Guild Wars 2's Path of Fire expansion released a little over a month ago, bringing with it some massive changes to all professions, as well as entirely new Elite Specializations to mess around with. As you might imagine, this many drastic changes and additions quickly resulted in some very wonky PvP balance. Not exactly ideal considering the expansion launched in the middle of a PvP season!
As such, I am very glad to say that Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire's first balance update has now arrived! You'll find the full patch notes over at the official website, but if you can't be bothered to go through all of the changes, just know that most of the classes have received some much needed balance tweaks and quality-of-life changes. This goes doubly so for the Mirage Elite Specialization as ArenaNet has finally removed some of the annoying delays between the various Axe attacks!
Besides the above mentioned balance changes, this update has also brought with it the long-awaited improvements to Path of Fire's event rewards, as well as some fancy new cosmetics you can earn via newly added collection achievements. I'm not sure if this is enough to bring people back into the Crystal Desert for more than a couple of days, but its certainly a step in the right direction.
While I would love to say this update has been a massive success, I'm afraid there is one major problem that's managed to sour everyone's opinion of it - Loot Boxes. Instead of being able to buy or earn whatever mount skin you like, the only way you can get the new ones is by buying Mount Adoption Licenses for 400 gems ($5), with each one guaranteeing you a random unique skin. Since there are 30 different mount skins in the box, most of which are completely plain and uninteresting, I think you can see why people are currently furious.
Hopefully ArenaNet will address this in the near future as its an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise excellent update. Until then, I would highly recommend you don't waste your money on these Loot Boxes because the odds of you getting something good without spending downright insane amounts of money are... well, not very good to say the least.
