GeraldBC.4927

Change CAN be good if it is made with effort and healthy intentions. But not every change is intrinsically good and (most of) GW2's changes are more along the lines of bad fanfiction written by someone with a chip on their shoulder about every aspect of the source material. Everything from the source material is either downplayed, reframed as a bad thing or outright retconned into a bad thing. The gods are a perfect example. They came to Tyria and gave rise to entire nations across multiple continents, created various ways to defend Tyria and prolong the planet's lifespan and they were so invested into the well-being of the people that they fought wars among each other over what would be the best decision for them. Even in their absence, their influence persists through the souls of their most devoted servants and things like the 'favor of the gods'. There is some bad here and there, but there is also a lot of good and the good clearly outweighs the bad. Now try and find anything positive about the gods in GW2 that can't just be dismissed as religious humans playing favorites. You will fail. Every line of dialogue or ingame document found - even in SotO, only talks about how useless and destructive the gods were and how everything they do only makes things worse and basically screw the gods the gods were always bad. This even includes Kormir herself talking about the gods, when she has every reason to give credit where credit is due. They even brought Balthasar back and retconned him into being a sadistic cartoon villain, happy to kill random peasants for no reason all just to get the opportunity to murder one of the gods on-screen and feed his power into Aurene as a cherry on top. I'll have to put this more abstractly to help you understand it. So you have a story of any medium of your choice, and within it, there's a major character. It's a flawed character, they make a mistake here and there but overall they do a lot of good and they're clearly trying to do the right thing and become very popular as a result. Then you get a sequel to the story written by someone else and suddenly, everyone hates that character, everyone is talking smack about them, everyone across the board agrees that they are awful and that the world would be better off without them and there is no hint of irony or implied deception in those new takes. Not just that but even the character themselves agrees with this unanimous change of heart, has become self-loathing and is taking active measures to remove themselves from the picture. All at once, the moment the writing changed hands, everyone in the entire universe suddenly decided that they despise that character now. Could you seriously observe this drastic and one-sided shift without making inferences about the new author's likes and dislikes? I don't see why anyone should. And this doesn't just apply to the gods, just off the top of my head the same treatment was given to Adelbern, Gwen and the Ascalonians in general The Vabbians including the princes, Elona in general The Dwarves Joko

I'm in the same boat. For obvious reasons I hated how the new story additions throughout GW2 violated the lore of Guild Wars in ways that were petty and mean-spirited. Even in the new texts found in the world, some of that resentment against the first game's lore on the part of whoever wrote it still shines through. But something about certain developments around the time of the Silent Surf release and the SotO announcement like the complete shift on their balance philosophy gave me the impression that someone who wasn't at Anet before had taken the reins. Anet suddenly started implementing ideas that would seem intuitive and obvious to a regular person, but - judging by their actions - were considered blasphemous within the studio. Stuff like expanding crucial group boons to classes and specs that were treated as black sheep for years prior, buffing said black sheep classes to a point where they actually keep up with top performing builds and even outdo them for a brief time, overhauling the archaic daily system that had been in place for as long as the game itself, handing out larger amounts of rewards to the same accounts at no loss to themselves, adding bugfixes to dungeons that had been untouched for almost a decade, there was more but I don't remember it off hand. It gave me reason to believe that something crucial had changed internally right around the tunnel episode. I decided to give Anet a chance to prove me wrong on certain things and they did. They CAN improve, they CAN fix bugs. They can even make the previously unthinkable a reality and swap out Zojja's condescension for introspection. They actually took one of their darling characters who - at least previously - could never be wrong about something without the fabric of reality ripping apart - and made her stop and think: "Wait, am I in the wrong here?" This has not happened before. To whoever at Anet may be reading this, if any of the above speculation is accurate, if said new mystery person exists and makes a suggestion and you find yourself thinking "wait we can't do that", stop that thought immediately. Whatever he's suggesting to do this time, you CAN do it and going by past examples, you probably SHOULD do it as well.

I've done tons of rift hunting. Yes I know how many essences per rift you get. For starters, nobody actually spends 5 ectos just to get some extra t1 essences. So from the get-go your calculation is making false assumptions. That's not even mentioning the presumptuousness of that first line. Even if it was buffed and made more efficient than killing random overworld mobs, the fact that it can be avoided as a dedicated activity would effectively kill it. Stop begging anet to give you free essences and just farm them.

