Ghostkat.9580

Wait, so you think just because something got nerfs, that somehow makes it okay for it to be literally unkillable with infinite Aegis and blocks? Clearly you missed the entire point of my post. I wasn't "frothing at the mouth," in spite of whatever you seem to think. I was calmly pointing out that this is an issue the devs should look into because having an unkillable class with infinite blocks by definition defeats the point of a PvP mode. Your entire response was a series of excuses. "Reminder that it didn't win MAT,". "It got 18 nerfs,". "New weapon is mediocre,". Again, that affects it being unkillable due to getting infinite blocks how exactly? Just because something has shortcomings in damage output doesn't justify giving it a God Mode. Maybe think a little bit before rushing in to be contrarian so you can keep your response on-topic.

Rifle and longbow were always bad ideas. They have never been, and will never be, good ones. The entire reason you believe otherwise is a matter of community rhetoric in the wake of long-standing complaints that Elementalist does not have a decent ranged option. This is entirely a fault of Staff and Scepter - the two most "Mage-esque" options - feeling overwhelmingly outdated in terms of more modern gameplay. Over years and years with the community's size dwindling with time, the loud and vocal voices of the GW2 community coalesced with the notion that Ele needs a new one, purely because ArenaNet did not show any signs of wanting to go back and modernize some of its more dated systems which also plague Ele to this day. Examples include the current state of the Conjured Weapons and the summoned Elementals. Enough people kept saying Rifle or Longbow was the answer, to the extent that the community's group-think just aligned with it without question. Unfortunately, this does not fix the problem, it only sidesteps it, and Ele's issues are a lot more deeply systemic than just the available weapon choices. This is also why everyone's pointing out that Catalyst's hammer has issues on Weaver and Tempest, because by design, it is meant to interact with the way Catalyst's wells function, but wasn't designed to be a serviceable hammer in its own right. This is why Conjured Lighting Hammer - for all of the issues that come with it being tied to the way Conjured weapons work - is a superior hammer in terms of gameplay, because element aside, it has everything a player might possibly want or need on one weapon hotbar, designed with parity to the layout of other weapons like Sword and pretty much all of the off-handed options. You get two AoEs - one with a combo field - a leap finisher to use as a gap closer and to make use of combo fields, and a really good CC ability. That is irrespective of its status as an elemental weapon; it's just a solidly packaged weapon kit in its own right. If Conjured Lightning Hammer was changed simply to "Conjure Hammer," was changed to a toggle instead of a 30-second timer, and without changing its animations (only the visual effects and boons/conditions associated with its abilities) was able to swap elements, it would be a vastly superior weapon to the hammer we currently have on Catalyst. That's because it's a good weapon that interacts with combat design well first and foremost, rather than forcing its design exclusively around a singular gameplay mechanic. Bow is the same way. Conjure Frost Bow is a healing weapon, but what if it was just Conjure Bow and you could change it to fire, earth or air? You'd have a very serviceable longbow that would likely function considerably better than a new two-handed longbow that only exists because a) you saw elemental arrow types in other videogames, and b) you stubbornly held onto the idea that you thought it could work if done right, without thinking about it any more deeply than that. There's nothing it would reasonably offer you that couldn't already be done by fixing the Conjured Weapon system, which exists primarily because Ele cannot swap weapons mid-combat and since single-attunement builds do exist, if you're not able to conjure an alternative weapon, you're hurt by your gameplay being too limited. A regular longbow risks being either redundant to how a Conjured Bow would be if it could element-swap, or being in the same situation as Catalyst's hammer, where it's designed specifically around a particular mechanic that doesn't really translate to the other two specializations. Conversely, Weaver could make decent use out of a build that primarily uses the conjured bow, and then swap to a melee option for close-ranged combat if needed: Right now, there are too many builds that are very heavily dependent on making use of the Conjured weapons for DPS, especially openers and rotations that utilize the Fire Greatsword. It's not uncommon for rotations to get screwed up because a party member accidentally picked up the second Greatsword drop we needed for our rotation. I'm of the mind that a) since this system is overdue for an overhaul, its fixes should be prioritized, and b) no weapon that is currently accessible through the Conjured Weapon