Guild Wars 2 April Studio Update Drops Info On End Of Dragons Meta-Events, World vs World, And More

Today, ArenaNet dropped another post offering players insight into what’s currently going on with Guild Wars 2. For players wanting to keep up on what’s happening, this is the post to read, covering things like the final encounter of the Jade Sea Meta-event and its associated rewards, the DirectX 11 update, world vs. world, and new-player improvements.

The work currently being done on the final encounter of the Jade Sea Meta-event is focusing specifically on the final boss. Over the past month, the team has been making balance adjustments intended to make it more accessible while still keeping it challenging. The results have already been pretty solid, with the number of clears raising from 15% in the first few weeks to 60%. This makes the boss more in line with others in the game world.

Rewards for this boss have been updated as well – in response to player feedback. The developers have removed a good deal of junk items and increased the value of chest contents. There is also now a Hero’s Choice Chest that will be rewarded upon successful completion of the event.

On the graphics side of things, the work on the DirectX 11 update is nearly complete. In fact, they intend to fully enable DX11 by default for all new accounts on May 10. Existing players who aren’t already in the beta will have to enable it from the game settings menu, so if for some reason your system can’t handle it, you can probably wait.

World versus World is getting a lot of attention. The developers are still hard at work trying to fix the queue bugs that have been plaguing people. The problem is that they’ve been unable to replicate them, so on April 19 they’ll be adding data logging to the game that will let them get the info they needed.

To prepare for the upcoming Steam launch the dev team has also been experimenting with various ways to ensure comfortable on-boarding for new players. They’re currently planning to test some changes intended to improve the new-player experience. They do note that there are no plans for big changes – at least at the moment. Instead, they’ll be focusing on some of the smaller things that might irritate new players.

Finally, now that things have wrapped up on last month’s update, the Guild Wars 2 team is going to be taking a bit of a break. Don’t expect to hear anything from them until April 18...At least they let us know.