What's New In Janthir Wilds?
Guild Wars 2 recently released its fifth major expansion, Janthir Wilds. With a new expansion comes many new things for players to collect. Let’s go over some of the new goodies (including their stats and effects, where applicable).
Janthir Wilds Legendaries
Promotional material for Janthir Wilds has informed us that it will include two new legendaries: a legendary spear and a legendary backpiece. Both of these items will be coming in later patches and have yet to actually be revealed, so there’s not much we can tell you about them now.
While we have absolutely nothing on the new spear, you can obtain what appears to be the precursor to the legendary backpiece: the Standing Stones Timepiece, a backpiece skin obtained by completing achievements in Lowland Shore.
The Janthir Syntri Mastery achievement awards the Bearkin War-Helm skin, whose tooltip also states it will be used in legendary crafting; given it is neither a spear nor a backpiece, it is unclear which it will be used for.
Janthir Wilds Armor
Janthir Wilds’s release has brought three new full armor sets: the Polychromatic, Titanplate, and Woad sets. The Polychromatic set can be purchased in Lowland Shore using Ursus Oblige and research notes; the Titanplate set must be crafted, and the recipes can be purchased using research notes, unusual coins, or Ursus Oblige; finally, the Woad set can be earned in PvP or WvW using the Janthir Wilds Reward Track.
Players can also obtain the first half of the Rot Stalker set from the Wizard’s Vault. The remaining three skins should be added in the next quarter, allowing players to complete the set. The screenshot below displays the helmet, shoulders, and gloves; the chest, leggings, and boots will be released later.
Janthir Wilds Armor List
- Polychromatic armor set — purchased with Ursus Oblige and research notes.
- Titanplate armor set — recipes purchased with Oblige, research notes, or unusual coins; crafted with Janthir Wilds materials.
- Woad armor set — earned in WvW or PvP from the Janthir Wilds Reward Track.
- Rot Stalker armor set — purchased from the Wizard’s Vault using Astral Acclaim.
- Meteor-Wielder’s Glove — earned from the Falling Star collection, purchased form the Wizard’s Vault.
- Standing Stones Timepiece — backpiece earned by completing the Lowland Shore Mastery achievement.
- Bearkin War Helm — helmet earned by completing the Janthir Sytri Mastery achievement.
Janthir Wilds Weapons
Janthir Wilds comes with several new weapon sets. The Full Moon and Ursan Ornamented weapon sets can be obtained throughout the expansions as loot from events and chests. The Serpent’s Wrath set is a bit rarer, only obtained from Janthiri Gear Boxes or by purchasing from certain renown heart vendors using Karma and Janthir Wilds materials. Finally, the Onyx’s Spider set can be purchased from the Wizard’s Vault.
There are also a few standalone skins added with the expansion: three spears and two daggers.
The two dagger skins resemble clawed gauntlets. They are the Sorrow’s Claw, obtained by completing the 2nd act of the Janthir Wilds story, and the Ornamented Bearkin Claw, which can be obtained from Kodan Caches or as a potential drop from defeating the Bog Queen or Barbed Vale… or from simply dancing with the bearkin.
The three spears are the Nature’s Vine Spear, which is earned during the early portions of the Janthir Wilds story; the Pale Branch Spear, which is a rare drop from the new ‘Of Mists and Monsters’ meta-event; and Falling Star, a unique skin earned by completing a side-story achievement purchased from the Wizard’s Vault. Falling Star has two appearances: a standard metal form and a fiery, ignited form (shown below) that appears if you use the infusion that comes with it.
Janthir Wilds Weapon List
- Full Moon weapon set — Dropped as loot in Janthir Wilds or purchased with unusual coins.
- Ursan Ornamented weapon set — Dropped as loot in Janthir Wilds or purchased with unusual coins or Ursus Oblige.
- Serpent’s Wrath weapon set — Purchased with Karma and Janthir Wilds materials from certain renown heart vendors or dropped from Janthiri Gear Boxes.
- Onyx’s Spider weapon set — Purchased from the Wizard’s Vault.
- Ornamented Bearkin Claw — Dagger dropped from certain Lowland Shore events or found in Kodan Caches.
- Sorrow’s Claw — Dagger earned by completing the 2nd act of the Janthir Wilds story.
- Nature’s Vine Spear — Earned early on in the Janthir Wilds story after training spear mastery.
- Pale Branch Spear — Dropped from the ‘Of Mists and Monsters’ meta-event in Janthir Syntri.
- Falling Star — Spear earned by completing a side-story achievement after purchasing it from the Wizard’s Vault.