system should be its own equippable weapon on Ele since that would be redundant in favour of better-fitting options. So that being said here is why you're getting main-hand-exclusive Pistol and not Dual-Pistols, Off-Hand Pistol or Rifle: What sorts of moves do you think would be needed to occupy all five slots, reasonably speaking? What would a water pistol, for example, do? It squirts water. Okay, that's one ability. It can shoot ice. Okay, that's a second ability. It can fire a vapor. Alright, that's three. Congratulations, you've now exhausted the solid, liquid and gas forms of water. So what's left for 4 and 5? You could shoot a puddle onto the ground and maybe it chills enemies, or heals teammates in an AoE, right? The problem right there is we already have stuff like that, and in spades, on the other existing off-hand options, like Dagger, Focus and Warhorn. All of the other elements have this same kind of issue. Players champion rifle as a ranged option because when they don't think about it deeper than in the most superficial way, they can wrap their minds around the concept of a flamethrower, a super soaker and a tesla gun. On paper, that makes sense. Try to fill 20 weaponskill slots with unique abilities not already on Ele available through other weapons so it's not redundant. Now that gets a bit more challenging. This is why it makes the most sense to restrict a new ranged option to a main-hand pistol, especially if you have development constraints and can't be putting out anything that's redundant to stuff we already have. Dual pistols could be a thing, but outside of having for the cosmetics of it, there's no real value to it other than wasting development resources making something redundant and making new icons for it, when you could instead put those resources to better use elsewhere. In terms of gameplay, a main-hand pistol can still shoot through combo fields put down by an off-hand weapon like Dagger, Focus or Warhorn. This is the reason for why main-hand focus is always the correct answer here, especially during the Far East Asian-themed expansion. I'm not pushing for it because it's what I personally like or want. I understand that Elementalist has more to gain by a) updating Staff and Scepter appropriately with more up-to-date behaviours on weaponskills, b) updating out-of-date mechanics to be put to better use in modern gameplay (including but not restricted to the Conjured Weapons, which currently cause rotational issues and other gameplay inconveniences in their present form), and c) presenting options that are likely to cater to a wide audience since this is a product put out into a consumer market with intentions to sell. So under the circumstances, if you're a business person, and you have a Korean-themed expansion, you aim to respect that culture due to who your studio's parent company is, and you need to think of what sorts of things you want to make for an Elementalist class that fits that expansion, you have to ask yourself the following questions: 1) How are the elements represented in South Korean culture, and are they associated with anything in particular that might be relevant to gameplay functions? 2) Does this game already have something which fulfills this particular archetype? 3) What is the demand for this sort of thing in the broader gaming market? 4) Does this fit the universe my game is set in? 5) Does this require a hefty development investment or can this be developed at a low cost? The answer to these questions is as follows: 1) South Korean culture uses the same representation of the elements as Japan, Vietnam and China, the five elements, or "Wuxing,". Unlike the more westernized depiction of the five elements of alchemy (earth, fire, air, water and "spirit/aether/quintessence"), the elements of Wuxing (earth, fire, wood, water and metal) are representative of the changing of the seasons, cycles of creation and destruction via how they interact with one another. Occasionally, popular culture will swap out "wood" for "air," and occasionally "metal" for "thunder" or "lightning," so creative liberties are sometimes taken with them. Wuxing is typically associated with holistic medicine and the martial arts. 2) Not adequately. The closest thing we have to a martial artist class is staff on Daredevil. People who aren't really into media from Far East Asia might not care or understand the distinction, but those who are draw a very, very firm line between that and a fists-using, fireball-throwing martial artist as two completely different and only tangentially-related archetypes. They do not fulfill the same power fantasy. 