vectorfox.6894

Well if i ever felt like playing untamed over my current choice of soulbeast it's now dead and buried, why for the love of god why does ranger need another cast time to a movement skill. Instinctive engage on high ping is awful as by the time you land the enemy is on the other side of the map, ranger needs more snapiness. Another skill that feels broken at high ping is serpent's strike and to a lesser extent stalker's strike, cripple is not enough to guarantee those skills will land and especially serpent's strike which tends to roll you in such a wide manner that you hope the enemy walks into it. Also please find more pets to synergize with poison master in PvE you only have the bird due to its low cd to perma proc it and im not sure if this is a high ping issue again but you really need to smash the skill activation and attack command or it feels like an eternity before the pet actually uses its skill, just very clunky and unreliable. I do appreciate those buffs to utilities which do feel lackluster for how much cd they have although im still skeptical on if i will use the signets as 25% ms on hunt feels almost meaningless with how many classes have perma swiftness or high superspeed uptime, not sure if you could give it another use. Signet of renewal is only there for the resistance imo and dolyak does that better. Signet of wild again feels like an eternity for a small immob field that you will be half dead by the time you finish casting it. Please just consider the impact of cast times on a class that has most of its defences packed into active dodgerolls and evades.

Very happy to see rewards being looked at before alliances come out since it will atleast occasionally bring in more people. I wonder though if there was a simpler and better way of implementing them than weeklies. Now obviously i know nothing of what the code looks like or what you can easily implement but can you track the number of objectives and their tiers? If so tie a reward to both holding an objective and improve the reward based on its tier, the more you own and is tiered up the more rewards you get every tick, this could be liquid gold, memories of battle or some other reward. If you did implement this you could heavily incentivize proper play and give comparable PvE hourly gold for whatever threshold you see fit whether that for owning everything or just being moderately ahead. The issue with weeklies is that once someone does them why would they continue killing yaks or going out of there way to take a keep if lets say they are a roamer. Again very happy you are taking a look but please continue to build on this and find better alternatives BEFORE alliances come out.

Doesn't take a genius to see an ensuing uproar from one of those NA linkings so I'm very interested why there isn't a statement especially when we just had increased communication per the tweet regarding roadmaps and what seems to be a fast tracked blog post for and update for WvW. I'm not sure if the Dev team is waiting for either alliances to come out so they never have to explain the many poor balancing issues over guild wars 2 lifetime or would like to deliver it in a livestream which they will never find the time for. Either way i would very much suggest that similar to finding time for the weekly achieves they also find time to review this process, we have no idea when alliances will actually come out and surely it would take less than a week to find a way to avoid any egregious linkings for the mean time before WvW once again bleeds players.

PvE is the only content that matters and we haven't even got a content roadmap for that content yet, so I'll say put my money on a blog post around after alliances get released.

I think there is a lot of weakness in the writing quality, stemming all the way back to the whole plot of dragons and what became of them. The dragon story was a mess, I would be surprised if they ever intended for all the dragons to die. It really caused a lot of issues from both abruptly obliterating any semblance of mystery from the world as it writes you into a zero sum conclusion of Aurene having to survive as no one else can deal with the fallout of the trajectory throughout the seasons. Sure this wouldn't destroy the story as a whole but any story beats threatening Aurenes' life are completely void of emotional impact (pun intended) and that happens multiple times. (work in progress post, will expand)

I think the biggest item you can latch onto for the dragonvoid is that Aurene was a thing since at least season 2 and with that they had to have some idea of killing all the elder dragons or it would be a little scuffed for Aurene to only cover a portion of the other dragons workload so from that they had to have some idea of absorbing the power but also not making it that easy so there would be a twist and some alternate threat to your goals. If you want to prove the specific "dragonvoid" was going to be a thing then look towards the ley-line anomaly and bloodstone arcs where they re-used the idea of sentient magic with bloodstone soul(?) magic to basically create the idea of the dragons essence along with memories to create a sentient magic that has a purpose (to consume). Do i think this was the exact plan from the start? not really because it ended up creating a lot of issues that i will post in the writing quality thread.

Hmm well some of my favourite allies were Zojja and Almorra and both were to sent to the shadow realm so I can't really think of anyone I liked and would want to bring back, although imo you could probably grab a random handful of core npcs and have them be more interesting than our current cast.

Thanks for the update Grouch, I think Anet has been in a constant battle to win over players confidence as each positive patch comes with disappointment but I hope from these comments that means Anet is willing to talk to the players a bit more. I know its hard to ignore the people that go too far in their negativity but i feel like more casual communication at least lets us understand where the devs are coming from and i would say players are usually confounded more than mad when content doesn't hit the mark so discussion on how we can work together would be fantastic. Now relating to balance, I'm curious where balance goes as a whole since some design philosophies like blast finishers mattering for boons anymore have sailed since classes just provide boons just from breathing, would we ever see a buff to those mechanics to incentivize that style of play or are we just having it there for mild flavour? So many questions to ask because many options don't feel like they are on the same playing field anymore .

was the 'leader of the pack' nerf to double down on 'one wolf pack'? because they just whacked all the stance skills, yay my poison meme build really needed that i guess. Seriously these patch notes look anemic to what i was expecting, like big overhauls to traits and skills.but its just the changes for the new focus on boons over unique buffs. then some random adjustments/fixes. Unless this is literally just a tiny preview and there is more then i wholeheartedly regret getting even remotely hyped for some sort of big shakeup.

I would be down with a past fractal and seeing more Soo-Won, i think she was really interesting for the most part and any chance to see past Tyria is a big positive to me. Yeah thats kind of the feel i got from from it with Soo-Won and the dragons which im not surprised people really liked since who doesn't like baby dragons? But it just didn't feel apt for the story or very compelling compared with what had been built up.

The dream is just the mists right? Does bring up an interesting thought though about where elder dragons go since mortals have things like the underworld and dragons being more than animals or forces of nature and now being closer to what is just a juiced up sapient dragon. Do they go to the mists or just dissipate into magic?

I saw that post game meta dialogue and i still find this absolutely awful and such a slapdash way of explaining Tyria that creates even more questions but then assures such questions will never require proper answering because anyone who would know that far back has now perished thanks to us. The whole reminiscing on her past and the baby elder dragons didn't really feel genuine to me and instead just tried to lay on some quick emotions. Now before i get called some cynic i really want to highlight the final moments with Kralk and the final cinematic with Soo-Won which i believe were actually well delivered sympathic moments for the elder dragons. Theres no cheap appeal to emotions with making everyone children and giving a motherly spin but those moments where the dragons finally give a small glimpse into their humanity and mortal fears was excellently delivered and far more interesting.

Could be a moment where gameplay trumps narrative and they were brought in to make the content more exciting. I also think it would have been brought up more in-game by npcs because it is an interesting topic to see if such an old elder dragon actually has minions; especially after Kuunavang states she had to be approached to take the role. I also wouldn't entirely use a case of similar appearances to bridge this gap as im confident they didn't always know what Soo-Won was going to look like, unless a dev shows old concept art which i would happily trade being wrong for that haha.

Fantastic to hear Rubi, there are moments of this expac that show real growth within the Arenanet team and many of the parts that i think fell short were likely from outside factors like time or project restraints so this will be an amazing period for the game going forward. sending my best wishes.

Cinematics are definitely a welcome step-up though the story was a mess in many respects but mostly the pacing and the conclusion.