Tulki.1458

... eh? Why change this from a trait that works on mechanist to one that doesn't, or at the very least doesn't make sense? Engi also isn't really hurting for ways to apply regeneration on support builds. It just seems like this will see less use now, not more.

Most others already remarked on effectiveness. The weapon just isn't effective from a numbers standpoint, though the ability to do a chain reaction with skill 4 to grant 25 stacks of might is a cute novelty. Unfortunately that's where the effectiveness stops. Another big problem (among everything else said) is that it's just too clunky and weirdly lacking in damage capabilities. Yes it's supposed to be a support weapon, but other support weapons still have some degree of damage scaling (including engi mace...). They're also more effective with less micromanagement. The expectation that an engineer is required to line up chain reactions with FIVE casting delays (2,3,4,5 +chain) is completely silly. Engineer builds already need to incorporate kits to be effective in virtually any role, so not only is the shortbow underwhelming -- it also requires so much babysitting that you can't really use kits effectively. And the only payoff you get is something substantially worse than any other option, or no effect at all because the target walked slightly out of range while you were busy casting five skills. I wish this wasn't made for support, because the engineer already has great support builds since SOTO launched. It honestly needs significant buffs and a radical redesign into something completely different, like maybe a hybrid stat weapon or something.

The thing I'm asking is, why is it doing this instead of just offering you 12 for all three modes? Again, there's a weekly acclaim cap anyway so I'm not sure why the player is being asked to choose up-front when they could effectively choose what to do anyway because they don't need to do everything to hit the cap.

This is probably gonna sound a bit weird or adversarial but even if this devalues "just logging in", I think that's the intention, and I also think it's a good intention to have. More people playing the game to earn things instead of logging in and out is better for everyone. As for my feedback on the system itself, I find the PvE/PvP/WvW checkbox selection to be a bit... odd. We know that there are weekly caps in place for acclaim so I'm not really sure why the player is being prompted for what content they want to focus on. Shouldn't everyone be offered everything all the time if they're capped on rewards anyway? The checkboxes feel like over-engineering.

Er to be fair to us, this seems to be avoiding the spirit of the question. We all know that relics are a separate equipment slot, but this doesn't answer for why people who already created a full set of legendary runes need to do more or spend more up to a year later to gain back the functionality that was removed from them. I'm going to be extremely blunt in my criticism about this question. Legendary runes were exceedingly expensive to craft. You sell gold on the gem store. I don't buy gold on the gem store, but it is something that you sell and even display banner ads for. You have made the choice to remove functionality from something that you potentially baited players into paying tens or hundreds of dollars for, placed it behind an expansion, and are now saying that those same players will wind up paying even more to reobtain. I cannot think of any other game where doing this would be considered acceptable, and the amount of dancing around this question between the blog post and multiple forum threads is getting silly. It seems like the only way a change or even a bare minimum answer will happen is if it becomes a PR nightmare like mount skins were. I didn't spend real money on legendary runes, but if I did, I would certainly feel like ArenaNet just scammed me. As it is, I feel like ArenaNet wasted a bunch of my time instead, which is also bad. I know it is a new system. Everybody knows it is a new system. This is starting to look like a scam, because your team won't answer for why it was designed this way.

Why can't you be specific about what the compensation is? And why isn't the compensation simply "here's a free legendary relic for having six runes"? You should know what the compensation is. Your team is being opaque with this and it's starting to seem like they're doing it for a reason. Further, in the meantime why can't you just add a vendor tab with account-bound copies of all the relics for people who have already bound six runes to their account? Are you actually willing to change this feature based on feedback, or not? It doesn't seem like it. Relics have kinda killed my hope for this expansion, and the willingness to press forward with them without even thinking through the consequences makes me think your priorities are wrong, and that hurts future expansions too. It's rare that one decision you make reflects badly on the future of the game, but this is one of them. Removing and then reselling character power was something I thought you wouldn't ever do. What a shame.