3) Very high, because this kind of content generates tons of money annually. The Dragon Ball franchise alone is slated to make just under a billion dollars this year even with no ongoing show or movie, based on Bandai's projections from the franchise's performance in the first and second fiscal quarter of the year. Additionally, the games which feature this class archetype struggle to keep interest due to budget and development constraints that prevent engaging gameplay and a functioning element-swapping mechanic. Guild Wars 2 is the only MMO with action-oriented reactive combat currently on the market to have successfully pulled off the element-swapping mechanic, making it uniquely poised to generate interest with players who have been waiting for a game to come along that can finally provide this power fantasy. Additionally, our Far East Asian-themed expansion is set to release shortly before an extremely popular franchise has a movie debut, allowing us to ride that marketing wave to signal-boost our game to a broader audience. 4) Yes, and in fact, two NPCs in the expansion perform elementally-based martial arts moves, so it already exists in-universe. In spite of many players insisting that dual fists should go on Guardian due to Guardian's similarities with Guild Wars 1's Monk and its more Cleric-based move set, a precedent was set in GW1's story in which a Canthan Monk marries an Elementalist, which could be argued as the in-narrative justification for how over time this became the regional norm and justifies two NPCs displaying these abilities. Furthermore, it is a reference to the idea of dual-classing from Guild Wars 1. Furthermore, many cosmetic skins for the main-hand weapon in question already fit the desired function. They are currently relegated to off-hand weapons. 5) Since around 90% of the proposed specialization currently exists in-game, albeit split apart and not all in one place, its development is extremely low in cost and can be accomplished with a great deal of recycling existing assets. The entire off-hand version of the weapon still sufficiently fulfills these purposes so only the main-hand skills are necessary, and the utility skills can be brought over from elsewhere. So regardless of whether or not it's something I personally want, it makes sense, from a business perspective, lore perspective, marketing perspective, and general gameplay perspective. Conversely, the only reason to continue arguing for longbow or rifle is that the community won't shut up about demanding longbow or rifle, but it's very clear that other than the insistence of wanting it for the sake of it, or insisting that it's needed to circumvent a problem instead of just addressing the problem, the community hasn't actually thought terribly deeply about the situation. Outside of just really wanting it, there's nothing about rifle or longbow that addresses a need that couldn't be sufficiently fulfilled by fixing staff and scepter and updating out-of-date utilities (such as conjured weapons) and traits, which includes getting a potentially superior longbow anyway by default in the process.

Just for context... check out this video if you haven't seen this before. Count the moves he does that are already in Guild Wars 2. Note that Flame Wall (Fire Focus 4) is used at the start of the fight and he does a combo finisher through it at the 48 second mark. Fire Shield (Fire Focus 5) is used at the 1:46 mark and its Transmute Fire form is used earlier at the 1:07 mark. Just to highlight some examples of how off-hand focus already works for a martial arts class. For a projectile, Ryu's Hanto Hadouken variant from his guest appearance in the fighting game Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid has him firing a phoenix that travels out and then comes back to hit a second time, instead of a typical fireball. https://imgur.com/DKzTovK This is literally Fire Scepter 3, which heals as a phoenix should. You can use this as an excuse to update Scepter to make the Ele mains who want to be mages happy, and also have something expansion appropriate. So in EoD, with GW2's cosmetics, you have one specialization where you can either be this: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/saintseiya/images/1/1d/Tech-Shiryu-RozansRisingDragon.jpg Or be this: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:948/1*3QjoPyvXwOde5NmP0YHz_A.jpeg There is choice, and relevance outside of the Far East Asian-themed expansion should a player want to take the "when in Rome" approach going into a new expansion. Both parties are pleased, and now everyone's happy. For Water martial arts + Summoner, you're looking at something like this: When ANet put the Street Fighter move, the "tatsumaki senpukyaku," onto Willbender's "Whirling Light," I immediately said to myself there's a 98% chance that a game designer was like "we need a cool kick move to go on Willbender," googled Street Fighter, saw that and said "that spinning kick looks pretty cool,". What didn't occur to them is that "tatsumaki senpukyaku" literally translates to "tornado whirlwind leg" which means it's already elementally aspected to air. Whirling Light can still be a radial 360-degree weaponstrike to match the Willbender specialization artwork a bit better (it's odd it doesn't have a move that resembles what it's doing in the artwork) without it being the tatsu. The Tornado Whirlwind Leg - more commonly known in the West as the "Hurricane Kick" - should be put on the Elementalist where it rightfully belongs. I keep saying that like 90% of what you'd need to get a proper elemental martial arts