tanpopo.9102

* casts elite skill One-Year Thread Necro * So uh, now that we've all got these Black Lion Vouchers from the event, does anyone have info for poor OP who's waited a year for an answer? Namely, does the Weaver/Elem sword elemental effects affect the full length of the chain whip sword when it's extended? I mean, that'd be pretty sweet, right?

This isn't so much a QOL suggestion but I guess more of an immersion one. As far as I know, there isn't some lore or explanation for why mounts just pop in and out of existence. I think it might be nice if there was at least some rudimentary attempt to make the mounts run away or something every time you dismount or use an engage skill. Like use the raptor tail, then it dashes off out of sight. Bunny stomp, then it bounces away. The skyscale engage is actually kinda okay, although it does dematerialize pretty quickly too. An on-mount animation would be great too! Like if you call your raptor while running, your character's speed increases drastically for a step or two as you approach mount speed, then you do a running mount onto the raptor. It doesn't have to be as stylish as movie Legolas, but something other than "poof, magic" would be a bit nicer. From what I can see, it does already look like there is a mount animation, but the only real thing missing is the mount running up. Probably never gonna happen, but can't hurt to ask, I guess.

I've been replaying some old story journal content to help finish my Quietus collection. I'm not exactly a fan of forcing us to replay story or strike content to finish these, but that's another problem. This story segment was actually pretty enjoyable and entertaining, from strictly a non-achievement perspective: Entertaining dialogue (subject to personal taste), a bit of back story, and overall a nice opening into this expansion. I also want to say that it seems like the artists who work on this game consistently do a pretty fantastic job. However, the achievements for this section are leaving a very sour taste in my mouth, and are reminding me why I probably left all these uncompleted in the first place. I'm getting the impression that someone just tacked these on afterwards, did some basic "ok it works" testing, and just left it at that, without any real regard for player experience or respect for others' time. Think Before You Leap: Clear the Armada using the leap skill less than 10 times. This one is actually pretty nice in theory, because it requires some level of planning ahead and strategy, which is actually a nice way to make replaying content more fun. Except this ability is quite buggy, and often results in me falling off target... which is fine, except the counter for this achievement still drops no matter what. The wiki recommends "consider using leap abilities from skills and bundles to save on Prismatic Leap uses, such as the Lightning Hammer or Experimental Rifle." Should these sorts of measures really be necessary? Also, it's rather difficult sometimes to ground target on a platform that is moving or higher than you. This makes the next achievement even more annoying: This Isn't Cannon: Avoid all cannon fire and spinning traps. This doesn't sound too bad at first, but there's a lot of cheap shots and trial-and-error memorization. It's the kind of gameplay that I wish died in the 90s (I was there and I don't miss it), and it reminds me a bit of SAB's Tribulation mode, where the whole "challenge" is just cheap shot surprises that you need to memorize. It doesn't help at all that cannon projectiles fire without warning and have very poor visual indication (black cannon balls against dark ships), and the cannoneers' AOE indicator lasts for maybe half a second before it actually hits. It's enough that I can barely dodge in time, but not if I happen to get stuck in some animation lock. If you watch this GuildJen video, about 25s in, she gets cheap shot by a cannon before she even really has a chance to do anything. But hey, I guess it's easy once you've memorized the entire level already? The spinning traps could also be a rather cheap shot the first time for melee players, given that they are difficult to spot in the chaos that is GW2's graphics effects. Also, given that my favorite character is a weaver, good luck taking out some of the ranged cannoneers if you happen to get stuck in combat with only a melee weapon equipped. Mission checkpoints are actually a good thing, except in this case one of the checkpoints is in the middle, and directly interferes with the above achievement, so if you get hit, you are stuck with this failure condition, and you need to restart the entire story chapter. The nature of these achievements means that it's generally easiest to do all of them separately, which honestly feels like a poor way of padding gameplay. There's already a ton of stuff to do in this game, and it's already tedious enough that someone might choose to replay story on multiple characters to finish their elite collections. It would be nice if future "achievements" would be more forgiving, or at least give us a way to quickly restart the achievement part while still in the instance. An allowance of 2-3 hits would've made this so much easier. I was also going to suggest that the meta-achievement allow for partial completion instead of every single achievement, but I'm just now noticing that even though it says "Complete all 16 EOD Act 1 Achievements," there are actually 18, so I may have been wasting my time, after being misled by poor wording. It seems this is also the case for Acts 1-4... guess I'll file a bug report after confirming I don't need all 16. QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

