It’s that time of year when the gates of Shing Jea Monastery are once again thrown open to celebrate the Dragon Festival in Guild Wars. This year the festival runs from Thursday, June 30th to Sunday, July 3rd – and features a visit from the Emperor himself!

The Shing Jea boardwalk is once again open, as are the Rollerbeetle racing games and the Dragon Arena. Special missions, including acting out key events from Canthan history, will be available from Imperial Guard Hanso in Shing Jea Monastery.

As always, the Dragon Festival is a great chance to boost your Hall of Monuments achievements by working on your Luck, Unlucky, Gamer, Drunkard, Sweet Tooth and Party Animal Title Tracks.

You can find the full festival schedule and more details on the Guild Wars Dragon Festival page.

One of the most interesting challenges facing players in Guild Wars 2 is exploring underwater. There’s going to be a huge amount of underwater content, so it will be interesting to find out more.

Over at the ArenaNet blog, Jonathan Sharp (a game designer at ArenaNet) has posted up some details on how underwater exploration and combat will work. One of the most interesting things is that all players automatically have a breathing apparatus – when you dive into the water, this will automatically be deployed, allowing you to breathe. Like all gear, players will be able to upgrade and customise their breathing apparatus.

Combat and health will also have some new mechanisms for players to get used to:

When you’re underwater, you don’t need to worry about breathing until your health goes to zero. When this happens you go into a drowning state, which functions like the downed state you experience when above water except with some small ability to move. When you are drowning, you have three ways to recover:

* You kill an opponent, which will cause you to rally.

* An ally can revive you, just as they can above water.

* You reach the surface of the water, where you will stop drowning and regain health. When your health bar fills all the way you’ll be revived.

Intriguingly, there will also be special underwater-only weapons and skills. Different underwater skills makes sense – land based traps or area of effect spells (especially fire ones!) don’t really make much sense underwater. As for the weapons:

We really wanted fighting underwater to be a new experience for the player, so we created a bunch of new weapons that you use ONLY underwater. This opens up a whole new spectrum of skills and tactics that you can use underwater and really distinguishes the feel and pacing of underwater combat from land combat.

You can read Jonathan’s full post on underwater exploration and combat in Guild Wars 2 at Underwater Combat.

A new Guild Wars 2 profession has been unveiled by ArenaNet – the Engineer – which promises to open up a new world of interesting gameplay.

Masters of mechanical mayhem, engineers tinker with explosives, gadgets, elixirs, and all manner of deployable devices. They can take control of an area by placing turrets, support their allies with alchemic weaponry, or lay waste to foes with a wide array of mines, bombs, and grenades.

If you think of the way a Dervish works – summoning spirits, using a mix of Ranger and Healer skills – then you’ve got the idea of how an Engineer will work. Using turrets and deployables like grenades and bombs – instead of spirits and traps – an Engineer seems like a natural extension of some of the abilities we see unveiled when the Asura appeared in Eye of the North.

You can get a good idea of how the Engineer will work in practice with this brief concept video:

Read more about the Engineer’s abilities on the Guild Wars 2 site here.