class going is already in the game, so you can easily cobble it together and have it at least be serviceable gameplay-wise with very little time and money expense. AND... this is one of those things that's mega popular and makes tons of money without trying very hard. Not to mention, other MMO devs struggle with getting this to work well. GW2 is the only game on the market right now that has a serviceable elemental stance-dancing system, which is why other games either lock you into an element or provide the visual effects but don't give you control over swapping. ANet could have easily beaten the competition - including FFXIV, which gutted its Monk badly - but chose not to go the obvious route, leaving money on the table for no good reason other than trying to be different for the sake of being different. Similarly, it must not have occurred to the dev team and the DEI group who censored out content that wasn't exclusively Korean that the tatsu is from a fictionalized Japanese martial art called Ansatsuken. Either that, or they didn't care since it looked cool. However, they could have used Korean martial arts like Taekwondo, Taekkyon, Subac and Yongmudo. So... erm... whoops, I guess. 😛 We could have had a metal element being the new F5 skill instead of these weird orbs (Wu Xing, the 5 elements of Taoism, are also used in South Korea, along with Japan and Vietnam, so there's a lot of shared cultural iconography), and summons similar to overloads like what's in the BDO video above every time the water dragon appears during the moves. Considering how overwhelmingly Caucasian the dev team is, along with Zhengyi Wang's departure from the art team (he went to Blizzard) and how much stuff seems ripped at-face-value either as memberberries references to stuff in GW1 that shouldn't actually be relevant anymore or stuff from Final Fantasy XIV, I'm not entirely surprised at the lack of cultural homework done by anyone not named Maclaine Diemer. Element Monk is supported by GW1's story with the marriage of Cynn and Mhenlo, and is a better reference to the dual-classing of GW1 and how that may have impacted the culture over 250 years than trying to force Mesmer-Warrior or Bunny-Thumper into a game with a radically different combat system. There's a reason why Spellbreaker is the least-played class in the entire game... these kinds of references aren't substitutes for good game design in the combat system we currently have. And, unlike Catalyst, there's actual representation of this in-game, with two Canthan NPCs. I found it so odd that the hammer-wielding Catalyst was what we got for the Ele reveal during Lunar New Year - which has an event called Dragon Ball - while the Dragon Ball Super movie was right around the corner and was delayed until not long after EoD's release. Plus, all of the focus skins that look like knuckles weapons... it felt like such a massive marketing faux pa. It's not like Bandai didn't project that the Dragon Ball franchise would be set to make just under a billion dollars in 2023 based on its earnings in the first half of the year or anything (even with no new movie or show announcement)... The Gundam franchise made just under a billion dollars last year as well, but did we get new Mechanist skins for the Jade Mech? Nope. It's still green and fitting with very few cosmetic options... Whelp, unless Catalyst gets forcibly yeeted from the game and replaced by this, it's not happening, because ANet decide no new elite specs. And that means this will never be a thing, so I have no further reason to purchase focus skins from the gemstore, BL chests or pursue unlocks for in-game achievements: https://e1.pxfuel.com/desktop-wallpaper/656/421/desktop-wallpaper-fire-god-liu-kang-liu-kang-thumbnail.jpg Weebs get this stuff. Sadly they're in short supply 'round these parts, which is why opinions here tend to not be in their favour. ANet is welcome to do whatever they want with their game, but they also accept the consequences of decisions that don't strike when the iron is hot to successfully expand their player base (or by extension, they're responsible for those decisions which might alienate interest). I'm of the mind that unless you're making FFXIV money (which is practically carrying the entirety of Square Enix at this point), it's best for a dev team to play it safe and go with what's proven to be profitable, over trying to be different for different's sake, which is a higher-risk option. Clearly Catalyst is an example of that going horribly wrong, and should be a cautionary tale to any and all aspiring game devs who are looking for their game to be thriving and profitable with active players in the millions instead of the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands. Which also makes me worried for the expansion, since Secrets of the Obscure comes out around the same time as Armored Core 6... a game so overwhelmingly profitable that its sheer tidal wave of preorder sales had to be temporarily paused for breaking Bandai Namco's payment processors. SotO is going to have some steep competition for the first few weeks of its launch.

