Guild Wars 2 News

Dress up as a symbol of death from ancient times. The old practitioners of the medical arts carried the dead across waters infested by Zhaitan's undead stench. It is said the beaks on these intricate masks smell of a lovely fragrance, a stark contrast to their ill-fated presence. The Vigilant Physician's Mask Skin is available for 400 gems.



On Friday, October 24, we're restocking our shelves with amazing goodies! Many incredible, unique weapon skins will be 20% off until November 7. Commander, make sure to check out some of our best: the Stoneshard Scepter Skin, Bone Dragon Staff Skin, Synergetics Energized Shield Skin, Devil-Rending Dagger Skin, Voidflame Assassin Dagger Skin, Gilded Stratus Longbow Skin, and Etched Porcelain Greatsword Skin.

Returning This Week

This week's discounts are ready for you! Grab them before they're gone. From today until October 28, Bank Tab Expansions and all permanent lounge passes are available at a 20% discount.






Log into Guild Wars 2 and press 'O' to access the Black Lion Trading Company for these great offers and more!

Hello! My name is Robert Neckorcuk, Platform Team Lead at ArenaNet, and today I get to be the mouthpiece for a large, multidisciplinary effort that managed the Guild Wars 2®: Visions of Eternity™ elite specialization beta event through its release, subsequent issues, and eventual fix. Beta events have usually been affairs where the development teams seek feedback on new features, skills, and systems—but as we were all reminded recently, these betas are also the first live trial of new technologies that are used to produce new features, skills, and systems. This post will recap the rocky start to this beta event and provide a behind-the-curtain look at how our team approached and overcame those challenges with help from all of you!

I want to start with a special shout-out to all of you in the community—we recognize this was not an ideal situation, from the original game issues to us requiring your aid in gathering more data when we'd purposefully enabled a known crash-inducing event. Through it all, we saw many messages of kindness, understanding, and support. On behalf of our whole team, our words cannot express our gratitude as we struggled to solve this issue. Thank you all.



On Wednesday, August 20, at exactly 9:17 a.m. Pacific Time (UTC-7), the beta event weekend showcasing the new elite specializations for our sixth expansion, Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity, began. This was not a great start, as the beta was supposed to begin at 9:00 a.m.! We simply messed up a time-zone conversion, and the starting time was off by an hour. Fortunately, we were able to modify some configuration files and get the beta event started before 10:00 a.m.!

We never plan to ship bugs, but we do make plans and have systems in place that allow us to quickly react when issues do arise. Soon after the release, three issues were identified that we knew we wanted to correct as soon as possible. One of these we were able to simply disable with configuration files. A second issue, unrelated to the beta event, could be fixed by deploying a change to one of our backend servers. The third would require a same-day game build. By 2:00 p.m., all three issues had been handled, and we were looking forward to kicking back and joining in the beta fun. Shortly after this, our community manager messaged the group asking for a status update, as the game was on fire.

All around our remote offices, brows furrowed. We weren't getting any crash reports and all of the graphs looked steady. Once we knew to start digging, however, we eventually hit paydirt. One of our client error reports was repeatedly showing a Code 1083. Cue the ominous music.







Code 1083 is a very specific error code, referenced only once in our entire server codebase: "Waiting for Unlock." In Guild Wars 2’s core server architecture, ‘locks’ are a component of how our map contexts are organized, as maps can be created on any server in our hosting fleet. The character-locking mechanism exists to ensure that there is only ever one map context that has authority to write data to your character record. A useful tool to mitigate exploits, but it is still used primarily for ensuring consistency of character and account data. Normally, when you enter a map, a pending lock is placed in the database for your character, showing the game server's intent to take authority. A handoff occurs when there's either no existing lock or an existing lock is released from a previous game server, and the pending lock is converted to the authority lock.

But we don't always get to live in a perfect world—bugs happen and maps crash. As the developers, we want to gather as much debugging information about these events as we can. So when a map context does crash, we can actually take a quick pause during shutdown, gather relevant information, and email it back to the office to investigate and fix. During this flow, the game server knows that this map is crashing and can also tell the database to release any held locks.

