With a new expansion, Guild Wars 2 will fulfill the great desire of hardcore gamers

With End of Dragons, Guild Wars 2 is redesigning attack missions. These should offer two levels of difficulty in the future and be so difficult that they are considered new raid bosses. This should finally challenge the hardcore community again.

What was announced? The “Attack Missions 2.0” were presented in a new blog post. They should be really crisp in the new End of Dragons expansion, especially through the challenge mode.

So far, the attack missions are something like a shallow introduction to the group content of Guild Wars 2. With a total of 10 players, you fight a boss from the story, who offers different mechanics, but can usually be defeated by any group.

With the new challenge mode, that should change. According to the developers, they should “feel like real raid bosses”. This is a big change, because hardcore gamers in particular have been severely neglected over the past 16 months.

Battles are developed hard at first and then made easier

What are the new attack missions like? As before, you fight against a boss in the attack missions. In normal mode it will still be easy to defeat.

In the challenge mode, however, he should get new mechanics and offer “surprises”. In addition, certain “damage thresholds” are expected from the players. So if you are only moderately proficient in your class, you will have difficulties with this mode.

In order for the bosses to get really crisp, they were developed top-down. So a heavy version was created first for challenge mode, which was then toned down for normal mode. However, the normal mode should retain the core of the boss’s skills so that you can train for it there.

Do the Challenge Modes start immediately? No. The developers emphasize that players should first familiarize themselves with the stories of the world and the new elite specializations. The higher level of difficulty should only come a few weeks after the release.

What about rewards? There will only be one currency for completing Assault Missions in End of Dragons. This allows you to buy unique rewards that would otherwise only be available as drops from the bosses. So if you are unlucky to drop, you are guaranteed to get your desired reward at some point.

In addition, you should be able to exchange the currency of the new attack missions for the currencies for the old missions from the Icebrood saga, if you prefer the new boss fights to the old ones.

The hardcore community has suffered hard over the past few years

Why is this change so important? Guild Wars 2 and its raid content have a difficult relationship:

For the release, raids were completely dispensed with. However, the 5-player dungeons offered only a low level of difficulty.

With the expansion Heart of Thorns, 3 raid wings for groups of 10 players were released, which were even really well received. The bosses have been crisp and challenging for the community so far.

Unfortunately, ArenaNet could hardly keep up with the raid content. The guilds did the raids faster than the developers could add. In addition, the level of difficulty decreased somewhat over time. So the first raids were also the hardest.

Since May 2019 – almost 2.5 years now – not a single raid has been published. Instead, one has focused on the attack missions, which, however, are more aimed at “casuals”. The big raid guilds, on the other hand, were quickly bored of it.

Now with End of Dragons finally comes content that promises a real challenge. How difficult the bosses really are and whether they are rewarding enough, we will probably only find out after the release in February 2022.