It’s Turtles All the Way Down
Saturday. It's cold and wet outside, and another early morning after a broken night of sleep. V is working in Folkestone today, and Gubs has an open day at Kent University, which he’s attending with a few of his friends. I am having a chilled and sleepy day at home, with the resolve to remain steadfastly in my PJs, drinking copious mugs of tea and playing a metric fuckton of Guild Wars 2. I took this screenshot as we adventured through the tortuous trails of Verdant Brink hunting Hero Points; in this image, taking a well-earned break at the controls of our siege turtle.
Verdant Brink
Verdant Brink, the first major zone in Guild Wars 2’s Heart of Thorns expansion, is the gateway to the Heart of Maguuma region. This zone vividly portrays the aftermath of the Pact’s catastrophic assault on Mordremoth, the jungle dragon. The landscape is dominated by towering vines and the smouldering wreckage of airships, creating a visually striking and perilous environment that sets the tone for the expansion.
The zone introduces players to Itzel hylek, a local tribe of frog-like creatures who have allied with the Pact survivors. The Itzel play a pivotal role in the zone’s events, offering unique rewards in exchange for Airship Parts, which are scattered throughout the area. Their presence underscores the theme of collaboration in the face of adversity, as both the Pact and the Itzel strive to survive in a hostile environment.
Verdant Brink features a dynamic day-night cycle that significantly influences gameplay. During the day, players focus on securing outposts, gathering survivors, and assembling defences. As night falls, the zone transforms into a battleground, with Mordrem forces launching relentless attacks. Players must defend rally points and recover supplies, culminating in challenging encounters with powerful Mordrem lieutenants in the jungle canopy.
The zone is renowned for emphasising vertical exploration and combat, a departure from the more horizontal design of previous Guild Wars 2 maps. Players navigate multiple layers of the jungle, from the forest floor to the towering canopy, utilising new Mastery abilities such as gliding, updraft use, and bouncing mushrooms. These mechanics are essential for fully exploring the zone and gaining access to its hidden areas. Verdant Brink also introduces five adventure challenges, offering unique gameplay experiences and rewards.
The design of Verdant Brink reflects several core themes of the Heart of Thorns expansion. The zone embodies the struggle for survival in a hostile environment, with its dangerous terrain and relentless Mordrem threats. The verticality of the map encourages multi-layered exploration and combat, while the dynamic day-night cycle adds depth and variety to the player experience. Additionally, the zone serves as a showcase for the new Mastery system, with its layout and challenges designed to highlight abilities like gliding and updraft use.
Verdant Brink’s development marked a significant evolution in Guild Wars 2’s approach to zone design. The map’s vertical structure, combined with its dynamic events and emphasis on survival, creates a complex and immersive environment. The inclusion of the Itzel tribe and the remnants of the Pact further enriches the zone’s narrative, illustrating the collaboration between disparate groups in the face of overwhelming odds.
Siege Turtles
The Siege Turtle, added with End of Dragons in February 2022, is Guild Wars 2’s first true co‑op combat mount: one creature, two players, and a design that leans more into shared firepower than pure movement. It arrives with a lot of baggage in the best sense of the word, carrying forward a concept first seen in Guild Wars: Factions while folding it into Cantha’s new jade‑tech era.
Back in Factions, Luxon siege turtles were lumbering artillery pieces trundling over the frozen Jade Sea, used to escort caravans and break Kurzick defences in missions like Fort Aspenwood and The Eternal Grove. They were hard to interrupt, shrugged off most harassment, and sat somewhere between mobile fortress and cultural icon within the Luxon armada. End of Dragons picks up that thread a couple of centuries later: Luxon descendants in modern Cantha are still breeding and training these creatures, but now they are harnessed to jade thrusters, reinforced saddles, and gem‑powered guns, more light tank than living catapult.
In play, the mount splits responsibilities cleanly. The driver controls movement, a momentum‑based sprint, drifting turns, and a forward slam that can damage groups of enemies without dismounting anyone. The gunner, perched on the back, aims and fires twin jade cannons in arcing ground‑targeted blasts, with a limited magazine that refills more quickly when the turtle is moving at speed. The health pool sits around 40,000, making it comfortably tougher than a player on foot, and the mount has the unusual ability to walk along the seafloor instead of swimming when it drops into deep water, a trait it shares only with a mastered skimmer. Idle animations—like the driver slumping in the command chair when nothing’s happening—give it a bit of personality beyond raw stats.
To keep it from overtaking regular builds, the Siege Turtle’s damage is tuned as strong, situational burst rather than a replacement for full rotations. Cannon volleys can hit multiple targets for several thousand damage and apply burning, which feels great in events and dense encounters, but the ammo limit and reload pacing mean it works best when paired with other sources of damage rather than relied on exclusively. Some enemies also have explicit resistances or quirks that make them less vulnerable to siege‑type attacks, nudging players back towards standard skills when the turtle is not the right tool.
Unlocking your own turtle is a process rather than a one‑off drop. It starts with getting a turtle egg, either as a reward for successfully completing the Dragon’s End meta, “The Battle for the Jade Sea”, or by buying it from a Peddler for 200 Writs of the Jade Sea if the meta keeps slipping away. The egg isn’t a physical inventory item; it silently opens the “Stomping Around” achievement, which chains into three sub‑collections: Turtle Unlock: Starting Small, Getting Stronger, and Suiting Up. Starting Small has you feed the hatchling stacks of chopped kale, carrots, lettuce and strawberries; Getting Stronger moves on to fish fillets and a few simple tasks; Suiting Up sends you around Cantha to gather saddle and tech parts like Luxon Tools, Turret Plans, a Turret Power Unit from Seitung Province’s meta, Alleola Oil, Deluxe Leather Seating from leviathan events, Thruster Plans, and a Thruster Control Unit. When everything is in place, you return to Rota in Arborstone and finally receive a fully grown Siege Turtle.
Behind the scenes, the mount represents a solved design problem. ArenaNet had floated the idea of two‑person mounts back in the Path of Fire era but parked it until they could find a use case that justified the complexity. The Siege Turtle arrives as that use case: a mount that is fun precisely because it asks two people to cooperate, but that is also limited enough—via ammo, handling, and encounter design—not to trivialise content. Players have embraced it as much for its social value as for its combat uses, rolling into Drizzlewood Coast, Dragonstorm, and open‑world metas with a second person on the guns and treating it as a kind of Tyria‑flavoured warthog.
Little touches round it out. The mount’s visual design draws on Galápagos tortoises and long‑standing myths of world‑bearing turtles, and in‑game lore notes its fondness for carrots, a detail leaned on in the feeding collections. Finishing those achievements unlocks a miniature baby turtle for your home instance, and the jade tech plating and colour‑selectable saddle pieces give enough room for personalisation without undermining the sense that this is a big, shared piece of machinery. It ends up occupying a specific, memorable niche: less all‑purpose than a raptor or skyscale, but unmistakably itself whenever you and a friend decide it is time to roll out on something with cannons and a shell.
