Yesterday morning, ArenaNet announced Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire. Pre-purchases opened the same day. The expansion launches September 22.
I’ll be honest with you: I’ve been playing this game since launch day 2012, covering it for Exitializ since before the first Living World season was a thing, and I had to sit down for a minute after the reveal stream ended. Not because the announcement was overwhelming in a bad way. Because it was overwhelming in the exact right way.
Let’s go through it.
Key Highlights
- Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire - the second expansion - launches September 22, 2017
- New regions: the Crystal Desert and Elona - a continent from Guild Wars: Nightfall not visited in GW2 before now
- Mounts are in the game. Each mount has unique mechanical abilities tied to traversal
- New elite specializations for all nine professions
- Bounty Hunt system replaces the meta event chain structure in the new maps
- Pre-purchase available now via the official GW2 site; includes access to the Heart of Thorns expansion at no extra cost
- Launch is seven weeks away
What We Don’t Know Yet
- Full elite specialization reveals - ArenaNet has confirmed all nine professions get a new spec, but only some have been detailed so far
- Full mount roster - we know the Raptor; additional mounts are confirmed but not all revealed
- Story details beyond the broad Balthazar-in-Elona setup
- Whether existing HoT masteries carry forward into PoF content progression
The Mounts
I’m going to start here because this is what the community has been talking about since the stream ended and it’s the right place to start.
Guild Wars 2 resisted mounts for five years. ArenaNet’s consistent explanation was that the game’s movement system - dodge rolling, skill-based traversal, map design built around ground-level engagement - didn’t have room for the conventional mount model that other MMOs use. Conventional mounts in most games are speed boosts with different skins. They don’t change how you interact with the world; they just make getting from A to B faster.
The design team apparently sat down and figured out how to make mounts that weren’t that.
The Raptor is the first confirmed mount, and its primary ability is a long-distance horizontal leap - a canyon-clearing jump that covers ground no character ability could bridge. That’s not a speed boost. That’s a traversal tool. The world is designed around it in a way that means the Raptor doesn’t just get you somewhere faster; it gets you somewhere you couldn’t go otherwise.
If this design philosophy extends to the other confirmed mounts - and the early reveal materials suggest it does - then what ArenaNet has built isn’t a conventional mount system. It’s a mobility toolkit where each animal unlocks a different dimension of the game world. The phrase “joy of movement” has already started appearing in community discussions. That’s the target they’re describing. That’s what the reveal footage looks like.
Five years of “we don’t do mounts” resolved in one announcement by building something the genre hasn’t seen before. Credit where it’s due: that’s the right way to reverse a long-standing design position.
Elona Is Back
Guild Wars: Nightfall took players to Elona - a continent south of Tyria, spanning desert and jungle and coastline, with a human culture distinct from Ascalon or Kryta and a political situation that the 2006 game resolved through its primary campaign.
Guild Wars 2 has existed for five years without visiting that continent. Players who came up through Nightfall have been waiting that entire time. Players who came to GW2 directly have heard the name as a piece of franchise lore with no direct experience behind it.
September 22, both groups are going to the same place.
The Crystal Desert - the Tyrian region that borders Elona to the north - was always a placeholder in GW2’s world, present in lore but not accessible as content. PoF opens that region fully and connects it to Elona proper. For GW1 veterans, specific locations from Nightfall and even Eye of the North will appear in recognizable form 250 years later. For new players, the setting is a new continent with its own visual identity - vast sandstone canyons, ancient ruins, open desert - that doesn’t look like Tyria, Maguuma, or Orr.
The scale implied by the reveal footage is larger than Heart of Thorns. HoT’s maps were dense and vertical; PoF’s appear wide-open and horizontal, which makes sense for a desert setting and - not coincidentally - makes mounts feel natural rather than bolted on.
Palawa Joko, the lich-king who ruled Elona in GW2’s present day, is apparently still there. We haven’t seen much of what that means for the expansion’s story yet, but if you know Joko from the original game, you know his presence is going to be a complication.