Hrm, I'm not really expecting a good answer once the blog comes out. If existing owners of legendary runes weren't losing functionality, the answer would be very simple. That it's seemingly not simple doesn't inspire confidence. I'm looking forward to the blog post, but I'm going to avoid pre-ordering SOTO until I see what it says. And that's really a first for expansions in this game for me. I don't like the precedent this might set as far as the studio being okay with invalidating player progression (and doing it on a high-cost legendary unlock of all things). I said it before, but going back on that promise in GW2 signals loud and clear to me that the team has lost the plot and doesn't understand where its game came from any more. Mishandling GW2 is the thing that'll wean me off onto something else. Where is the game director and why isn't he guarding against stuff like this?

It's weird how much some people here are (willingly or not) ignoring the arguments from players against relics. I guess I should break it down to be crystal clear? Legendary runes currently give: - Swappable stats and set bonuses Post expansion, legendary runes will give: - Swappable stats You must now obtain relics to get: - Set bonuses This really isn't rocket science. Relics devalue runes. You can't formulate any sort of counterargument to this, and it shouldn't be shocking at all that people are unhappy or stating that this is invalidating player progress, which was supposed to be a cornerstone of GW2. If the GW2 team is okay with violating that cornerstone, fine. They can push the game in whatever direction they want. However, that was one of the aspects I find most compelling and it is what keeps me playing the game. If the team has decided that invalidating player progress in GW2 is now an acceptable design decision, then it has lost a major differentiator and is now competing with a much broader pool of games. Again, the team is welcome to do whatever it thinks is best for the game, including invalidating player progress for retention or other reasons. I just hope they know that in doing so, they are now competing with a lot more games, and it's looking like a better idea to go play one of those instead. I play GW2 over FFXIV (for instance) because I don't want my progress to be invalidated. But now that GW2 is invalidating progress too, I may as well play FFXIV instead because they have a greater number of more interesting combat encounters.

My first impression: You're invalidating part of a large gold sink in the game while also pushing ads to buy gold in the gem store. Purposeful or not, it's not a good look. Yeah, though I'm just reiterating what's been said already, compensation is not what I'm looking for. I am looking to receive the exact same functionality that I crafted the runes for. That is, I expect nothing less than for the expansion to launch with a legendary relic slot that I get for free for having six legendary runes bound to my account. And no, not for a "discount" as compensation. Free, at launch (not in a quarterly update), full stop. Revoking a legendary (and not just any legendary, but one of the most expensive ones to create if you craft all six) would be one of the worst precedents set in the game's history. I'll even be brutally honest here and say that your initial silence and the hesitance to just give players back what they already earned is the thing that stopped me from pre-ordering the expansion. I get it, you want relics in the game as another type of reward, and legendary runes plus the armory get in the way of that. But you already added them to the game, and you already made a contract with players that if they craft the legendary runes, they will have full account-wide freedom to swap rune set bonuses. You are now clawing that back for an expansion and asking people to earn it again, which violates the "no loot treadmill" promise of GW2. That on its own should have been a big enough problem for your game director to veto the feature - it's extremely weird that he didn't. The grind to unlock them was so significant that any level of disrespect for players' time obtaining them is extremely damning and kinda deflates my desire to play the game any more. Because if you're willing to devalue legendaries to add a feature bullet to an expansion, what else are you willing to do, and why would I want to stick around and find out? This game is supposed to pride itself on never invalidating your progress. Now it is, and now it's going to compete with other games that do have vertical progression, and handle it better than your game does. Is that a good idea? The nagging thing on my mind is why didn't you just move the stats over to gear instead? There was an elegant solution to decouple stats all this time, and it never required you to introduce another equipment slot. Hell, you could have done something even more interesting than relics by removing the stats from runes altogether, but lowering the set bonus to 2 or 3 runes instead, reducing the overall stat budget but allowing players to make more qualitative build decisions. Instead, we have a solution to a self-made problem being sold as an expansion feature.

I hope the Mechanical Genius change to a cooldown penalty still has the buff as a grace period. Pet pathfinding and movement are too unpredictable to take into account without a grace period buff.

Does the ArenaNet team still know that a quarter of the engineer's core skills are turrets? Because those still haven't changed since before the first expansion. I mean come on, renegade legend skills are basically turrets but with proper design put into them. What's the deal here? At this point it seems like they're being deliberately avoided for some reason. Is there a hard technical reason why they can't be changed?

