GeraldBC.4927

There kind of is but not really.

I'm very positively surprised with the story. A miraculous leap up from what they've made before. Whoever was involved in designing that deserves a raise, preferably at the expense of the people responsible for EoD. I want to make an extensive feedback post/thread sometime but I want to wait with that for until I've played the rest of the expansion some more. My only criticism towards the narrative design is that the heart of the obscure is casually handed to the player, yet treated like it's this rare or unique artifact that makes the commander special for wielding it, when every other player chara- I mean rift hunter in the overworld seems to have one of their own.

First off, to dismiss that concern, this isn't another thread complaining about the relic system existing or nerfing runes. This has nothing to do with that, save maybe for the fact that it concerns relics. I see one (potentially) last issue that needs mentioning, in a separate thread so it is unmistakably separated from all the whining on the idea of the relic system itself. With the examples shown in screencaps added in the blogpost explaining relics or one of the articles published by game news outlets, it's clear that the idea behind relics is that you can customize your toolkit with a range of different special effects and abilities triggered by skills or effects triggered by other conditions. Which sounds good, it sounds like it could make things a lot more interesting. COULD is not a guarantee. In PVE, the meta obviously for any and all power dps builds is to take scholar or thief runes. Why? Because their 6 part bonus effects - their 'relics' - give you a flat damage increase by 5% or 10% respectively. It's reliable, guaranteed and affects all your damage, not just one skill. I need to emphasize that an across-the-board damage multiplier like this is MASSIVE if you tally up all the individual skills and traits affected by it. So most likely on release, scholar and thief relics will remain the only relics used for any and all power/strike damage builds. Everyone will exclusively be using flat damage increase relics and the same will go for healing if 'monk relics' are a thing. So to make up for that, if new relics and relics with special effects are to have any relevance, one of two conditions needs to apply. Either the flat damage/healing increase relics need to be removed as a choice (eg integrated into every class by default leaving the relic slot open) or the bonus effects/triggered skills from new relics better hit like a truck. If you're going to expect people to break the egg that is across-the-board damage multipliers, those new effects better be the mother of all omelets.

If you don't specifically plan on killing something, avoid getting hit at all as a baseline, that way you never enter combat in the first place. If you did get into combat anyway, simply run out of the train station/vantage point area and towards the outer part of the arena. As long as you don't have condis ticking on you or from you, that will get you out of combat.

Whose idea was to schedule this for release day instead of one month later?

Reading comprehension And yes, the tunnel events give you plenty of opportunities to mount back up as well.

This is plain and simply not true. You do not need the turtles for anything other than collecting energy. Once you've collected the energy, you don't even need to be mounted to charge the stations. And you can't charge the stations until the mobs have been killed. So if you stay mounted, you're just standing there waiting for someone else to kill the mobs. All of which are scaled up assuming that both you and them would fight them. You are slowing everyone involved down for no reason. If you dismount, you can help kill the mobs so people can get to charging the station. Again: You don't need to be mounted to charge it. The moment the circles are blue, the beam connects. Not only that but the mobs are set up to go for the stations specifically, so if you just run maybe 10 meters away from the stations, you already get out of combat and can mount back up to collect more energy. You lose nothing by dismounting. What's even worse is when people stay mounted for the hearts. The defiance bar is broken, the stations are disabled, there is no purpose to being on the mount. The hearts aren't like walls or gates, they take normal on-foot damage. And people will have the above told to them and they still stay mounted. They know better, they just choose to use the fact that the turtle has any use at all as an excuse to leech. And it will be the same with skyscales unless some feature is included that prevents it. In fact it will be worse because the floating skyscales will be cluttering up everyone's vision on top of it.

Yes. I wouldn't be opposed if people had a tool that lets them go "You there. Get off your kitten skyscale and help us!" and force them to dismount. I'd even suggest making it so if someone gets dismounted by the heart, their in-combat mounting is on cooldown for a minute.

