Mungo Zen.9364

So why was the food removed?

Not to be too doom and gloom but, they have taken almost a full year to vaguely balance the professions and even then, many are still not there yet. 2022 and EoD was meant to be a refresh for GW2 and Anet after the poor conclusion to IBS and 2021 (alongside the ongoing profession balancing, WvW Alliances beta in year 4 or 5, PvP in basically maintenance mode). Yet we got an expansion with less content then previous ones, and still the same mess everywhere else. We have had a run around on profession balancing and WvW Alliances betas were underwhelming from the player perspective. We did get the re-release of Season 1, but as nice as that is, rehashing old content is a low cost way of putting out 'new' content. While we may get some nice looking presentations for what is coming this year, a roadmap from Anet is not what I am waiting for. I am waiting for actual content to be delivered and judging them as such. No Hopium that the next LWs or Prof Update will be 'the one that makes it better' but rather, I want to see what they deem worthy of delivering to the playerbase and decide if I am going to log in from there.

Advanced Gliding can be used everywhere you Glide, which is most of the game world, so it is probably preferable. If you have Living World Season 3 you will get more HoT Mastery Points to complete the HoT Mastery lines with. Allowing you to come back for the missed MP later. Also, if you haven't seen it, there is a list of Mastery Points on the Wiki, If you scroll to the top, you can add your API key and see which ones you have completed/need to complete. Which should give you a wide selection of MP you haven't done yet as there are 198 possible MP in HoT and you only need 144 for the HoT Mastery Tracks.

Perhaps this could be merged into the QoL thread and Anet can take care of this request from there.

Do you think they gave Virt distortion for PvE or for PvP/WvW? Does having Distortion in PvE even matter??

Nope, nothing to do with SoI. What you have quoted is the suggestion. To have IF also decrease Blade Generation outside of combat from 10s to 3s. And as you also quoted, I do not think that would be enough of an improvement to make it better than Bloodsong or Psychic Riposte.

Well, it isn't ALL the seasons but, The GW2 Sales Page does appear to have the option to buy Living World Season 2 Complete for cash. Alternately you can buy 'Everything' with The Complete Collection. Now, you likely already own the game and some or all the expansions so this may not be the route you want to take but, it was an option for new players to buy that package. Unfortunately, your complaint is one that many people have shared on these forums, and until the last year, was largely ignored by Anet. We have never before now been able to buy LWS outside of the Gem Store in any capacity. So given the above options, it is possible they are looking at ways to allow users to buy them for cash and more options may be available in the future.

There will always be a way to bypass the User Account portion of the OS. With a little work, you can find ways to strip out parts of the OS after install. Things like all the MS products and advertising being pushed on you (such as OneDrive, Office, Store) can be removed, the Telemetry and Heuristics can be removed. Even Cortana can be removed. I have been modifying and stripping back my OS since XP with an effort to make the OS as streamlined as possible. The modern OS is tying up system resources and bandwidth with the nonsense I listed above and more. By getting rid of the junk I can run games or music software very efficiently with no interruptions. Modifying your OS is really easy and there are some good Reddit posts about what tools to use and how to use them, alongside some decent Discord communities. However, always use caution when modifying your OS, reinstalls take time and if you don't plan out what you are doing you could lose your saved data and files (hint always store them off your PC). And if you modify your OS, don't sign in with your account first!!!!

I believe that Infinite Forge should not generate Blades faster as a fix, as it will need to generate blades as effectively as Bloodsong, and Bloodsong can generate Blades for Power builds very effectively (at least in Meta group builds). Infinite Forge, when compared to Psychic Riposte and Bloodsong, is only doing 1 thing, and limited to only in combat. One option would be to have IF speed up Out of Combat blade generation from every 10s to every 3s. While a slight tweak, it would give IF Virtuoso faster recovery or less downtime after combat. I still think this would need something else to make the trait compete. Another option may be to have IF increase Bladesong Strike Damage by 1% per Blade used if within the Range Threshold (600 Units, same as Mental Focus). This would give a DPS boost for melee oriented strike builds and a focus on 5 blade Bladesongs. Numbers could be balanced from there. A different twist on the above, have Infinite Forge double the effectiveness of Deadly Blades, doubling the duration of the effect, or possibly even allowing it to stack the damage modifier. In either case you get slower Bladesongs that hit harder, and benefits for non-Dagger/GS users.

While leveling I always choose to focus on one utility type and a trait tree that supports it. You could choose to do that with a specific weapon, but as you change gear a lot while leveling it’s a good chance to try out different weapon play styles. For example, using the signets suggestion from earlier, you can see that many professions have a signets trait to pair with them. Signets on the Wiki So you could do a signets build for leveling, or a different utility type that interests you that has a trait pairing.

Can someone explain to me, a Mesmer main since 2017, why IP is brought up since it was changed to baseline in 2015? How is a trait that hasn’t existed for 7 years still relevant to conversations in this forum??

DX11 had a clear path from DX9 which GW2 launched with. There were comments about the path from DX11 to DX12 being a bigger technological challenge and perhaps insurmountable for GW2 engine. Yet, with Windows 7 being end of life, I am surprised MS would invest any resources into making DX12 work on Win7. EDIT After some reading it seems that Blizzard paid Microsoft to develop the stuff to make DX12 work on Win7 by baking a lot of the components into the game itself. The logic here is due to Windows 7 being the predominant OS for gamers in China and WoW having a massive player base in China that Blizzard would pay to update the game to help those players (and keep them as happy subscribers). It appears that Microsoft has offered this to other companies as a service but when it comes to GW2 how many players use Win7 and how much revenue do they generate to offset the cost of Anet paying Microsoft for the upgrade. It’s probably not how they want to spend money even if they are able to get DX12 to work with GW2.