There are like... multiple problems with this, I think. 1. Maybe a minor problem, but it's not on a world timer, especially given that the size of the event is comparable to more "epic" world events like Mordy-Mouth. This alone probably puts it out of most peoples' minds, and as such, it's easier to forget. 2. It seems to be tuned to expect a full 50-person group. The event usually ran fine when it was a weekly, but after that, not so much. 2b. It doesn't help that the enemies in this zone seem to be tuned for post-EOD power-creep, where even vets and elites are pointless health sponges. And has since been the case since GW1, when in doubt, just spawn more enemies. I'm also not really a fan of how enemy "challenge" is handled. Oni pretty much just slash non-stop and stack bleeds like crazy. If you're not being carried by zerg condition cleanse, I don't see what "strategy" is actually applicable here. Same with the void hearts that pulse deadly PBAOE -- I'm not sure if this is just default behavior or if something triggers this, but the only counters seem to either be A) again, being carried by overwhelming zerg force, or B) switching to ranged options, making a slog even slower. 3. And yes, it's a slog. From north to south, to north again, it's like what, at least two hours? I try not to watch the clock during this event. I think the southern boss fights are fine, even if enemies like the Oni are pretty lazy design. Getting there is a different story though. I really wish this game had less lengthy NPC escorts and point defenses more than 5 minutes long. This zone makes me feel like I was rude to give feedback about the length of other events like Kaineng Blackout. The north meta is what is more painful, I think. I might be able to tolerate the slow turtle segments if the boss itself was bearable, but it's so painful to play. I'm not quite sure what exactly makes it like this, but I'll share some observations: First, the north meta splits up the squad into two parts, snipers and behemoth, which makes things even worse considering the tendency for low population, "spawn more health sponges" encounter design, and the fact that the meta is less popular, and as such, people probably have a tendency to not really understand how to optimally play this. Behemoth side: What does the behemoth actually do? More often than not, I see people avoid this side because the enemy spawns here tend to seem overwhelming, and I want to point out that if you have an event that heavily requires the use of turtles, you will see people be lazy (or perhaps safe) and choose not to dismount, which probably has a decent impact on the overall damage output of the squad. Snipers: This seems to be the more popular side, although some things still make it painful. Enemy spawns on this side seem manageable, at least. A problem here is that a lot of players just won't put down their sniper rifles, which is both a player and design problem... doesn't everyone like powerful rifles? But just like we're forced to put down the rifles once the void hearts spawn, we should be forced to put down the rifles once the energy is depleted. This would force people to either clear the mobs or MOUNT A TURTLE and actually help collect energy. I also wish players were smart enough to notice the very obvious tracers and target marks from the jade mech snipers, but I think those are actually okay, even if it's sometimes very difficult to notice these things given the chaos of enemy spawns, and the fact that mounted turtle players keep blocking my view. It just takes so long to collect energy, and the giant's defiance bar seems so beefy, and even the kitten void hearts are super tanky. How is it that a full squad of people can consistently fail to take down all three hearts? tldr: either drastically reduce the time needed to complete the entire zone, or drastically reduce the difficulty so at least coming to this zone isn't a huge risk of wasting time. I'd prefer a bit of both approaches, actually. Is there even a chance anyone will actually go back and adjust this? Given that we're basically live-beta testing Weaponmaster, any chance we can just have someone drop the numbers by like 30% and let us see how it is?

every build is overperforming in PvE I get it, balance is difficult -- no sarcasm intended. Given that I doubt we'll ever go back to 20-30k dps being the norm, any chance we can just get a band-aid fix instead, and have old content BOSSES' health boosted? It's honestly pretty sad seeing Mordy-Mouth or Octovine dropping in one phase. I feel sorry for any new players trying to do the Shatterer achievements, considering it usually melts before any of those mechanics even show up. And in a way, isn't it a bit insulting to everyone who helped develop the game before, to have their work just trivialized like this? And then there's the Gyala meta end boss, which is a painful slog even with a full squad. Then again, I don't know -- maybe the new target model for the game is for Legendary Divas who just want to show up, randomly attack stuff, and get "rewarded". I honestly don't have anything against casual content and I hardly touch any "hardcore" content myself, but making a game too easy is just as bad as making it too difficult.

