Hello, Tyrians!

We’re busy preparing for the first Beta Weekend Event, but in the meantime, we’d like to get in some extra testing of the new revenant profession. We’re inviting all pre-purchasers to join us for a special revenant test weekend starting Friday, July 10, at noon Pacific Time (UTC-7) and running until noon Pacific Time (UTC-7) on Monday, July 13. During this test weekend, you can create and play a revenant beta character anywhere in the existing game: PvE, PvP, and WvW! We’ll also be opening up our new Player vs. Player game mode, Stronghold, to all players who play in the queue for Unranked PvP over the course of the weekend.

These testing events are an exciting opportunity for you, our players, to help shape the development process and the experience you’ll have when Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™ is completed. Though the trend these days is often more to treat beta events as simply marketing sneak peeks, we very much believe in having beta events that mean much more. We want to let you experience vertical slices of the final game experience; we’re going to listen to your thoughts and suggestions, we’re going to iterate on the experience, and only when we love it will we ship the expansion. These are real beta tests, and you have the real opportunity to help shape Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns with your feedback.

Revenant and Stronghold Test Weekend Feedback

For this test, we’re looking for your thoughts on balance and how fun it is to play as our new profession, the revenant—along with its newly announced Ventari legend and the staff weapon—in the existing Guild Wars 2 game world with (and against!) existing professions.

As a result of feedback, Stronghold has had a number of changes since the last time it had an open test. One of the big comments we heard from the most recent open test was a request for queue preferences between Conquest and Stronghold game modes, so we’ve added one that you’ll be able to test out for the first time during this bonus event.

We’ve also added our new Mist Champions, which will give all players access to Turai Ossa, and players who pre-purchased will have access to two additional Mist Champions for the bonus weekend. We’ve also made changes to the balance of NPCs’ abilities, added an overtime mechanic that keeps a game going as long as a lord is still in combat when time runs out, and more! We’re looking to see how well these solutions addressed the feedback we saw from the last public event, and we’ll be gathering any additional thoughts on your experience with the game mode.

Beta Weekend Events—Coming Soon!

Though this bonus weekend event will help us get more feedback on the revenant profession and Stronghold experience, full Beta Weekend Events will be starting soon to test larger components of the expansion. We’ll come back with more details on our first Beta Weekend Event shortly.

We’ll see you in game!