Kondor.2904

As far as I'm aware after reading several posts about "back in the day", exotics were not easy to acquire, it costed as much as it costs to gear full ascended right now (well, maybe not exactly right now, but you get the point) and it was very common for player to do instanced content undergeared. What exactly are the end game goals if not legendaries (to lesser extent ascended) and gearing then ? Getting emotes and gemstore skins ? I wouldn't say there's anything besides gearing, extremely rare infusions and probably titles that can be considered a long term end game goal.

You are not.

Exactly my point.

According to whom ? According to me, that's why I created the thread and am expressing my opinion about the new rewards. Most of the relevant things in the game include trade-offs where you can't just get everything at the same time with low effort imput, which I think is the right thing. Well, if anyone keeps projecting their own experience on the purpose of this thread, it may boil down to that. I stated several times that it has nothing to do with me having to put more effort than newer players into something. It's more about putting any sort of effort, and I don't think you should encourage apathetic player behavior such as that, which may lead to even more unhealthy tendencies within the game imo. I also don't agree with your points about older maps being more difficult or empty. I actually started doing HoT, LW3, as well as all the subsequent achievements and collection way after its initial release and popularity spike. I had absolutely zero troubles doing any event or any achievement, or completing Chalice of Tears, or finishing any meta event, or obtaining any item. Absolutely zero troubles, and I'm not exactly sure why and what causes this weird propaganda. Yeah, sure it's not as faceroll as it is during launch, but it's far far from being hard or impossible. I actually also relatively recently finished all my core Tyria achievements from the side stories, and I still had absolutely zero troubles doing any of the events or achievements even though the maps are much less populated and player engaged. I'm also continuing to work on my aurora collection right now, and it's absolutely disgusting how everything just effortlessly gets handled to me compared to when I did few first achievements prior to Seasons of Dragons thing. Absolutely doesn't feel like anything legendary related.

How is that related to in-game progression again ? If a new/veteran player chooses to prioritize cosmetics, that's on him, and you are not supposed to double or tripple rewards because someone's gear/mini needs a proper skin too.

Okay, that makes sense. But you don't need this kind of fast tracking in this game. A slight boost is nice, but It's a game with horizontal progression where you don't need to constantly upgrade your gear, so since ascended and legendary will always be top gear, it still needs to require effort, even more so than in the other games with vertical progression. I would understand if they increased the amount of experience you get from events to boost mastery gain, maybe additional mastery points, events frequency, etc. But currency basically only relevant for gearing ? There's very little catching up needed in terms of gearing when exotics is more than enough to beat the whole game and they were massively streamlined not long ago.

I don't get why everyone brings up grind themes and struggles of being a new player. Like I mentioned in my post, there's a difference between giving new players a hand and literally letting them skip the "working on something" part straight to "getting something" part. Yeah, let's remove any achievements and currency gates from legendary trinkets, include a complete ascended set as a "gift" when you finish your personal story because why playing the game at all, why putting any effort into obtaining long term end game goals, right ? Just give everything to everyone for free, why bother. And then players complain about someone afking on meta events like Dragonstorm. This kind of rewarding does nothing but promotes exactly this kind of passive behavior. Aka if anything requires more than 5 mins of my time and doesn't reward me with full on overstacked rewards, there's not point doing it. I'm also not sure if anyone posting checked the amount of currency you need for aurora and related items, but as for Lake Doric, you only need 350 of jade shards in total to get everything you need for aurora. You have spare 150 shards without counting map completion rewards/heart vendors/jade nodes. Like, you can get everything you want from this map without investing more than an hour of your time, half of it spent on chopping trees. And I don't understand how this tendency can be viewed as a positive thing, where you are directly discouraged from actively playing on the map. Again, I'm not saying we should not have rewards and new players should have it as hard as veterans and stuff. I'm saying it's not a good thing when you flood your new and existing playerbase with enormous rewards of such an extent that lets them obtain end game items and skip through numerous achievements with little to no effort. And Effort does not mean Grind btw.

No, I get the general idea behind this and I'm not against it. The whole Seasons of Dragons thing is pretty decent, and I think it's already enough of a reason to replay content for older players and it already provides incentives and a clear activities outline for newer players to play the maps alongside with the existing achievements. I am, however, concerned about the extent of this thing. The amount of excessive rewards removes any incentive to play the area past map completion because you get enough of currency to literally acquire most of the relevant rewards from the heart and unbound magic vendors. And put other maps rewards into perspective too, it even further simplifies an already extremely streamlined ascended gear acquisition. I'm not against incentives, I'm against excessive incentives that will make you effectively skip a huge portion of content because there's either no reason to play it more than once or no reason to play it at all, since you got all the things you wanted by simply doing map completion elsewhere.

I mean I like decent rewards as much as everyone else, but isn't 500 jade shards (and potentially other map currencies) for such low intensive activities too much ? I get it, you need to make these retrospective achievements attractive until the expansion comes out, but they already are with legendary amulet and other stuff. Like, even 250 of the map currency was kinda yikes for the amount of effort required and it's doubled now, really ? All this excessive rewarding does not just simplify the item/achievement acquisition (giving out 100 for chopping some trees could be called simplifying), but it straight up invalidates any kind of effort and the need to actually play the game. No need to spoil the playerbase to such extent imo.

