We’re preparing for our ninth annual Extra Life event, and we invite you to join us! Extra Life is a yearly gaming marathon in support of Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, a network of nonprofit children’s hospitals dedicated to helping make sure every child receives the best possible care through critical life-saving treatments and health care, disease research, pediatric medical equipment, child-life services, and more.

We’re proud to be supporting Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and patients like Coale for another year, and, as always, we invite you all to join us!

This year’s livestream will be from Friday, November 14 at noon Pacific Time (UTC-8) until Saturday, November 15 at noon Pacific Time (UTC-8) on our Twitch channel. Members of the Guild Wars 2 development team and ArenaNet Partner Program will livestream for twenty-four hours to raise funds for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals.

Join us for a memorable event and help us make a real difference to those who need it most.

Log in to Guild Wars 2® between October 28 and November 18 to receive the title “The Extra Life” if you didn’t unlock it in previous years.

A special enhancement effect will also be available in-game:

• +5% magic find
• +5% experience from all sources
• +3% WvW reward-track progress
• +3% PvP reward-track progress

The effect will gain another stack for every ,000 USD in direct donations to Team ArenaNet. To activate new stacks of the enhancement effect and view hourly donation-total updates, just visit the city of Lion’s Arch after you log in to Guild Wars 2.

The 2025 Extra Life Donation Bundle will be available in the gem store from October 28 until November 18. The bundle contains five Extra Life Karma Boosters, five Temporary Selfless Potions, and the all-new Mini Guardian Angel Blish. Players can also purchase additional Extra Life Karma Boosters separately. If you missed last year’s Guardian Angel Pedestal Chair, we’ll be making that available again this year as well! Purchasing any of these items will also grant you the in-game title “The Extra Life” in blue text. We’ll donate all proceeds from purchases of these items to Extra Life.

As always, when we reach ,000 in direct donations to Team ArenaNet, ArenaNet will match that amount, instantly doubling our impact to ,000!

Want to get involved? It’s easy to join Team ArenaNet! Visit our team page and select Join Our Team.

Prefer to create your own team? No problem! You can still be part of the ArenaNet Super Team by choosing “Create a Sub Team” when signing up. You’ll have your own page and goals, but your efforts will also contribute to our overall fundraising total.

You don’t need to stream Guild Wars 2 to participate—any game will do! Or, if streaming isn’t your thing, help us spread the word and encourage friends, family, and coworkers to donate.

We’re so grateful for your unbelievable generosity over the years, and we can’t wait to join with you to change kids’ health again this year!

The veil between worlds has thinned again, and whispers of the Mad King echo across Tyria. Starting today until November 4, at noon Pacific Time (UTC-7), the Shadow of the Mad King festival beckons daring adventurers to step into a season of dark revelry. Haunted laughter drifts through the air, doors creak open to strange realms, and the scent of candy corn lingers with an unsettling sweetness. Will you answer the call before the portal closes?

Head over to our forums for the complete release notes for today’s update.

The sweetest and most sinister of all the festival currencies, candy corn spills across Tyria once more. Gather trick-or-treat bags, trade your sweets, and claim the spoils of the season. This year’s celebration brings a host of chilling new rewards for the brave and the bold.

Complete the (Annual) Halloween Rituals meta-achievement to earn the Lunatic Jester’s Trousers, a one-of-a-kind armor piece perfect for those who dare to dance in moonlit chaos. Complete the weekly and meta-achievements to gain the new Unchained weapon set, forged with the restless energy of the Mad Realm. Finally, you can visit the candy corn vendor to purchase your very own Plush Zhaia Backpack or a Mini Candy Core Golem powered by pure sweetness.

Decorators of the macabre, your time has come. Transform your guild hall or homestead with unsettling new décor: the Festive Fall Tent, Ominous Fortress Ruins (right and left), and Ominous Fortress Buttress. Visit Deft Lahar in Lion’s Arch to secure these spectral touches.

The path to the Mad King’s domain begins with a letter from Magister Tassi. Check your in-game mail for an Invitation to the Mad Realm. Use this to travel between the mortal world and the twisted realm of Mad King Thorn.

Lion’s Arch serves as the heart of Halloween festivities in Tyria. You’ll find portals to Lion’s Arch in every major city for players level 35 and above or for anyone who owns a Guild Wars 2 expansion.

For those who can’t access Lion’s Arch directly, fear not! You can still find haunted doors in locations like the Village of Shaemoor or the Village of Smokestead. These spooky portals are guarded by Lunatic Boatmasters who will happily ferry you to the Mad Realm’s horrors. Don’t forget to explore the haunted doors scattered throughout Kessex Hills and Gendarran Fields—trick-or-treating opportunities await!

