Presumably reaching the same spiritual epiphany that Gabe Newell did in the Mojave circa 1999, ArenaNet has decided that people enjoy being given reasons to spend their money and will once again be knocking 75% off the retail price of Guild Wars 2. To coincide with their shenanigans at PAX East, from now until midnight on Sunday the digital and digital deluxe editions of the game will sell for $10 and $15, respectively.

Given that the game's first expansion is releasing this year, it's a great time to give your life over to combating malevolent vegetables and dancing polar bear trains!

That's a super good deal. I wish I could get the digital deluxe edition and apply the goodies to my current account, but I guess that's not how it works.

Awesome game and a awesome price if interested, potentially hundreds of hours of content here.

@jaycrockett: Actually, if you log in during the sale, the digital deluxe upgrade in the gem store is also discounted! That should mean you can grab the bonus goods for around $5.

Oh god, I'm really tempted. I'm watching the QL right now and the combat looks pretty interesting

A thousand and some hours later, I finally got some gems and upgraded to the Deluxe stuff. Didn't really need to, but hey, 75% off.

As an old GW player, I never made the jump to GW2 because I read I needed to do that HoM stuff. Was that ever worth it?

I wish I could like this game. Was too much a departure from what I loved about the first GW game. I bought the special edition of GW2 when it launched...played a little, wasn't impressed, went to DragonCon, and then never went back to it after I got back.

I played it for ~100 hours before I got bored of it. Definitely worth it for 10 bucks. General concensus is that the deluxe edition doesn't really add much value (but it's 5 bucks difference so take it or leave it).

My main gripes with the game come down to "Oh, I'm in fact playing a MMO" / "This isn't like the first game" so take it with a grain of salt.

• Exploring is definitely the crutch of the game. There are lots of hidden areas with jumping puzzles or unique art assets that you can completely miss. I had some very memorable quests like helping to prepare "Meatoberfest" in the Charr area or launching cows or whatever.
• I like the way leveling up is handled in this game. You get exp for exploring, crafting, fighting, doing quests etc. At this point I have enough money and quest rewards that I can level up my second character without actually having to play the game.
• When I first started playing I thought the movement was slow. I eventually made a build that gave me permanent swiftness (33% increase movement speed) which helped.
• For normal PVE the meta seems to be to put everything in offense since you can dodge attacks instead of taking damage. I did that and still felt like every mob was a tank with way too much HP. It's a MMO thing I guess.
• All these cool endgame enemies from the first game like Destroyers and Jotuns are reduced to standard mmo cannon fodder. It's a MMO thing I guess.
• For the combat it sometimes felt like I could use an extra hand (literally). One to control the mouse, one to use the skills, one for moving. Or alternatively, native controller support please? I eventually rebinded a bunch of keys which helped.
• For completing quests you get Karma which are basically "fun bucks" that you can spend at the quest giver. Unfortunately they're 99% useless in the "useless useless" way not the "fun useless" way. Most of it is equipment that you better/more easily get through the ingame auction house. At one point I got the Frost Gun consumable which transforms my current weapon into a Frost Gun. I thought "Great, more stuff like this please!". Unfortunately, there are only a handful of consumable weapons like that in the entire game. I was expecting stuff that transformed me into a snowman or something (which is possible to get! Through the gem store or ingame auction house... yay...)
• The personal story stuff is ok, not great but it does provide a guideline on which area to explore next. Some of the later missions are out of chronological order. I have no idea why, it shouldn't be the case. Why is this the case? I feel like this should be priority number 1. Please put your story in the correct order.
• I played the last part of the Living World story and hated it. You need to pay money to unlock previous sections which isn't fun. The part I did had a lot of combat sequences that were basically the same fight repeated x amount of times. Combine that with meaty high HP enemies and yuck... I did get me some fanservice where I saw some of the cool characters from the first game, so yay?
• When the game was released there was a Polymock Arena that was sectioned off. It's still sectioned off. =( A shame, Polymock was basically a Pokemon clone in the first game where you collected Polymock pieces and allowed them to battle eachother. In this game you have... belching contests... I didn't enjoy it as much (still pretty similar in concept though).

Just purchased the deluxe edition and waiting for it to install.

Wow, that's super tempting... but I really should listen to my better judgement and just say no! lol I've got plenty of variety of games I could be playing instead of getting sucked into an MMO! Great deal though!

You don't need to do it, no. It's all exclusive cosmetics and titles for the rewards, and if you've played any decent amount of GW1 you should already have a few of them unlocked in GW2.