At this point, we gathered our first real clue as to the cause of both our lack of operational visibility and the type of error we would need to chase down. As we were not receiving the reports of these crashes, we knew that entire "clean-up" code path was never getting triggered, meaning locks were not being released cleanly. The map context holding that lock no longer existed, so there was no entity to tell to release the lock. The final outcome was to simply expire the lock on a timer. After a while, with no update from the previous lock owner, we would release the lock and a character could once again connect to a map context that was able to acquire a new lock.

The long timer exists to cover a number of different infrastructure interruptions, and while we recognize it is painful for the player to be unable to log in, it is the lesser of two evils, as it ensures the integrity and consistency of our players' data.

After discussion among the team and leadership, we believed this was a significant issue and that prematurely ending the beta event would be the correct course of action, providing players a better experience and allowing the team to investigate the source of the issue. With the knowledge that our application code was crashing and not triggering the collection and reporting flows, Occam's razor suggested to us that we would be looking for a memory-corruption issue. This was confirmed later that evening using the operating-system logs.



We started by breaking down the problem and trying to find the smallest scope where the issue could exist. While this would help prevent us from staring at millions and millions of lines of code, with the knowledge we had, the scope space couldn't be narrowed too finely. We have nine new elite specializations, and we didn't know which profession was the catalyst (pun intended) of the crash.

We ship code all the time, and although the beta event was in August, the very first code changes supporting these new specializations were submitted last year. On Thursday, several team members started working on the problem from this angle by searching for key words in submission comments and perusing changes.

Other folks looked into our data, seeing if we could identify any patterns regarding certain maps, professions on those maps, player counts on maps, etc., that could help further narrow the scope of the issue.

We did have one other hint that helped narrow down where we should be looking, and it dealt with how our game servers manage and group different types of memory.



Every game needs data to know how to operate: which creatures spawn where, when dynamic events trigger, the geometry of the ground for collision detection, and so much more. A game server is able to create a number of map contexts, and each map context will claim some memory to hold all of its local information for use and updates.

In an effort to minimize our memory footprint and reduce duplication, our game servers will additionally create a section of shared static memory. Here, we can place any unchanging data and allow it to be read-only, shared among all map contexts. Most things tied to identifier tags, like items, achievements, creature types, etc., exist here and can be read by any map context, as it will always be the same information, regardless of which map is running.

Based on the memory corruption crashes we saw (or didn't see), we could determine that the only way for this to occur was through an issue with shared memory. Our search space narrowed slightly more.







While we continued our investigations, we commandeered a planned team-wide internal playtest on Thursday to attempt to reproduce the crash on one of our development servers. The instructions were intentionally unclear: make a beta character, mash buttons, and submit a report if you crashed. There was no crash.

We couldn't cause a crash.

Our development servers run slightly different code and configuration than our live servers do. On Friday, we came up with a plan to run another internal playtest on our staging clients, which is the closest mimic we have to the live environment.

Once again, we couldn't cause a crash.

With fewer options available, we made the decision to enable the beta event in the live game again, intending to have our players cause a server crash.



At exactly noon Pacific Time, the beta event was turned back on. Our chat grew quiet for a few minutes as we all pondered what might happen next. We had made some additional preparations prior to reenabling the beta event by identifying specific tools and monitoring to try and provide the best opportunity to spot crashes and capture debug data. What we hadn't specifically prepared for was how lucky we were about to get.

Just before the noon relaunch, we deployed a new build, fixing a bug involving some of the new player summons. The first stroke of luck was that a new build forced all of our game servers to create new shared memory buffers, which shuffled around all the memory allocations. At 12:11 p.m., our monitors reported the first crash. Our second stroke of luck came a moment later, when we received a full crash report from our internal diagnostics. The second-and-a-half stroke of luck was the nature of the crash, as provided by the crash-dump file. A piece of code was trying to delete a piece of deleted memory.

"Why are we double-deleting?" we asked ourselves. "Wait, why are we deleting from the read-only memory at all?"

First, we wanted to make sure this was the crash we were looking for and not a strangely timed coincidence. We passed the information from the crash-dump investigation to our QA team, and within fifteen minutes we were able to reproduce the bug. In the meantime, our team monitoring the live game had noted a few more crashes; some were sending crash reports, and others were triggering the memory-monitoring tools we had set up earlier. The reports all showed similar information about trying to read or delete a section of already-deleted memory. After one final discussion to confirm whether we'd gathered all we needed, we once again disabled the beta event.



