Zenith.7301

Orr is better. More variation in gameplay and theme. Nayos is the worst map by far. Too monothematic. The first SoTO map is easily the best. The second map has the best meta.

Not only legendary gear, but the different legendary skins, as well as color variations for the aurene legendaries. Plenty of stuff to chase. Fractal God alone takes over a year of grinding fractals every day.

I'm also wondering when we will see expansion relevant lounge passes, or finally a portal scroll tome to put them all in. Them continuously creating separate portal scrolls to eat up shared inventory slots is so scummy, as well as inventory clutter with crap like the new improved comms device you can't even put in the shared inventory slot. Relics not having their bank tabs despite Anet being unwilling to expand our bank tab purchasable slots. Even worse, 10+ years since GW2 release and you can't still autosort the bank tabs. Items have to be manually sorted, it's horrendous. Having to manually delete skins instead of absorbing them for a transmutation charge into your account. The inability to choose the appearance of legendary accessory effects, so if you prefer the 1/2/3 accessory combination appearances, you can choose.

I want to repeat. $25 bucks upfront for ~6-8 hours of story content is unacceptable. All the previous expansions double to tripled that time without doubling or tripling the price. And the masteries themselves are pretty uninspired. The only masteries worse than these are the IBS masteries.

With 6k hours played, on top. Like, how. Not even CM raid fights last more than 7-8 minutes. And this person is so set against introspection that they will stay this bad and blame the game anyways. The game is not perfect, but 30 minutes on a story boss, hell even 10 minutes on a story boss is such a spectacular display of lacking basic understanding of how the game and your class functions. Is she running a PVT or shaman's scepter mesmer and choosing not to shatter? A pvt mainhand axe torch ranger? What the hell are you doing to put out this little damage?

This is why player feedback is rarely taken seriously. Some people are so hilariously inept and aggressively ignorant about it.

I'm just wondering what possessed them to let go of much of their animation/vfx team. They used to be known for beautiful and unique animations, now the new elite specs and weapons just recycle assets and look lazy.

Unfortunately, I don't see it happening. The new Anet is heavily anti-gods since their favorite little race is Charr and the whole GW2 project is about unity of disparate races and the human gods would be too human centric for their tastes. Their entire storytelling in GW2 has been about burying GW1's lore by dismissing the past or reframing it for their "modern" take.

A real dervish scythe with a dervish class and a real ritualist class with ritualist staff or scepter.

Warrior makes sense as not being too popular since it's the one class lacking any magic vfx, besides spellbreaker it can feel pretty plain. Deadeye is heavily stigmatized since rifle deadeye has been bad in PvE for so long for anything besides Qadim pylon kite. The other problem is thief PvE core gameplay is pretty flawed. Because the initiative system incentivizes spamming the best DPI skill, the rotations are generally pretty plain and ignore 80% of your weapon skills. Elementalist unfortunately is very high apm and highly reliant on autoattack counting, and clipping those 3rd autoattacks in the final auto chain is rather costly as is mistiming the the elemental orbits.

Randomly dodging and dashing around isn't what makes for good PvE encounters. If anything, it just punishes melee even more than ranged loadouts. You can see it in EoD and SotO open world design. The PoF skating mobs dashing all over. These heavily penalize melee constrained by 6-10 sec cd movement skills. It's even worse for mesmers, who rely on the clones running over to mobs. Random dodging and leaps like the HoT frogs just penalize build>spend classes and specs and reward steady damage specs. Just look at all the EoD strikes, but especially the 1st and second. All the dashing about of the bosses on top of aoe circle spread mechanics penalizes melee, which is why engineer/specter/virtuoso were so strong. More PvP like behavior does not work in PvE, because it often applies randomly without much logic, and emphasizes having a spec with high uptime and consistent damage delivery instead of bursts which can be entirely whiffed by a dash or random dodge. The boon spam ala PvP style that needed to be corrupted subsequently incentivized bringing scourges or mesmers, restricting DPS build variety. What PvE needs is role based mechanics based on weapon loadout (so you force a spread of ranged and melee weapon loadouts), expanding the range of boon application to 1200, and making healing more efficient on isolated targets instead of needing to ball up because healers heal in cd bound bursts of healing instead of consistently with spammable spells. The lack of consistent tank mechanics is also a problem for encounter design. Bringing back the relevance of toughness checks just creating increased aggro and giving more low cd access to the taunt condition for tank specs giving a large enmity boost on CC immune mobs will fix that.

Even if you're using ranged weapons you're gonna stack in melee because that's how boons are shared and healing is done. Until they revamp boon range to be a lot larger and more easily targeted healing, everyone will move in a stack.

