ArenaNet focuses on a Fresh Start with the second week of Feature Pack reveals.

The September 2014 Feature Pack is less than two weeks away for Guild Wars 2. This week, ArenaNet unleashed another set of reveals under the topic "A Fresh Start" that focused on improvements to different areas of the game including a major focus on the new player and leveling experiences.

The first reveal was improvements to the Megaserver System. The megaserver system was rolled out earlier this year in the first feature pack, and this feature pack will continue to improve the way the system sorts players into different instances of a map. Among these changes are a reservation system for guilds that are currently doing guild missions and the establishment of global guilds which will make all guild improvements available to players no matter their home server.

The game will also alert you to when the system is getting ready to close an emptying map, preventing cases where a player might be alone on an older instance of the map. The notification will allow players the option to switch to a more populated map, and in so doing gain the Volunteer’s Blessing which will increase movement speed, karma gain and experience from kills for 10 minutes.

Tuesday’s reveal was a set of smaller improvements. Dungeons will no longer belong to a single player. Currently the first player to enter a dungeon is considered the host of that dungeon, and when that player leaves it closes the dungeon. This could lead to accidental dungeon resets. After the feature pack release, dungeons will no longer have a host and will stay open until the last player leaves.

Crafting will get a little less tedious as players will be able to open the recipes and craft subcomponents. Players will no longer have to keep searching through their recipes lists to find a subcomponent before having to search for the main recipes again on the list.

Crafters will be getting new recipes including new backpieces to show off their crafting prowess. The Crafter’s Backpacks will only be obtainable by crafting them yourself, but they won’t cost too much to build. Each of the crafting disciplines will have different appearances and each discipline has multiple versions of the backpack with bigger, fancier backpacks requiring a higher level of that specific crafting discipline.

Crafting will also get more recipes for leveling gear. This new gear will be up to exotic quality and the new best in slot gear all the way through leveling, but will not be added to level 80 which will see no change to the current best in slot equipment. In addition to being best in slot, this new equipment will come with two stat combinations so players can customize them to fit their play-style. While crafting is the most straightforward way to acquire this gear, players will also be able to find them as loot drops while leveling.

Alongside the new crafted gear, ArenaNet is adjusting what gear drops for players. After the feature pack, players will be more likely to get gear that their class can use. So a Warrior is more likely to get Heavy armor to drop as loot than Light armor. This doesn’t mean however, that the Warrior will only be getting heavy armor. This system will help players find gear that they can use while leveling. This change will also extend to level 80 characters, but reportedly won’t be as noticeable at max level.

As part of the new leveling experience, players will get a level-notification. This can be opened by clicking the new badge that bounces in the lower right corner where special reward chests currently appear. The notification will show what new features and systems players have access to at the new level as well as any stat improvements and rewards a player might receive.

As part of this system, WvW, PvP and a few other areas of the game will no longer appear in the UI for players until they unlock them at the appropriate level. This doesn’t mean that low level players won’t be able to experience these areas, but they will have to go to the appropriate locations in the game world as the UI shortcuts for these will be hidden. This is to clear up the UI for new players and not introduce too many aspects of the game all at once.

Along with the idea of new player simplification, the downed state is now unlocked at level 5 and unlocks such as weapon swapping and skill slot unlocks have been shifted to better pace the early levels of the game. The way weapon skills are unlocked has also been changed. Currently, unlocking weapon skills is on a weapon by weapon basis by gaining experience while using a weapon to unlock its skills. Now, weapon skill slots will be unlocked a milestone levels and will unlock for all weapons simultaneously.

To help players get to relevant content in the open world, the content UI in the upper right will provide a single clear direction for a player to go to experience content. While focused for leveling characters, max level characters can also benefit from this system by switching it to world complete mode. If that doesn’t interest you, players will also have the option to turn the new UI off completely. While good at pointing players to relevant content, some of the more hidden areas of the world such as jumping puzzles and legendary llamas will remain hidden from this system allowing players to still find hidden gems by exploring the game.

The last reveal of the week was to how the personal story is set up. Currently, personal story missions are spaced out every few levels. This gave it an awkward start and stop pacing if players played them while leveling as story arcs would persist across multiple of these missions. After the feature patch, the personal story will be unlocked in chapters as a level-up reward. These chapters will allow a more complete experience for each of the story arcs. Alongside the new story unlock setup, some of the rewards given from the personal story missions has been altered.

The feature pack is less than two weeks away, but this isn’t the end of the reveals for the patch. Next week, ArenaNet has another set of reveals planned that has them “rethinking the way you collect and trade items!”

Matt Adams aka the Mattsta

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