Guild Wars 2

Thanks for letting us know!

I hope ‘crunch time’ isn’t too stressful for you guys. I’m really looking forward to PoF and finally, actually getting my raptor (and the other mounts) but I’ve heard some crazy things about what developers go through to meet deadlines.

Yay! Thanks, as always, for the update. Can’t wait!

Best of luck.

Great, now just eleven more months until everything will be balanced

I am super excited!!!

Trying to maintain my excitement in the face of numerous disconnects.

But I can’t let even that get me down when I’m so close to having my riding lizardpuppy and bouncy mountain-ignorer.

Nice! Looking forward to it and getting to play a Deadeye….

BOOM! Headshot!

You guys did this in a little over a year? Holy kitten, O.o you guys either work hard, or you live in the office.

Could you tell us a little about the changes made to the elite specs since the last time we got to put them through the ropes?

11 more days….

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

Today we hit an internal milestone: we locked down all content and feature development for Path of Fire. We now move the game to our staging servers and start final preparations for launch.

This expansion is all about content, and today’s milestone marks the completion of eighteen months of content creation. It’s been a labor of love for the team. We hope we’ve brought each story chapter, each open-world zone, and each mount up to the level of what you experienced in the demos last month.

Thanks to everyone who joined the demos and the stress tests. We used those tests to inform our final balance tweaks, and to squash some bizarre bugs that we could only reproduce under heavy load, like the one where Raptors would randomly show up in non-demo maps.

We’re in the home stretch. Eleven days to launch! We can’t wait to play Path of Fire with you!

Mo

Is there a chance the kind of content we should expect will be discussed ina stream or a dev diary before the expac. Or do you think its better to leave it to us to find for ourselves on launch?

I’ve given the matter some thought and I’ve decided that I’m willing for y’all to release the expansion early.

Will tomorrow at noon your time be ok?

hope is not as buggy as the launch of hot

Just a flesh wound.3589:

I’ve given the matter some thought and I’ve decided that I’m willing for y’all to release the expansion early.

Will tomorrow at noon your time be ok?

I’m unlikely to be up at noon. 1pm would suit me better

Lol. You go, girl!

Gave it a +1.

That’s great news, looking forward to all that content, hope there’s more than HoT!

Please, for the love of all things colorful and horselike tell me that you did one last balance pass on the elite specs.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

Today we hit an internal milestone: we locked down all content and feature development for Path of Fire. We now move the game to our staging servers and start final preparations for launch.

This expansion is all about content, and today’s milestone marks the completion of eighteen months of content creation. It’s been a labor of love for the team. We hope we’ve brought each story chapter, each open-world zone, and each mount up to the level of what you experienced in the demos last month.

Thanks to everyone who joined the demos and the stress tests. We used those tests to inform our final balance tweaks, and to squash some bizarre bugs that we could only reproduce under heavy load, like the one where Raptors would randomly show up in non-demo maps.

We’re in the home stretch. Eleven days to launch! We can’t wait to play Path of Fire with you!

Mo

there will be a preload?

I miss my raptor! Can’t wait!

Please-please-please, let one tiny corner of that new content be new guild missions.

Will there be another launch event like you did with HOT ?

It’s september 12th here already. Only 10 more days!

Considering that season 3 had some really good quality control, I am expecting the same thing for this expansion. Also please keep up the communication as it is now. I rather have you deliver on something then have a promise that goes on for years without seeing any of it. I know you have issues trying to make any major new UI features without something breaking. So take your time on getting that thing the community is trying to pile drive it’s way into the game. Since I am sure you are aware of it by now.

Woohoo! Thank you for all of your hard work. I can’t wait to play it!

I hope after you done with the PoF contents, you can take a close look of new specialization optimization and balance.

Some of them are way under-performed.

I doubt you guys can fix it by the time PoF launch, but I do hope you guys look into it right now and ready a patch to fix them in the near future..

