During Gamescom 2025, I visited ArenaNet at the NCSoft booth to preview two of the biggest features of the upcoming Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity expansion: the improvements to the Homesteads feature and the new Elite Specializations. What follows is an edited version of my chat with Sarah Davies (Senior Gameplay Engineer) and Cal Cohen (Lead Competitive Designer). As a reminder, the expansion will be released on October 28 for PC.
Sarah, what’s coming to Homesteads with Visions of Eternity?
Sarah Davies: As you know, we added customized player housing with the Janthir Wilds expansion. That’s our Homestead feature. But with Visions of Eternity, we will be adding a new map alongside some new improvements to the feature. You’ll still need expansion 6 to access the new map, but if you have both expansions, you can switch to the new plot by talking to an NPC, storing your decorations, and swapping over.
The default house that players will start with is just like housing built into the side of the ship. But let’s talk about the map first. The new Homesteads map was a private island. The main feature of the island is this ley line volcano. I don’t know if it’s a volcano or a mountain, because it’s like magic instead of lava, but I’ve been calling it a volcano. We’ve got a ley line that can take us around the map. We’ve got some fishing nodes dotted around the water just because you’re going to have a relaxing private island, so you want to be able to fish. We got some waterfalls and pools. This is gonna take us around the back side of the volcano through the one rock. You can see that some of the magic is seeping out of the volcano, and then if we follow the ley line all the way up, we can get to the top.
There’s some flowing fungus and next to it a nice starry pool and some really cool crystals. I think this place is beautiful, and I’m really looking forward to decorating in here. And then we got a bubbling of water over here. It has a low gravity effect to add to that otherworldly feel. Inside the water, you see it goes down to the ocean. There’s also the tail of a Leviathan going away. You can’t go down to see the leviathan, but he lurks down there as a little friend.
Outside of the volcano, there’s some more of that water with the low gravity effect. In fact, this is where the wood nodes are. Inside the volcano, you have the ore nodes, while the wood nodes are back here. This is where the Harvest Collection Box will be – that’s the auto-harvesting stuff we added to the previous map; we’re bringing all those boxes back into this map.
I’m going to change the map to nighttime. At night, you can really see the magic emanating from this volcano. I’m really happy with what our artists have done in this map. I think it’s really gorgeous. But now I’m going to send it back to daytime so I can show off the house. Like I said before, this house is the default one that players will get. One piece of feedback we got from Janthir Wilds is that some players wanted to be able to completely remove the bare house, so with Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity, we made this house entirely out of decorations. If they want, they’ll be able to completely remove all these walls and roofs and everything and start from scratch if they want. We’ve also furnished the inside a little bit more than last time, so you can see you have a dining area here. The balcony has a cool view; you see the skiff dock is back as well. On the third floor, this is your bedroom with a magnificent view.
Anyway, there’s also a restore feature that just restores your Homestead to default. One of the exciting changes we’ve made is adding a new modification skill. Normally, when you edited a decoration, you’d press confirm modification, and this would move the decoration to the new spot you set it to.
But now we’ve added ‘place duplicate’. If you have another such decoration in your storage and use it, it will place a new one where you’ve moved it. This makes making fences or walls a lot faster because you don’t have to realign them. You don’t have to place the position each time manually.
You might have noticed we had to pack up all the decorations when we moved to the map. There is an option to preview this without having to get rid of your decorations, but most players, I feel, are going to want to decorate a new map if they’re into decorating. As we were developing this, we realized that by packing up the decorations and asking players to get rid of their old work to move to the new map, we were giving players this really tough decision of, do I erase all this hard work that I’ve done before and not go and play in the new map, or do I go to the new map and have to give up all my old work?
To address this, we created the decoration layout system for Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity. If you go into the menu and open the save load layouts, you get the decoration layouts UI. Now we can save your decor as a layout, so that way players can just save a layout from where they were before, switch over to this map, and load it up here. Something to note is that all of these layouts are stored locally on your computer. That means they won’t sync between devices, but it does let you save a lot more because we have to save all the data for all the decorations. So this will let you save more, and also because they’re just files on your computer, you can share them around. If I actually go to the folder where they exist, you can see that these layouts are just XML files; they have the position, rotation, and scale right in there. Because they’re just files, you can create a new one. Really quickly, I load this, you can see I have one layout that has like a tower, a ship where I reuse some of the walls to make like dilapidated housing, and then I have another layout that is just like a bunch of plants. But because these layouts are just files on your computer, you can easily create new ones.