Umm do you also want it to be 900 Range shotgun style weapon?? With traits that give you Condi Buckshot with AoE or Power Slugs with piercing?

If there are less variables to the forum then the moderators have less stuff they need to deal with. We get a feature less forum to facilitate Anet saving money.

They recently gave us the ability to sit without chairs so…..anything is possible.

Healers who do not provide Boons are worse off than DPS who don't supply Boons. In the homogenization of GW2, since they wanted to create 3 support roles (Heals, Quick, Alac) but only provided 2 support slots per 5 man group, it means that again, builds that can compress 2 roles (Heal+Alac or Heal+Quick) will be a better choice than Pure healing or Pure Boons. If they had left boon sharing to 10 man and groups were built around 3 support slots in 10 not 2 in 5 we might be able to have pure Healers standing beside pure Quick and Alac providers. At this point I am waiting for Anet to either make Heals+Alac the default combo (and update all Alac providers to have comparable Healing options), or balance all Alac and Quick providers to all have equal Healing capabilities. Do note, I do not think pure healers have a future in GW2 PvE due to this role compression. Rather eSpecs that do not have access to Alac or Quick should probably not bother being a healer. PvP and WvW might find homes for pure healers, or professions built using healing traits.

Isn’t relentless pursuit a Reaper thing?

Pre-EoD Celestial Chrono only needed 1 Well, Tides of Time and Shatter Spam to self buff Alacrity and make good use of Improved Alacrity. When they updated Celestial to include Concentration and Expertise it really helped self buffed builds like this. I was running Imp Alac and Seize the Moment to double dip on both Quick and Alac when I started playing around with Celestial builds. I do not understand what you are saying here. What is this "Relentless Pursuit + Relentless Pursuit for great Aegis uptime since they buffed Chronophantasma"

Role a Mesmer and equip Scepter and Malicious Sorcery trait alongside your choice of gathering tools. As per the wiki: Scepter awesomeness

Celestial Chrono is fine. I far preferred it pre-EoD as there were more options for how to build it out via trait and weapon choices and that flexibility offered more powerful builds. Still non-meta builds, still not top DPS but absolutely viable. The biggest difference was pre-EoD I could solo Champ bounties really easily with Celestial Chrono. Can’t do that today due to DPS being suspect. You can’t die but you also can’t kill much before the timer runs out. All that said, this build should be pretty decent in Open World for anyone boosting a Mesmer since they get Celestial gear with the boost.

I agree. The current state of profession updates and balance is atrocious and I’d like to see the root of the problem, Anets profession developers and testers, be improved upon. Until the people making these changes are given the tools and guidance to do their job well, we will continue to get really poor updates from them.

Anet doesn't care as long as they have money rolling in. Virtuoso is relatively fine, and Mirage and Chrono are functional. They aren't good, they aren't great, they are functional (barely depending on what build). At this point I don't see Anet investing the resources into fixing the playstyle of a profession or eSpec beyond any type of numeric tweaks to existing skills and traits. Simply looking at what they did the last year, how they executed changes to Mesmer and other professions, this dev team isn't in the market to make changes that complex. And given the cadence of releases, it will likely be February before we see another round of tweaks and the possible chance for Mirage to get it's dodge back, and then 2-3 more patches of rebalancing to fix that. That puts us where, end of 2023 before Mirage may actually be balanced into the Meta for each game mode? I'd still wager that in 1 year, Mirage is still just Functional, and doesn't play any differently than right now. I'd almost wager that second dodge doesn't come back in 2023 given how Anet has treated the Mesmer profession in the past few years.

Other than having your name announced in the zone the race is hosted in, what rewards are there for top three race finishers? Some players will never win a fair race, it's just the way it is. However, the system is setup so all players can finish these races. And the fun, excitement and rewards are balanced so completing the races is where the focus is, not on winning them.

I can't find anything that supports this comment. Which races had the race times changed? Which patch notes show this? This is conflating the issue by combining several factors. You could also argue that you can't do these races now without the Jade Bot Mount Booster, but you don't specifically need it, it just makes it a little easier. I just ran the Wintersday race on an alternate account that has Raptor Mastery 3 (the long jump) but nothing else. No Jade Bot Mount Boost (no EoD), no Energy Recovery, no LWS4 upgrades, not even sharing abilities from Springer or Skimmer, the only other mounts unlocked on this acct. Without all those tools I still managed a 2:28 which gives you Gold for the race. So I could agree that without Raptor Long Jump you wouldn't be able to complete the course in Gold time, but you definitely do not need all the other boosts. What these boosts do is make the the average racer less skillful in using their mounts to the fullest capabilities and in turn make those boosts seem mandatory. A handful of players will always push themselves, the mounts capabilities and race course to the limits. Many people will struggle to finish the race because they are racing the clock, the leaderboard or friends and guildies, not themselves. You will become fastest when you race for yourself.

This comes up during several festivals and ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The race events do not reward by position only by completion of the race. The timed race does have a leaderboard but again, no rewards for being at the top. Im trying to figure out why you’d swap to a Griffon tho, I just do the whole race on the Beetle using the Jade Bot Mount Recharge.