A couple of weeks ago, I took a brief tour of the first two maps in the upcoming Janthir Wilds, the newest expansion for Guild Wars 2. Going into this preview, one of my biggest questions was, “What could draw us to Janthir?” After traveling to other realms for much larger concerns, a return to handling things on Tyria seemed like a massive shift. I was surprised that our focus was switching from larger cosmic concerns to a much more local storyline, which seemed sudden. Additionally, we spent some time in a homestead to better understand how those will work. So, without further ado, let’s jump right in.
Lowland Shore
As much as I enjoyed the expansion storyline of Secrets of the Obscure, one side story almost managed to completely derail me from the main storyline. Very early on we are given the Heart of the Obscure to help close the rifts the kryptis were using to invade Tyria. We also learned that a kodan Wizard, Waiting Sorrow, crafted it, but she had mysteriously disappeared without a trace. This particularly stood out to me because she had been very close to Dagda, but she didn’t seem to know where Waiting Sorrow went or why she left. There was also some breadcrumbing: when Waiting Sorrow mentioned to Isgarren that she wanted to leave, he asked her if she wanted to die. There’s nothing like a good mystery to pique my interest, and I was already highly suspicious of Isgarren anyway.
Aside from my general interest in Waiting Sorrow, she’s crucial now as the search for her seems to be what leads us into the wilds of Janthir. We learn that not only did she leave with her Wizard powers intact, but she left sometime before the Searing of Ascalon. This means she’s been missing for about 267 years, so she’s had plenty of time to become well-established wherever she is, and with her Wizard powers at her disposal, who knows what she’s been up to in the meantime. I hope she has been up to good things, but anything is possible.
All of that setup took us to the first map of Janthir Wilds, Lowland Shore, which appeared to be a lush forested area. While wandering around, we ran into a wild warclaw, and with the help of some local kodan, we could subdue it and bring it back to their village. As it turns out, this group of kodan capture and raise warclaws. This is fitting because players who don’t already have their warclaw mount available, it will unlock after this first story instance. It should, however, be noted that unlocking the warclaw through the Janthir Wilds story will not unlock it in WvW. However, ArenaNet is adjusting the WvW acquisition of the warclaw to make it more streamlined.
Speaking of the warclaw mount, it has a few new abilities in JW. The new jump/dash ability causes the most significant change, as it can completely change how you move around the world. When I’d jump on the warclaw, it would act as if it had landed on an invisible platform in midair. From there, I could continue to dash forward or jump up higher until it ran out of stamina. If I just stopped in midair, we’d fall. There are some skills in planning your stamina use, but this may be easier for players who find the springer hard to manage when trying to jump up things. The springer jumps much higher in one jump than the warclaw, so if you have good aim, it’ll be faster than the warclaw trying to go straight up. Additionally, the warclaw has a treasure-sniffing ability, allowing players to find hidden stashes around the various JW maps.
Near the first village in Lowland Shore, there is a warclaw derby setup to test our abilities with these new warclaw skills. Instead of just running through checkpoints as fast as you can, there are various barriers and obstacles that need to be navigated. If you, like me, have a habit of hitting the skill to attack and dismount from your warclaw, you may find this derby a bit frustrating at first. Every time I accidentally used that ability, I was netted and stunned for a short time. Once I adjusted to not automatically using that skill all the time, the derby was a lot of fun. This is one area where players who don’t have experience with the Warclaw might have a bit of an edge.
This map doesn’t have a meta event because, as a first introduction to the Janthir Wilds, they wanted to focus events and time spent learning about the kodan and their culture. The kodan in JW has a heavy influence drawn from Nordic culture, and to help with this, they partnered with the National Nordic Museum. I don’t have any particular expertise in Nordic cultures, but hopefully, the extra work they put forth in this helped them create something new but familiar. The town we visited certainly felt like it could be a place that existed.
With the Janthir Wilds expansion, they are also adding tiered hearts. Originally, in Guild Wars 2, players did hearts once and then were done with them. They were part of map completion and gave differing rewards for completion. In Living World Season 3, ArenaNet changed hearts to be repeatable once a day for the same rewards each time. With this newest expansion, tiered hearts will give increasing rewards each time a player completes them. They didn’t get into detail about how exactly this will work. Still, it’s an interesting idea, which hopefully means it’ll be much more useful to clear hearts multiple times.
Janthir Syntry
Janthir Syntry is the second map we visited and the second map players will encounter through the storyline. This area is far more wild and unsettled than Lowland Shore is. A very long time ago, the mursaat had a prosperous city in this area. At some point, smugglers also encamped in this area, not realizing their proximity to the mursaat city. Lastly, the White Mantle also were in the area for a time. Although Janthir Syntry is very dangerous, there is much to explore and discover.
While exploring Janthir Syntry, it’s a good idea to watch for the mist tides that cause the area's magic to go wild. These mist tides cause the local titans (not the same titans from Guild Wars) to get empowered. One of these titans, named Greer, is a new world boss who becomes a particular problem as he tries to drain the bloodstone of its magic. We didn’t see the entire fight, but there is one part where the warclaw can play a big part. After he’s been weakened, we mounted on our warclaws and used our chain pull to wrap him up and knock him over. It was a superb use of the warclaw in a fight, and I’ve been waiting for something like this since the warclaw was first announced.
During this fight, we also had a preview of how the stack indicator is being updated. The more minor update is that it was a more vibrant green, which made it easier to see in the middle of all the fight animations. The more significant update is an icon showing how many people need to stack in. For example, in this fight, three people needed to stack in, so three little green people icons were shown. If two people had been required, there would have been two icons shown. This is an excellent update because the question of how many people need to stack in was something that there was no real way to tell in game, aside from not enough people getting in and dying from the ability.
Homestead
The primary feature coming with Janthir Wilds is Homesteads. However, I wasn’t particularly excited about it. I’m not someone who generally wants personal housing in games. I already hardly use the personal home instances, and I often forget guild halls exist at this point. Adding another instanced area seemed a bit pointless. That said, after spending time in the Homestead with everything active, I understand the draw and am looking forward to having my own to play around in.
One of my big hesitations was the apparent tension between the new homestead and the personal story instance. Even though I don’t go to my home instance often, I have put in a fair amount of work unlocking various things in the home instance… particularly all the cats. It seemed odd to leave all of that behind for another instanced area. Thankfully, they’ve taken that into account. To not invalidate the work we’ve put into our home instances, things we’ve unlocked will transfer over to our new homestead. This fixes my biggest issue with homesteads; added to the rest bonus we get while there, I’ll likely be spending a lot of time in my homestead.
When you place the door to your homestead down, it allows anyone in your party to visit it. However, if someone is on your block list, they won’t be able to see the door or visit your homestead. I love this touch on things because allowing friends to visit your homestead and help decorate if you’d like is a fun addition. Friends can also use your nodes as they do in home instances. You will not be able to harvest the nodes in your homestead and someone else’s on the same day, which makes sense.
With just one more week to go until the launch of Janthir Wilds, everything is in place to be another exciting expansion. We have a mystery to solve and countless things to discover. The first two maps had a lot of diversity to offer, and I wasn’t expecting a new world boss, let alone one in the second map. I can’t wait to see what lies in the rest of this expansion.
