All summer long, ArenaNet is dropping old episodes of Guild Wars 2’s living story for free for folks who missed them many years ago. Thus far, the company has run promo weeks for Gates of Maguuma, Entanglement, and both halves of The Dragon’s Reach. This week’s freebies are Echoes of the Past and Tangled Paths, both originally from 2014; they push players through the Silverwastes, so even if you’ve already got these episodes unlocked, the next week will be a good time to drop back into those areas as players cluster into them.
You should be able to just check your in-game mail for your story unlock tokens, but if that doesn’t work, you can navigate to the story journal and click the “buy” button on the right episode to buy the episodes for 0 gems. Yes, this all works even with a free-to-play GW2 account.
Meanwhile, the game has seen a small balancing update today that tweaks the May 11th patch.
“We wanted to give special attention to small quality-of-life issues experienced by several professions. To that end, we are making changes such as increasing the maximum duration of the swiftness boon to 60 seconds, and allowing multiple applications of superspeed to stack duration. Quality-of-life fixes to individual professions include proper source tracking for the firebrand’s Ashes of the Just skill, and a fix to the movement behavior of the thief’s Death Blossom dagger skill so that it no longer sends you far past the intended target if you are under the effect of swiftness or superspeed.
“With regard to WvW, we are making targeted changes to two pain points: the overperforming engineer trait Purity of Purpose, and the druid skill Glyph of Unity. We’ve long seen Purity of Purpose be the dominating support trait for large group play in WvW, with its ability to quickly and continually stack all boons in an area. In this update, Purity of Purpose has an internal cooldown of 2 seconds per affected target. This means it can be triggered on the same target again every other second, such as on alternating pulses of Cleansing Field, but not in shorter intervals.”