Elite Specializations
All nine professions are getting new elite specializations. That’s the same model as Heart of Thorns - a new spec per profession that adds a new weapon type and a new mechanic - and based on the reveals so far, the PoF specs are leaning into distinctive fantasy concepts rather than mechanical complexity for its own sake.
The ones confirmed so far:
- Firebrand (Guardian) - a tome-wielding support spec that looks like it could shift the meta for raid support in a significant way
- Scourge (Necromancer) - shade mechanics, barrier application, a new role for Necromancer in group content
- Deadeye (Thief) - a long-range marksman spec with kneel mechanics and a single-target focus
- Mirage (Mesmer) - dodge-based illusion mechanics, a spec that looks like it rewards mastery in ways casual players will find demanding
We’re still waiting on the Ranger, Engineer, Elementalist, Warrior, and Revenant specs. They’ll reveal over the next seven weeks, almost certainly. Watch the GW2 blog for those drops.
Our read on what we’ve seen: this generation of specs looks mechanically distinct from the HoT generation in ways that should diversify the meta rather than simply replacing it. Whether that holds once players have the specs in hand on September 22 is the question.
The Story
“One Path Ends” closed Season 3 with Balthazar’s agenda made clear: he’s in Tyria pursuing Elder Dragon power, and his next step points south - toward the Crystal Desert, toward Elona, toward Kralkatorrik the Crystal Dragon who’s been sleeping in those sands for centuries.
Path of Fire picks up that thread directly. Balthazar has moved into the desert. The Commander follows. The complication is that “following a god into a desert to stop him from killing an Elder Dragon” is not a simple operation, and Elona’s political situation - occupied, complicated, home to its own factions with their own agendas - is going to make it harder.
This is a better story setup than Heart of Thorns had at launch. HoT arrived with the Mordremoth threat as a background force that we were told about but hadn’t fully experienced yet. PoF arrives with Balthazar as a character we’ve spent Season 3 understanding - his logic, his capabilities, what makes him dangerous - and an emotional investment in the outcome of confronting him that the Season 3 story earned.
The community is going to find out in seven weeks whether the payoff matches the setup. My instinct says it will.
Pre-Purchase
The pre-purchase is live at the official GW2 site.
Worth knowing: purchasing PoF now includes Heart of Thorns at no additional cost. If you bought HoT separately when it launched, that’s frustrating - I understand. But for players who’ve been on the fence about HoT, or players who are coming in fresh through the F2P base game and considering their first expansion purchase, this is a genuinely good deal. You’re getting two full expansions for the price of one new one.
The pre-purchase also grants a few bonus items including some in-game rewards, though nothing that should be the deciding factor either way. The expansion itself is the reason to buy.
Launch is September 22. Seven weeks.
Who Should Pay Attention
Everyone who’s been waiting for the expansion. The wait is over and the announcement delivered. Pre-purchase if you’re ready; if you want to wait for more spec reveals before committing, you have seven weeks.
GW1 veterans. Elona. You’re going home. It’s going to be something.
New or returning players. The PoF + HoT bundle deal is the best entry point the game has ever offered at expansion price. If you’ve been considering the game, this is the moment.
WvW and PvP players. The new elite specs are going to shake the competitive meta on launch day. Start reading the spec reveals carefully.
Lore players. Palawa Joko. Balthazar. Kralkatorrik. The Crystal Desert. There is so much to read in preparation - start with the GW2 Wiki’s Elona article and the Balthazar lore page.
What to Watch For
Elite specialization reveals. ArenaNet will continue dropping them over the next seven weeks. Each one shifts the pre-launch meta conversation. We’ll cover every one.
Beta weekend. There’s no beta announced yet, but ArenaNet has run pre-launch test weekends before. If one materializes, watch the official blog.
Mount reveals. The Raptor is the first. More are coming. Each one is apparently mechanically distinct. I’m paying close attention to how the full roster shapes up.
GW2’s 5th anniversary. August 28. Five years since launch. We have a retrospective coming. After an announcement like this, it feels like the right time to look back at how far the game has come.
Seven weeks. See you in the Crystal Desert.