Janthir Wilds Pets & Mounts
So far, Janthir Wilds only features a single new pet for Ranger players to tame—the Juvenile Warclaw. Fret not, however; Secrets of the Obscure also had only one new pet at launch, but two more were added over the course of its quarterly updates. This will likely be the case for Janthir Wilds as well; Rangers can look forward to meeting new pets in the near future.
Unfortunately, the Juvenile Warclaw doesn’t appear to be particularly viable in most scenarios. Its Pet Skill is a rather niche utility, granting up to 5 targets superspeed for 3 seconds. Ranger doesn’t have many sources of superspeed, but there are few scenarios where 3 seconds of speed every 20 seconds will be particularly useful.
Speaking of Warclaws, Janthir Wilds has placed a heavy focus on them, with one of its main selling points being a complete rework of how the mount functions in the open-world, making it much more effective for getting round and generally much more fun to use.
Warclaws are also a large part of the lore and worldbuilding in Janthir, with the local Warclaws—called “Journeykin” by the local bearkin—taking on a much different, more natural appearance than those encountered in the Mists prior. To go along with this, players can earn the Janthir Wilds Warclaw Skin shortly into the expansion’s story to allow them to grant their own Warclaw the same new look.
Janthir Wilds Homesteads
Before we move on from all the new skins to take a look at some of the combat-oriented additions, let’s briefly go over one of Janthir Wilds’s flagship additions: homesteads.
Homesteads are private home instances that players can decorate as they please and even invite their friends to. You earn your homestead shortly into the Janthir Wilds story, and you can unlock furniture recipes by training the homesteading mastery or purchasing them from various vendors; furniture is crafted using Janthir Wilds materials.
There are already a ton of options for customizing your homestead, and more will be released with each quarter of the Janthir Wilds expansion. Look forward to more furniture and features as the remaining masteries are revealed.
Janthir Wilds Relics
The first release of Janthir Wilds brings with it six new Relics—unique accessories introduced with Secrets of the Obscure that provide unique, (usually) playstyle-altering effects, replacing the effects that used to be tied to sixth runes. Some of the new Relics are already seeing use in the meta; others are being left in the dust. The nature of GW2’s gear system has left us with nothing to discuss stats-wise throughout the rest of this article, so let’s go a little more in-depth with each of the six new Relics.
Relic of Atrocity
With Relic of Atrocity equipped, the damage and healing of your lifesteal attacks and effects are increased by 15%.
While this seems an interesting option at first, Atrocity is not very good. Few builds in GW2 put significant focus on lifesteal, and even then it is usually in small amounts where a 15% increase would not amount to much.
Lifesteal is also a somewhat situation effect to begin with. Even if there were significant and powerful lifesteal builds, they would see little to no play in instanced content such as raids; in an organized squad, you would generally either focus entirely on damage or on healing your teammates—in both cases, lifesteal is useless to you, locking Atrocity out of a significant portion of the game and the meta.
That said, there are a couple niche scenarios in which Atrocity is actually very good: the battles against Eparch at the end of the ‘Lonely Tower’ fractal and the ‘Into the Spider’s Lair’ meta-event. In both of these fights, you can obtain a buff that applies lifesteal to all of your attacks. By using Atrocity under these conditions, it suddenly becomes a flat 15% damage increase, which is very good—for comparison, one of the current go-to Relics for power DPS builds, Relic of Fireworks, only provides a flat bonus of 7%.
Overall, while Atrocity has some niche uses, it generally falls short compared to other options in most scenarios. Unless you’re going for 100CM clears, you’re probably better off with a more consistent damage or healing tool.
Relic of the Claw
With Relic of the Claw equipped, your strike damage is increased by 7% when you disable a foe—that is, when you hit them with a crowd control effect such as ‘cripple’ or ‘slow’.
You may notice that Claw provides the same damage bonus as the Fireworks Relic mentioned above. Both Relics provide 7% increased damage for power builds, making Claw a viable “sidegrade” to Fireworks for some builds. Fireworks’s bonus is triggered by using a weapon skill with a cooldown of 20 seconds or more; for builds with lots of CC effects, Claw may be a more consistent option, and its existence may allow some new builds to appear that don’t need to worry about meeting the conditions of Fireworks.
Relic of the Stormsinger
With Relic of the Stormsinger equipped, you will gain an effect whenever you use a movement skill—that is, any skill with a movement effect such as ‘leap’ or ‘retreat’. It does not trigger on instantaneous forms of movement such as teleports or shadowsteps; additionally, you do not need to hit an enemy with whatever skill you use to gain the effect. Once you have the effect, your next attack will create a chain-lightning that deals light damage to up to 3 targets. The effect has a 3 second cooldown.
