Competitive week wraps up with feature reveals focused on sPvP and WvW.

The 2^nd Feature Pack for Guild Wars 2 is releasing on September 9. As with the first Feature Pack that released earlier this year, ArenaNet is releasing the details of what features are going to be released with the pack slowly over the course of multiple days. Today was the last reveal for the first week of reveals, rightfully called Competitive week due to the focus on features targeted at the two PvP game modes, Structured PvP and World vs World (WvW).

The first reveal wasn’t much of a feature, but the announcement of a new series of tournaments, cumulating in the first international tournament with a cash prize pool. The World Tournament Series kicks off with the Tournament of Glory in the coming weeks and will end the first series with a championship tournament being hosted in Beijing.

Along with the tournament is two new armor sets that will only be obtainable through PvP. The Glorious Hero’s armor will be obtainable through tournaments linked to the World Tournament Series, while the Glorious armor can be obtained through a new PvP Reward Track: the Glorious Armor Reward Track.

The last sPvP focused feature is the Standardized Enemy Models. This feature is an option that will only apply to Team Arenas and custom arenas that supports the option. Standardized Enemy Models will make enemies all look like humans in armor specific to the enemy’s class. This, for example, will make all necromancers look the same so players can immediately identify their enemy in PvP and will equalize an enemy’s presence in the map (so Asuras cannot hide where other races couldn’t).

Touching all areas of the game is the announcement for the next round of class balance changes. In the reveal, ArenaNet gave a high level overview of what each class’s changes will include. Check out the reveal page to see what changes will be coming to your favorite classes.

Switching over to WvW, ArenaNet revealed a new ability line, a new trick and changes to the commander title.

The Siege Golem Mastery ability line will allow players to buff their effectiveness while piloting one of the two siege golems. The ability line will give your golem super speed after destroying either a wall or gate, increase offensive and defensive stats, add an AoE healing effect to the Shield Bubble skill and gives the golem an ejection seat. The ejection seat will safely eject a player from their golem when it is destroyed, where players without the ability are downed when the golem is destroyed.

The new trick is the Siege Disabler. Like the traps already in the game, the Siege Disabler can be bought from the Traps and tricks outfitter for Badges of Honor and a small amount of silver and costs 10 supply to use. The Siege Disabler when thrown will disable all enemy siege weapons within a radius of 450 of the target area for 45 seconds. The exception to this is manned siege golems which will only be disabled for 20 seconds. This trick is a thrown grenade making it a projectile and subject to anything that effects projectiles such as Swirling Winds and Feedback. Along with this addition, the traps currently in the game will now cost Badges of Honor and silver, instead of the current combination of Badges of Honor and Karma.

Commander titles will be getting an upgrade in the feature pack, with the addition of more commander icon colors as well as account-bound commander tags. All players with the commander title unlocked will be able to switch between the current Blue icon and the new Yellow, Red and Purple icon colors. Players who have a commander tag before the feature pack will be grandfathered into the new, multi-colored commander icon system with access to their commander tag on all characters on their account. Players will still be able to buy an account-bound commander tag after the feature patch goes live, but it will cost 300 gold to acquire, three times the current cost of 100 gold.

The last "feature" they revealed was the next WvW Tournament, which will start September 12 just three days after the release of the Feature Pack. The World vs. World Fall Tournament 2014 will maintain the Swiss-style tournament it had during the Spring Tournament, but has been shortened to just 4 weeks. Achievements have also been changed. Instead of completing achievements throughout the tournament, players will be working towards smaller weekly achievements. Complete all four weekly achievements to complete the meta-achievement and earn the title Mist Treader.

Rewards are also seeing a rework. Much like the achievements, players will be receiving rewards on a weekly basis, based solely on your world's ranking that week. That doesn't mean that overall ranking doesn't matter, as a new statue will be placed in each Borderland's citadel to celebrate the victors. Interacting with this statue will give a one-time buff to WXP and XP, with higher ranking worlds getting a longer duration of the buff.

If nothing revealed so far is of interest to you, just wait as this is only the first week of reveals for the Feature Pack. There are two more weeks left of reveals that will "improve the Guild Wars 2 experience for new and veteran players alike!" and "rethink the way you collect and trade items!"

Matt Adams aka the Mattsta

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