Are there any plans to rework engineer turrets yet? ~8 years with no changes whatsoever to these skills, and yet we've seen many reworks to other skill categories (some having been reworked multiple times). Core engineer has one less utility skill type than other professions, yet an entire category is fundamentally worthless. There are many reworks in this patch, but it's crazy to me that turrets are still ignored.

Pretty bad change. The 3s refresh is unacceptable as others said, and I was also frequently able to lose the buff when running in a straight line because the pet moves unpredictably. The pet is now a liability on a pet class. If you gave the mech commands to the player and removed the mech, it would actually be better now. That should have been enough of a wake-up call in testing to show that this is bad design. Also, stuffing yet another crucial elite spec function (this debuff) onto the dumping ground that the buff bar has become is unacceptable. At least budget the UX work to integrate it into the mechanist UI if you have to commit to this change. If you want to halve the player's stats when the mech misbehaves then you have to make it extremely visible to the player.

Getting a patch note for net turret is almost worse than not having any turret notes at all. The team knows they exist, so why have they been allowed to sit in this state for nearly a decade?

Have you tried turning post-processing down (or off) in the options? That setting in most of the zones causes the jade to look much more vibrant than the base textures actually are. With it off, it turns from radioactive green to more of a blue-ish green. There are many tools such as reshade that can apply custom post-processing to games. Like you said I don't know if there are any that ArenaNet specifically gives the OK on. I know several content creators use reshade and openly talk about it, but you never know how ANet will react. If you can get a known legal way to apply your own post-processing, you could absolutely make the zones easier to look at.

I'm curious... how does mechanist bring "less" heal than scrapper? Scrapper doesn't have anything in its kit that heals besides med gyro (swapped for med kit) and bandage self? I guess bandage self is a slight burst heal with the inventions line but that's not very much.

This isn't really a bug, more of an oversight I think but a pretty bad one. Any sort of bonus that refers to "+x% boon duration" or "+x% condition duration" do not transfer over to the pet, because these bonuses aren't granted in the form of expertise or concentration. Those bonuses "could" be provided as expertise or concentration, and it wouldn't make a difference anywhere else in the game if they were, but mechanist is unable to take advantage of them because they aren't. There are also many mobs across the game that the jade mech simply won't target. This is most common among "structure" enemies and prop bosses (world bosses with the big targeting reticles on them). The mech will simply sit still and do nothing.

All components should be account-wide unlocks, not items. This is how every other mastery in the game works. Jade bots shouldn't be any different.

All of the jade bot equipment should be account-wide unlockables. It doesn't make any sense otherwise. I also don't really get the "just buy a core off the trading post" argument. Yeah, the price will eventually go down. But without a core, an alt cannot use any jade objects in Cantha whatsoever. No zip lines, batteries, glider boost, rez, nothing. At all. If you only own EoD, this makes Cantha nearly impossible to traverse (especially Kaineng). Most of the modules are also account-bound anyway. And they can't be equipped unless you're near a bench. So why are they even items? They should just be unlocks. The only thing this decision does is hurt the game, because now I don't want to play any of the expansion content with alts. And if their intent is to add a mega grind to obtain "legendary" jade bot equipment, that's really not good enough. The system -just- launched and it's already so tedious that I haven't bothered to use it at all. Asking me to dump hundreds of gold into a legendary sensor array to fix the lack of QoL isn't going to work. I've already disengaged from the system. It needs to be made convenient, immediately, as a baseline for everyone.

Would it be possible to remove engineer turrets from the hero panel and skill swap menu? It's kind of annoying having them clutter the space since I never use them anywhere.

The transparency and numbers breakdown is really good but I'm pretty much with the others here - if your numbers have determined that CM mystic coins were a tiny minority of those earned, why remove them? This makes it look like they're being removed for a reason other than what you stated, which makes the messaging worse, not better. It's clear from the numbers you gave that this isn't really an economic decision. Lacking more info, this sounds like planned obsolescence of fractals. Not good.

That's not an apples to apples comparison. The ranger has a weapon swap, the mechanist does not. The ranger has two pets, the mechanist has one. The mechanist is more dependent on its pet than core ranger is.