The engineer profession's newest elite specialization, the amalgam, introduced a flashy new profession mechanic called Morph and a new code path for how these skills are set and updated. This new behavior was what morphed our plans of a successful beta into a three-day tribulation.

The bug occurred due to a misunderstanding of a data structure using local map context memory, or the game server's shared memory. When a single engineer player with the amalgam elite specialization equipped swapped out a Morph skill while its cooldown was active, the intent of the code was to store that skill change and the cooldown carryover relative to that particular player's context. That change was made using a pointer that unknowingly referenced the shared memory. Thus, when we intended to delete a local reference to the previous skill, we were accidentally deleting the skill from the wider shared memory. The next time any player on that game server attempted to reference the now-deleted Morph skill, we would crash.





Fortunately for us, we wrote this data structure and its helper functions, so technically the fix was a one-liner.

At 12:53 p.m., we submitted this fix to our development branch and began our processes for bug testing, regression testing, and promoting the change to our staging and eventually live builds.

Personally, I am still impressed with how quickly we are able to ship changes. It's due in part to our wizardly Engineering team, and "E," who actually fixed this particular bug. However, our build pipeline also has a few tricks up its sleeve to help us keep things moving along quickly. For most Tuesday releases, we need to run a full build that includes all of our code and content. However, for a change with only one piece of server code, we can perform a fast build. This is a much more minimal and selective build that takes very little time to complete, allowing us to get it out the door quickly.



Just a few hours later, with the fix deployed to the live game, we enabled the beta event once again. Our Engineering team members and QA logged in to create amalgam characters and verify the fix. To our relief, there were no further crashes from the verification.

Our team continued to monitor, using all the same tools as we had earlier in the day, and it appeared that the fix had worked. We were pleased to finally deliver the experience of these new elite specializations to our players with all the new skills and mechanics working as expected.



After the incident, and after the beta event closed a week later, the team came together once again to recap, iterate, and plan. Is it possible to catch issues such as this internally and earlier in the process? Is there a new tool or procedure that can help mitigate these types of problems? If we were to see a repeat of this issue, what would we handle differently? How could we recover to a nominal player state faster?

I'm going to morph the closing I wrote for a different post back in 2020:

Our continued efforts are always targeted at providing our players with the best experience and usability of our services. We love to celebrate the designs architected by those before us and the tools and processes we utilize to retain our world-class server standards and in-game mechanics and events. We recognize that we may not achieve perfection, but we will certainly strive for it with every future procedure and deployment. As we look forward to the exciting new features and projects the gameplay and design teams are bringing to you, we are constantly working behind the scenes to make sure that you can always experience and enjoy all that Guild Wars 2 has to offer.

Thanks again and see you in Tyria!

Greetings, adventurers! Back in August, we ran a beta event to test and collect feedback regarding our nine new elite specializations that will make their debut when Guild Wars 2®: Visions of Eternity™ launches on October 28!

Today, we're going to go over the feedback we received and what changes we're making to each elite specialization for launch. This blog will outline what we feel are the most impactful changes at a broad level; the full list of changes will be detailed in the expansion release notes.

To kick things off, we received feedback during the beta that some of the elite specialization emblems didn't represent the mechanics and themes as they were presented. To better align the art and design, we'll be updating the icons for the antiquary (thief) and luminary (guardian) during our first major update to the expansion early next year.







Feedback regarding the amalgam landed in a solid state for the beta. Along with some balance tuning, amalgam is receiving a new grandmaster trait, replacing Contagious Mutation, which shared strain bonuses to allies. Contagious Mutation was a niche trait compared to its neighbors, and its existence limited the effects we could put on strains as we had to consider them being given to allies. Contagious Mutation's removal allows us to keep strains strong and interesting while also making room for a new grandmaster that can open up a new role for amalgam.

The new grandmaster trait, New Genes, provides boons to allies when a morph skill is used, as well as an additional boon based on which specific morph skill was used. In PvE, the generic boon will be alacrity, allowing the amalgam to mold into a more supportive playstyle. With these gameplay changes as well as some visual effect updates, it's never been a better time to slime!