I'm not entirely sure this suggestion belongs here, but it's technically about saving time, among other things, so... Please consider making some events shorter I don't have a complete list, and not every event needs to be shortened, but in recent memory, these come to mind: Bjora Marches, Storms of Winter: After building defenses, there's a ten minute stretch where we need to defend the shrines. This segment is hardly difficult, given that if you're a smarter and more attentive player, you know you can just stand by the bonfires and literally watch the enemies melt away. The "bombers" do no damage to the shrines, so this segment is, as Colin's infamous line from the manifesto goes: "I swung a sword. I swung a sword again! That's great." Ten minutes isn't a long time on paper, but basically sitting idle for ten minutes and just pressing 1 makes it feel like an eternity. This should be five minutes, tops. Kaineng Blackout: Bruh this whole event, from start to finish is like half an hour, for slightly more reward than you might get from a leviathan spawn. A number of the defense segments could easily be shortened, and a good 10-15 minutes chopped off this event. I want to say Echovald Gang Wars is a bit like this too but I don't quite remember. Again, more of what is basically brain-dead idle or follow NPC time, with minimal effort. Unlocking the Wizard's Tower: This one has an 8+ minute segment where you do little else except run over colored balls. WHY. Again, not really a terribly long time on paper, but it feels like a slog when you're actually there, because it's hardly what I would call stimulating or challenging. Should be five minutes at most. The rest of the event doesn't feel too bad, I guess. Chak Gerent victory: Yeah, can't forget this one, right? That post-victory wait might've not been too bad at one point, but now that every player is running around with 2-3x the dps from before, now we typically have a ten minute wait time staring at a wall. "Cannons ready to fire! But uh, we're safe now so let's just run some last-minute diagnostics just to be safe." (admittedly not a bad idea, but still) Maybe an extra check could be inserted into that countdown timer? Like every minute or two, just check to see if all the Chak Gerents are dead, and skip to the end sequence. I'd even prefer these sorts of segments to be harder, but faster -- make us actually have to try, and actually make it feel a bit more hectic. But barring that, a decent bandage fix would just be to shorten them. Here are some reasons to consider: 1. Because I would hope the game designers want the game to be fun. But I don't know; maybe people honestly do find these sorts of tasks fun, and I'm just out of touch. 2. The game is getting larger, with more events to do. People only have a limited amount of time to play per day, and this lets people enjoy more of the game daily. 3. Kinda follows #2, but it gives the player more of a sense that their time is respected. Also, skyscale chicken skin please 🙏🐔

I think it'd be PRETTY SWEET if we could "favorite" items in the gem store, or even unpurchased skins in our equipment tab and such. When it goes on sale, we could get a notification, pigeon mail, or whatever. It could also be used as an in-house metric to track what players want most, hint hint 😱

The first few skills of mounts actually take their keybindings from your weapon skills, which is a bit confusing, because the game lets us bind the same keys to weapons and mounts simultaneously, but the mount keybinds take precedence so you end up with skills you can't use. This has been a problem for a while now but I guess player controls aren't a priority. I'm guessing that because technically we can rebind to whatever we want, it's a "player error" issue or something. I ended up just sucking it up and rebinding Mount Skill 2 to something else, but now I'm going through this awkward phase where I keep messing up races and simple activities because I'm used to my old keybind. I'm not sure what the best fix would be, but maybe they ought to just create a separate set of explicit keybinds for mount skills 1-3, and by default have them inherit the keybinds from weapon skills, especially now that we have mounts and such that have more skills (skiffs, certain types of story-related vehicles, etc). Anyways, my small QOL suggestion: It would be nice if we could right-click the Wizard's Vault icon at the top of the screen to instantly collect all pending rewards (kinda like the old system), instead of having to open the window and individually click everything.

