Massively: Guild Wars 6th Anniversary Celebration (2011-04-28)

[Centaur]

There is a big article up at Massively, describing the changes for the 6th anniversary, offering some prizes you can win, and als including an interview.

Some quotes:

Characters celebrating their sixth birthday this year will find a surprise in their inventory, with the biggest surprise being what the gift is not: a minipet. That's right -- instead of sixth year miniatures, ArenaNet has introduced a series of over 30 different everlasting tonics. Tear off the wrapping on your birthday present to find a tonic to turn you into a familiar friend, an intimidating foe, or ... well, it wouldn't be any fun if we gave everything away, would it?

For you PvP players, the meta is about to be turned on its ear. Remember last Halloween when the Lunatic Court set out to free the Mad King? They didn't succeed at the time, but there were hints that the full effect of their efforts hadn't been seen yet. Well, we're seeing it now! "Instability has begun to seep into the world, gathering in the places where the influence of the Mists is felt most strongly." That influence is strongest in the PvP arenas, so welcome to the Flux era. Flux comes and goes, bringing new effects with it every time. Flux is only the beginning, though. "The Flux system is the precursor to several improvements that will be coming in a PvP-specific update. We'll be taking a look at improving some titles, the incentives to play, the rewards for various formats, and more."

Finally, we move on to our faithful Guild Wars heroes -- or one of them, anyway. There is an interesting bit of trivia in the Wiki regarding our Ritualist hero Razah: "Razah's profession is listed as 'variable' in the Nightfall manual. This was printed before the final design was decided upon."

Well, that's not quite the case. As John Stumme elaborates in our interview below, Razah was originally intended to be a wild card hero with a changeable primary profession. This anniversary update finally brings poor Razah the ability to live up to his potential, and you can now change his profession. Simply head out into the Heart of Abaddon (without Razah in your party), find Razah, and tell him what profession you'd like him to be. Congratulations, Razah!

Check out the full article, and the interview, here.

[Nem]

Haha the tonics will be a kick in the teeth to a bunch of players in case that some of the BDay ones get the same form(s) of the expensive ones in the past.

The PvP update is way too late, the PvP community dissipated way too much because nothing interesting enough happened for too long. I blame automated tournaments.

Razah is going to be teh awesomeness!

[ComplexNuber]

Woah, nice. Only thing of large interest to me is Razah, I bet everyone will turn him into a necro. Although I might have a plan brewing for a 4 mesmer team (including me). With the supposed upcoming 50% sale, it might be worth grabbing a merc slot or two to fill up the party with some fun gimmicks. That's pretty much the only thing I enjoy in GW nowadays, making new gimmicks and trying them

Some other interesting things I saw:

Hard Mode-only quests are another addition along those lines -- it's a bit of tech that allows us to revisit any quest from Guild Wars and change it up to be a new and challenging experience.

An example of this is hero chatter, a new feature that allows the game to recognize the heroes that you have in your party (including Mercenary Heroes by personality type) and lets them have custom battle and idle conversations based on that. It's a fun little addition that adds a lot of personality into the hero experience, but we decided to hold it for later release until we felt we had enough conversations to make the system feel robust and compelling

we can tell you that this update brings an exciting gift for those of you in Pre-Searing: a festival hat maker and a costume maker