Thank you and to everyone at ArenaNet for your hard work in creating this expansion for us, and for all you guys do generally.

11 more days and they can’t get here soon enough

Build Templates soonTM?

Well done. I’m looking forwards to next week.

Hope everyone’s getting enough rest before the inevitable sleepless nights.

Did Mirage get any rework? Please post the class changes, if any.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We hope we’ve brought each story chapter, each open-world zone, and each mount up to the level of what you experienced in the demos last month.

I seriously hope you have improved the things that people have criticized about certain map mechanics and, of course, the elite specializations (effects, balancing, and so on).

Don’t disappoint me! I would hate to take my leave from this game because of recent design disappointments and the increasingly infantile writing.

Nevertheless, good luck with the launch. I hope everything works out for both sides.

Ithilwen.1529:

Did Mirage get any rework? Please post the class changes, if any.

It’s way too late to rework an entire spec, at most, you would only see some tweaking of parameters. Case in point: HoT elite specs, there were some changes in the final product (as compared to the hoT beta) but those changes were mostly bug fixes and there were some trait adjustments.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We can’t wait to play Path of Fire with you!

Rein it in there, sunshine. You don’t want to be anywhere near us when we start to play.

Why?

Because you know what’s out there, and are waiting to see our reactions to your favorite parts. All of the devs are, I’m sure. And we… we’re going to go over and poke that random bush. Or talk to that NPC for the tenth time. Or go AFK right before the nifty event goes off. And so on.

Hang around with us on launch day, and I promise you some of you will break down into screaming fits of frustration.

Needless to say, I can’t wait for launch day.
::innocent grin::

Congratulations for reaching that milestone in a timely fashion, and thank you for letting us know! As you can probably tell we are looking forward to seeing the result of all that work soon.

This thread contribution was brought to you by RAPTOFIN, the raptor leather care for raptor friends. For that new raptor smell that you love.
Mmmmmh, RAPTOFIN!

Heck yeah! Can’t wait for all the new stuff.

Also looking forward to the great wailing and gnashing of teeth regarding anything that can be used in WvW. Everything will “ruin the game mode and be proof that the devs don’t care about WvW™.”

Any chance of the Soulbeast getting its awful fartshroud changed?

Can you tell us a time exactly when PoF will go live to play? HoT went live at 12:01 a.m. PST on the day of it’s launch. Can we expect PoF to go live at 12:01 a.m. PST on September 22nd?

Whatever time it launches, it will be Pacific Daylight Time, rather than Pacific Standard Time. =)

Congrats! Can’t wait to play. Super happy to support you guys, you’ve been killing it lately.

Definitely can’t wait to play this content on a non-demo character!

Thanks for the hard work guys. It seems that since Colin left, you guys finally went back to the roots and are making this game enjoyable again. I am glad to be back after 3 years and ready for the PoF journey.

buff weaver.
ktnx.

Delete Firebrand give us Purifier.

Unknown.3976:

Ithilwen.1529:

Did Mirage get any rework? Please post the class changes, if any.

It’s way too late to rework an entire spec, at most, you would only see some tweaking of parameters. Case in point: HoT elite specs, there were some changes in the final product (as compared to the hoT beta) but those changes were mostly bug fixes and there were some trait adjustments.

Nor does mirage need one.

Good luck gw2 team, wishing you the best of luck and much success with Path of Fire. I hope we will see you launch it like HoT, where you pushed the button That was so much fun and an exciting moment and you have to keep up the tradition

Palador.2170:

Mike O Brien.4613:

We can’t wait to play Path of Fire with you!

Rein it in there, sunshine. You don’t want to be anywhere near us when we start to play.

Why?

Because you know what’s out there, and are waiting to see our reactions to your favorite parts. All of the devs are, I’m sure. And we… we’re going to go over and poke that random bush. Or talk to that NPC for the tenth time. Or go AFK right before the nifty event goes off. And so on.