Rocket punch makes [weapon 3] on any weapon stronger than it is otherwise.

The engi's other traitlines are very good for bleed and burn. So to be a viable condi weapon, you need bleed or burn, not confusion. It COULD become an excellent condi and condi alac weapon if the confusion on 1 and 2 was replaced with bleed or burn. You'd have cc, you'd have extra barrier/alac, it would be perfect. Slapping confusion on that seems less like deliberate design and more like they just rolled it randomly.

Obviously there are some elements from EoD clearly recognizable. EoD had a lot of small, soloable overworld content with its shrine guardian chests and minidungeons and the Kaineng JP. And they had a justification for existing and people farming them: Jade Runestones. An item rarely, or in a few exceptions, guaranteed to be found in the many chests hidden throughout Cantha. And you need 100-200 runestones to create EoD legendaries and their skins. SotO seems to be designed with the same idea, at least at a certain point in development. You have all kinds of chests in the open world, the new zones have shrine guardian chests hidden throughout and you even have special minor and major arcane chests that require doing a minigame and which are locked behind masteries. The arcane chests and shrine guardian chests even contain unusual coins just like their counterparts in EoD did. But there is no point to farming them or even grabbing them as you pass by, because there is no special item found in them that people will need for the upcoming legendaries. Why did you go through the trouble of designing those chests if you weren't going to put anything inside that makes them worth opening?

Okay I didn't know that. I actually thought this was a little surprise thing where she has 27 different voice lines for that one line just to call you by your elite. Nevertheless, referring to a variable with an index-match or if-then statement or something simpler to that effect shouldn't be beyond the scope. In one case it makes zero sense as well. How am I supposed to believe that Uenno, an Asura, can't recognize the very crass and obvious differences between male and female humans/Norn/Sylvari? With Charr maybe, but other than that, the Asura are the least dimorphic playable race.

That idea is bad for the same reason why making convergences unlimited would be. If you can just get it from random overworld mobs, what point is there to do rift hunting?

If you can manage to get the possessed Dagda in the story instanced version of cosmic observatory to name you by your elite spec - which you've already accomplished - then there's no way that getting characters to refer to you by 'him' or 'her' based on your sex is too difficult.

If someone in the game actually told you that they play guild wars 2 as of today on a heroic edition account and actively played on this account long enough for it to be still active to this day and in all this time, they didn't buy an expansion, they were lying to you. If someone is invested enough in the game to actively play it for 10 years, they are also invested enough to buy one expansion. If someone claims they are one but not the other, you can safely assume that they are not being honest.

I'm not sure where to stand on this issue. On one hand this passage is entirely correct. On the other hand, all the alt account farmers generating mystic coins, could you imagine what would happen if they were all gone? What would happen to mystic coins? Then again, since you now can simply spend AA on gold at a rate that's currently better than MC, the effect wouldn't be that massive anymore. Maybe now would be the time to nuke all the heroic edition accounts. At least all the ones that don't have any expansions attached.

I was already saying that if Kryptis constitute demons (which they should) powerful potions of demon slaying will become basically obligatory when ToF CM comes out.

The first thing that sprung out to me seeing the prospective recipes is that they are somehow cheaper to make than envoy armor, on top of not being gated behind raids. Only half a set of condensed trophy gifts per piece? Really? That is of course unless the idea is that you only have might OR magic to make, but in exchange you have to make 2 for each piece.

They don't give you progress towards obsidian armor or the legendary relic, that's the difference. The essences, you know the ones that you can't just buy with gold? Those are the reward. You don't do it for the loot bag or the random bones dropped by the mobs, you do it for the essences. That's already accounted for, I already have a system for doing t2 and t3s for a fraction of the cost, ready to go when the generous donors are finished with donating motivations. People don't see the appeal now because there's still plenty of people with deep pockets willing burn through motivations, but even in the worst case scenario where that phase actually ends, there's already ways set up to solve it. Oh really, which ones? Raw materials and trophies? The same ones that are completely worthless unless there are material sinks to drain them out of the market? Those? Why would those matter? The goal of farming the new content is to get the new rewards. If you don't want the new rewards and you don't like the new content either, what is the issue? Nothing's changed at that point. Just continue farming old maps then. Is the issue that other people are farming it?

