Looking Forward to Janthir

The next GW2 expansion is live in two days: Janthir Wilds. I'm cautiously optimistic that it'll be more interesting than SotO was. At the very least, homesteading should be a good addition to the game.

The new¹ model for updates is to not talk much about them, so as with SotO, we don't know a ton about JW. I have some expectations and hopes that I'll outline. In a few days, I can go revisit this post and see how JW did.

Story Arc

This is what we know least about: the Isles of Janthir are where we believe the mursaat originated, but they've become an area Tyria has largely forgotten about. The Eye of Janthir presumably has some connection to the isles.

When we killed "the last mursaat²", the Eye wandered off into the mists. Mabon's journals mentioned the possibility of more mursaat out there in the mists beyond our world, so maybe it went to hunt them down and stare at them. So my first hope is: we'll find out more about this weird magic eye thing that has an axe to grind with the mursaat.

Eagle-eyed players may have noticed the Eye in Nayos, suggesting some kind of set-up for its inclusion in the near future:

In 1337 AE, the Eye of Janthir could be seen overlooking the final battle in Nayos between Eparch, the Midnight King of the Kryptis, and the Pact Commander and their allies. After Eparch had been slain and his niece Peitha took the throne as the new Midnight King, the Eye disappeared once more.

I'm not really sure what's left for the mursaat story, though? They're all -- as far as we know -- dead, and the non-native mursaat have never shown any interest in Tyria. Their human supporters, the White Mantle, has been massacred, and shouldn't be much of a force these days.

The marketing has some titans, and the wizard court was in Janthir before the events of SotO. Maybe the idea is Mabon was keeping another Door of Komalie-type thing sealed, and with him gone, we don't know how to keep the titans out of the world?

Bears

There are some grizzly-bear kodan living on the island. I'm expecting them to be an entirely different civilization from the polar bear kodans, much like the Olmakhan were charr without militarism and machine oil dripping out of every single orifice at all times.

I was expecting SotO to be more low-key and relaxed, as a reset between the near-misses we had every expansion with the Elder Dragons. That was a big thing for FFXIV, which ended its decade-ish storyline around the same time as GW2 did. SotO ended up not being that.

But I'm hoping we can get a little chill and tranquility from our new grizzly bear friends. Or at least a Fat Bear Week in-game event and some cool housing items.

Image from official GW2 blog. Mostly posted because bears are cool.

Cats

Imperator Malice has been mentioned in the marketing somewhere -- but I'm not sure where -- because she's got an entry on the JW wiki page as a significant character:

Malice Swordshadow — Cunning Imperator of the Ash Legion, she is the only known direct descendant of the charr Khan-Ur among the current imperators after the charr civil war. Progressive yet manipulative, she is about to come face to face with a shadow from the charr race's past.

I'm not sure where all those words came from. She's been in the trailers, but I don't think they mentioned her in any of the JW blog posts?

There's a power vacuum after the civil war and some of the other legion's imperators got killed. So to me, that text suggests maybe she's gunna end up as Khan-Ur after having some kind of ordeal in JW.

That would be a neat story thread to pick up again: who gets to be Khan-Ur has been a Thing predating the launch of the game. The humans sent in a team to recover the Claw of the Khan-Ur, intending to use it as a bargaining chip in peace negotiations with the Black Citadel. It came up again during the civil war, but that was a couple years ago now.

The "shadow from the charr race's past" is interesting. Does that refer to titans? I'm not aware of them interacting in the past, but it's a big Tyria, so who knows?

It Was an Old God

That may be my biggest reservation for the expansion. We vaguely know there are gunna be titans, which are demonic fellas. But the preorder bonus was a set of tentacle-themed gathering tools called the Eldritch Horror set.

If you look at an example of a titan, you'll see the tentacles are some other creature that we haven't been told about:

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It's possible they just gave us some tentacles to go with the nautical "spears usable on land" thing.

But I'm very concerned they've taken a page from the WoW playbook: we go in expecting one thing, and then, surprise!!! An Old God is actually behind everything!!!

That was a neat plot twist in classic WoW. That stopped being a neat plot twist when they did it for nearly every expansion for the next fifteen years.

WoW has ruined lovecraftian gods in MMOs for me, so I'm not gunna be receptive to that in GW2.

Homesteads

The headline feature for JW is player housing. It's confused me why they didn't do this sooner: they put a lot of work into Heart of Thorns for guildhalls, a decoration system, and a crafting profession to make guild consumables and decorations.

It was all priced for guilds and gated behind group activities, though -- you don't see players running around with a "home" being one of their guilds. Mostly, being a regular member in a guild didn't give you decorating access. All you could do was contribute your hard-earned resources to the group.

It took nine years, but somebody finally had the idea of porting that to a personal instance. It's about time!

I'm not good at decorating in any game, but I'm still excited to try my hand at it. They've done a big revamp on the decorating tools; I guess they had a lot of limitations before? Sounds like it should work like the FFXIV decorating does, which is plenty flexible for people to make cool stuff.

I'm looking forward to collecting decorations. I hope they've strewn them throughout everything, so when we go back to the dungeons for the next Dungeon Rush mini-event, there will be some exciting new drops.

Collection achivements have been a major thing in GW2 for years, but they've started to feel very ... robotic? For example, SotO had one to gather Dadga's tarot cards. There was a lot of opportunity there for the item you get to have little hints about the future -- they could adjust some card text subtly between updates as little puzzles to find and solve. But they never did anything: you gather the cards and get a few achivement points. End of story.

This is an opportunity for the JW collections to be more meaningful. Collect some materials and the bears'll give you recipes for some weirdly-named Ikea cabinets!

Stronghold 2: This Time, We're Strongly Holding

JW is meant to have a new sPvP mode. But as far as I can tell, they have not mentioned this again since announcing the expansion on June 4th. Everything we know is this vague blurb:

And we’ve got one final thing to share for now: Over the course of the coming year, we’ll also be seeking input from the community on a new PvP game mode we aim to implement. We have a prototype of a map and mechanics that we’ll be ready to start beta testing later this year, and we’ll iterate on and refine that, taking into account your feedback on the beta tests.

They tried adding a new mode in Heart of Thorns, it was not immediately popular, so they gave up on it entirely. Stronghold was an sPvP match type similar to a MOBA: you have creeps to escort and resources to find before you can take on the enemy lord.

The biggest issue was the builds you want to bring to Conquest and Stronghold were different, so queuing up for both at once was a bad idea. This is a solvable problem, but they just ... didn't. No additional stronghold maps were made, so it's always just been the one, over and over. It's no surprise people don't want anything to do with it.

The terse statement about a new mode does not indicate they've learned anything -- to me, it suggests they don't know why Stronghold failed and are terrified of the community reaction to whatever they're doing.

I guess we'll see if they ever mention the new sPvP mode again!

Preparations

Over the last month, I've been selling legendary greatswords on the trading post to raise gold. Every one I sell is ~700-800g of profit. The other ~1300g I get is immediately re-invested in materials to make the next one. I'm up to ~3,500g this way. This should give me a goodly amount of money to invest in the new psuedo-crafting-skill they've added for personal homestead decorations.

Beyond that, it's pretty much business as usual: kill people in WvW and keep my bags clean.

I thought about making a legendary spear, but I'd like to see what the skin for the new JW spear looks like before I commit to one. I don't think I need to use a spear on any character immediately, so I can take my time.