Milo.3840

Exactly... like one of the things in Drowned Kaineng is just to uncover a vault that talks about to people in love?? There's mayyybe a few in Echovald Wilds that are decent like the Forever Tree and Ignis.. but Ignis just ends up feeling like "here's a big bad spooky tree man". I was probably too hasty not fleshing out what I meant by "instanced content". What I meant by it was that it seems now that player concern has shifted heavily into DPS numbers etc for instances. I mean I know of course those types of things will always be of concern in the MMO scene, but it's (to me) at a point like WoW now where trivial amounts of numbers are the key concern of development. Again it's difficult to describe. I'm whole heartedly for things like dungeons and fractals as they are in great quantity and really flesh out the game's story; gameplay for fractals is incredible thanks to the different mechanics that change around. I just wish things like fractals and dungeons had some sort of matchmaking system so that more players like me with anxiety about discord etc could get involved, but that sounds a bit selfish on my end so I didnt want to put it in the post

TL;DR: Overall vibe and fantasy of the game then and now. Lately, there is a heavy lack of suspension of disbelief in the game in my opinion. Open world needs to make a comeback and I wish somehow someway it could feel similar to real end game content like people feel raids/strikes are end game content. GW2 excelled at being different from other MMOs in that regard, but now it's starting to feel the same. I hate that Open World gets sorted into the "doesn't really matter endgame" category. Maybe a blend between how Straits of Devastation, Malchor's Leap, and Cursed Shore maps progress (unlocked vendors and map completion etc), Drizzlewood Coast's reward track and amazing map progression, and the difficulty of Dragon's End would do it. Lately, I've been seriously having a good time doing core Tyria map comp on all of my characters. The level scaling (save for gear and general power creep) makes it all still feel relevant. It's an awesome way to farm spirit shards, gather mats, and you generally always have something you can do in core Tyria. This is all my opinion and I'm honestly just wondering if anyone feels the same way. GW2 is by far and large my most favorite video game to date (save for maybe Halo or Ratchet and Clank) and I sincerely care about it. It's hard for me to portray precisely why I feel the Core Tyria maps (and PoF as well to be honest) are GW2's best developed for the game but I will try: The number of renown hearts to complete: Ever since Living World came about, the renown hearts became abysmally small, and I suppose they tried to compensate by making them take much longer to complete and having them available to complete each day for rewards. I believe a healthy blend could be accomplished by increasing the number of renown hearts available per map, while reducing the time to complete each heart and reducing the rewards per vendor. Overall it would take the same time and give the same rewards, but would encourage much more engaging map exploration and less "go to these three or 4 areas each day and to a long grueling task". Not only that, but the many, many events that already take place all over the map could contribute to heart completion as well. The events that change the map state: As far as I know, there isn't really anything to do anymore like Core Tyria's "do these events to unlock this vendor" type things. I've really been needing obsidian shards lately and I actually enjoy how Straits of Devastation has an awesome event chain to unlock Tactician Deathstrider to purchase Obsidian for Karma. Not only that, but the Hero Points are sometimes locked behind capturing a shrine. The Harathi events are amazing as well because capturing a camp actually captures it from the centaurs and allows you to purchase Centaur weapon skins (it's just very frustrating how long allied forces hold the camps and prevent renown heart completion with ease). Those types of things could be fleshed out much more with cool Jade Tech Brotherhood skins, or Speaker skins, where the unlocked vendors sell unique exotic items with Dragon's or Ritualist stats (for a hefty fee of map currency that you could maybe possibly gain by renown hearts and event completion.. if only there were something like "writs" in the game that we could exchange...) The Fantasy Vibe and suspension of disbelief: There's tons of lore to be found and more importantly, the ambient dialogue fits the game's fantasy waaaaay more than EoD's "Earth Social Dynamics" vibe they've for some reason decided to adapt; I'm not saying they don't belong in the game at all, but when you constantly vomit affirmative action with subtelty all over the place, it really kills the fantasy vibe in my opinion. It's really difficult for me to accurtely describe the general feel of the game in core Tyria vs EoD.. maybe it's just that EoD feels more attached to "rainbow dragon magic, friendship, and love conquers all" overbearing theme, I'm not sure.. but core Tyria really gets you immersed in the story's universe as you play the maps.. but that's not what the post is mainly about, as I don't want to be grouped into the anti-affirmative action crowd that I feel will immediately discredit my argument; I just want more of the game's universe and heavier down-scaling on "Earth World Problems" and "as long as we have each other" vibe. "Ear Choices that sort of matter but not really (and personal story in general): No longer do personality traits do anything. Sure it's a nuance, but it was a neat feature for players to have akin to titles. There isn't anything like "choose this path to experience the story this way, but lead to the same end game". It was so cool to decide which route to take in our affiliation with the Pact and really felt immersive. To top on all of that, I might be in the minority of people who preferred the old style of cutscenes and dialogue where it showed your character talking to story characters rather than speech bubbles over a walkie-talkie and rendered cinematics. I was just wondering if anyone feels the same way or not. Lately it feels that GW2 has been leaning more towards instanced content being their focus for devlopment of end game, and I feel that really does the game a disservice. I don't understand why that open world should be the default easy mode of the game. In my opinion, it could be an understood concept that the further you progress linearly on the map, the more difficult it becomes, where again I'd reference to Orr. I'm so sorry if I couldn't accurately portray why I feel Core Tyria is where GW2 shines the most, but maybe if you feel the same you could elaborate. To me I could really just sum it up as that's where you can really feel where the devs poured their heart and soul into developing something artistically amazing. The cultural armor tiers, the research they did for the accuracy of map geography and vocabulary, the little things like when you kill a racoon or rabbit with an ice damage weapon (it's hilarious if you haven't seen it yet) [list continues]. All of that must have taken a serious amount of innovation, time, and dedication with confidence, whereas lately it feels that the devs are afraid of taking such devoted risks like they did with the initial development of the game.