It's not as much of a material sink if you use your motivations efficiently. And if you have someone else donating theirs, it doesn't cost anything at all. That's the thing, it's as expensive as you make it, but it consumes resources which has a ripple effect of making older content more rewarding. WvW offered nothing unique. What, because of the siege mechanics? Oh boy siege weapons sure are something never seen in a game before. It's not like every mmo has something like this. Large online battles involving armies of players? Lineage did it, WoW did it, Ultima Online did it, Albion still does it today and they all do it better than GW2 with WvW. There is nothing fun about hyper-micro-managed zergs compressed into a single blurb consisting of overlapping player models, waiting for the comm to give the go on spamming boons and overrunning the enemy zerg. First off, there is nothing uniquely less fun about rifts than other overworld content. What, you'd rather do something else? Hoo boy, can't wait to get back to dragonfall or drizzlewood kittening coast, can you? Maybe even do octovine for the bajillionth time. And aside from that, the system makes perfect sense. Where is all this nonsense even coming from of the content 'offering nothing in return' or 'ripping off' players? It's the same system as Aurene Legendaries in EoD and just like with Aurene legendaries, it offers you legendaries in return. The only difference is that the new system for the new legendaries actually forces you to engage with it in some capacity via essences, bottled lightning and stardust. I actually like rifts as an overworld thing because It's not stressful (unlike a lot of instanced content) There is no minimum time required to do it properly, you can do lots of rifts or only a few rifts and the approximate amount of essences per rift stays the same (unlike fishing where you need to commit to those stacks one way or another whether or not you use jerky) You can start and stop doing rifts any time you want (unlike overworld metas which have specific 2-hour timers) It doesn't depend heavily on RNG because while the amount may vary, you ALWAYS get essences from every rift boss, every single boss gives you some degree of progress towards whatever legendary you're farming them for, guaranteed. (unlike jade runestones which are heavily RNG outside of very few, very specific chests) You don't even have to search or wait for the events, you essentially cause them to happen yourself.

They are a material sink, both to create a more self-sustaining material sink and to offer players a choice. Spend more gold/resources on motivations and use them on every rift so you can farm your essences faster or get together with others and take turns opening rifts so you get more bang for your buck. And that's a good thing. Any tier of rifts not sustaining itself in terms of essences is crucial to the entire system making sense. If you could sustain t3 rifts just by doing t3 rifts, what point would there be in t1 and t2 existing? It's not like you need to touch them beyond the bare minimum to get to t3. So I do hope that if convergences give all three tiers of essences, that there is some hard cap on how many of them you can farm, because otherwise it will invalidate all three tiers of rifts.

The point of the rift/motivation system is that a cost is intrinsically attached to every rift, which gives motivations their value. If motivations are just issued for free on meta completion, they become worthless. They wouldn't even be worth the materials it takes to craft them. An item where the whole is worth less than the sum of its parts.

It's already been teased that there will be convergences, big rifts that are instanced, give essences from all tiers and that require a not yet existing fourth tier of motivation to open. I'm concerned that if those are too good and have no limitation, that regular rifts will be rendered completely obsolete and effectively cease to exist as a group activity, defeating any purpose in adding them to the game in the first place. Why would someone go through the trouble of farming T1-T3 rifts if they can get all the essences they need by spamming this new, better rift? The first solutions that occur to me are to give convergences some limitation like a timegate. You can only craft one T4 motivation per day, it works the same way as ectoplasm refinement. You can only earn rewards from one convergence per day. You can only earn rewards from up to 5 convergences per week (rewards are issued via a weekly rift hunting achievement)