Fixed that for you. 😉 Seriously, though, the only reason why anyone keeps asking for longbow is because of community rhetoric due to staff and scepter being very outdated, therefore the lack of a decent ranged option made talk of longbow and rifle attractive. This does not fix the problem, it just side-steps it. Staff and scepter would still be unappealing for those who want to have an exciting mage power fantasy. If they fixed the Conjured Weapon system and let you element-swap the frost bow, you'd likely have a better longbow than getting a new two-handed one, much like how Conjure Lightning Hammer is just a better overall package than Cata's hammer. If we could element-swap that hammer, even if they kept the animations for all 5 weaponskills the same, it'd be great. Just make it a toggle instead of on a 30-second timer, and ditch the duplicate since it causes a lot of rotation problems, and you're pretty much set. Sadly, pistol feels to me to be as unimaginative in concept as bow and rifle. We have flamethrowers, super soakers and tesla guns. Zelda has different elementally-tipped arrows. We've seen that all before in games and it's pretty basic and boring. Take for example, the water element. Water 1 - it squirts water. Water 2 - It sprays a mist. Water 3 - it shoots ice. There's your solid, liquid and gas forms of water. I'm pretty sure that's the reason why it's main-hand only, instead of off-hand, so the dev team doesn't have to think too hard about a whole set of 5 moves per element on a firearm. Could they do something like "shoots an AoE puddle on the ground that heals allies/chills enemies,"? Sure, but off-hand Focus, Dagger and now Warhorn have that sort of thing covered in spades, so what would be the point of getting off-hand pistol other than a slightly clumsier version of stuff we already have? Seems like a waste of development resources. Now then, if we're talking what would have been appropriate for the expansion - and considering all of the Focus skins that look like knuckles in other MMOs, plus the martial artist cosmetics we keep getting - then Element Monk would have been the ideal thing to get. And no, before you go saying "nah it would be Guardian," read up on your GW1 lore. Cynn marrying Mhenlo introduces Elemental powers into the Monk order, and unlike Catalyst, we have two element-wielding martial artists in the game: Master Stonefist and Officer Aimi (the latter uses fire). It's also more in line with what would be expected in a Far East Asian setting, as usually the five-element diagram originating in Taoism as Wu Xing (but used in Japan and Korea as well) is typically associated with two things: Far Eastern holistic medicine, and the martial arts. For fire, you're looking at something like this: Note that Flame Wall (Fire Focus 4) is used at the start of the fight and he does a combo finisher through it at the 48 second mark. Fire Shield (Fire Focus 5) is used at the 1:46 mark and its Transmute Fire form is used earlier at the 1:07 mark. Just to highlight some examples of how off-hand focus already works for a martial arts class. For a projectile, Ryu's Hanto Hadouken variant from his guest appearance in the fighting game Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid has him firing a phoenix that travels out and then comes back to hit a second time, instead of a typical fireball. https://imgur.com/DKzTovK This is basically Fire Scepter 3's projectile visual effect so it's already in the game, just to highlight how low-cost it would be to put this together. If you're looking to break rules and make the Water stance less of the go-to for healing, you could leverage the phoenix here and do exactly what Fire Scepter 3 does, healing you when the phoenix returns for a percentage of the outgoing damage that was done, or something of that nature. Then you can use this as an excuse to revamp Scepter so those who want the Wizard/Mage power fantasy can have a better Scepter to work with. For Water, and especially if they wanted this to feel like more of a Summoner with the Celestials, you're looking at something like BDO's Mystic Awakening, and then you'd have a Phoenix on the Fire one. Note the dragon that comes out when certain moves are performed: Speaking of water dragons. You can take the Saint Seiya approach with pretty much all of the Celestials and Guild Wars 2's armour cosmetics and have something that feels like a blend of Summoner, Elementalist and Martial Artist all in one. Case and point: https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/saintseiya/images/1/1d/Tech-Shiryu-RozansRisingDragon.jpg This trailer alone doesn't even show all of the water-themed moves available in the game on this thing, but for an auto-attack combo and the 2 and 3 skills, it has more than enough to pick from. I can keep going for all of the elements, but you get the point. If you look at fighting games and the sheer variety of move possibilities they have, then something like this can get very exciting. As much of a staple as elemental powers are in martial arts fiction coming out of Far East Asia, sadly most games coming out of the region haven't been able to crack how to get the element-swapping right, or make various other missteps due to a variety of reasons, including many Far East Asian games being very low in budget. There's been a high demand for a decent