You shouldn't have to choose which stats the mech inherits by picking traits. It should just inherit everything all the time, since it's already limited in which stats it can apply based on which skills it has. No other profession has to choose to ignore most of its stats for its profession skills. I would like to play hybrid mechanist builds such as diviner or trailblazer, but currently this is not feasible because it's designed to ignore most of the stats on hybrid sets. You have to go fully into support or power or condi. Very uninteresting from a build perspective. Rocket Punch also shouldn't be restricted to Mace 3. That trait already has an ICD attached to it. It should be able to proc from any weapon or kit 3 skill. Again, this change is needed to allow for more build variety. It also seems like a glaring mistake to have a mandatory trait that does nothing unless you're using a specific weapon. The outright removal of Jade Siphon is very noticeable. Please add it back and allow F1-F3 to interrupt whatever the mech is doing instead of just getting rid of it. The mech is an elite specialization mechanic, and it is the only profession mechanic that the mechanist has since the tool belt is gone. Compare it to core rangers, who get two swappable pets, and you'll see it's already a simpler mechanic even with Jade Siphon. Stripping it down risks making it boring. If the interrupt problem can't be solved, it should still be added back and proc off of a weapon skill like Rocket Punch. Lastly, the mech should work underwater. I mean, this is really just a silly one. You're shipping an expansion with (at least?) two mastery lines that are designed to work in aquatic spaces, and the mechanist loses their profession mechanic underwater? I'm sorry that this sounds like an insult, but getting in the water and seeing the entire mech disappear and be replaced by a single damaging skill just makes it feel like the spec ran into budget cuts. It feels bad. What happens if I'm sailing in a skiff and an aquatic enemy destroys it? I'm just screwed?

Positive: Siege turtle is a lot of fun. It's hard to handle properly but so were all the other mounts until I got used to them so this will be the same. Plus it doesn't have its masteries yet. Feedback: I want a way to open the passenger slot to anyone, not just someone specifically in my party or squad. GW2's open world combat thrives because of how you can spontaneously cooperate with other players. Having no barrier to entry to load a passenger or board someone else's turtle would be good, as long as you can still restrict it to people in your party/squad. I would even argue that allowing anyone to board should be the default because that will lead to the most fun in open world events. I'm not sure how you could prevent griefing around vendors and such though. Maybe a separate bind for board siege turtle vs. interact.

Making mechanist even simpler by binding one of the mech skills to the mace and removing another one isn't good. You made a change to decouple Untamed from the hammer so I'm not sure why that design philosophy is being reversed for Mechanist. By far the biggest problem I had with the elite spec in beta 3 was that it's just too simple. It removes a huge amount of the engineer's utility in exchange for a passive and mostly uncontrollable mob. That's not bad in and of itself, but the lack of weapon swaps, heavy reliance on kits, and most core utilities being useless without their tool belt versions kills the elite specialization here. You have very few options for how to play, and what your character can do is severely reduced. To really get down in the muck: Core engineer's weapons are too poor, and too few, and they can't swap weapons. Kits are mandatory for all specs in dps roles. It's the same case for mechanist. But if we don't want to run kits, we can't really substitute in any of the other core skills because without the tool belt they're virtually useless. One that especially stands out is elixirs: you can't support allies with them while playing as a mechanist because you lose all of the throw skills (despite harbinger now being able to drink and throw elixirs at the same time...?). In a couple words: not fun. I don't care about numbers much because those can change easily. Unfortunately this is a deeper problem with core engineer and how heavily they rely on the tool belt and kits to make up for lackluster utility skills, weapon skills, and no weapon swap. As soon as you release an elite spec that replaces the tool belt, it breaks so many aspects of the core spec that it feels very empty. Your options are pretty much kits as a crutch for weapon skills, or signets because those are the only skills balanced to not have tool belt counterparts. The rest of the engi kit is borked. And I think it bears repeating a second time: the fact that the mechanist has a clear build path for support, yet also blows away your ability to buff allies with elixirs which are dedicated support skills, should be an extreme red flag for design. It would seem natural for a support elite spec to lean into alchemy from the core profession, but that's just not an option here. Did nobody notice this and call it out? Doesn't this seem like an extremely odd decision?