[Rate the new Legendary armor]

Personally, I think they all look way too busy and impractical. But I'm the sort of freak that loves realistic armor design. In my opinion,. the greatest expression of beauty is the marriage of form and function.

I look forward to getting them but I'll definitely transmog them to something else.

[How do you feel about each of the controversial new features?]

Open World Legendary Armor:

I like it. I enjoy open world content more than instanced content. That's what MMO's ought to be about, at least to me, and I hate how much content in modern MMO's is instanced.

Easier Skyscale:

I don't really care. I'd like some sort of legacy skin or something as a salute to the players who actually did the grind, but at the end of the day, it's necessary for new players to catch up and access the latest content where the rest of the community is.

More Weapon Choices for All:

I think it's cool. I hope it'll open up room for a larger and more interesting diversity of builds.

Runes and Relics:

I have no strong opinions. I think that a lot of my opinion will come down to how they implement the new system. It's been a minute since I played so I don't think I'm familiar enough to pass judgement on this change.

[Any hope for fixing rotation clunkiness and UI QoL fixes?]

First time I've posted here in a long time, maybe ever, but some of the new updates that GW2 has been seeing has me tentatively optimistic. I think one of the big sins of development so far has been developing features, then dropping and leaving them unsupported, ultimately wasting development time (Dungeons, Raids, and up until recently, Fracs and WvW).

The fact that fractals are seeing development again, that WvW is getting revisited, and that builds are getting looked at - all of that makes me hopeful that we'll see some QoL fixes in other aspects of the game. While the current state of the game doesn't particularly bother me, it does bother my friends - they're much less casual than I am. I asked them why they weren't eager to play GW2 instead of other MMO's. I've collated their feedback and I'll present it here for the developers. I'm also curious whether players who follow the game more closely than me think it's likely they'll be addressed.

There were a few gripes, like the amount of content which was "zergable," and performance issues. But a big one was how unoptimized DPS rotations were, coupled with big issues with the UI. Here are some quotes.

Quote

Guild Wars' rotations feel like afterthoughts. They're things that the players math out after the spec has been out for a month, and when the specs were designed, they never had more than cursory math into them.
I can only really speak generally about the various states that Mesmer has been in over the years, I dunno what it's like now, but for example;
At one point in time, one of the best DPS specs available to mesmer involved spawning a ton of phantasms and keeping them up as long as possible. On its own, that wasn't so bad. It's a bit clunky because pushing certain buttons on your other weapon always had higher priority than finishing with your cooldowns on your current weapon, and there's no good way to track that, but manageable.
Where it got bad is that this playstyle feels beyond awful to play in the open world. Nothing lives long enough for you to ramp your damage up, and because your DPS is backloaded, you're hamstrung for the purposes of 95% of the content in the game, which means you need a completely different build for open world stuff (which necessitates different gear).
My current build when I do play my Mesmer is the inverse. Poor sustained DPS, but tons of frontloaded burst, because world content rarely requires you kill more than a dozen tightly packed mobs, unless you're intent on soloing elites or something.

So, having builds with completely different rotations, and different gear (nbd to me but it bothered one particular friend), and the inability to track CD's on weapons not being held - those were all problems. Coupled with this were some complaints about the general flow of rotations. Having to wait 10 seconds to swap weapons to use the ability which actually matters isn't fun, and it interrupts the flow of things.

Quote

Often times weapons are like [Utility] [Damage] for an offhand.
But the utility isn't useful, and you'd never want to use it in PvE.
Except that the damage portion of it is massively overtuned.
So it outcompetes an offhand that would feel much better to use.

So basically, in order to get maximum DPS, they feel forced to engage with the game in a way that isn't fun, exchanging fun and flavorful offhands for offhands that had a single ability which provides higher DPS. And in a context like raiding and especially in PVP, if you want to win, you have to do your best - even if best practices feel clunky and unenjoyable. If utility of offhands were buffed in a PVE context, or if their damage was lowered - if they were flattened out somehow - there wouldn't be this incentive to weapon swap and interrupt your rotation. It would feel much less clunky and feel like a more fluid experience.

The last big complaint, and this was a huge complaint, was related to buffs, synergies, and the UI.