We've taken steps to reduce the amount of guesswork required while playing as the antiquary. For starters, we've made the Split Deck trait a baseline mechanic when the elite specialization is equipped; you will now always obtain one offensive and one defensive artifact whenever you pilfer, regardless of the traits you have equipped.

All artifacts now additionally give unique, temporary passive effects to the antiquary after activation, allowing for additional strategic choices even after the corresponding artifact has been used. As an example, using Metal Legion Guitar grants an effect that allows the antiquary to use sneak attacks for a short period of time, even when not in stealth.

Traits have also been reworked. Split Deck has been replaced with Repeat Ransacker, which reduces the recharge of Skritt Swipe whenever you use an artifact. Possessive Hoarder has had its boons altered and now grants its effects to allies around you as well. Lastly, Double Edge skill icons now have a different appearance whenever they can be used while on cooldown, to differentiate them from regular skill cooldowns.







The majority of the feedback on conduit gameplay revolved around the conduit's profession mechanics and bonuses being too passive. As a result, we've made several changes to this elite specialization to make it more rewarding to players who wish to play the conduit more proactively.

Cosmic Wisdom has been moved to the F3 slot, and their effects have been altered to provide bonuses specifically for the legend that each form represents. As an example, Form of the Assassin now fires lesser enchanted daggers at enemies close to you whenever you use a Legendary Assassin skill or while channeling Impossible Odds. Invoking a different legend will now automatically switch your form to match the new legend, ensuring that you'll always be able to make use of the new functionality of Cosmic Wisdom even when moving to a different legend.

In place of Cosmic Wisdom, Release Potential has been added to the F2 slot. These are a set of skills that are automatically equipped depending on your active legend, so players will have access to two different Release Potential skills based on the legends you bring to combat. Certain aspects of these skills will scale based on the amount of affinity you have built up, encouraging the use of other legendary skills before this one to obtain the maximum effect.

For example, Release Potential: Assassin is an attack that sends out three increasingly large shock waves from yourself that damage enemies and immobilize those that are struck by all three waves, with increased damage and greater immobilized duration depending on how much affinity you have accumulated.







A big point of feedback was that the evoker trait line tried to do too many things. The element-themed traits were flavorful and helped to further define the playstyle of each familiar, but they took up a lot of space that could be used for other things, like addressing the lack of support boons. We still like what most of these traits brought to each of the familiars, so we've decided to make them passive bonuses tied to each familiar. For example, while you're accompanied by the otter, you will always heal allies when you grant them regeneration.

As we mentioned in the preview stream for the evoker, we suspected that the utility skill bonuses could be more than a stun break, and the majority of the feedback we saw agreed, so we went ahead with some improvements to those.

We also saw a ton of feedback asking for the ability to enable autoattack for familiar skills. Our initial investigation found that this would require a complex technical change and need more time to ensure quality and stability, but rest assured that it's a high priority for the team, and we'll release it as soon as it's ready.







Galeshot aimed high and shot true over the beta week. There's always room for improvement, so here's a bird's-eye view of the adjustments we've made. The largest change will be to galeshot's arrow generation. Gaining arrows was largely a passive experience, and there weren't enough options to add arrow generation to your build.

In the beta, we saw that in PvE, most of galeshot's strength came from triggering the Shrike grandmaster trait rapidly. We are happy to see galeshot reward the projectile-focused builds we saw utilizing Shrike, but we want to make sure playstyles built around the other grandmasters are also viable. Shrike's arrow-generating capabilities are going to be lowered, and Squall skills will now grant arrows on use. This will help the grandmaster traits stay in parity with each other while also making arrow generation a more active process.

Additionally, Fetch, the master trait that also aided in arrow generation, is being reworked to Thrill of the Catch, granting an arrow when you or your pet disable an enemy. Squall skills will also see usability changes, such as Whirlwind breaking stuns, Perfect Storm being castable while moving, and Mistral becoming a dome. In competitive modes only, Quarry's Peril and Pelt will grant two wind force stacks to make it easier to access Hawkeye in higher pressure situations. Lastly, the Cyclone Bow will now remember when it's been set to autoattack.

Be sure to keep an eye out for a new pet to encounter in Castora that works with galeshot's Flock Together trait!