So I'm someone who almost exclusively does open world and occasional wvw. I swap weapons and sigils a lot. A lot a lot. Is there a way to "store" your legendary's stats such that every time you equip it you don't have to re-customize the stats and sigils all over again? Even more irritating is using my Legendary Sigils on a Legendary weapon, so much that I've elected to just freaking keep the regular sigils in my bags now because all I have to do is just equip them on the weapon rather than every time re-customizing the sigil ON TOP of re-customizing the stats of a weapon.. and then there's the having to re-transmog the Legendary every time as well.. A scenario being, if I'm running around in open world on my Willbender and I only have two equipment template tabs. One is my power guardian equipment and the other is condition guardian. Sometimes I like to swap around to Dragonhunter. I have two Legendary Swords unlocked and a Legendary Greatsword. However, Dragonhunter can't wield off hand swords. So when I swap over I equip a shield or focus or something off-hand and equip my bow for the other weapon set. Then I swap back over to willbender. Now I have to re-customize the swords all over again from the armory: sigils, stats, etc., whereas previously before Legendary Armory I could just re-equip the sword off-hand hassle free.

You mean sort of like how firing canons work? Like having to hold down the button increases the range of the cannonball. But yes I agree with the awkwardness of the pattern. And I find it very difficult to make use of Flowing Resolve due to the dash aspect, especially when there might be a gtfo red circle spawned by a boss, or even worse if youre fighting something with complex terrain and you will fall off

I hope I'm not the only one having issues with this, but like 50% (nearly 100% of the time underwater) of the time I activate Rushing Justice my character just dashes through an enemy and misses the impact damage and spawns Willbender Flames behind or to the side or somewhere in outer space. I could maybe deal with missing the impact damage but trying to kite an enemy into the willbender flames after activation is starting to give me migraines.

Hmm so when I looked it up on the wiki, it says jade was purple-ish. Had no idea Zhaitan caused it to turn green. I wonder what that implies for the future lore

Is there any correlation? Why is jade itself so significant to magic?

This is still occurring for me today

Even more cosmetic drops like that would be a huge upgrade from constantly getting greens. I'm not saying stat progression here at all, just some sort of unique option LIKE RUNES/SIGILS that can only be aquired AND ARE ACCOUNT BOUND through metas/raids/etc. As for people lecturing me on salvaging and crafting, I have completed the Agent of Entropy achievement (salvage 200 items) 21,319 times, I'm no pleb when it comes to crafting and have made tons of gold from buying off the trading post not from a few pieces doing a meta. I buy stacks on stacks of 70-80 greens from the TP for and use my runecrafter's salvage-o-matic to craft runes/sigils etc and then the raw materials to craft and sell gear. The amount of items I have to salvage to do that cannot be aquired through a meta nearly as easily as I can buy them from the TP. I just want something meaningful to be a possible reward from doing content, like tons more of Chak Egg Sac type things and ESPECIALLY unique ascended gear akin to what drops from Triple Trouble. The unique gear I mentioned above would be nice, but I know that won't ever happen. They didn't even add new Armor Runes to the expansion for the new specializations for some reason.