I'm not sure why they didn't try to add new race variations in the forms of awakened humans (post-PoF) and mordrem variations of sylvari (post-HoT), which would basically serve as reskins of regular humans and sylvari without much change. It wouldn't even need any real "personal" story, I think just some background text would suffice, and you'd just start as level 80 once you complete the respective expansion story line. Or maybe they did think about it and it turned out to be way too complicated and resource intensive idk, but that could add some variety to the current races. But anyway, not a big deal, yeah. Plenty of other ways to make the game more diverse and engaging tbh.

Harvesting part was nerfed too btw kappa

Yo stop hating on DBL, best map in wvw

Condi chrono generally has a more simple rotation than axe mirage, for example, although gets a bit tricky with confusion burst timings. But I personally enjoy mirage fluidity and rotation more (which is really more of a skill priority rather than strict rotational sequence), especially with recent changes to chaos traitline where you can also benefit from combo fields and adapt your playstyle to certain scenarios where you want to pump more confusion. (But that’s only applicable to some really specific instanced encounters). Dps-wise mirage will be infinitely more efficient than cchrono for everything aside from literally couple raid encounters (since it focuses solely on confusion application). Although even there it actually recently started slacking due to newly awakened infamous staff mirage and potential axe mirage variations. So if you wanna play condi mesmer, for 99% of PvE you will be better off choosing mirage not only because of much better damage, but also because of much better in-built survivability and possible defensive boost from tormenting runes (mirage has around 4 times more torment stacks on average than cchrono).

I don't know if the guy actually checked his own video or the boon bar of the golem, but phantasmal defender has been bugged for a very long time, and it does not trigger Delayed Reactions, so you won't get any slow/DT synergy from it. The utility is still pog for open world tho, because a) it helps you solo most breakbars in no time without sacrificing any clones for your opener b) again helps with the cc after the opener reset if the mob didn't die from the first burst c) actually spikes like a truck if it blocks enough hits Also a small note for the Danger Time variation. It won't probably matter for open world, because you will likely trigger Delayed Reactions a lot by pulling/cc'ing mobs anyway and most fights will be short enough to get a lot of value from DT. But do note that for Danger Time to be better than Improved Alacrity, your slow uptime should be around 30%. Again, it shouldn't matter much for open world, since you pull mobs a lot and at meta events people usually spam Electromagical Pulse. But if you notice that generally your fights take long enough or you feel like you don't apply slow often enough, you might wanna consider taking Improved Alacrity.

Imo there's no point building chrono for survivability, you will be much more efficient on condi mirage if you want to have decent survivability/damage ratio. Going sustained power is a weird kink. I'd go for the most dps options on power chrono, if it's solo open world, you'd want to make sure you can self supply the most vital things, like might, fury, vulnerability and preferably quickness too (conveniently, illusions exists for those purposes, and other things are basically built-in too, including boon strips). You also want to make sure you are very close to crit cap, so you can have reliable damage. I personally wouldn't pick StM or the alacrity trait for solo play, cuz I see no point in it, just yeet everything with chronophantasma, you will have a chance to roleplay support in more organised instanced fights. pChrono is generally a very diverse build with lots of built-in tools and even ranged capabilities that you can use to boost your survivability. As for condi builds, condi chrono is mainly confusion focused and, thus, very niche build, so it will be really slacking in general open world. If you want to play condi, just take any condi mirage, be it staff/staff or regular axe/x. Or if you are really always solo, you can take both staff and axe, cuz you can boost axe's damage with boons from staff, which you otherwise lack. If you want to skyrocket your sustain, pick tormenting runes and enjoy being essentially immortal.

Exactly this. I've bought several of them just to realise they bug out when applied with my favorite armor skin. Kinda weird they've been putting quite a bit of effort into streamlining the whole infusion thing and have been continuously introducing new ones without releasing any sort of option to preview them. Like, come on, those are the most expensive and rare items in the game, at least make more 1-time-use tonics like the ones for crystal and frost legion infusions.

Staff had its niche as a utility weapon, and it was used where this utility set made sense. Not every weapon is supposed to break benchmarks in instanced content.

You already had every weapon usable for specific PvE scenarios btw. It looks like you're the one who wants to get pigeon holed into 1 build and 1 weapon set.

Voted shortbow, but thematically mesmer is the edgiest kid in the class 💁‍♀️, so obviously longbow is a better fit.

rr won't be better than staff mirage on confusion bosses, that's kinda the point of the build

Yeah, cuz the lateset larger-scale threat story line was so great and well received too. Oh wait...

Well, we got sylvari stretch emote if you're into that 👀

No, I'm just saying that you have other options that are less scuffed (still scuffed but less) for fractals setting. But you choose to play one that's more scuffed and then say "doesn't feel nice, too scuffed". That's almost if someone complained about ventari heal rev being awkward to play. I don't even get why people even bringup alac staff in the relation to fractals, where it: a) doesn't get to exploit its broken confusion stacking, b) is condi oriented and generally very slow for most encounters, c) has way less flexibility in terms of utility kit than alacren. Whether it gets nerfed or not, will hardly affect its place in fractals.

But why would you bring power STM to fractals ? If you take STM that means you replace pug friendly Hfb, meaning you should have really quick phases, which is kinda yikes for STM relying on constant clones generation, not even talking about the the need to constantly stack on you, also scuffed uptime of other boons, and yada yada. No sh#t you're struggling with pugs.

I legit don't understand that urge to remove the ability to precast clones. Every time they dumb down one aspect of the gameplay, they simultaneously break half of the game with it. Just... why