Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure launched in August 2023, took a mixed reception on the chin, and spent the next year quietly building the foundation that Janthir Wilds launched on. Now that we have JW to compare against, it is worth going back to SotO with fresh eyes. Not to relitigate the complaints, but to account for what it did and what it was trying to do.
What SotO Walked Into
What SotO Walked Into
Secrets of the Obscure had an adversarial launch environment. That is not revisionism — it is the setup.
Coming off End of Dragons, which had shipped in February 2022 with three new legendary weapons, a rich Cantha setting, and a satisfying conclusion to the Elder Dragon saga, SotO was always going to face a comparison problem. EoD had closure. SotO was opening a new story, in a new setting, with a new group of characters players had not met before. The Astral Ward and the Wizard’s Tower are compelling lore, but they are a harder sell than “go to Cantha and finish the story you’ve been playing since 2012.”
On top of the comparison problem: SotO launched with the new Relic system replacing secondary rune stats, a change that hit established builds across every game mode. Players who had their gear sets tuned over years of play woke up to the launch and found their setups needed rebuilding. The frustration was immediate and loud.
And then there was the quarterly content model itself — new territory, with no track record. When ArenaNet announced the annual expansion plus quarterly updates structure, they were asking the community to trust a release schedule that had never been tested. SotO was both the experiment and the subject.
What It Actually Delivered
Given those headwinds, what SotO actually shipped over its full cycle is worth examining piece by piece.
The Wizard’s Vault was the most underrated addition in the expansion. The overhaul to daily and seasonal reward systems changed the everyday login loop for the entire playerbase — not just SotO owners. The new system gave players meaningful rewards for content they were already playing, structured a reason to engage across modes, and gave Astral Acclaim (the new daily currency) a clear spend path. This is the kind of systemic improvement that most players absorbed without fully attributing it to SotO.
Weapon unlocks for all professions came in the Realm of Dreams quarterly on February 27, 2024. Every profession, a new weapon. Elementalist pistol. Mesmer rifle. Warrior staff. Guardian pistol. Revenant scepter. The full nine. For a game that had added weapons primarily through elite specializations for years, this represented a genuine philosophy shift: weapon access as a baseline expansion feature rather than a specialization unlock gate. The precedent that set — JW building on it with land spears — matters for the long-term health of build diversity.
Obsidian armor gave the game a new legendary armor crafting path that did not require raid progression or ranked PvP. Players who had been locked out of legendary armor for years by the content requirements suddenly had an accessible route. The grind exists, but the gate does not.
Temple of Febe Strike Mission Challenge Mode added a high-difficulty benchmark to the expansion’s group content lineup. For the endgame Strike community, this was a meaningful addition.
The Convergence Question
Convergences were SotO’s big swing at new group content, and the results were genuinely mixed.
On paper, Convergences make sense. Fifty-player instanced events on a predictable schedule, with an on-demand private instance option for organized groups. They bring large numbers of players into the same content without the barrier of a ten-person raid team or the chaos of fully open-world meta events.
In practice, the community divided sharply. Casual players appreciated the accessibility — join, contribute, get rewards, done. Endgame players found the encounters lacked the mechanical complexity that made Strike Missions and raids satisfying. The “hitpoint sponge” critique was real: bosses in Convergences often had large health pools and relatively few mechanical demands, which made organized groups feel underpowered by comparison to what they were used to.
There is a version of this critique that basically says “Convergences were designed for a different player than me,” and that framing is more accurate than the alternative reading that they were just badly designed. The question ArenaNet was trying to answer with Convergences — how do we give organized groups and casual players a shared space in endgame content? — is a genuinely hard question. SotO’s answer was imperfect. JW’s answer, with full raids alongside the continued Convergence format, is a more complete one. But SotO asked the question first.
The Relic Problem
The Relic system is where this piece has to be honest. The community’s frustration was not a misread.
Replacing secondary rune stats with an entirely new Relic slot affected every player’s existing gear. The transition required time, resources, and for some builds, meaningful reconfiguration. For veteran players with extensive established loadouts, this felt punitive. The new system did offer more flexibility long-term — more granular choices, cleaner itemization — but the launch friction was real and the community communications around it were not as clear as they should have been.
This is the kind of change that looks better after six months than it does at launch. But “better in retrospect” is cold comfort when you logged in on expansion day to find your builds needed work.
What It Built for Janthir Wilds
Here is the case for SotO’s legacy, now that JW has given us a reference point.
The quarterly cadence that SotO tested — and that some players were skeptical of — is the same model JW launched on and is delivering raid content through. The Godspawn quarterly in November 2024 brought a new raid three months after JW’s August launch. That delivery was only possible because ArenaNet had spent a year under SotO learning what the quarterly production pipeline could realistically support.
The Wizard’s Vault system that SotO shipped is still running. JW players use it. It is part of the game’s daily structure now in a way that no previous reward system managed to be.
Weapon unlocks as an expansion feature — established in SotO’s Realm of Dreams quarterly — set the expectation that JW’s land spears fulfilled. The spear arriving across all nine professions felt natural because the Realm of Dreams update had already established that pattern.
SotO was not the expansion the community wanted in 2023. It was the expansion ArenaNet needed to build to ship JW in 2024. In retrospect, that context makes the mixed reception feel more like a transitional moment than a failure.
Who Should Pay Attention
SotO owners who never finished the story: With the full arc completed through The Midnight King, this is actually the right time to go back. The story lands better when you can run it start to finish rather than quarterly chunk by quarterly chunk. The Wizard’s Tower aesthetic and the Astral Ward characters are worth experiencing at pace if you can now do it on your own terms.
Players curious about Convergences: If you bounced off them at SotO launch, the Temple of Febe Challenge Mode is worth attempting with an organized group. It is a different experience from the public queue version.
Obsidian armor crafters: The path is open and SotO players who built up Astral Acclaim can continue progress. The Wizard’s Vault wiki page has the full crafting requirements if you are mapping out the grind.
What to Watch For
SotO is closed as a chapter. What it seeded is still growing:
- Weapon diversity across professions is now an expectation, not an exception. How ArenaNet continues expanding weapon access in future expansion cycles will follow the SotO precedent
- Legendary armor accessibility through non-raid paths — whether future expansions add more routes alongside the Obsidian track
- Convergences as a format — whether ArenaNet refines the encounter design in JW’s Convergence additions based on the SotO feedback
The verdict on SotO is complicated. That is a more interesting verdict than it gets credit for.