I would like a modified in-combat weapon swap for elementalist, and maybe engineers and others who may want it. Yes, I understand why they currently cannot swap in combat. No, this would be different so it could not be abused. There are variations of this idea, but basically, we would swap weapons (or perhaps hold weapon swap for 1-2s just to be sure), and all our weapon abilities would be on a 5-10 second global cooldown (or whatever is appropriate), so your DPS would be dead during that time and would not really be viable for abuse in some spreadsheet warrior's rotation. I think still being able to use utility and dodge skills would be fair though so I can at least stay alive during this time. Why is this needed? To be blunt, there's a lot of very melee-unfriendly combat in this game, especially in open-world PVE. Reasons include but are not limited to: "challenge" scaling just involving spawning tons of crap, often with poorly-telegraphed knockdowns (HoT and any sort of charging mob is a good example). Even when there are proper telegraphs, they can be difficult to see in all the player effect visual noise. Then there are enemies that just put out an endless flurry of attacks, making dodging mostly pointless, and healing merely delaying the inevitable --Dagda is a bit like that, and I'm also reminded of the void oni or whatever in Gyala that just continuously stack endless bleeds. And then there are just the "screw you for choosing Weaver," like various Kryptis, pretty much all Gyala boss fights, and PoF harpies who drop PBAOE effects on top of themselves, despite the fact that Weaver was a highlight of the PoF expansion. Yeah, I get it -- risk vs. reward, right? That may be the case for more focused encounters like strikes or fractals, but most normal PVE is pretty messy by comparison, and most of the time your "reward" is just getting downed instantly from some massively upscaled champ, or having to do twice as much work for roughly the same overall DPS as a ranged option, unless maybe you have a zerg carrying you with boon showers and healing. I doubt anyone is going to actually go back and change the behavior of these enemies, so the "easiest" band-aid fix would be to allow some modified weapon swap, so I at least have a fighting chance instead of running from the fight like a coward to swap, or just dying so I can reset the story instance. As it stands now, I usually have to roam with a staff going into unfamiliar content, and it feels kinda crappy sometimes when I actually run into a solid melee fight... because using a sword was a huge stylistic appeal of the Weaver in the first place. edit: after reading some posts in the SOTO weaponmaster beta feedback thread, I think there are some valid related concerns there too, namely: 1. older weapons haven't been brought "up to spec" to newer weapons/specs, namely staff having really only having one, maybe two (if you're a weaver) decent damage elements, whereas some of the newer ranged specs can put out more dps for comparatively less effort. 2. conjured weapons do seem to have been a sort of engineer-style kit option that could alleviate the problem of being stuck with one weapon, except they are also "stuck in the past" in a number of ways. Barring a very laborious and involved complete rework, maybe just make them a permanent summon, instead of a 30s timer (perhaps excepting FGS since it seems quite powerful already)? They'd still keep the lengthier cooldowns, but once you summon, you "keep" them until you swap away. It's bad enough if you're stuck with Frost Bow or... Lava Axe as your only ranged option, but having them limited to 30s, and then either missing your timing or having someone else pick up your other conjure is extra painful.

Ever since the announcement of SOTO Weaponmaster training, I've been wondering the same general thing: "what is the point of Catalyst?" Often, new weapons added a more iconic identity to new elite specs, like Weaver swords. But Weavers do just as well with any other weapons, as I was pleased to discover, and I'm sure most have figured out by now. But take away the hammer from the Catalyst and what are you left with? I tried out a staff Catalyst today, and... I'm not really sure if I'm doing something wrong. It seems Catalyst basically amounts to a boost to base stats and a deployable damage/combo/boon field? I've never actually had much interest in playing hammer Catalyst, but upon hearing that Grand Finale basically overshadows everything else, wouldn't it make more sense if the Catalyst F5 and hammer 3 skills were just swapped around? That seems to go more in line with the Catalyst's description of "wielding nature's forces with scientific precision". Would it be terribly bad if the hammer 3 skills were changed to the Jade Sphere field skills instead? Or maybe they'd have to move it to 5 or something, because of Weaver compatibility, unless they don't mind giving Weavers dual boon fields or something. Then again, maybe that could be a sort of support option for Weavers that they seem to be sorely lacking at the moment? Hammer would then get a sort of unique identity as a mid-range boon support weapon. Sure, they'd have to rework Catalyst traits, but maybe this is one of the "easier" ways of giving the Catalyst some identity? Even then, the whole mechanic of having to rotate through all elements seems a bit too much like the Weaver's Weave Self, feeling a bit uninspired, but maybe it's too late for a full rework. Anyways, I ain' an expert and I'm probably just going to keep playing Weaver. RIP Arcane Archer, may pistol hopefully save us.