Could advanced users directly modify these XML files? Although I guess that would just be more complicated than doing it in the game.
Sarah Davies: That’s right. But it does let you do things like copy-paste, so if I load this up now, you can see those two layouts are now put together, which lets you build modularly. The other nice part is they’re shareable, so you can share them across the NA/EU divide. If you are uncomfortable editing your files, like some users may be, we do have an in-game method for doing it with this party layout saving. If you are the owner of a Homestead and you invite your friends in as guests and you enable this, your guests will be able to open the UI. It won’t have the load button, but they’ll be able to save your loadout from the Homestead to their own computer, and then they can go to their Homestead and load it.
If they tried to build that same layout and they don’t have everything built or they don’t have all the decorations, the game will let them know, and only the decorations they have are going to be placed. But they can click on this and they’ll get a list of all the decorations missing. This will let them work towards having the full layout built in their Homestead, and you can load it anyway and it’ll load as many of the decorations that you do have.
You could add them later, I guess.
Sarah Davies: Yes. You’ll have to reload the template—we don’t have a system for putting them in the missing places—but as you saw, loading the templates is really quick.
I think that the layout feature is going to really allow for a lot more creativity. Even if you’re not sharing layouts with others, you still get to make layouts and then easily switch between them. Like, have a Halloween one, save that and then make a completely different one about Winter’s Day, and just switch between them.
Even if you don’t own Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity, you’re getting the improvements coming to the Homestead feature, so you’ll still get the layouts even if you don’t get the new expansion.
What kind of feedback did you incorporate from Janthir Wilds regarding the Homestead feature?
Sarah Davies: Like I mentioned, one of the big things was the default house not being able to be removed, so we made sure that this time the whole structure is made out of decorations and that players will be able to use it if they want but also delete it if they don’t like it. Another piece of feedback is for making new structures.
There were a lot of decorating pieces, but we didn’t have a lot of walls or roofs for decorating, so players could decorate the inside of their house, but they had to get really creative to make structures outside on the land. The new house also addresses that by adding new wall pieces and roof pieces that players will be able to use to decorate with. We’re very excited to see that and also we’re very excited about the layouts being shareable because we’ve seen, especially on like Reddit, where people are making these incredible Homesteads, but then people are having trouble visiting them because you have to coordinate with the person. We’re thinking that layouts will address a lot of these things that we’re seeing where players look at the Homesteads, but then aren’t able to go see them in the game or replicate them on their own.
On that note, speaking about other MMOs with the housing feature, Elder Scrolls Online recently added the so-called Home Tours, a way to make it more accessible for players to visit another’s house. Are you maybe thinking about adding something like that, like a list where people can put their Homestead on a list and others can just visit?
Sarah Davies: We haven’t done anything with that for Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity, but we definitely made sure when we were designing Homesteads that we’re not closing the door on anything like that. I know that specifically for visiting other houses, especially if the owner is not online, you still need to make sure that we have the data available so that if we do implement something like that, we can make sure to get the data about the decoration placements to the player who would be visiting. Part of the initial design of Homesteads, even in Janthir Wilds, is making sure that we were saving the data in a place where we could access it, even if the owner was offline.
We do keep in mind some of the things that we may want to do moving forward and make sure that we’re not putting ourselves in a hole where we can’t do this now because we designed it differently.
If you want to decorate something, you’ll probably also want to show it to someone, right? Anyway, is the feature popular among Guild Wars 2 players?
Sarah Davies: Yeah, it kind of depends on the players. We definitely get players who spend a lot of time in Homesteads and really like to invite people over to show it off. We definitely see people who will be in the LFG really just showing off their Homesteads.
We have numbers on exactly how much time players are spending in their Homesteads. It’s enough that we were given the green light to continue improving the feature, so that’s very exciting. But hopefully, now that we’re adding more ways to share Homestead creations, people will be even more excited.
Cal, can you talk me through a couple of the new Elite Specs coming in Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity? Let’s say the Luminary and Paragon.