Now I see a lot of uses for the upcoming masteries for the skyscale and griffon, but I and many others already see problems caused by it on the horizon. Primarily, this issue lies intrinsically with mounted combat and was already creeping up in gyala delve with siege turtles before. A lot of random tagalongs misunderstand the functionality of the siege turtle and end up spending the entire final boss mounted, trying to kill scaled-up champion mobs and haze hearts using turtle skills only and thus of course, dragging out the meta way more than need be. To extremes where it almost fails at times. With skyscale fireballs, this problem is coming to every meta in the game. Unless something is done to clearly curb that, people will mistake the skyscale's ability to inflict small amounts of damage while remaining mounted as license to spend entire overworld bossfights floating in place, spamming fireballs. Clogging up everyone's vision with the giant flapping wings of their mount. Imagine trying to complete Dragon's End but 25 out of 50 people spend the entire fight floating 3 meters above ground spamming their fireball. And not just with Soo-Won, but with every fight, the area you're trying to overlook is going to be filled with skyscales. Death-Branded Shatterer? Maw of Mordremoth? Chak Gerent? Whatever the new maps offer? So many metas the completion of which we take for granted are going to start failing for lack of anyone affecting the fight in a tangible way. There needs to be some kind of solution. Something that clearly, visibly and viscerally tips players towards realizing that they are not supposed to sit on their mount all the time. It has to be conveyed to them in a way that they can't ignore, even if they try to. I can think of a few quick fix solutions which I will list, but I will leave coming up with a more elegant solution to the professionals. -place an anti-skyscale aura on old meta bosses that forcibly dismounts them and keeps them from mounting back up, similarly to how jumping puzzles work -create an additional mastery for the heart of the obscure that allows players to charge and fire a lightning strike at another player IF they are mounted on a skyscale. The lightning damages the skyscale by more than a third of it's max health and the cooldown is short enough that it can be reused before the mounted player starts regenerating health. The main problem with any forced dismounting is that with the in-combat mounting mastery, people can just immediately mount back up. It always has to be coupled with something that prevents them from doing so afterwards. No matter what one may argue against the above, the fact of the matter is that I don't want to spend every overworld meta with 20 skyscales flying around in my face and neither do you.

I'm calling this one now: "Shadow of Nayos" is a title just like "Scythe of House Aurkus" and it's actually just Scarlet as a demon. And no, this is not far-fetched or even unprecedented. 3 words: Maw of Torment.

Elementalist has 4 separate sets of weaponskills for every weapon. So even a one-hand weapon like pistol still gives him 12 new skills.

Please tell me this isn't New Kaineng 2 where it's just a friendly open world city AS an overworld zone. I hope there is some twist to it where either the astral ward is driven out of the city one story instance in, or the city's authorities have been taken over by an enemy.

You didn't even read the post you're replying to. Right now, the different classes and specs are close enough that one can choose between different classes and specs without social repercussions. This includes condi holosmith. You can choose based on personal preference, because the differences aren't so vast that they disrupt the gameplay. Barely anyone plays holosmith in general, not to mention condi holosmith. But if say, the game's balancing was so out of wack that condi holosmith benches 70k dps and everything else 20k, everyone would be forced to play condi holosmith against their will. That is a failed state for balancing, even a less exaggerated case would be. Nothing I said in the OP or the post you replied to, is false.

You are making the fundamental error of letting 'perfect' become the enemy of 'good'. While making all builds and specs 100% equivalent numerically may be impossible, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to approximate it. What is possible is to even out the effectiveness of different specs and builds sufficiently that players at least have the option to choose between them in a social setting. To stick with the vindicator vs herald example, the absolute benchmark of a power herald may be higher than that of a vindicator, but they are still close enough that people won't just kick you for playing vindicator instead. If the differences between different specs and builds are too vast, the weaker variants will just be gatekept out of existence. That is the exact thing you'll want to avoid. At that point, you may as well call it quits on balancing between builds and simply make presets that don't have any trait or gearing choices.

If elite spec weapons are to be made accessible from within core classes and other elite specs, then this means that A LOT of tuning on all specs needs to be made, or else every class will effectively be reduced to a single elite spec. I will explain. Obviously, different elite specs within the same class are not identical to one another. Some have stronger utilities than others or stronger profession mechanics and others have weaker utilities and profession mechanics, but make up for it with having a stronger weapon attached. But if every elite spec can access the weapons attached to other elite specs, every 'correct' build will simply involve combining the elite spec with the strongest utilities/elites/healskills and profession mechanics with the strongest weapon they can find in another elite spec. An example that comes to mind is vindicator VS herald. The vindicator's unique jumps and legend are overall weaker than the herald's traits and abilities, but he compensates for that by having a strong weapon with the greatsword. But if every spec can access greatswords, every power revenant is basically forced to combine herald with the vindicator's greatsword and both other specs as well as any builds associated are effectively removed from the endgame. This issue will play out with other classes as well, but it can be countered by balancing out the specs themselves with each other directly, rather than the effective sum of each spec with its associated weapon. For the revenant, that might mean giving the vindicator stronger jumps or buffing the alliance stance skills. Or it could mean making the scrapper's gyros stronger.

