Jumping puzzles: the content with no combat and no group

Somewhere in the middle of your third or fourth evening a floating platform will catch your eye, and you will spend forty minutes finding out what is on top of it. That is a jumping puzzle, and nothing in the game tells you they exist.

They are the only content here with no combat, no group and no timer. Just a route somebody hid in the geometry of a map you have already walked through twenty times.

What you get for finishing one

The chest at the end resets daily, per account. Not per character: doing Troll’s Revenge on your ranger and again on your necromancer pays once.

The chest itself is a Grand, Splendid or Magnificent Chest depending on the puzzle, and the contents are respectable rather than remarkable. Nobody farms jumping puzzles for gold, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling a video.

🔴 The rule worth writing down: puzzles that award a chest count as events for Wizard’s Vault objectives, with exactly five exceptions. Caledon Forest, Metrica Province, Wayfarer Foothills, Plains of Ashford and Queensdale do not count.

Those five are the starter zones. Which means the puzzles a new player is most likely to find first are precisely the ones that will not tick the objective, and plenty of people conclude the system is broken when it is working as written.

Where to start

Goemm’s Lab in Metrica Province and Morgan’s Leap in Caledon Forest are the two to try first. Both are long rather than precise, both give you room to fail, and neither drops you somewhere that costs five minutes to climb back from.

Troll’s Revenge in Lion’s Arch is the next step up and the one most players remember, partly because it starts in a city you already know and ends somewhere you had no idea existed.

After that the difficulty scatters. There is no rating system, no tier list built into the game, and a puzzle in a level 25 zone can be harder than one in Orr.

Mounts do not save you

The instinct after unlocking a springer is that jumping puzzles are now solved.

They are not. Most puzzles disable mounts inside them, and the ones that do not were usually designed after mounts existed and account for them. A skyscale can occasionally get you to an entrance faster, and there are a couple of famous shortcuts, and none of that touches the puzzle itself.

The same goes for gliding. It changes the recovery from a mistake more than the route.

Which is the point. Every other traversal problem in Guild Wars 2 was eventually solved by giving you a better animal. Jumping puzzles are the one place still asking you to be the thing that gets it right.

Why people keep doing them

There is no leaderboard. The chest is small. Nobody in map chat will congratulate you.

And yet the moment you finish one is disproportionate to all of that, because for twenty minutes you were the only thing standing between you and the top, and nothing scaled itself down to help. Guild Wars 2 spends most of its design effort making sure you never feel stuck. Jumping puzzles are where it stops doing that, on purpose, in a corner, for anybody who wants it.

If you have been playing for a while and cannot remember the last time the game made you nervous, go and stand at the bottom of one.