While reviewing the luminary feedback, we saw a few of the same points being repeated consistently. The lack of luminary-specific virtues, the penalty for using too many radiant weapons, and the low impact of the weapons themselves are the main issues we're addressing.

We've introduced a set of radiant virtues to replace the core guardian virtues. We still wanted to capture some of the feeling of core virtues with shorter cooldowns and instant effects, but they will bring a bit more to the table. Each of the virtues will also power up the next usage of their respective radiant weapon, with Virtue of Justice empowering the hammer, Virtue of Resolve empowering the staff, and Virtue of Courage empowering the sword and shield.

Our initial goal with the shroud's recharge time, which scaled with the number of weapons used, had been to create more flexibility to dip in for a single radiant weapon—for example, using the shield to block an attack and then immediately exiting with a shorter cooldown. It became clear that scaling—past a typical recharge time—disincentivized interacting with the shroud too much and felt like a significant penalty beyond our original intent. We've reduced the maximum recharge time to 10 seconds (15 in competitive modes) while continuing to grant a reduced recharge for unused weapons. This will allow players to still get a small recharge reduction when using a single weapon without the downside of an excessive recharge time when utilizing the full suite.

Finally, Radiant Shroud has been renamed Radiant Forge.







Paragon feedback was largely focused on a few key areas: many utility skills lacked impact, some traits felt a bit plain, and adrenaline was hard to come by. We did a pass on the utility skills to add some additional value; "Brace Yourselves!" now also grants protection to allies while granting bonus adrenaline to the paragon on both activation and echo. "We Shall Return!" and "Find Their Weakness!" also grant some bonus adrenaline on their respective echoes, which we expect to play well with the Reverberation trait to fuel the paragon's chants.

Feverish Pulse lacked depth for a grandmaster trait, so we've folded in the effects of Brisk Pacing to give it some additional power. This also frees up a slot in the master tier for an additional damage-focused trait, as we saw a lot of feedback that paragon's damage potential wasn't quite there yet.

Strengthening Stanzas moves out of the grandmaster tier to fill that slot, making room for a new grandmaster trait with a bit more active gameplay. This trait will grant bonus damage based on the current motivation tier—the same 1–3, 4–6, 7–10 thresholds used by chants—rewarding good resource management with a nice damage increase.







Ritualist's shroud lacked some impact, with a lot of its damage coming from the spirits' autoattacks. We're putting a bit more damage into the shroud skills themselves and adjusting some cooldowns to give some more incentive to stick around in shroud for a longer period of time.

Summon Spirits, while bringing a good amount of utility with its teleport and ability to reposition the spirits, felt too simple when compared to other iconic fifth shroud skills. It will still teleport and bring the spirits along with you, but instead of causing them to perform an autoattack, each spirit will now use a new, unique skill. Anguish will fire off a quick flurry of projectiles, Wanderlust will launch a larger projectile that dazes nearby enemies, and Preservation will create a protective barrier that destroys enemy projectiles.

Rupture skills brought powerful effects, but tearing down spirits was slightly opposed to the core fantasy of summoning and maintaining the spirits. We've rebranded them as Innervation skills (e.g., Innervate Anguish) to give ritualists the feeling of channeling power through your spirits. The effects are still the same, but using the skills will no longer destroy the respective spirit.







Troubadour is seeing changes across the board after its beta performance fell a little flat. Reverberating Lute is becoming Lively Lute, sending damaging sound waves toward your enemy while also sending healing tones toward your allies. The Harmonious Harp is being updated to function as a channeled skill, having its healing condensed to give a more impactful feel while also granting distortion at baseline. This allows the troubadour's harp to be a strong healing tool while their lute can handle smaller amounts of more frequent healing.

Tales and their performance bonuses are also being adjusted. For the healing and utility Tales, the performance bonus will grant notes for playing their matching instrument, and the abilities themselves will always be full strength. This allows for more innate note generation while also making their usage more flexible.
There's a decent amount of trait adjustments, both small and large. The minor traits are being fully reworked. Symphonic Resonance now grants a unique bonus based on which instruments are playing, such as movement speed with the drum or small pulse healing with the harp. Harmonize will now grant a note whenever you use a phantasm skill to improve note generation even more.