I finished the current expansion story in about 8 hours total. I'm sorry, but that's really bad. For FFXIV or WoW, we're talking at least a week of play. The first map was great, I love the fractals and imagined scenarios. The second map is OK, good meta event but otherwise too monotone. Nayos by far is the worst map. There isn't largely any distinctive landmark or features about it. It's just an unremarkable zone with a lot of events going on. The story is not bad, despite the cringe referring to a clearly female demon mimmicking female anatomy with a stereotypically female voice register and established female designation (Cerus calls her sister) as a Midnight King. Come on, stop with that forced crap.

Well, I'll give you that lol. Point still stands. GW2 is only sustaining its costs right now. Anet is not in any spot to overhaul an engine for a new MMO, and in the process risk a lot of players who won't be happy their years of legendaries and expensive skins don't carry over to a new GW3 they would have to significantly spend resources into. That's really the curse of MMOs. People invest long term for years into character items and appearances and mounts/mount skins and losing those to start fresh is a tough sell.

WoW is rolling in money, massively more popular and successful, and it hasn't even released a WoW 2 despite predating GW2. What makes you think there will be a GW3 with a much smaller studio with far less resources. MMOs don't do sequels. GW2 was the absolute anomaly. FFXIV was a reboot of FFXI, but it's an hugely successful franchise. GW2 started well with HoT but fell off a cliff in PoF.

Problem is most mesmer builds rely heavily on ether signet phantasm resets to sustain DPS, yet that healing signet has got a whopping 30 sec cd and most of the time you don't even benefit from the heal when you do need it due to the need to use it on cooldown rather than when you need the healing. There was no reason to remove the block on F5 either.

Way too much work and things that can go wrong (like stray aoe destroying your continuum split early) for the little payoff. It's just a worse support/dps held down by the current continuum split ramp up adndisadvantages on top of mediocre wells and its once great elite spec weapon (the shield) being made obsolete.

PoF was the last xpac we got new animations for elite spec skills and weapons instead of recycled animations from other classes. Vindicator starting in EoD had the same greatsword swing animation for the autoattack chain, greatsword 2 and the second part of greatsword 4, and greatsword 2 was only changed to have a more distinct swing animation months later. It still has the same copypasted reaper Gravedigger animation for greatsword 5. The vindicator alliance stance recycles the same swirly fart cloud across several of its utility skills with the same exact color palette and vfx. Compare that to Herald and Renegade. Specter uses the same autoattack chain swing animation on scepter as warrior mainhand axe. Virtuoso dagger uses the same melee swing animation despite being a ranged dagger weapon. Compare that to the unique animations for mesmer greatsword as a ranged weapon. Also, it's no accident mesmer hasn't received a single new phantasm for the past 2 expansions. Anet is not the same studio as when the original GW2 and HoT came out. At least with SoO it got good metas back more toward the standard of HoT, although HoT remains the best designed xpac by far. PoF core maps were gorgeous but were quickly abandoned despite its many design flaws.

Give back the block. There was nothing wrong with it. Virtuoso lacks clones for protection.

What dagger needs to be is a support weapon alongside necro staff. Make them the boon+healing weapons and give proper healing to scourge for a vampiric scourge healing spec that isn't just a 3rd healer wannabe meme but not good to be a healer or boon support, just a safety barrier and rez bot. Just give dagger and staff healing and boons. Warhorn can be the support offhand, but insect swarm needs a serious revamp, it's terrible and Banshee's Wail is also really bad for a 20+ sec cd ability. Because Reaper has historically been the underserved spec in PvE. For most of GW2s history, necromancer has only existed as competitive condition scepter specs while the power specs were WvW memes and little more. People crave a death knight theme and reaper fit the bill. Harbinger is unpopular because nobody thinks of a necromancer when you're spraying bullets with a gun or throwing wushu elixirs, so it's an even less popular spec on top of being made of glass by removing shroud but giving the necromancer none of the active defenses and powerful healing and blocks/evades that the other classes have. Scourge thematically is a very well fleshed out spec and has performed well despite not in the support themed manner it was intended to, but rather as the premier condi dps spec.

You can't have high utility specs doing top tier damage. And despite taking DPS utility skills, scourge would still be a purely ranged DPS spec with ample cleaving capacity, rotational 2-3k barrier, an aoe fear, and a rez signet on top of great passive CC application as well as the best passive boon corrupt in the game. If a necro spec should be doing top tier damage, it should be power reaper and full condi harbinger. They really should turn necro staff and mainhand dagger+warhorn into a proper support weapon setup, and introduce a trait for scourge to convert absorbed barrier damage into healing, so it can function as a proper healer. Dagger 2, dagger 1, staff 2 and staff 1 could provide significant healing and the staff marks could provide fury and might to allies.

