ArenaNet has just announced Mist Champions for Guild Wars 2’s incoming Heart of Thorns Stronghold PvP mode. In a new dev blog released today, Branden Gee and Hugh Norfolk explain that the Mist Champions replace heroes in the Stronghold mode and act as “superweapons” during the fight. So far, there are three such characters, each plucked from lore and each with special skills: Turai Ossa, Grymm Svaard, and Nika.
The studio has also revealed that players will be allowed to toggle their game-mode preferences and choose whether they’d like to play Stronghold, Conquest, or both.
Meanwhile, Game Director Colin Johanson told fans on Reddit that the much-beloved Super Adventure Box mode would need a serious technical and itemization revamp before ANet could consider returning it to the game, and that’s not happening right now because of the impending expansion.
We’ve made a number of changes to the physics engine as a result of places like Silverwastes, Dry Top, and the expac that means we need to go back and re-work SAB to use all the new movement systems. It also needs a pretty solid rewards overhaul, and I know Josh would love to make some changes to world 2 before it returns.
We’re all focused on expansion – both the announced details, and the un-announced details and simply can’t peel anyone off a team to work on it right now without it effecting expac. The two SAB worlds we’ve seen will return as we’ve said before, but simply put our focus right now is on making the expansion amazing :)
The community is pretty bummed by the news, and so are we, but hey, at least it’s coming back eventually. The first round of Super Adventure Box took home Massively’s Best Update or Expansion award in 2013.
