Tuesday, 16 December 2014

The Wintersday Patch Releases! New Daily Achievement system, Log-In Reward Track and more!

A Very Merry Wintersday to one and all! Today we’re going to be looking at ArenaNet’s latest patch to hit Guild Wars 2!


On this update we see that instead of the annual Wintersday celebrations being held in Lion’s Arch, the Jolly festivals are being head in the human capital city of Divinity’s Reach. Personally even though i know that ArenaNet would hold the celebrations in Divinity’s Reach, I would have LOVED it if Wintersday would have been held in the Charr home city of Black Citadel. But considering what I said in my last post about the history of Wintersday and the relation it has to the Human Gods, i knew that this would not have been possible but it can’t hurt to dream, amirite?


Luckily, to sooth my pain the holiday activities are returning last year so i get to take my anger out on people by sniping them with a slingshot loaded with a snowball in Snowball Mayhem, Which is one of the activities that they brought back for the Wintersday patch. After today’s patch however we’ll be having a 1 month long break until the next and final episode of the Living Story season 2 releases.

Along with the usual Wintersday things ArenaNet also included a number of interesting things like the new Daily Achievements system. Basically what ArenaNet have done here is that they removed and adjusted the actual achievements, and revised the rewards that you’ll be getting for each achievement done, of course some achievements are going to be harder to do than others but it’ll be well worth it as most of the achievements have different rewards added to them. You also no longer get 1 achievement point per daily achievement done but instead you get 10 achievement points for completing any mix of 3 daily achievements and then any achievements you do afterwards would just be for the reward. I think that this change is for the better and that the players in Guild Wars 2 that are focused on getting a higher number of achievement points faster will appreciate this change a lot. They also removed laurels from the Daily Achievements but I’ll explain more about that in just a moment.

The Log-In Reward Track system, this reward track system rewards you for simply logging into the game. Every day as soon as you log into any character on your account a UI will pop-up telling you how far you are along the track and then after clicking continue, they’ll show you what dailies there are for you to do on that day. Remember i told you about the Laurels thing? Well don’t worry because instead of laurels being reward in the Daily Achievements, it will now be rewarded in the Log-In Reward Track along with a large amount of other stuff. The rewards for the Reward Track gets progressively better each week of the track and the reward track ends and resets at every 28th log-in. At the end of the reward track lays the coolest reward of all. You have a choice between a Chest of Ascended Crafting Materials, Chest of Legendary Crafting Materials, Chest of Plentiful Laurels (If you feel like having more Laurels) and Chest of Grand experience (Which gives you Tomes of Knowledge). The only downside about all of this is that they are going to be removing the monthlies achievements but personally i didn’t really care much for the monthlies i just did them for the extra laurels and the achievement point which i will be getting anyway thanks to the Log-In System.  

ArenaNet also added a way to get Empyreal Fragments out of your inventory (finally)! After completing a task for an orphan by the name of Laine (which might take a few days if i understand correctly), you will get a Wintersday Gift Tree which is a node in the shape of a (you guessed it) Wintersday tree that delivers Wintersday gifts all year around in your home instance and you can also get The Star of Gratitude, which allows you to turn unwanted Empyreal Fragments into other stuff, very similar to what Mawdrey II does with bloodstone dust!

 There are also 3 new unlockable collections one of which can grant you an Endless Gift Box Tonic and I mean, who WOULDN’T want to turn into a gift box for an endless amount of times?  ArenaNet also added a underwater water breather called the Rime-Rimmed Mariner’s Rebreather which has some special snowflake-y effect when swimming with it underwater. I will be getting this for curiosity’s sake alone. That plus my underwater breather is still the level 0 you used to get when you started a new character.

Also another thing of note is that the people of Tyria are receiving a new outfit called the Arctic Explorer Outfit to the Gemstore for 700 gems, I don’t know how long it’ll be there for yet but i do know that i will be getting it as it looks awesome on my Norn and Charr (except for the damn tail Q_Q) and there is also the Wintersday weapons set that’s out now at the Black Lion Weapon Specialist for 1 BL Ticket. If i had a spare ticket somewhere i would pick up 1 or 2 of these weapons as some of them do look interesting but I wouldn’t put any special effort or gold into actually buying one of these there are better weapon sets that I could be spending my money on, but hey that’s just me!

That is it for the PvE side of things in this Wintersday patch if i forgot to meantion something that came with the patch that i didn’t include in this post please let me know in the comments and i hope you all enjoyed reading this!

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