For a bit of trivia and perspective, according to this post on GameFAQs, the original install size for the game was around 17 GB. My current install is 65.4 GB, almost four times the size. So... we've certainly received a lot of new assets over the years, for relatively low cost. We can probably expect more new stuff with the expansion, especially after the influx of cash after launch, and hopefully with their new "release model". https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/938738-guild-wars-2/63848258 Reusing assets is generally also not a bad thing when done skillfully, considering it saves on disk space, and development time and money that could be used for more significant things. Personally, I hope they add some nice new combat animations.

Hi, and sorry for making a whole thread just for this but... I would really like a skyscale skin that is a CHICKEN. Yes, I know chickens are not great fliers and they certainly don't hover, and skyscales have four legs... but I'm sure you folks have the skills to make this happen. Maybe even a feathery cockatrice breathing petrifaction breath would be okay? You'd have to get a bit creative with adjusting the stance a bit for two legs, but c'mon, it'd be so worth it. Next time you're all out sitting on your skyscale, just look how it's sitting there with its wings folded up, and instead imagine sitting on a big, juicy, fluffy chicken. Then imagine that fat boi flying off into freedom 🐔 Do you feel like chicken tonight? It could be chicken... every night. 🍗 Tasty videos of chick-scales:

I didn't get to try thief in the last open test, but I would like to say that Specter trait lines could use some power or strike options. I like the theme of the Specter but not so much the somewhat awkward scepter, and I've preferred to play the "plain" old power-based weapons... which tend to underperform as a Specter. Now that weapon choices are opening up, it'd be nice to see.

I would like to see an alternate interaction method for mesmer portals and possibly certain other objects like Aviator Memory boxes, due to portal trolling and such. Sometimes those kinds of pranks are funny, but when a portal leads into being stuck inside terrain, that's a borderline "blocks progress"-level bug, or even anti-player/griefing exploit. And sometimes you get stuck in combat too, so it's not like you can just easily waypoint out. Personally, I think it would be ideal if you had to hold down the interact button for like 1-2s so it has to be a very intentional action. There could also be an option to turn this function off for people who want it the old way. The other method could be to just have a shared binding with the existing interact, so you could either bind two different keys, or just have them both bound to the same button.

Ranger trivia: The term "ranger" doesn't come from fighting at range; it's a term for someone who protects a range of land. They're survivalists who need to learn how to be good at a bit everything, including ranged combat, but they're also deadly melee fighters, like Aragorn in LOTR or... even bunny thumpers I guess. A ranger who doesn't know how to use their melee skills is a sad sight indeed... /preach But anyways, I think the "arcane archer" would be more of an intuitive fit, especially considering there's a precedent already set with the Ice Bow. But there are also examples of "arcane gunners" in fiction, so I guess this could potentially be interesting. I don't know what the theme of the new expansion is, but maybe it could open up a lot of "Victorian mecha-magic" sorts of looks and skins. There's no saying that magic has to be completely exclusive from tech, after all. You know, kinda like... the entirety of Canthan and Asuran society. It may not everyone's cup of tea, but not everything can suit our whims; I still don't really like the Tempest much, for example. And while the pistol is usually a 600-900 range weapon, there's always the possibility it could have a unique 1200 range for this class. There has been precedent of them mixing things up before, like 1200 range hammers and melee staves. Also keep in mind with their new weapon liberation system, we can still (probably?) use the new elite spec without necessarily having to use a gun, so you can still be a "traditional" mage if you want. I just hope, if nothing else, that they make an effort to make NEW ANIMATIONS AND EFFECTS for the new skills. The previous elite specs recycled so many animations they felt a bit boring sometimes. I really, really don't want to see another "spin to win" animation -- it just feels like such a dumb thing to do in combat. Like... it's entirely possible to cast and create whirling effects without turning into a dreidel. Warrior axe spin and elemental fire overload? A bit cringe (certified opinion™). Ranger Whirling Defense? Now that's a cool skill.