The Wizard’s Vault is a reward system coming in Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure™ that can point you toward content to play. Let’s dive into what that means, shall we?

Astral Allies

The wizards are largely unknown to the denizens of Tyria. That’ll change—at least for you and the commander—next week, when Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure launches and you get to start on the new adventure we’ve been preparing for you.

As an ancient, arcane, and acquisitive lot, the wizards have amassed something of a treasure trove. For reasons best known to themselves (our guess: they don’t often leave their towers), the wizards have set up a system through which enterprising adventurers can earn astral acclaim by completing certain tasks and trade that acclaim in for rewards from their vault. They’ve even set it up so that the exchange works whether you can physically reach their location in skies above Tyria or not!

Behold:

New Ways to Earn Rewards

By directing players to various parts of the game with regularly refreshed challenges and rewards, the Wizard’s Vault system functions similarly to a seasonal content pass in other games. But we tried to build the Wizard’s Vault from the ground up to be as player friendly as possible: exclusive cosmetics don’t go away at the end of a season, you can choose your reward order, and there’s no cost in gems or real money. Ultimately, our goal with the Wizard’s Vault is to help you find things to do in Guild Wars 2 and then reward you for doing those things. Some of the choices that we made about the foundations of the system mean that is a substantially different experience from many seasonal passes:

• Reward choice: As you complete Wizard’s Vault objectives, you earn astral acclaim. Astral acclaim can be spent to buy specific items offered in the Wizard’s Vault shop. Rather than unlocking specific items at specific tiers of progression, you can choose which rewards you want to acquire.
• Reward longevity: The rewards in the Wizard’s Vault rotate every few months, but any cosmetic rewards introduced through the Wizard’s Vault will remain available. When they’re no longer part of the most recently updated offerings, those rewards will go into a legacy tab of the reward shop, where they’ll remain available for purchase for astral acclaim (although at a higher price). Our goal in doing this is to alleviate player anxiety about timed rewards—if something comes into the vault when it’s not a good time for you to be playing much, it’ll still be there for you later.
• Rewards for gameplay: We do not have a premium tier of the Wizard’s Vault that has additional rewards, and players cannot buy astral acclaim with gems or real money.

For this first round of exclusive cosmetic rewards we have the Enchanted Owl Griffon Skin, a new weapon skin collection, and three unique armor pieces. Other items in the Wizard’s Vault shop—in-game currencies, crafting components, and more—will be available through gameplay. One item bundle we’re debuting is a legendary starter kit, meant to provide a new inroad to the legendary crafting system. These starter kits are a way to turn your playtime into progress toward a specific legendary. We’re introducing starter kits for four legendaries in this first round of offerings and intend to rotate in others in the future; we’ll be watching feedback and usage to inform future iterations of the starter kits.

Gameplay Direction

One of the goals for the Wizard’s Vault as a system is to give suggestions to players looking for something to do in the game. To that end, we have daily, weekly, and special objectives related to PvE, WvW, and PvP. Those three categories are presented as checkbox options so you can choose from one, two, or all three categories. In addition to the daily and weekly objective refreshes, special objectives are refreshed each season when the Wizard’s Vault rewards cycle.

The Wizard’s Vault replaces the existing daily login rewards and daily achievements—specifically the generic Daily category. Other categories (like Daily Fractals, Daily End of Dragons, etc.) will still be around in the achievements panel. You’ll continue to receive progress toward Daily Completionist by completing Wizard’s Vault daily objectives and achievement points from the Wizard’s Vault Daily Completionist achievement.

Once one of your characters reaches level 80, the Wizard’s Vault UI will be accessible to all characters on your account, regardless of which expansions you own. If you do not have Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure registered on your account, some rewards will be locked, and you will be unable to visit the in-game location of the Wizard’s Vault. The system will be fundamentally the same for you otherwise. We’ll be keeping an eye on feedback for what we can do in the future to continue to improve the system and bring fun new rewards and experiences to you.

Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure launches on August 22, and you’ll be able to check out the Wizard’s Vault, conquer the sky with your skyscale and Flight Training Masteries, hunt down the demonic Kryptis, and more. If you haven’t had a chance yet, there’s still time to prepurchase so you’re ready to see it all when the expansion comes out!