Lots of people wonder about this. Rather than giving an actual estimate on whether they will make it take provisioner tokens to get overworld armor, I'll offer a hypothetical instead. How mad would you be, if -Obsidian Armor (or however they call it) takes a gift of craftsmanship to make BUT -There are new faction provisioners in the new zones offering tokens for items from the new content, ergo you can get more provisioner tokens per day than before.

My guess so far is that there will be a currency that's very similar to elegy mosaics. And whether it's the armor or the relic, you'll need a lot of them to make it. This is the aesthetic all the kryptis should have. And I maintain that they probably already made Kryptis models that look like this, but someone that's anti-fun decided to veto those designs.

Zojja being forced to show some introspection on her behavior prior to the mordrem pod. But that's only if Arenanet can overcome their paralyzing fear of portraying a female character as anything other than the dreaded M-S word.

This line of thinking is why for almost the entire game's lifespan, necro specs were consistently kept sub-standard compared to most other classes. Reapers now stick out as seemingly op to you, because necros being bottom-of-the-barrel has long been accepted as the norm. It's one of those rare times where most necro specs can actually keep up with the rest of the roster, don't immediately beg for this to change.

That is a good point. That may be part of why they decided to make rifts bounty-like in the sense that they don't appear unless someone is actually making efforts to open them. Randomly appearing kryptis invasions definitely should involve veterans at most, simply so new players can still beat them even if they're on their own.

You don't need the expansion to get a scholar relic. It'll be what they call a 'core relic'. It's already available, the only price tag is the one in the trading post. If the thing you're actually bemoaning is having to go to the trading post or craft it, then all I can respond with is "Yes and?" I'll have to repeat it just because I find it funny that this is seen as some heinous injustice: You will walk to the trading post. You will buy your relic for 50 silver and you will like it. In fact what I'd find even funnier is, you know how two of the meta runesets in PvE are from dungeons? What if nightmare and monk relics required dungeon tokens to get? Potentially more than the runes.

Obviously it's written to be comical, I don't actually think wearing an exotic item is the end of the world. But I meant every word otherwise. See this is part of what I mean. You're guilty of overblowing it as well at least in this element specifically. The whole "They're just taking runes way and then selling runes back to us." is disingenuous on multiple levels. The fact that you repeat this meme at least 3 times in a span of 2 posts only makes it worse. The functionality of the original runes ultimately remains in the game, at no additional cost to the player aside from maybe one gold for a relic. If we assume that core relics retain the name of the runes they were taken from, nothing is stopping you from simply combining scholar runes with a scholar relic, nightmare runes with a nightmare relic, etc. No expansion needed for those. The actual thing that is sold are additional relics that weren't in the game before. And obviously as some even understand, the reason the legendary relic is part of the expansion as opposed to a core item handed out for free, is because it incorporates the new relics that are specific to the expansion. The closest thing to any remotely justifiable criticism I can come up with for the relic system, is legendary relics not being part of the expansion release. But even that, in light of the reactions the announcement got, I have to rescind because I can see a tangible reason to delay doing so (aside from time constraints due to the expansion itself being a short-hand decision forced onto Anet by a controller from NCSoft). It's to force people, even veterans who are completely covered in legendaries, to engage with the gearing system or whatever 'relic unlocking system' they're setting up. Look at how shook, how terrified they are at the mere thought of having to buy or craft an item - even if it's a single one - for different builds separately. As people have joked about elsewhere, the whole thing ultimately comes down to this: Vets: "We're bored! We have legendaries for every slot and now we have nothing to do! Give us something to do!" Anet: "We took one of your rune traits and turned it into a standalone item for you to grind." Vets: "Wait, no! Not like this!"

You and I both know the exact kinds of copes they would lean on to dismiss what I say. "He only says relics are fine because he doesn't have legendary runes himself! He doesn't know the plight and suffering of us rune-havers!" "He only wants to inconvenience veterans who went through the trouble of crafting runes unlike him!" And now that I have 7, neither of those fly. I can say with no excuse to downplay it, that I'm glad to have those runes and that those runes give me a QoL advantage, even after the introduction of relics.

Unless I misunderstood them, what it will entail is -Wizard's Tower city/outpost -Flying city overworld map -Sky island overworld map -Some new masteries, at least one of which relates to rifts -Classwide Espec weapons and 1 or 2 new weapon choices per class -some vague 'wizard's tower' system, no idea what that will be I believe (or hope) that the 'choice of 3 core relics sent to you on release' merely refers to the ones you get for free on release and there will be more core relics to be crafted/found with effects based on the 6th rune bonuses from the previous system.

Joko says hi