Blazing Rathalos.1904

I agree that energy could be a good design element. After all, we have in core: Adrenaline Life force Revenant energy Endurance And for elite specs: Astral Force Heat Malice Shadow Force Those all work, because they don't check every single box on this list at once: Only affects a single skill. Only determines in a binary way whether the skill can be used or not. Is normally only produced in one way. Has only a single trait that interacts with it. That's boring. So yeah, they need to improve on some of those points, or throw it out.

I'm not sure to be honest, I consider many amateur-made elite spec concepts for ele I saw in the past years to be better than the concept Anet went with for Catalyst. Even just completely ditching any idea of a weapon with melee capabilities would have improved it in my eyes. Note I'm not even talking about implementation here, just the base components chosen were bad. So in my opinion, it has less to do with a lack of design space and more with bad design decisions.

Elite specs were conceived as a way of adding more fun options, while constraining the number of build combinations to make balance manageable. I'm very curious to see what they will be adding for "new tools" in the future. Because if it is anything along the lines of weapons/utility skills/traits (just in a less constrained format), they will face the same problem as GW1: an exponentially increasing number of combinations with each expansion, making balance an absolute nightmare.

Couple of points here: I don't really see how design space was limited. You seem to refer to different "roles" since you speak of them all being available (or should be) across the existing elite specs. But "roles" are not playstyles. Let's look at Engineer: Holosmith, Mechanist and Scrapper all have pure DPS builds. Does that make these elite specs somehow less good? Of course not, having more different ways of achieving the same thing adds variety, which makes the game fun. Elite specs were simply a way of adding more fun options to achieve mostly the same things, while constraining the number of build combinations to make balance manageable. I'm very curious to see what they will be adding for "new tools" in the future. Because if it is anything along the lines of weapons/utility skills/traits (just in a less constrained format), they will face the same problem as GW1: an exponentially increasing number of combinations with each expansion, making balance an absolute nightmare. Very curious to see what solution they came up with, and here's hoping they came up with something fun, novel and sustainably manageable for the design team! PS With the dozens of fun ideas that have been floating around for Elementalist elite specs over the years, I'm now even more upset that they went with the bland, uninspired mess that is Catalyst. It was tolerable when I though we would get more in the future. If it was going to be the last one, they should have used up more of the giant gulf of "design space" available in Elementalist.

I was fine with having one elite spec for my main be so uninspired and bland, under the assumption that we'd get more. But with it now probably being the last, what we got is: The third elite spec with significant focus on close range, and little long-ranged additions. Overlap with Tempest on aura usage. Essentially flavourless self-buffs for Utility Skills. A profession mechanic that's just a glorified boons-and-combo field, with a barely interactive energy mechanic slapped on. If they were not preserving "design space" for future elite specs, there were a dozen better ideas they should have gone for to actually round out Elementalist.

I read this as "What's happening here is clearly comparable to something that happened before and is well known." Not "This is related to the history of this exact geographical location." While Anet hasn't always been completely faithful to previous lore, I don't think they'd arbitrarily move a historical location if they could avoid it. In this case, placing the new map in the old location would have been easy. So I do believe this new "Deep" is intended to have a degree of separation with the old "The Deep".

I think you actually make a very good point here: The "commander's friend" side of Gorrik wants to keep the commander safe, but the gravity of the situation requires his "rational scientist" side to still divulge this information, since he knows of it, so it would be irresponsible to not mention this option.

The funny thing is, I think "the Commander" felt the same, since it did not have much of an effect. They even just say something along the lines of "I know what you're trying to do. Not going to work!" Gorrik speculates that you've dealt with that particular trauma enough already. That's why the Demon then switched to more recent events.

Note that this is only true for players who played from the release of PoF / HoT and actually got the associated Living World episodes for free. For all the players that started after (a proportion that will only grow over time) they did not get any content after the expansions, those are separate paid products.

I'll just repeat what I posted elsewhere: In other words, better to spend this dev effort on balancing current skills or working on future Especs, even if they don't come out every expansion.

Yup, and being able to balance Especs independently is one of the main reasons they came up with the elite spec system in the first place. Not taking advantage of that just seems stupid. I feel like I need to stick a post-it on all their work-stations that says: "Is it Core? Don't nerf it unless it's problematic with a majority of Especs".