Cal Cohen: Sure. The Guardian’s new Elite Specialization is the Luminary, and the idea is that it’s kind of Charr-inspired. Various areas of the Tyrian Alliance inspire many of the Guild Wars 2 elite specs, so we have some Elonian inspiration, some Canthan inspiration, and other races. As I said, the Luminary is inspired by the Charr, and that shows right away with this kind of brazier of light and flame energy. It’s kind of the power source of the Luminary. The idea is that this specialization is able to harness some additional weapons of both light and flame. The Radiance Shroud is kind of a take on the Necromancer’s Death Shroud. This tends to be more like the Guardian’s Light Shroud as a counterpoint to that.
There’s a few different skills available. Each of these weapons you equip has an initial attack that happens and then flows into a follow-up attack. The Hammer is intended to be more of this power damage, more aggressive, crowd-controlling, damage-dealing weapon, whereas the Staff is gonna be a lot more supportive, focused on healing allies and providing them with some boons, stuff like that. You also have the Sword, which is more mobility-focused. It deals some damage but is a bit more utility-focused. Lastly, the Shield is obviously intended to be more of a personal defense build with a bit of ally support and crowd control.
One thing that’s happening as we’re equipping these weapons is we’re getting this buff from one of the traits that’s going to be a character-defining buff. When you equip the Hammer, you get bonus strike damage for your Luminary. When you equip the Staff, you get increased healing. You get a movement speed boon with the Sword and damage reduction with the Shield. And as you exit the Shroud, you’re gonna maintain this buff for a little bit of extra time. It’s almost like a stance, where you can get that bonus damage stance and then translate that into the rest of your weapons. That’s really the gist of the Shroud. There’s no energy-gaining resource like the Necromancer has, no life force or anything like that.
You can just go in when the skill is not on recharge, and then, depending on how many of these skills you use, it will set the recharge of the Shroud. If I use three different skills, that’s gonna put me on a 15-second cooldown, but I could go in and use a single skill, which would trigger a much shorter cooldown.
So, if you know what you’re doing, there are opportunities to be a bit more flexible. Some of these skills are a little bit more situational, so you could go in and just use the one that you need, and then you’ll have them more readily available as opposed to a typical Shroud.
Is the Luminary designed to allow a variety of roles (DPS, tank, support, etc.)?
Cal Cohen: Definitely. The two primary rules that we’re expecting are the DPS build and a supportive boon healer role. That will come from the Hammer with the damage and the Staff with the support elements; you can pick and choose the utility skills. Some of the utilities of the Luminary are going to be good for that, but obviously, the core Guardian already has access to a lot of damage-dealing utility skills or supportive utility, so it should be pretty flexible. There’s a trait that grants Alacrity to your allies.
Let’s switch to the Paragon now.
Cal Cohen: The Paragon is a support-focused Warrior. You still have your burst skill. I have Flurry for having a sword equipped. But then you also gain access to three new Chants, which are drawing some inspiration from the Guild Wars 1 Paragon as well. The idea is that you can have one active at any given time, and this is dependent on a mechanics called Motivation. There are some traits that give you Motivation and you also gain Motivation as you use burst skills, or when you use a Chant, and then that motivation is going to start being consumed to power these Chants. Here’s Chant of Action, which is the more offensively focused one, giving out Might and Fury boons to your allies. Based off the amount of Motivation you have, that impacts how many of these boons you get per tick. With the first tier of Motivation you’re getting one Might stack, the next tier up you’re giving two Might and Fury at the same time, and the final tier gives three Might and Fury. Each of these also have an initial component as well. The first time I activate this, I am giving some Might and Fury.
Because you gain Motivation as you use all of the different Chants, you can fire off a few Chants back to back, and then the chant that you end on, you’ll have the largest Motivation pool that starts pulsing the most powerful version of that effect to your allies. Obviously, this one was more offense-focused. Chant of Recuperation is more defensively focused, giving that barrier to allies initially and then pulsing a bit of healing and resistance potentially if you do get that highest threshold, and then Chant of Freedom provides Swiftness at the bottom tier, then also Resolution and Stability being added. There are a few different costs for these different Motivation levels. We’re looking at the PvP balance right now because we’re in the PvP lobby, but the PvE balance is a little bit different as well, where some of these costs might be a little bit lower and the boon durations will be higher just to really enable the players to kind of do what they want.
