- Guardian: Pistol (main and off hand)
- Revenant: Scepter (main hand)
- Warrior: Staff
- Engineer: Short bow
- Ranger: Mace (main and off hand)
- Thief: Axe (main hand)
- Elementalist: Pistol (main hand)
- Mesmer: Rifle
- Necromancer: Sword (main and off hand)
Secrets of the Obscure Announcement
Good Morning Friends! While I have not been actively talking much about Guild Wars 2, I still end up poking my head into the game a few times a week. I need to properly spend some time catching up and experiencing the “What Lies Within” content update and the second part of the Gyala Delve zone meta. I feel like before I talk about anything that transpired yesterday, I need to talk about the controversial post that the Arena Net team made back in February. Essentially in the Studio Update a new path forward for Guild Wars 2 was outlined, that they would be moving away from Living World and instead doing smaller and more frequent expansions.
With this post, the community sort of spun off in a bunch of directions. Some seemingly now accurately predicted that this would mean yearly expansions. Others went into doomer territory and assumed that this was the beginning of the end of Guild Wars 2. Whatever the case… this shift in direction combined with a somewhat poorly received content update for What Lies Beneath caused some opinions to circulate. I personally thought Gyala Delve and the What Lies Beneath update were pretty enjoyable. I was largely on board with this concept of narrowing the scope of what an expansion meant and then following it up with specific quarterly content drops. In the time since then, we have seen effectively a quarterly schedule which I think is awesome. Mostly for me when it comes to a live service game, the studio behind it needs to nail a predictable cadence and set expectations… and I think Arena Net is now doing both.
Now we move forward to yesterday, and ANet dropped the trailer for the next Guild Wars 2 expansion, Secrets of the Obscure. With the close of the Dragon Cycle expansions with End of Dragons, we now move back to core Tyria and are delving into mysteries that have just been sitting there in the open for a decade now. We’ve had this giant floating Dalaran-esc tower in Kessex Hills that was just begging to be explored, and it seems like the new expansion is going to be taking us there. This is honestly something that Wooden Potatoes predicted in his mega video throwing out mini-expansion ideas that would begin to tie up loose ends in the world. If you look at the map there is already a bunch of areas to expand into new zones, without the need to necessarily build another content island.
With the announcement came a bit of an info dump about the features of Secrets of the Obscure or as the community is already referring to it as just “SOTO”. There is a new expansion site that serves largely as a teaser for the features and a way to pre-purchase. Then there are a number of news blog posts that deep dive into some of the features themselves. More specifically there is one covering combat changes and another talking about some of the more ephemeral rewards structure features. I think what excites me the most are the tweaks to combat, which again everyone was speculating since content creators had latched onto the fact that an Elite Specialization had not been mentioned in either the roadmap or the subsequent Q&A.
Essentially we are getting new build diversity through the removal of elite specialization requirements for weapons. As it stands right now in order to use a Longbow on a Guardian, for example, you have to be using the Dragon Hunter talent tree with your build. In order to use a shield with a Mesmer, you have to be a Chronomancer. The first change with SOTO is that they are removing these requirements and when a class has access to a weapon… all of the specializations have access to that weapon. For ages I have wished I could build a Reaper that used the Greatsword as the main weapon set, and then Pistol as my secondary weapon. Sure I realize that Pistol is largely designed for condition damage… but it plays fine with Power Gear at least in the open-world content I largely do. I will now be able to craft this as well as a bunch of other dumb build ideas that I am sure the community will go wild with.
More than that, however, in one of the quarterly updates it seems like every single class is getting another weapon to play with.