Mad King Thorn’s laughter rattles through every shadowed corner, daring mortals to dance to his tune. Embrace the eerie with activities both beloved and bizarre!

Lion’s Arch:  The city is transformed into a nightmarish vision filled with ghoulish decorations and a haunted atmosphere. Every two hours, Mad King Thorn himself will challenge players to a twisted game—obey his commands (but only when he says “Your Mad King says…”) and win keys to unlock his treasures!

Mad King’s Labyrinth: Explore the dark and winding maze of the Mad King’s Labyrinth, battling hordes of twisted creatures, racing your mounts, and trick-or-treating for bags stuffed with ghoulish goodies. Be wary, though—dreadful enemies like the Grand High Viscount of Candy Corn and the terrifying Labyrinthine Horror stalk these shadowy halls.

Mad King’s Clock Tower: For thrill-seekers, the original heart-pounding jumping puzzle returns. Race against the rising miasma below! Or, if you prefer a slower pace, test your skills on the Stopped Clock Tower variant.

Ascent to Madness: Ready for the ultimate showdown? Face Mad King Thorn himself in this spine-chilling dungeon encounter, available to players of all skill levels.

Mad King’s Raceway: Race through creepy courses on your mounts in time trials or head-to-head races. Rental mounts are available if you don’t have your own.
Minigames: Speak to a Lunatic Boatmaster to jump into the frenzied chaos of Reaper’s Rumble or the survival horror of Lunatic Inquisition.

We hope you enjoy the season of spookiness and all we have in store for the community this month, including the release of our sixth expansion, Guild Wars 2®: Visions of Eternity™ on October 28!

Be sure to also check out today’s gem store blog for some new haunted items like the Graveyard Homestead Pack and the Witch Cauldron Chair!

A supernatural mist comes this way; October is the awakening of the most ghostly season. Build a foggy cemetery to honor the fallen—or just decorate your homestead for Halloween! The Graveyard Homestead Pack includes one of each decoration and will unlock their recipes so you can craft more! This pack is available for 800 gems and contains the following decorative pieces:

• Graveyard Charrgoyle
• Graveyard Fog
• Graveyard Fence
• Graveyard Gate
• Graveyard Column
• Graveyard Tombstone
• Graveyard Straight Stone Path
• Graveyard Curved Stone Path

Inside each chest, you’re guaranteed to find a redeemable Black Lion Statuette, the Evon Gnashblade Trick-or-Treat Bag, and two common items. You also have a chance to find something rarer in the fifth slot, including special items, glyphs, and skins from the Foefire Weapon Collection and the Paladin’s Decree Weapon Collection.

Exclusive Item: Witch Cauldron Chair

Prepare a frightful concoction under the moonlight’s foggy gaze. This cauldron is bubbling with green spirits and a secret recipe that’ll make your guests glimpse the afterlife. While sitting before your bubbly brew, press a skill to toss in a ghastly ingredient. The Witch Cauldron Chair is a new, exclusive drop from Black Lion Chests.

On Friday, October 10, we are shaking up our stock! Infinite gathering tools will rotate in with a 20% discount until October 24. Here are some of our favorite items from this batch: Infinite Sweet Treat Gathering Tools, Infinite Volatile Magic Gathering Tools, Shifting Sands Mining Pick, Cosmic Logging Tool, and the Glitter Bomb Harvesting Tool.

Returning This Week

Various items are hot with a discount this week! Stock up on what you need for your adventures. From today until October 14, the Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic, Silver-Fed Salvage-o-Matic, and Runecrafter’s Salvage-o-Matic and Equipment Template Expansions are 20% off and Build Template Expansions are 40% off.

Hey, folks! This is Bryan Yarrow, Combat Systems Lead on Guild Wars 2®, and I’m here to talk to you about something really exciting that’s coming with the first major update to Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity™ early next year. As we announced in July, we’re merging the Strike Mission and the raid game modes into a single game mode, which will just be called raids. We’ll be releasing another blog on this topic in the coming months with more granular details, but today I want to focus on why we’re doing this and how we got here.

Strike Missions were originally designed to help players transition from open-world content into raid content. They were intended to be quicker to complete than a full raid wing and have slightly less complicated mechanics as well. Over time, our data indicated that Strike Missions weren’t performing as the content bridge we were hoping for. When we dug into the details of why this was happening, we found a number of reasons that we believed were all contributing factors, and we’ve been attempting to address these over our past few expansions.

