Our next major release for Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure™ isn’t far away, and when it arrives you’ll be able to craft a legendary relic. Relics are a new category of equipment that we added with the expansion’s launch in August of 2023; you can read more about them on our wiki if you’re not familiar.

Upon acquisition, legendary relics can be equipped by all characters on an account simultaneously, allowing players to freely swap between relic effects.

We’ve got two additional pieces of information that we’d like to share with you before legendary relics become available.

Compensation for Legendary Rune Owners

When we first announced relics, we mentioned that when we were ready to add the legendary relic to the game we’d compensate players who have already crafted legendary runes. This is because non-attribute bonus effects were removed from runes when relics were introduced. At the time, we were still evaluating what the appropriate compensation would be in terms of legendary relic progress.

Now we’re happy to announce that when legendary relics become available, any player who has already crafted at least one legendary rune will be granted a legendary relic for free. In other words, you’ll get 100% of legendary relic progress as a bonus for having already crafted a rune. We had previously communicated that crafting all seven runes would yield additional progress, but as we evaluated options for compensation, it became clear that the best choice was to fully compensate anyone who had made any legendary runes prior to the legendary relic becoming available with a completed legendary relic. When the release that contains legendary relics goes live, the eligibility period will end, and the only way to obtain a legendary relic will be through the normal crafting journey.

We’ll announce the timing of the next update soon, as it’s coming up pretty quickly.

Legendary Relics in Future Expansions

Legendary relics will work a bit differently than other legendary equipment, in that players will need to unlock new relic effects for future expansions in order to make use of them with their legendary relic. All other legendary equipment components like runes, armor, and weapons are automatically updated with new attribute combination choices as those combinations become available.

When we made an update in 2019 to reduce confusion in the way attribute-selectable gear worked, we decided to allow existing legendary equipment to retain access to all attribute combination selections regardless of expansion ownership to honor existing functionality. We will continue to do this for previously existing types of legendary equipment. However, from a rewards, economy, and experience-design standpoint, we think it makes sense to ask players to actually engage with new content in order to make use of its new combat offerings. So, for relics only—and starting with the fifth expansion—new relic effects will need to be unlocked within each expansion in order to be accessible via legendary relics.

Legendary relics will come with all Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure relic effects unlocked, will still be freely swappable between existing relic effects, and will still be able to be equipped simultaneously on multiple characters. They’ll also have automatic access to the new relic effects we’re planning to release alongside our third major release for Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure. We’ll have more information about future expansions’ effect unlocks sometime later this year after we’ve officially announced expansion 5.

Thanks for reading. We’ll be back in a few weeks with more information about our next major release for Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure.