Heart of Thorns Impression.

LSo two weeks ago ArenaNet surprised the Guild Wars 2 community with an announcement that there would be an Expansion Pack coming out sometime soon. This Expansion Pack would continue the story from the current Living World story arc as well as adding a lot of new content to the game that has been in demand for a while. I'm going to talk about the pieces of revealed information that I liked and what I'm hoping for in the upcoming expansion. 

 Lets start with the story, the current story arc ended on a cliffhanger showing the Tyria's greatest united military the 'Pact' being destroyed during assault of the Maguuma Jungle where the Elder Dragon Mordremoth was hiding. Through the story instances I found out that the Sylvari were minions of an Elder Dragon, however Caithe a Sylvari disappeared with a promise to protect the only remaining legacy of the player friendly dragon Glint. When the expansion starts I think that the new chapter in the continuing story to involve me the player convincing the world that maybe some of the Sylvari are still friendly, or that there may be a way to save the Sylvari from the influence of the Elder Dragon. Between finding a way to save the Sylvari race, locating Caithe and Glint's Legacy that she stole as well as figuring out how to beat the Elder Dragon I expect there to be a lot of story content to rival a few chapters worth of the living world stories. Considering that I will be paying for a full expansion, I hope that this new expansion story is at least as long as the personal story that came with the release of the base game.

 In regards to the new maps and Player vs Environment (PVE) gameplay, with the lack of a standing army to fight the Elder Dragon, it suggests that players will probably be doing more of the activities that were previously assigned to NPCs in earlier content. The latest map released for Guild Wars 2 had a map where players were entrusted with securing and upgrading fortresses and escorting supplies to upgrade these fortresses to withstand enemy attacks. I expect that the new maps will build up on this style of gameplay with more content being dependent on player involvement in the various regions of the maps. Since the pact's airship invasion failed we will probably have to progress a long siege over land and through the jungle reminiscent of the straights of devastation invasion gameplay, to bring the heavy weapons of the world to bare against the might of Mordremoth.

The Expansion announcement also told us that there would be a new heavy armor profession the Revenant and a specialization for every profession in the game. This means that everyone will be busy learning the new abilities of the existing professions or learning the new one. So everyone will be returned to their 'newb' like state where they don't know for certain what works best for their chosen profession at launch. This is good, as currently there are 'efficient' builds which causes folks to all follow the exact same blueprint for creating their characters and I want there to be more opportunity for builds to move away from these Meta (cookie cutter) builds. As for the changes to each profession, as there have been no releases on what kind of adjustments are going to be coming for them, so I can't really say anything about them.

Lastly the new feature I am most happy about is the announcement of more Guild based activities including the ability to obtain a 'Guild Hall'. ArenaNet has clearly announced that they intend to put the 'Guild' back in Guild Wars 2, so I'm hoping for possibly dungeons or fights that require a high level of coordination but are still completable by small Guilds with around 10 people representing.