martial artist class in games for quite a long time that can swap between elemental stances, and it just so happens GW2 is the only game currently on the market that has figured out the element-swapping in a game with more action-y combat than Final Fantasy XIV's more rigid global cooldown system. That being said, many Monk mains have jumped ship from that game because they simplified the gameplay into the ground and removed its elemental stance-dancing, and for years they haven't been able to do Monk justice. Many Summoner mains have also left and I've encountered quite a few of both in this game. It really felt like a huge letdown when Catalyst was announced during the Lunar New Year event, which has an activity called Dragon Ball (a direct reference to the popular franchise of the same name), when the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie was right around the corner and was pushed back to just after EoD's release. It's like all the stars had aligned for ANet to knock this one out of the park while the competition with more money is struggling to pull it off, and what we got instead was a big swing and a miss trying to be different for different's sake. For a game that really needs to broaden its player base significantly more, that was a big, big misstep to me. Meanwhile, putting martial arts moves onto Guardian because Guardian has GW1 Monk-like abilities doesn't make much sense when GW1's story sets up a future for element monks, we have them in EoD already, it's a good reference to the idea of dual-classing (without trying to shove homages to popular builds into a game with a very different combat system... *cough* Spellbreaker *cough cough* Untamed *cough*), it's marketable and would have immediately caught the eye of players ANet is trying to attract from other games. You're more likely to scare off FFXIV players when they see you've merged together Monk and Samurai, something Monk mains hated about sharing Striking gear because it's one of the things that shackled them back and inhibited rotation diversity. Also, I'm 98% sure whoever designed "Whirling Light" on Guardian looked at footage of Ryu and Ken's "tatsumaki senpukyaku" (literally "tornado whirlwind leg") from Street Fighter and said "that spinning kick looks cool, let's copy that," but didn't realize that in English it's called the Hurricane/Tornado Kick and is already aspected to air. Also, it's a move from a fictionalized Japanese martial art, not a Korean one like Taekwondo, Taekkyon, Subac or Yongmudo. Whoops. Yet another reason why these specializations shouldn't be designed by a committee of several people, since that's how we get too many cooks in the kitchen (especially if they don't really know from this stuff). They should be handled by one person with a focused creative vision. Whirling Light would make more sense if it was a 360-degree weapon slash anyway, considering the art for the Willbender elite spec, so they could just move the tatsu animation to where it rightfully belongs, recycle a few other things from elsewhere already in the game, put it all in one place, and you're looking at a proper Far East Asian-themed elite spec that's 90% done out of the can and can be slapped together quickly and on the cheap and still be quite serviceable, even if the animations could still use a bit more love to feel unique. Weebs get this stuff. For all Mighty Teapot kept explaining "weebs, come save our game," to be honest, the kinds of decisions that led to Catalyst's creation, or even stuff like a longbow-using Elementalist in a Far East Asian expansion (that would be more appropriate on Thief for various reasons) alienate that very demographic. The thinking is very shallow, along the lines of "well, it COULD be good," or "I saw it in Zelda, so there," without thinking it through terribly well. The result is that we now have a "Catalyst" that doesn't "catalyze" anything, whereas we could have just used the Wu Xing elements (again, also used in Korea) to have cycles of creation and destruction and actual elemental catalyzing, but I guess the only person who did their actual research on Far East Asian culture was Maclaine Deimer. It's really not hard to figure out how to put this together, but you just need to be enough of an anime fan, specifically shounen stuff, to know these things. This kind of thing is also SUPER popular in Latin America, so it's an easy way to broaden the player base into other regions outside of just North America, Europe and Far East Asia.

Shield is going to make Virtuoso very broken because it can basically get infinite blocks, with Shield recharging blades and bladesongs giving Aegis. When it comes to instanced PvE like strikes and raids, good players might wind up breaking your encounter design by way of being pretty much immortal. Furthermore, unkillable Mesmers in PvP/WvW are going to be a balance nightmare. It seems Shield from Chronomancer is the reason why the final bladesong lost its damage shielding ability, but what it got instead with off-hand shield is so much more broken. I'd honestly put the bladesong back the way it was and rethink blocks giving blade stacks. This will solve the problem of unkillable Mesmers in PvP/WvW automatically. As it stands, the fifth bladesong isn't terribly useful without its shield if faster-firing abilities just give Aegis quicker.