While playing throughout the first week, I actually started taking notes of all the bugs I stumbled on at some point. Posting it here, because the bug subforum is infamous for being ignored to the point where I have to infer that some at Anet might not even know it exists. General ⦁ The Kryptis bosses' green mechanic can be cheesed by avoiding line of sight from the boss. ⦁ If you are trying to do the Fractal Push achievement for Act 2 mastery, collecting essences during the meta progresses the optional route and can lock you out of getting Fractal Push if you collect too many. ⦁ At least you can replay the chapter to attempt it again but this still seems like an oversight Skywatch Archipelago ⦁ Some dialogue from Peitha triggered by entering certain areas are localized so if you fly around, you drift away from her voice. She keeps talking anyway. ⦁ Sometimes the event "Stop the angry dwarves from causing a panic." bugs out where the dwarves stop doing anything and Vhalin can't be interacted with. ⦁ The event "Help Battlemaster Flintfoot prepare new trainees for combat." Has the same problem as the event named above. ⦁ Chests spawned after Mabon opens the wizard's tower, continue to show on the minimap after opening them when treasure sensor is equipped. ⦁ In the escort event with Elrik the dwarf, if Galene the Seething has spawned, she will interfere with the escort event and kill Elrik if not stopped. ⦁ The Kryptis rift west of the burning fortress in the skyward marches sometimes has all its mob spawns blocked so there's no krytpis to kill and fill the pre-event bar with Amnytas ⦁ Chests spawned after Nourys is defeated, continue to show on the minimap after opening them when treasure sensor is equipped. ⦁ In "Help Zizel prepare concoctions for the fight against the Kryptis.", when you finish brewing a concoction, it says "Place the concoction in the bin next to Zizel" when the 'bin' is clearly a crate. ⦁ In "Help Forro purge corruption from the animals and return them home.", all the cleansed animals have extremely bizarre paths after using the flute on them. They're hugging pillars, moving sideways to their destinations (in the case of the skyscales), something is very obviously wrong here. The flute also doesn't work unless you are targeting the animal specifically and it does not refresh the 'charmed' buff when used while the animal is still charmed. You have to wait for it to run out and then use it again. This is awkward and unnecessary. ⦁ The Shrine Guardian chest near the Astral Ward Training Grounds is badly placed and has spatial overlap with the crate next to it when it spawns. This is an issue with many shrine guardian chests. ⦁ The platform defense event with Livia does not give credit towards the event if you stand on the platform and shoot enemies with the SAK rifle. ⦁ The Kryptis rift at Equilibrium Glade is a particularly egregious case of awkward scaling found with all kryptis pre-events. The progress bar fills up at a painfully slow pace and there's so few enemies that squads trying to complete it end up constantly waiting for respawns. There might be some nemeies spawning INSIDE the hall of balance, but I couldn't see if that was true because the entrance is locked until after Lyhr's escort event. ⦁ The event "Escort Lyhr to the halls of debate so he can rebalance himself." frequently bugs out at the start. When the counter for players in the circle reaches 5, it gets stuck at 5 and he refuses to start. This event remains bugged and its chain undoable until the map resets. ⦁ The fact that all event chains interrupt when the meta begins is very frustrating. ⦁ "Can't complete Amnytas Mastery Achievement due to bugged Seer collection." ⦁ The descriptions and hints in the shine guardian chest achievement "Fantastic Flying Foxes" seem to be placeholders that arenanet has forgotten to replace with actual hints. There's no cheesy hints and tips where to find the chests, just names of locations and for instance, 'Bastion of Strength' is listed 3 times, identically. ⦁ Chest number 22, listed as "Thaumaturgy Park" in 'Fantastic Flying Foxes' is bugged. If you enter the circles, the fourth circle simply leads you back to the start. It took completing this one several times for the chest to appear.