can't get my client to the login part even.. it just says "Downloading 0kb (0kb/s)" then "Connection errors detected, retrying"

A solution I've always wanted in this game is for the elite specialization ascended weapon collection achievement to provide you with some sort of augment to gameplay uniquely specific to that class. Something like say if I unlocked Gravity (Catalyst's ascended hammer collection reward) it would have a unique effect like "Switching attunements grants stacks of Elemental Empowerment. Activating Grand Finale with all four Elemental Projectiles active instantly activates your Jade Sphere for your current attunement." Additionally, you'd be able to add it to an infusion for fractals etc. so you'd be able to swap it through different ascended hammers after you unlocked it. This same concept could be applied to map based collections for a different sort of mastery as well. For example, say you were in Kourna. There could be an in depth reward track/crafting/collection system to unlock really cool combat abilities you gained from spending time there, like having a chance to summon one of those deployable turrets while in combat or gaining some type of power from Joko. With as much depth they have in these maps they create they could easily create unique rewards from them that aren't just the same "grind this currency for another ascended trinket or crafting materials to craft the same gear you've always been able to but different." Like the Dragonslayer weapons once crafted to ascended could grant the dragon response boons outside of response missions when killing minions of jormag or primordus in the open world

So I've been in love with this game since launch and have put in countless hours of gameplay. I love the rich depth of map exploration and achievements and the sense of agency with characters, but I have one huge complaint that I feel doesn't get much attention and I hope I'm not in the minority here.. Getting masterwork gear for doing countless metas/world bosses etc has now left me in a state of wondering "Why even bother doing those anymore, the rewards are the same lame thing over and over" which is just unidentified gear that has a very low chance of being an exotic that sells for less than 50s on the trading post. Once you get your ascended gear from Living World Currencies, there's really no point in doing them anymore other trading in the currency for crafting materials that rarely do you much good considering they still cost 1g per shipment. Once you manage to craft a set of ascended gear, again, there's very little else to do considering you can just use an anthology of heroes in the mystic forge to stat change at will. BiS armor runes/weapon sigils are readily and cheaply available on the trading post and/or crafted leaving little to be rewarded from actually playing the game. Magic Find is a joke because it does not affect boss chests, meta chests, or open world chests which more often than not give, you guessed it, masterwork unidentified gear and ascended materials that are usually considered trash to the point there are "Gobblers" like Gleam of Sentience that convert them into vendor trash for you so they don't take up space. Magic Find is also CAPPED meaning once you max out your Luck, it does nothing. As a matter of fact, Magic Find to me is now a burden because I'd rather loot junk that I can convert to Jade Slivers to trade for currency like Tyrian Defense seals and then use those to get materials. I understand people don't want a "Gear Treadmill" and neither do I, but as soon as End of Dragons launched, I still had zero progression other than masteries because the gear is exactly the same, save for two new Stat Prefixes that are barely any different than any of their predecessors.

It states 'deal increased damage while you have stability, swiftness, or superspeed. This increase compounds with each boon you have'. So does that mean the compound doesn't count for the other two boons aside from superspeed? For example, if I have all 3 with a stack of might, will the damage increase be 20% for the three boons plus superspeed or will it only be 10% for one of the three boons plus the stack of might?

Not really bonus stats so much as something like the sword "Firebringer" might have an effect that causes burning foes to have a chance to erupt and set nearby foes on fire, or "Bolt" could have an effect that causes a lightning strike and become a lightning rod, causing strikes against other enemies to chain back to it. Or something that would be really cool would be the Specialization Achievement Reward Ascended weapon to have unique effects for that profession. Like "Purifier" (Willbender's Ascended weapon) could have an effect "While you have a Sword in your main hand and off hand, Lethal Tempo can stack an additional X amount of times" Just examples of course

I whole-heartedly concur. I've gotten all I could want stat wise from the Season 4 currencies, but even ascended items offer only a small increase in stats vs exotics. Maybe a fix would be some new type of Rune level above exotic that only ascended items could equip, because agony infusions to me aren't quite interesting considering the only rewards you get from fractals are achievements and cosmetics.. something that is a cross between infusions and fractal specific rune sets would make me want to play fractals