Obviously, Adrenaline is pretty valuable to this elite spec. You’ll want to build up a big pool of Adrenaline to use a lot of these Chants back to back in order to build up that Motivation. We do see a bit of that in the utility skills as well. All of these also have an Echo component that we saw kind of fire off after an interval of time. You could trigger this effect immediately when you use a burst skill, so that’s going to be relevant for some of these that are a bit more situational, whereas with the healing skill, that Echo effect heals your allies and removes conditions from them.
Do you plan this spec to be potentially viable as a support even in Raids or Strikes?
Cal Cohen: Yeah, that’s really the goal. We will monitor the beta to ensure that the spec has all the tools to make it competitive with all the existing options. There are a lot of very powerful support builds in the games. We want to make sure that new support builds that are being added have a lot of the same tools, obviously being played in a different way, but making sure that they aren’t just worse than existing options.
In general, did you use a different approach with the elite specializations in Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity compared to the last time you added elite specs to the game?
Cal Cohen: I think something that we really focused on for this set of elite specs is looking at holes in different gameplay styles that a profession may be missing. A great example of this is the Warrior’s Paragon elite spec for this expansion. The Warrior didn’t have a great support-focused elite specialization before. There is now a healing build that you could play with the Berserker, but it was never really intended to do that.
The Spellbreaker and Bladesworn were also not super support-focused. That gave us an opportunity to make Paragon much more support-focused and really flesh out that playstyle for the Warrior players who want to make more of a supported build. There’s some other examples. I think the Luminary is a pretty good example of an elite specialization that’s more true to the core profession and hits a lot of the same themes of that protector, that bruiser, almost more of a knight Guardian spec compared to a lot of the other specs, which really shift the theme. There isn’t really a Guardian that’s really entrenched in the core Guardian themes as much, so the Luminary is intended to be more of that for the players who really identify with the base Guardian themes.
Did you follow any community feedback on what went right and wrong the previous time elite specializations were added to Guild Wars 2?
Cal Cohen: Yes. A lot of the elite spec process is based on that. We get a lot of value out of running the beta events, like this one where we gave the players a full week to make sure they had enough time to play with all the different specs and received even more feedback as a result. The beta events are something that we did for the previous expansions as well, but I think having a bigger chunk of time was useful to get us a better feedback cycle to improve these elite specs ahead of launch.
And you know, clear community feedback does give some direction for some of the elite specs as well. I was talking about trying to make that Guardian spec that’s a bit more true to the core profession. We also saw players asking for a more ranged playstyle for the Elementalist, and we see a bit of that in the new Evoker specialization. The same goes for Rangers with Galeshots, who really lean into that long-range playstyle that a lot of players have been asking for.
Based on the feedback from the beta events, are you willing to make radical changes or mostly just balance tweaks to the elite specs?
Cal Cohen: There’s definitely room for a lot to change. Balance is one thing that we’re looking at. We kind of expected that the balance would not be perfect for the beta because there’s only so much internal testing that we can do versus how much live testing happens in a beta event. But we also look for feedback on the larger mechanics of the specializations, and if there are mechanics that players don’t feel like they work, or skills that feel out of place where they feel like they don’t play well with the other skills, we totally have the bandwidth to go back and kind of address those as new.
There are a couple of months before the release of Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity after all.
Cal Cohen: Yes, we still have some time to make changes. We’re not hoping to make radical changes to the profession mechanics unless needed, but if the community really receives something negatively or if things are just not working, we’ll see. We are definitely trying out some some interesting ideas with some of the elit specs and the expectation is that some of them might not work as well as we want and we will iterate and fix the ones that don’t really work.
Do you have a favorite profession among the newly added ones? I know it’s always hard to answer.
Cal Cohen: I really think there’s a lot of exciting ones. One of my favorites is definitely the Evoker for the Elementalist. Having access to the four different elemental familiars that you can choose from, whether it’s the Fox, the Otter, the Hare, or the Toad. That spec is actually really flexible in that there’s a lot of different roles that it could eventually fill based off that element that you’re shooting to specialize in. It is a different way to play the Elementalist compared to a lot of the existing elite specs.
What about you, Sarah?
