Changes to Favour of the Gods

ArenaNet have announced that they are changing the way Favour of the Gods works. Originally, the Favour of the Gods was granted to one region of players, depending on events in the Hall of Heroes. When a team of characters defended the Hall five consecutive times, all players from that region gained the favor of the Gods.

You've probably seen the messages pop up occasionally - "so-and-so beats blah-team in the Hall of Heroes. To capture the Favour of the Gods, Europe must beat the US 3 more times"

Once your region had the Favour of the Gods, you got two things:

1) Statues of the gods in explorable areas would light up. Kneeling before them would summon an avatar, and you could then pay gold for some blessings. The handiest is a +2% Morale boost, but you can also boost specific skills and abilites, depending on which god's avatar you were talking to.

2) You could kneel before a statue of Grenth or Balthazar at The Temple of Ages (Prophecies), Zin Ku Corridor (Factions) or the Chantry of Secrets (Nightfall). This summons their avatar, and you can then pay 1 Platinum to get access to the Underworld or the Fissure of Woe.

This is all very cool, but the drawback is if you wanted access to the Underworld or FoE you had to wait until your region had favour. If it was pretty late and not many teams from your region were playing PvP in the Hall of Heroes, you were pretty stuffed.

ArenaNet have now changed this, with the aim of opening up access to these special areas. Since the game update on the 9th of August, all game players will gain Favour, irrespective of which region you're playing in.

Each time a player achieves maximum rank in a Title Track, their name and the achievement will now be broadcast in 7 locations across the worlds of Guild Wars. When 20 announcements have been made, all players will recieve the Favour of the Gods for 1 hour. During this hour, each extra player announcement will extend the timer by 3 minutes.

Initially there will be only 21 qualifying titles, but with Eye of the North coming soon you can expect that to expand rapidly.

You can see how this will open things up a bit, but even with the number of players active in Guild Wars, can we expect to see enough people maxing their Title Tracks to make this worthwhile? Only ArenaNet have access to the stats, so we can assume they think it likely enough to make such a major change.

For more details about how the new system works you can read the FAQ ArenaNet have put up at http://eu.guildwars.com/events/in_game_events/fog/

Cheers,
TOM

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