Guild Wars 2 Tackles Heart Of Thorns' Issues With Today's Spring Update

Even though it's light on new content, Guild Wars 2 is getting an important update today. The Spring 2016 Quarterly Update seeks to fix many of the thorny issues that cropped up in GW2's expansion, Heart of Thorns, and tackle complaints many players have had since the expansion's launch.

ArenaNet president Mike O'Brien outlined the many changes in a blog post today. Acknowledging the difficulty in playing through a whole map meta-chain, he said that "drop in, drop out" gameplay will be more rewarding, with more nonevent rewards and more incentive to "go off the beaten path." Uncontested waypoints will help with that.

Speaking of rewards, all XP for max-level enemies will be raised by 50%, to help with those Mastery tracks. For dungeons, token rewards have been doubled, and there's a new repeatable achievement that rewards players with 5 gold and 150 tokens for completing eight unique dungeon paths. WvW gets a live beta test of reward tracks, similar to PvP's, and there will also be testing of a new "world linking" system to try and even out WvW population balances, starting with Friday's reset.

Finally, there's free stuff! Anyone who purchased HoT will get an item that offers an instant level 80 boost, as well as a shared inventory slot. The full (and very extensive) patch notes can be found on the GW2 forums.