Sarah Davies: Well, I’m a big fan of the Evoker because otters are one of my favorite animals, so the fact that the water attunement is represented with the Otter is really exciting to me, but I’m also looking forward to the Paragon just as a warrior main. Having an elite spec that is more dedicated toward support will be fun to play in Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity
Cal Cohen: The Paragon is a great callout. Along with the Ritualists, these are two of the elite specs that are a bit more inspired by Guild Wars one professions. We’ve already seen feedback from players as we’ve been revealing these through our preview streams that they’re really excited to see the translation of those Guild Wars one professions in Guild Wars 2. We’re trying to evoke the right feelings and catch the right elements of those professions and translate them into an elite spec, such that the players who are really familiar with those really enjoy playing those professions.
The Elementalist is usually considered a hard profession to play in the game. Was that aspect among the considerations made during the design of the Evoker (and, similarly, for the other professions we’ll see in Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity)?
Cal Cohen: I think the Evoker is indeed supposed to be a little bit more accessible. It does still have access to all of the tools that make the Elementalist a little more complex, but having this specialized element that you can choose that really gives you more value into staying in that attunement. We’re still expecting that players are going to be switching attunement to get full access to their kit, but if you are a player who is more interested in staying in a single attunement and really channeling the feeling of that attunement, the Evoker should be a bit better at doing that than a lot of the others. I think we’ve seen a lot of success in the past with the Mechanist from End of Dragons, which is a bit more accessible as well, where the Mech itself is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for that profession. We definitely want those specializations to exist for players who really love those professions, but maybe some of the core mechanics are too complicated for them. If there’s a way that we can make an elite specialization that makes that profession that much better for those players, that’s really great for us, too.
In terms of balance, do you believe the new elite specs added with Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity will be on the same power level as the previous ones?
Cal Cohen: We’re hoping they’re around the same power level as what’s in the game right now. We’re just gonna get a lot of good data from all the players playing all the specs from the beta, and then going into launch we will have a better idea of where the balance point needs to be and what adjustments we need to make to the skills to make sure that the power level is where we want it to be.
Will the Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity expansion include changes to the existing professions and/or elite specs?
Cal Cohen: The primary focus will be on the new elite specializations, and if there’s adjustments that we need to make to the core professions to facilitate that, like maybe there’s some elements that the elite specialization needs that the part profession doesn’t have, and we want to just make some adjustment there, we’ll totally be looking at that between the beta and launch. Other elite specializations probably won’t be getting a ton of looks between the beta and the launch of the expansion, but we still do regular balance updates so we’ll continue to do that after the expansion ships where we will then have the new elite specializations as part of the live balance ecosystem and be looking at all the different things. We do continuously update older elite specializations when there are things that are either out of balance or skills or traits that aren’t quite up to par, so we try to make sure that everything is good to go on this one.
Do you think the balance is in a good place for the existing professions right now?
Cal Cohen: We’re always looking at adjustments that we can make. We’re pretty happy with the diversity of different builds that can be played right now in terms of what’s viable. There’s definitely some builds that probably perform a little bit better, that maybe we consider overperforming a little bit that we could be wanting to bring down a little bit just bringing everything a bit more in line with each other, but we’re pretty happy with like the diversity of all these builds that you can play with all these different elite specializations across all these professions. There really is just a lot of build diversity, assuming you’re not trying to do absolute min-maxing to make the perfect maximum damage composition, for example, but if you’re looking to do something that’s going to work and clear content, then there’s a ton of options and we’re pretty happy with that.
In Janthir Wilds, there were no new elite specs. Why did you decide to return to doing them again in Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity?
Cal Cohen: I think it’s the case that elite specializations are always the most exciting of the features. Adding a new weapon type, spears, is pretty interesting, and we were able to add some new ways to play the game. Elite specializations are almost on another level in the build customization and flexibility they add to the game. So, as we were looking into what we’re gonna do on the combat side for this expansion, we pitched, well, can we do elite specs? We figured out that we did have the bandwidth, so we really wanted to add another set of elite specs because we felt that that was the best combat feature that we could add to an expansion.
I imagine it will always be on a case-by-case basis, right? Like, it won’t necessarily happen again next year.
Cal Cohen: It’s definitely something that we have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis.
Thank you for your time.