Stormsinger’s bonus damage output is quite low, making it quite ineffective in PvE. It’s further hindered by its activation condition, making it only viable on a subset of builds which use many movement skills, such as Willbender; this hurts it even more in instanced PvE, where skills that force movement can often cause a player to accidentally fail mechanics, thus making such builds much less popular.
Where Stormsinger could potentially see some use is in competitive modes, particularly on builds which aim to one-shot enemies with powerful attacks. The lightning attack scales well and can crit; compared to PvE, where it’s an insignificant DPS boost, it has a chance to make a notable difference in competitive modes on some builds.
Relic of the Blightbringer
With Relic of the Blightbringer equipped, you will gain a stacking effect each time you apply poison to an enemy. After reaching five stacks of the effect, the next time you apply poison you will also apply cripple, weakness, and 3 additional stacks of poison to up to 5 targets in an area. The final effect also has an 8 second cooldown.
Blightbringer is also one of only two Relics in this set to function differently in competitive, applying only two additional stacks of poison, each of which deal less damage; additionally, the duration of all the applied conditions are reduced.
Blightbringer has an additional caveat to its effect that may not be apparent upon first reading its tooltip: it gains stacks from each instance of poison application, not each stack applied. That is to say, in order to activate Blightbringer, you must use skills or effects to apply poison 5 times rather than being able to use an effect that applies 5 stacks of poison to instantly trigger it.
In PvE, Blightbringer isn’t very good. Only a small selection of builds with rapid poison application can use it effectively, and it’s held back by its 8 second cooldown. The additional cripple and weakness it applies are too situational to be worth running the Relic, as there are other options that provide much better and more consistent condition damage bonuses.
In competitive modes… Blightbringer isn’t very good either. It’s more viable than in PvE, but ultimately still generally outclassed by other options. Its damage increase and supplementary conditions are more impactful in PvP than they are in PvE, but it’s still a big ask over other, better-established condi Relic options.
Relic of Rivers
With Relic of Rivers equipped, you will gain alacrity and regeneration upon dodging. The duration starts at 4 seconds and can go up to 8 with enough boon duration (you can see in the screenshot above that my Herald build bumped it up to 5). Additionally, despite what its tooltip says, its boons are actually applied at the beginning of your dodge roll.
Rivers is also one of only two Relics added in this set to function differently in competitive. In PvP and WvW, it only applies a base of 2 seconds of alacrity and 3 seconds of regeneration.
Rivers can be a powerful tool on builds that already dodge frequently as part of their rotation, such as Vindicator and Mirage. While providing self-alacrity isn’t worthwhile in group content, it can be quite good in competitive and while soloing PvE content.
If you aren’t playing one of the select classes that already like to spam their dodge for DPS, Rivers probably isn’t worth it. The damage you might gain from alacrity uptime will be canceled out by the damage you lose from spending time dodging when you could’ve been attacking.
ADDENDUM: Just hours before this article was published, a new patch went live that nerfed this Relic in PvP. It’s unclear how severely this impacted its viability.
Relic of Sorrow
With Relic of Sorrow equipped, the player will create a projectie-destroying bubble and heal nearby allies for 4 seconds, while providing 20% strike damage reduction for 1 second, each time they use an elite skill. The activation seems to come at a short delay after using the skill, and it has a 30 second cooldown.
The latter portion of the ability—the damage reduction—is laughably situational. The window is so short that, combined with the activation delay and the requirement to use another skill beforehand, it would be difficult to actually land at the right time. Furthermore, in most situations where you would go out of your way to prepare a skill to prevent incoming damage, 20% wouldn’t be enough to save yourself or your allies; while they won’t protect your allies, skills like Herald’s ‘Infuse Light’ or Mesmer’s ‘Distortion’ do much better at the same job—without taking up your Relic slot.
The healing provided by the effect is also quite low, so Relic of Sorrow’s most useful and interesting effect is the projectile disruption. This is also quite short, however, and on a long cooldown; it would fail in many common use-cases for projectile destruction, such as the Adina, Sabir, or AHCM fights.
Overall, while Sorrow has some niche potential uses—it could be used as a decent support tool in PvP or WvW, where there are fewer good tools for projectile hate and more frequent use-cases for short bursts of it—it usually won’t be worth taking over a more standard support Relic, and has seen little use in the meta.
Conclusion
The first batch of Janthir Wilds has brought quite a bit of new content with it, be they new skins, the new pet, or the new relics. The expansion’s gotten a good start with its first release, so fans can only hope that upcoming releases will maintain the momentum—and, of course, bring plenty more cool things to obtain with them.
