It’s Turtles All the Way Down
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.