The whole idea with Elite Specs was to make balancing a bit easier by cordoning off new skills added, limiting potential interactions. What you're suggesting might seem like less work initially, but will just create more work for the balancing team in the future. Only thing I can imagine is giving one or two to fill up gaps in Core Professions that have a very limited selection right now. For example, an extra condi weapon for Revenant to alternate with Mace/Axe (kitten because their initial design did not have weapon swap) or another main hand weapon for Engineer (So that they can add off-hand weapons in Elite Specs without requiring main-hand Pistol).

With quarterly updates replacing living world episodes, are we still getting preview trailers? The first one releases on the 28th, so I would be expecting a trailer around now. They were always fun to have something more specific to look forward to and speculate about.

What I think OP is trying to say is that Living world seasons are broken up into episodes. This means you can, for example, play the "All or Nothing" story on one character, then play "War Eternal" on another character. Meanwhile, Expansions so far require you to play each Act in order on one character. Can't switch to a new character for Act 2 of PoF for example. We do not know yet how this will work for future expansions, especially when it comes to the quarterly updates (that are now considered part of the expansion, rather than a separate episode). However, we'll see next week with the first quarterly update what they have chosen. Personally I don't mind not being able to switch characters though. I play through the story multiple times anyway.

Well, we already know it won't be just those things: Basically all of this hinges on what Arenanet is able to deliver in "gameplay and combat features". Until we actually know that, I don't think we can determine whether this will be worth it out. This will also be a major indication of how much resources the studio is actually putting into the game still. Just a waiting game, in the end.

I think this time there just weren't any changes that were as near-unanimously condemned as was the case with the previously planned changes to Gyros and Deadeye Rifle range. I know I certainly didn't see dozens of posts on the subreddit this time. So, they felt no need to change things beforehand.

Unfortunately however, this model was terrible for new players, which is not good for the game's health. Because, as loyal players who got all the episodes for free, we are mostly blind to the ballooning costs associated with the game.

You're almost correct here, but the scripts here are not truly pre-designed. It would be more accurate to say the script the machine is running was based on all the data used to run it. That's the difference between current "AI" and just having a bunch of humans program each response of the machine.

Assuming they're going for 1 expansion a year, I think the amount of playable content will be enough, and might actually be better than the average Gw2 year. But... They're going to have to add new combat options in place of the skills and abilities we have now, or these expansions are not going to sell. In a game like this you need new options to keep things from getting stale, and to actually entice players into buying these packs. Now, they could add individual weapons and slot skills. However, we already know from gw1 that this is even more of a balancing headache than elite specs. This is the whole reason they gave for creating elite specs in the first place: at least when adding Mechanist they didn't have to worry about broken interactions with Hammer or Gyros. Considering this, I think in the long run Elite Specs are still the least costly way for them to implement new combat options. Now, 9 elite specs per year is obviously not feasible, so they might go for a few each expansion, or develop them over 3-4 years and release them all in one expansion (leaving the others more empty, with other new features to compensate). In the latter case, they need to announce this plan around the release of the first expansion. If they can't manage either of these (or some other option nobody has thought of) than this business model is going to crash and burn within 2-3 years.

Really, this is just a countdown to when the devs would be forced to think of and implement a more creative solution, not a countdown to the end of elite specializations.

Are we talking about the floor low in the cube or the water underneath the cube here? Because the first is still reachable now.

That's not really an opinion but more of a speculation, where are you getting this from? Is it just baseless?

I always just assumed it was heavily undeveloped since players could not get there at launch. For one thing, a large chunk of the cube is actually not flying but sticking into the water. Wouldn't surprise me if the devs just didn't want players looking at the mess that might be there.

I had this happen at the end of Dragonstorm, but even there it is jarring, this should be moved to after you leave the instance. (Did play the last DRM before this after I purchased EoD, but it did not trigger there fortunately.)

Yeah, this needs to be fixed. I just had this happen at the end of Champions, and it's already profoundly weird to have Aurene ask me to come meet her, while standing in front of her. If it's happening after "Visions of the Past: Steel and Fire" that's even worse, straight up spoils the rest of IBS, right? Did you make a bug report on this?