For the same reason minions and most lifesteal necro mechanics are pretty terrible, and why we can't be healed in shroud to this day. A class entirely handicapped by PvP balancing in PvE. The massive DR reduction in shroud for reaper shroud only made it worse, since they balance the entire elite spec around that shroud uptime since the greatsword weapon and shouts are so pitifully undertuned.

You people keep getting this wrong. The problem isn't that range do the same dps as melee weapons. The problem is that the combat revolves around stacking for boon share and heals. There are no mechanics exclusive to range vs. Melee weapon loadouts like in WoW and FFXIV. Mostly because you are constricted around boonshare paradigm of stacking for boons and heals. If characters with equipped ranged weapon loadouts had specific mechanics to handle and lower uptime like melee, it would be balanced. Instead, what you people lobby for is a return to the greatsword meta with thw odd staff ele of old hugging the boss's face. To hell with that. Fix the actual combat and encounter design.

Gonna be honest, the mesmer's expanded weapon proficiency needs to come with a serious re-evaluation of Signet of Ether and chronomancer mechanics as well as a look at mainhand sword and shield. Signet of the Ether is basically a mandatory healing skill because the entirety of our DPS is dependent on it, and that is wrong. Remove the phantasm reset off it and natively lower the cd of phantasms to no more than 8-10 seconds like other classes' big ticket skills like 100b and whirling wrath, etc. It's wrong we basically want to waste our heal on cd just to keep a DPS rotation going, it goes against the design of what healing skills are for. Then comes mainhand sword and shield. Mainhand sword is irrelevant in PvE because its clone generation is terrible. Compared to greatsword and dagger, illusionary leap has about twice the cooldown because the skill is being balanced like a mobility skill with a subsequent cooldown. You need to lower its cooldown in PvE only to somewhere around 6 seconds. Power builds need to continually shatter to keep their rotation going, and on top of having lower clone generation, mainhand sword doesn't even pack the DPS of mainhand dagger despite being restricted to melee range, that's really bad. So much of its damage is sunk behind the 3rd part of the autoattack chain, and even it's inadequate compared to its ranged alternative weapons. Shield is a whole other problem. Humongous cooldowns vestigial because they were balanced around chronomancer being a cd refund alacrity bot in earlier times, but now that you've removed the alacrity and quickness generation off shield, it's become a dead weapon in PvE. This is bad, the signature weapon of the chronomancer elite spec isn't even used. The other problem is that DejaVu, the phantasm generation skill, is on a whopping 30 sec cd with a conditional on top. Not only do you need to trigger 2 blocks, but you get 2 low damage phantasms of about 1 phantasm per 15 seconds average that provides a redundant protection boon. Ever since you removed alacrity and quickness from the shield, you've massively devalued the weapon. The same can be said for chronomancer wells. They don't provide enough relevant boons or conditions, the CC outside the elite well is unremarkable, and our healing utility chronomancer well is a humongous 30 sec cd compared to mantra of recovery, which heals so much more, really any healing skill outheals the well. Why are our stationary wells with long cd so mediocre? Then there's continuun split. Why does it have a shard that can be damaged by stray aoe in PvE? And why does it still cost clones? This creates significant ramp up for chronomancers to start putting out performance and use their elite spec defining ability. It's even deadly to use in some raids as the continuum split can be broken early by stray boss aoe and rewind you to a bad spot. Remove this pvp mechanic off the chronomancer in PvE. Chronomancer is so much effort for far worse performance and rewards than the alternatives, and the way continuum split as well as our wells are are a big reason for it. Our melee power weapon is weak, and the elite spec signature weapon is bad. The class has really lagged behind. Unlike the clone reassignment of mirage or the carryover nature of stocked blades for virtuoso, chronomancer has all the old mesmer core clone mechanic problems and bad tuning to boot.

Mainhand Sword for mesmer will need to generate 2 clones on Illusionary Leap or a halving of the CD in PvE. If this doesn't happen, every single power mesmer spec will drop mainhand sword for mainhand dagger+greatsword, as the clone generation is so much higher to keep shatters going. Please consider making Continuum Split a set duration for chronomancer not requiring clones and making the rift immune in PvE so it doesn't automatically expire if some random aoe lands its way. Power chronomancer is pretty much a dying breed, and honestly with all the nerfs to mirage, the only decent PvE spec mesmer has is virtuoso. Virtuoso will be hard to dethrone as the dominant mesmer spec because it also fixes the issue with clones despawning on mob death, and you can target switch with illusionary blades but not clones outside axe 3 on mirage. Consider making clones not despawn on mob death, and for shatters to direct who the clones will shatter on. The mesmer clone mechanic is in serious need of review for PvE and WvW. The problem with that is the same problem that killed alacrity staff mirage. The clone ramp up requirement and the fact you can't spit out alacrity during intermission phases or when forced off the boss by some mechanic means in realistic scenarios you lose uptime.