Hang around with us on launch day, and I promise you some of you will break down into screaming fits of frustration.

Needless to say, I can’t wait for launch day.
::innocent grin::

Considering the way GW2 is designed I think some people at Anet absolutely want you to go poke the random bush or talk to the random NPC or even see what happens if you don’t complete an event.

I feel like this game is one of the best for encouraging and rewarding you to go off the beaten path. It may not always reward it in conventional ways – a lot of the time all you get is some interesting dialogue or something odd to take a screenshot of – but as someone who will always go left when I’m told to go right just to see if I can I certainly feel like it’s more encouraged in this game than most of the others I’ve played.

I could absolutely image a dev being there going “Nah, lets not bother with this event, it’ll only repeat in 10 minutes” because they know that actually if it fails a boss will spawn or something.

Danikat.8537:

Palador.2170:

Mike O Brien.4613:

We can’t wait to play Path of Fire with you!

Rein it in there, sunshine. You don’t want to be anywhere near us when we start to play.

Why?

Because you know what’s out there, and are waiting to see our reactions to your favorite parts. All of the devs are, I’m sure. And we… we’re going to go over and poke that random bush. Or talk to that NPC for the tenth time. Or go AFK right before the nifty event goes off. And so on.

Hang around with us on launch day, and I promise you some of you will break down into screaming fits of frustration.

Needless to say, I can’t wait for launch day.
::innocent grin::

Considering the way GW2 is designed I think some people at Anet absolutely want you to go poke the random bush or talk to the random NPC or even see what happens if you don’t complete an event.

I feel like this game is one of the best for encouraging and rewarding you to go off the beaten path. It may not always reward it in conventional ways – a lot of the time all you get is some interesting dialogue or something odd to take a screenshot of – but as someone who will always go left when I’m told to go right just to see if I can I certainly feel like it’s more encouraged in this game than most of the others I’ve played.

I could absolutely image a dev being there going “Nah, lets not bother with this event, it’ll only repeat in 10 minutes” because they know that actually if it fails a boss will spawn or something.

Agreed. They do encourage hanging around for ambient dialogue or searching in the nooks and crannies of the map and NPCs as they frequently put in neat little gems.

I was left behind by 3 of 4 friends that I played the new map demo weekend with as I was too busy poking around. They went off to do events and killed nearly every bounty it seemed before I even left Amnoon Oasis. I generally take my time and fully explore; more so if it’s in an area I know has throwbacks to GW1 (when I saw the hand of the Lonely Vigil statue after one of my friends said ‘come here, I think this might be of interest to you’ I deafened them with my happy squeal).

So for those devs who love to see players explore, people like me are a gem. To those who want to see reactions to events? I’ll be a disappointment for the first day or two after I walk into a new map

Just wondering, is there any way we have an estimated time where the expansion actually go lives? Just going on a whim it’d possibly be 12am server time right now, going off of how HoT went live at midnight ANet’s time.

ChrisX.8671:

Just wondering, is there any way we have an estimated time where the expansion actually go lives? Just going on a whim it’d possibly be 12am server time right now, going off of how HoT went live at midnight ANet’s time.

The PoF website has a Q&A section, this is what it says, “Path of Fire will launch at approximately 9:00 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7) on September 22, 2017”

The best luck and a smooth final sprint for you and your team, Mike.
I really hope PoF can capture my interest in the long run.

Jwake.7013:

ChrisX.8671:

Just wondering, is there any way we have an estimated time where the expansion actually go lives? Just going on a whim it’d possibly be 12am server time right now, going off of how HoT went live at midnight ANet’s time.

The PoF website has a Q&A section, this is what it says, “Path of Fire will launch at approximately 9:00 AM Pacific Time (UTC-7) on September 22, 2017”

Oh wow, I don’t know how I missed that. Thanks!

Gratz. We look forward to consuming your new content.