Quote

Everything to do with synergies and buffs feels very unpleasant because you're fighting the UI.
After having gotten used to weakauras and WoW's adjustable UI, even just needing to stare at the bottom of my screen to track cooldowns is an immense usability problem, and general chore.
Whereas in WoW, I move the bars that contain the information I need, to the middle of the screen, so I don't want to die while playing.
In WoW, a M+ build and a World build will play fairly similarly, just with varying amounts of utility and some priority changes in terms of rotation.

Something else that was mentioned verbally is how the icons for different buffs, debuffs, and other stuff are all color coded and sort of samey looking. From an artistic perspective, that's pretty cool. But from a UI perspective, that's not super usable. When you're doing PVP, you need to quickly identify buffs and debuffs. Making them too similar makes it harder to make those split second decisions which make a difference. Giving us the option to move buff/debuff bars to where we're comfortable looking would be great, or at least providing a centralized HUD option.

Conclusion

While I understand that the game design philosophy of GW2 exists in no small part to try and prevent elitism, by obfuscating DPS outputs and preventing the use of addons (the latter I mostly agree with - I'd love an RP addon), I think that making it easier to optimize builds, giving players the ability to adjust their UI to their needs, and giving more consideration to the fluidity of rotations, these would all actually make GW2 more accessible. These changes would make it easier to capture new players because the systems are less arcane and clunky, and more streamlined and intuitive, and it would make skills developed in other MMO's transfer better (making the transition less painful).

I'd really like to play with my friends, but I just can't persuade them to play with rotations and the UI as it is now. I hope this post puts these issues on the radar of the devs. I'm also curious if anybody else has had friends drop the game over these problems, or even finds these things to be problems. Given how many systems are being revisited, are you optimistic that we'll see any improvemnts in these areas? Please let me know below.

Full disclosure: I'm an FPS kiddie. I don't really care for tab targeting games, and I don't have much of an opinion about them. I'm indifferent. I play them because my friends do. GW2 is nice because it's very casual, and I've never felt like I'm wasting my time on content that will be outdated or unusable. I love GW2's economy and crafting design and its approach to evergreeen content. I just wish that my friends liked the core gameplay.

[Q&A with the Narrative Team]

What did you learn from writing Aurene, and what was your biggest challenge you faced with writing and characterizing her?

In an interview that was performed years ago, a writer said that sylvari could (probably) regrow limbs, but the article for that interview has been deleted, so the chain of citations I followed led to nothing. What's the word on Sylvari regeneration?

And another one. How big is the pact, anyway, and how many people were involved in Pact operations? I'm trying to get a sense of the scale of the anti-dragon operations. Was this more of an elite unit, or more of an enormous army? I know Divinity's Reach ingame is about a 4th the size of the real DR, so I'm just sort of curious about where else that lore/ingame scale discrepancy comes into play.

And a bit of a silly one (and also the last question), but why is Orr still wet and covered in marine life? I don't mean that in a snide way - I'm just profoundly curious. Because the maps for Orr create an environmental narrative which is extremely successful in engendering the idea that Orr rose recently, and they do it so successfully that I'd think they were designed to give that impression. But the lore tells a completely different story. So I'm sort of left wondering how that came to be. Was it originally supposed to have risen recently, then the lore changed, but the map was too far in development to change it? Or was the marine-life-on-land aesthetic just thought of as a cooler than alternatives, and the seeming discrepancy between environmental/lore story was just an unintended consequence?

@"Julia Nardin.9824" said:

Man, I would love to write some dialogue variants for some spiders and octopuses. That sounds rad.

Without getting too far off topic, if writing minds outside the sphere of human interests you, then I have a story you might like. It's a hard sci-fi first contact story featuring vampires. And it's free. If that doesn't hook you, I don't know what to say. It's called Blindsight. I write unprofessionally, and I think the insight that book gave me into writing different types of minds also greatly improved my ability to write characters in general.

Edited for typos and clarity.

[ANet's Contact Page Leads to a 404]

I'm not sure if that's a bug or just a mistake, or if there's any meaningful distinction between the two, but I thought you might want to know. In case you didn't.https://www.arena.net/contact