When we looked at who was playing Strike Missions and why, we discovered that inexperienced players had low engagement with Strike Missions. Furthermore, players who wanted to raid still felt blocked due to difficulty concerns and challenges in finding a group to run them with. Strike Missions simply weren’t being viewed as the stepping stone to raids that we originally intended.

Since then, we’ve tried to reframe and clarify how difficulty levels work in our group-instanced content across both Strike Mission and raid game modes. Normal mode should be able to be completed by anyone interested in learning the content, while challenge mode is aimed toward our hardcore audience. We also have some plans, which we’ll tease below, that will further clarify the intended difficulty levels of raids for players.

As we made plans to improve Strike Mission engagement, we came to realize that strikes and raids didn’t need to be separate game modes at all. They were both squad-based instanced content with similar levels of complexity. Raid wings were just longer and tended to have a bit more complexity per encounter than Strike Missions did. We were also paying some hidden costs by separating them, such as each mode having its own separate reward system that didn’t incentivize cross-engagement. Not to mention that it was confusing for new players!
Strike Missions will be known as raid encounters going forward and will be siblings with the current raid wings within the larger raids game mode. This should make it easier for newer players to understand and approach.

Combining these game modes offers us the opportunity to do much more than making things simpler to understand. In our first major update for Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity, we’ll also be adding the following to raids:

• A new raid UI with quality-of-life improvements (see screenshot below).
  • A list of all raid wings and raid encounters will allow you to go directly to the boss you want to tackle.
  • The list includes encounter difficulty ratings to inform players.
• Quickplay mode to assist players in finding a group for easier raid encounters.
• A merged reward system for strikes and raid wings.
• A new Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity raid encounter with a challenge mode (a second raid encounter, a challenge mode, and a legendary mode will come in subsequent updates).

These features will allow us to better communicate difficulty levels for raids and address the significant quality-of-life issues that depress engagement. And, as many of you have correctly surmised, the quickplay mode feature that we debuted in beta form for the Fractal Incursion bonus event will indeed be added to raids next year to help players find groups for the easiest raid encounters. We’re very excited to see how the community engages with our merged raid game mode, and we’ll share more details on how this will all work in the coming months. Happy gaming!

It’s time to celebrate the change of seasons with the autumn Guild Wars® franchise sale! Delve into past adventures and experience the latest expansion, Guild Wars 2®: Janthir Wilds™, now on sale. Or jump into Guild Wars and discover the storied history of the magical lands of Tyria!

From September 29 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time (UTC-7) to October 6 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time (UTC-7), you can take advantage of special deals on games in the Guild Wars franchise. Invite a friend to join your adventures or expand your account with a new expansion’s features. With absolutely no subscription fees, it’s always the perfect time to start your journey!

The following discounted items are available now on the official Guild Wars 2 website, with some of the same exciting deals on Steam! For those looking to add the Living World™ series to your collection, you can find them on sale for 30% off in the in-game store. The autumn sale is not currently available on the Epic Games Store.

Head north to the wilderness of Janthir—a dangerous land that was once home to the strange mursaat and their White Mantle sycophants. Befriend the lowland kodan who reside there and learn the secrets of wielding a spear on every profession. Your journeys will lead you to own your own homestead, engage in a challenging new raid, and forge a bond with a warclaw mount with new abilities!

Both Standard and Deluxe editions of the Guild Wars 2: Janthir Wilds expansion are now available at a 20% discount.*

In a world finally safe from the Elder Dragons’ corruption, new threats rise to seek power. Embark on an epic journey and uncover the mysteries of the Wizard’s Tower as you defend the skies against incursions from the Mists. Unlock access to weapons that were previously exclusive to elite specializations for each profession and an updated path to unlocking your skyscale mount.

Both Standard and Deluxe editions of the Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure expansion are now available at a 30% discount.*

The future of Cantha is now. The dragon cycle that has sustained and blighted Tyria for ages is collapsing. Mortal hearts and choices will define this moment in history—and echo into the future forever. Unlock new elite specializations, Masteries, and more, including access to fishing and skiffs.

Both Standard and Deluxe editions of the Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons® expansion are now available at a 40% discount!*

Experience the entire dragon cycle saga from beginning to end with Guild Wars 2—The Complete Collection. This bundle contains an entire decade’s worth of content! Included Guild Wars 2 Living World® Seasons 2–5 and the first three expansions:

• Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns®
• Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire®
• Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons

You’ll also get two Level-80 Boosts, allowing you to instantly level up two characters and jump straight into our latest content, with two Shared Inventory Slots to easily share items with every character on your account.