Troubadour is being changed from granting allies alacrity to granting quickness and will do so with the new master trait Life of the Party, which grants boons to allies affected by your Lively Lute or Crescendo skills. We hope that with these changes, the next time you see a troubadour, it will strike the right chord!







Thank you once again for playing in the beta and for giving us your feedback. It is truly invaluable to have a community so committed to helping us shape our game. Be sure to check out the official release notes when Guild Wars 2®: Visions of Eternity™ goes live on October 28 to see all of the changes we're making. And, as always, we'll keep our eyes on the forums and elsewhere for feedback after the expansion launches.

Until next time, we'll see you in the Mists!

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Giant Janthiri bees are known for their rare honey and adorable softness. This mount is locally raised by the lowland kodan and is docile and friendly! You can safely ride it without fear of being stung; they love their riders and regard them as part of the hive. The Fuzzy Bee Skimmer Skin is available for 1,600 gems.







Our seasonal goods are about to rotate with some great highlights! Starting on Friday, October 17, our stock of back slot items will be 20% off until October 21. We've picked a few favorites to help you choose: the Fire Quiver Backpack, Astral Scholar Cape, Royal Layered Cape, Rose Masquerade Cape, Delicate Lace Cape, and Trapper's Fur Cape.

Returning This Week

Take a small break from adventuring to check our discounted items for the week. From today until October 21, Material Storage Expanders, Recharging Teleport to Friend, Black Lion Expedition Contracts, and Black Lion Garden Plot Deeds are available at a 20% discount.




Log into Guild Wars 2 and press 'O' to access the Black Lion Trading Company for these great offers and more!

We're preparing for our ninth annual Extra Life event, and we invite you to join us! Extra Life is a yearly gaming marathon in support of Children's Miracle Network Hospitals, a network of nonprofit children's hospitals dedicated to helping make sure every child receives the best possible care through critical life-saving treatments and health care, disease research, pediatric medical equipment, child-life services, and more.

We're proud to be supporting Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and patients like Coale for another year, and, as always, we invite you all to join us!

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This year's livestream will be from Friday, November 14 at noon Pacific Time (UTC-8) until Saturday, November 15 at noon Pacific Time (UTC-8) on our Twitch channel. Members of the Guild Wars 2 development team and ArenaNet Partner Program will livestream for twenty-four hours to raise funds for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

Join us for a memorable event and help us make a real difference to those who need it most.





[h3]In-Game Events[/h3]

Log in to Guild Wars 2® between November 4 and November 25 to receive the title "The Extra Life" if you didn't unlock it in previous years.*

A special enhancement effect will also be available in-game:

• +5% magic find
  
• +5% experience from all sources
  
• +3% WvW reward-track progress
  
• +3% PvP reward-track progress

The effect will gain another stack for every $10,000 USD in direct donations to Team ArenaNet. To activate new stacks of the enhancement effect and view hourly donation-total updates, just visit the city of Lion's Arch after you log in to Guild Wars 2.

The 2025 Extra Life Donation Bundle will be available in the gem store from November 4 until November 25. The bundle contains five Extra Life Karma Boosters, five Temporary Selfless Potions, and the all-new Mini Guardian Angel Blish. Players can also purchase additional Extra Life Karma Boosters separately. If you missed last year's Guardian Angel Pedestal Chair, we'll be making that available again this year as well! Purchasing any of these items will also grant you the in-game title "The Extra Life" in blue text. We'll donate all proceeds from purchases of these items to Extra Life.

As always, when we reach $25,000 in direct donations to Team ArenaNet, ArenaNet will match that amount, instantly doubling our impact to $50,000!

*This post was amended to correct the dates of the Extra list In-Game event.



[h3]How to Join Team ArenaNet[/h3]

Want to get involved? It's easy to join Team ArenaNet! Visit our team page and select Join Our Team.

Prefer to create your own team? No problem! You can still be part of the ArenaNet Super Team by choosing "Create a Sub Team" when signing up. You'll have your own page and goals, but your efforts will also contribute to our overall fundraising total.

You don't need to stream Guild Wars 2 to participate—any game will do! Or, if streaming isn't your thing, help us spread the word and encourage friends, family, and coworkers to donate.

We're so grateful for your unbelievable generosity over the years, and we can't wait to join with you to change kids' health again this year!