000 Astral Acclaim. This is the same amount of Wizard Chore currency that you need to buy one of the Legendary Weapon starter boxes for example. You are then started down an achievement path that feels significantly more like a normal MMORPG quest than pretty much anything else in Guild Wars 2, including quest markers on your map indicating where you should go for various steps of the process. Essentially doing the quest chain does not require a huge outlay of time or gold and will end up with you getting a pair of Meteor Wielder’s Ascended Gloves in your armor type of choice, the Falling Star Ascended Spear, and the Heated Core Infusion which triggers the molten appearance of the spear weapon. Technically the infusion comes installed in the gloves but I am itemizing it separately given that Infusions are so overwhelmingly expensive and this one comes with +5 Power and +9 Agony Resistance. Well worth the 1000 Astral Acclaim and in total it took me maybe an hour to complete because I did not have any of the required old world renown hearts unlocked.
All told I am pretty happy with the start of Janthir Wilds. It gives me two new playgrounds to roam around and three mastery tracks to start chipping away at. I am hoping that either the World Boss Meta event gets watered down slightly, or folks figure out how to push through the mechanics a bit faster so that collectively the community can start clearing it. I need to sort through the achievements and see what I can reasonably knock out. I’ve not done any of the mini-games yet, and need to at least get silver in each of them to earn mastery points. I am very interested in seeing how the next few chapters of this storyline go. It feels fairly similar to Dawntrail honestly, where we have taken up this mentorship role over a brash youth, and while the stakes are high… they are maybe a little less world-ending. However, I do really want to see us building our retinue of characters up again and moving towards the next major objective on the horizon.
Anyway if I were to give the expansion a numerical grade, I would give it a strong 8 out of 10 currently with the ability to top that out if they land the next content drops over the coming year.
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