The Complete, Deluxe, and Standard editions of the Elder Dragon Saga Collection are discounted by 50% for the length of the sale. Note: only the Complete edition of the Elder Dragon Saga is available through the Steam store.

Unlock mounts, gliding, and more with the first two expansions for Guild Wars 2. This package grants you access to a new profession, the revenant, as well as eighteen elite specializations to change the way you play. Experience the joy of movement with the best mounts in MMOs.

This expansion bundle is available now at a 60% discount!

Now is the perfect time to experience the game that started it all! The original Guild Wars and all its campaigns and editions are discounted by 50%. This includes the recent Guild Wars: The 20th Anniversary Masterpiece Collection, which includes all three campaigns (Prophecies™, Factions™, and Nightfall™), the Guild Wars : Eye of the North™ expansion, and the Bonus Mission Pack.

Premium items like Xunlai Storage Panes, costumes, unlock packs, and more are all available at a 50% discount as well. Head over to the original Guild Wars site to take advantage of the sale!

Fill your Hall of Monuments and unlock bonus items and titles that transfer to Guild Wars 2!

Our expansion sales are also available from the following third-party retailers:

Americas:

• Guild Wars 2 Steam
• Guild Wars Steam
• Amazon
• Nuuvem

Europe:

• Guild Wars 2 Steam
• Guild Wars Steam
• CDgalaxis (Hungary)
• Gameliebe (Germany)
• Gamecardsdirect (EUROPE)
• Gamecardsdirect (France)
• Gamecardsdirect (Netherlands)
• Key4you (Czech)

*Deluxe packages for Guild Wars 2 are not available through the Steam store.

Back in July, we announced that a set of new and updated mechanics for the skimmer would arrive with the launch of Guild Wars 2®: Visions of Eternity™. Today, we’re excited to share more details, including some exciting boosts for those with the previous Skimmer Mount Mastery line trained.

To see the Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity skimmers—including the new abilities in action—join us for a livestream on our Twitch channel this Friday, September 19, at noon Pacific Time (UTC-7).

During your time in Castora, you will likely stumble upon a new, yet familiar, creature that calls this island home. Wavehawks—otherwise known as skimmers in Elonian local parlance—are masters of both sea and sky. They’ve adapted to the island’s rich energies—and, when tamed, they become a valuable asset for those attempting to survive on Castora.

Unlike the skimmers that reside in the deserts of Elona, these skimmers evolved in a setting rich with ley magic that runs through root and sand. This has turned the wavehawks into highly mobile mounts that can navigate with ease and grace over all kinds of terrain, as well as boasting some new combat and exploration abilities:

• Aetherlocation: A pulsing, sonar-like signal that detects nearby threats and enemies. While submerged, it also has the ability to detect hidden treasures throughout the waters of Tyria.
• Slipstream Boost: Increases the base speed of the skimmer for a set duration. During this time, using the Hover skill also increases the vertical height gain of the skimmer past previous limits at the cost of stamina.
• Water Jets: Commands the skimmer to fire a set of projectiles that damages enemies and heals allies. When it is held, the ability will continue to fire up to max ammo count.

Once unlocked, you will learn to master the skimmer’s new abilities throughout your Castoran adventure. For those with the previous skimmer masteries from Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire™, you’ll see a boost to the existing Masteries to take your mount to new heights:

• Advanced Hydrodynamics: Grants your skimmer the ability to dive underwater. For those who already have this ability with Skimming the Depths trained, it will also increase the base speed of the skimmer as well as grant temporary stealth when diving into and out of water.
• Castoran Intuition: Unlocks the skimmer’s ability to use Aetherlocation while also enhancing the Barrel Roll engage skill. This enhanced version of the skill allows for multiple dashes without dismounting at the cost of stamina. When it is held, the ability will activate its dismount portion of the skill.
• Convergent Evolution: Unlocks the skimmer’s Slipstream Boost and Water Jets skills. For those with Ride the Wind trained, it will further increase the aerial ascent power of Hover High while Slipstream Boost is active.
• Riptide Rider: Grants your skimmer the ability to ride ley lines and updrafts both above and within the water.

Alongside these enhancements, all versions of the skimmer—regardless of Mastery or acquisition method—will also be getting base-level updates. Players will now be able to dismount the skimmer in midair and can mount it in combat with no Mastery training required.

Everything we discussed today and more will be shown in detail during our livestream this week! Tune in to our Twitch channel this Friday, September 19, at noon Pacific Time (UTC-7) to see it all for yourself. Get ready to soar over the island of Castora on your very own wavehawk on October 28. Prepurchase Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity and unlock some of the digital rewards today!