Happy Guild Wars 2 Halloween, everyone! The annual Shadow of the Mad King celebration starts today, and I’m excited to dust off my Halloween alt and get to work.
Having separate special-purpose characters (a.k.a. “alts”) was a bigger thing before Build Templates were introduced. But I’m still a fan of using separate alts for each holiday.
Holiday Alts for Inventory Management
Every holiday has a long list of “stuff” that gets thrown at you while you play. In the case of Halloween, it doesn’t take long before your inventory is chock full of Halloween finishers, candy corn, Trick-or-Treat bags, plastic fangs, Strawberry Ghosts, Halloween Tonics, bottles of Batwing Brew, and more.
It may seem like a minor hassle to switch to an alt each time you’re ready to do some holiday content. But it’s less of a drag overall, compared to constantly managing the inventory of holiday junk on your main character. You can just leave all that stuff on your holiday character, keep it sorted into stacks, and delete or sell everything at once at the end of the festival.
In the case of Halloween, it’s particularly nice to have an alt when it comes to deleting those holiday finishers. That way you only have to type Limited-Use Mad King Finisher once to delete an entire stack of the damn things.
Holiday Fashion Wars
Everyone knows Fashion Wars is the true GW2 endgame! A holiday alt lets you really “lean in” to the holiday vibe. Pick a holiday-specific name, then have fun dressing your character in all the holiday-specific skins you like.
My Wintersday alt has the Winter’s Presence (snowfall) shoulders, snowflake glider, Cozy Wintersday raptor (it’s wearing little mittens on its hands!), snowflake mini, and the Enchanted Winter Antlers. Go big or go home, I say!
Creating a Holiday Alt
The hardest part, of course, is choosing a thematic name. After you have passed that hurdle, you have a few choices on how to proceed with your character.
Most holiday content “lives” in the capital cities. Characters on paid accounts have access to their home city right away. Characters on free accounts unlock access to their home city at level 10.
- Human: Divinity’s Reach
- Charr: Black Citadel
- Norn: Hoelbrak
- Sylvari: The Grove
- Asura: Rata Sum
Most (all?) holiday content in the capital cities is not level-gated. The holiday content either doesn’t have a level requirement (like setting off fireworks in Hoelbrak, or giving presents to orphans in Divinity’s Reach), or it up-levels your character to level 80 (like the Labyrinth, or Super Adventure Box).
If you want to engage with holiday content in a different city, you have a few options for getting there. If you have a Teleport to Friend, you can party up (either with a friend, guild member, or join a squad in LFG) and teleport to them.
You can also access all the capital cities from the Eastern Ward in Lion’s Arch. Characters on free accounts unlock access to Lion’s Arch at level 35. Characters on paid accounts can access Lion’s Arch from a portal in their home city.
Photo by Łukasz Nieścioruk on Unsplash