I was going to make a standalone thread with a colossal multi-section post giving extensive feedback on every aspect of the expansion, but I guess shortening each point to one or two lines is better. General main story campaign Colossal step up from any story content from the last 10 years. Quality of storytelling has gone up from "Bad fanfiction that has little to do with the source material" in S3 all the way to EoD, to "Actual western fantasy story warranting its budget, about a clearly defined struggle between good and evil" in SotO. New characters are more memorable, interesting and likeable at first sight. Would happily trade the cast from S1 onwards for the wizards any day. With Zojja, the impossible has been achieved: A Felicia Day character has acquired introspection and was stripped of her arrogance and condescension towards the commander and others, making her actually likeable as a result. Skywatch Archipelago Loved the overall design and the basic ideas, the perfect excuse to have elements from all past expansions and core compressed into one map, even with a few new models here and there. Resurrecting the dwarven race was a daring and courageous decision and I look forward to seeing what the dwarves do in the future I wish they had gone much more crazy with leylines, updrafts and ley looms. Imagine putting them everywhere and even creating a shortcut from the beacon to Droknar or shattered atoll via ley loom. I actually liked the meta fitting into the story in a direct way, even though the execution was rocky due to how awkwardly the 'fractal push' achievement is designed. I will expand on that in a bug related post Amnytas Lots of games acknowledge the idea of the gold-plated marble aesthetic, but a lot of them shy away from exploring it with a full-fledged open world map like this Like with Skywatch, I wish they had gone much more crazy with placing updrafts, leylines and ley looms everywhere The city being conquered by Kryptis all over and having to reclaim it as one travels through it is a nice change. I was worried it would just be Kaineng 2 Nouris has a massive issue that I feel is worth mentioning outside of the bugs: The 'maw of Nouris' as an object obstructs people from using skills, so any skill that isn't a projectile or melee attack is simply 'obstructed' and cannot be used. This is disruptive to many characters and classes. Just like in Skywatch, I like that the 'daily meta item' (bottled lightning, pouch of stardust) can be farmed towards outside of the meta by means of regular events rewarding static charges/pinches of stardust that one can combine into bottles and pouches at any provisioner. Collections and Secrets Completely riddled with bugs, in some cases very disruptive ones too. Entire achievements seem unfinished. 'Fantastic Flying Foxes' comes to mind with the descriptions just being names of rough locations and 'Bastion of Strength' featuring 3 times for 3 different chests A lot of effort was put into filling the world with documents or sidequest-collections that unlock dialogue for extra lore, but there is no creativity exercised in filling the canvases created. A lot of the hidden lore comes down to either "Screw GW1 and all its lore especially humans and their gods!" or "This wizard's backstory is being gay, wow such deep and interesting lore." This was boring, unimaginative and overdone a decade ago. Even more so now. Rifts Bounties redesigned to become the organized overworld group activity that OG bounties were SUPPOSED to be. Underrated, could be a nice relaxing experience if approached correctly Great idea on its face, but as is often the case, the playerbase found ways to take a fun idea and make it unfun, needlessly wasteful or both in their endless pursuit of minmaxing efficiency Wizard's Vault Big improvement and provides a good framework for making dailies/weeklies/special objectives more interesting Provides a sense of direction like actual daily quests much better than the original daily achievements Feels much more rounded out with some vestigial elements like slivers and writs of experience finally removed Some of the wizard's vault objectives are too vague and non-specific to provide the sense of direction they're intended to create. Like "Complete 10 events." "Kill X (non-specific) enemies." "Complete 3 Group Events." "Complete any Strike Mission." "Break 1 enemy defiance bar." Counter example for correct amount of direction: "Complete 1 Kryptis Bounty Event." (makes you seek out content of a specific expansion) Dailies involve returning to old minidungeons like Valdhertz Crypts which remain riddled with bugs that are in this case, gamebreaking. Don't actively herd players into buggy messes like that. I know that this has been 'addressed', but simply fixing Valdhertz would resolve the issue as well. Make it so multiple people can complete the dungeon together and still open all the chests and make the doors between rooms open, even if the enemies die a little too fast. Weapon masteries Made new builds possible in all game modes Class balance with weapon mastery included lacks polish, lots of pre-existing weaknesses in various specs are highlighted by the change like specter shroud being laughably weak A lot of weapons rendered obsolete due to better alternatives now being accessible to all specs, weapons like revenant swords and engi swords need a major rework to make up for this Skyscale masteries Liked the masteries themselves a lot, I just wish they had done more with them in the new maps, as mentioned above. Final comment: I think you may have overshot the goal a teensy tiny bit with how much it costs to make the new exotic skin set. I also have this long list of bugs I noted down in the course of a week, but I'm not sure where to put those.

I don't see where the issue is. 'Simulacrum Skyscale Skins' that are modeled after elder dragons sounds like a great idea.

Fractal rewards are limited in what you can farm on one account on purpose. You want everything to be as massive as fractal encryptions? You want the kitchen sink too while you're at it? This is just on par with the usual Antique Summoning Stones haven't been removed from the game. They still exist and you can still make legendaries with them. And the newest strikes are normal modes. EoD normal modes didn't give kitten* either. Edit: Don't you think you're overdoing it with the word filter when people can't even abbreviate Antique Summoning Stones?

Gold reward to the tune of 2-4 gold on completion (weekly like raids and EoD strikes) Green shards which you can use to buy mystic coins (daily) Chests with exos/rares and a chance at a free ascended weapon What more do you want? This is plenty good.

It's just the pendulum swinging in the other direction after a literal decade of keeping the necro nerfed into irrelevance. No amount of power on the scourge is ever too much. Scourge could be benching 80K and I'd still say it's deserved.

i noticed it too and it's something I will mention when I post everything I've written down. The problem is that the maw of Nouris (object) is blocking your sight from the maw of Nouris (hitbox), so any and all tab targeted skills do not work because you can't see the target, at least in the game's opinion. Kralkatorrik's weak points have a similar problem that remains unfixed to this day.