Hammer is very clunky and unfun to play, so no matter how strong you make it, I don't think I'll ever be using it. Conjure Lightning Hammer is a way better hammer and is tons more fun to use. Like with Fire Sword main hand and Fire Dagger or Focus, the leap finisher is on 2 and the AoE moves are on 4 and 5, so you can very easily set up combo fields to get combo auras. The hotbar layout has way better parity with sword main-hand and dagger/focus/warhorn off-hand. This means anyone who is familiar with Sword main-hand on Ele is going to have a lot more fun and a way easier time just picking up the Conjure Lightning Hammer and going to town. It's very "pick-up-and-go". Catalyst Hammer is considerably clunkier for no justifiable reason: the leap finisher is on Water 4 and the CC skill is on Air 4, whereas Conjure Lightning Hammer's 3 skill does more damage AND more CC. Imagine the following scenario: Take the Conjured Lightning Hammer and just rework it into Conjure Hammer. Let us swap elements. Don't rework the animations, just change the VFX, boons and conditions so they're element-appropriate. Remove the 30 second timer so it becomes an activated toggle, and remove the duplicate weapon drop. I get it sounds nice on paper to let a friend pick up the weapon and play with it, but it causes serious rotation issues in practice. BAM, you now have a hammer that is instantly more useful, smoother and more intuitive to play, and ultimately far more fun than the hammer Catalyst has. This is also partly due to Cata's hammer skills being designed around its wells, and by extension, Cata's traits are designed around the use of hammer over all other weapon types. Conversely, Warhorn is a great off-hand weapon because it puts down combo fields, and Sword is a great main-hand weapon because it is able to make good use of those fields for combo auras. Sword 2 on other elements just has really useful skills for gameplay, like a laundry list of "what does a player need to be able to do": Fire 2 is a leap finisher that puts down an AoE burning field, Water 2 is an excellent evade and one of the best healing skills in the game, Air 2 is a gap closer that does CC. It's like everything you need is all in one spot. Cata's hammer is not designed to be a good or useful hammer with useful skills a player needs to be able to immediately and sensibly access, it's meant to work as an accessory to the Catalyst's wells mechanic. And while a weapon fueling a spec mechanic is by no means a bad thing in it of itself (example: dagger on Virtuoso), I do believe this highlights just how poorly designed Catalyst as a spec is, and the hammer needing a damage buff outside of Catalyst to be useful and to overcome the fact that it's clunky to use is a testament to Catalyst's design issues. You'd need to overhaul how it works from the ground up and practically make a brand-new specialization if you want it to be useful. I sincerely think the people who main Cata only do so for one of three reasons: 1) Because it's been buffed to be powerful in certain game modes 2) Because they don't know how Weaver works and fell for the "playing piano" rhetoric, not realizing there are restricted element builds for it, and pushing all of the buttons in a way that more greatly resembles playing piano feels more braindead than making executive decisions about what element you're choosing to be in and why in a given situation 3) Heavy amounts of copium that this was the elite spec we got. Now that Tempest mains can use sword (which is lots more fun and will encourage more Weaver mains to use Tempest more often), it'll help ease them into Weaver since Weaver is not actually all that much more complicated once you get how sword works with using the leap finisher on combo fields you set up. I think that's going to be great for Tempest mains and restructure a lot of the current discourse on the state of Elementalist, as I'm seeing a lot of the aforementioned rhetoric in map chat coming from people who don't even have Weaver unlocked. Warhorn is a great addition to Weaver's arsenal, and offers a few alternative play style. On both, now summoner builds are far more viable. But if you want to use a lightning hammer for a Thor-style power fantasy, it's just way better and more fun to use Conjure Lightning Hammer. Sword/Warhorn is more useful not just because of damage, but convenience. Sword and Warhorn simply don't really offer much to Catalyst or its wells. I may have my heavy disagreements here and there with how some of the other specs are designed, but Catalyst is legitimately the only one that I think is so awful from the point of the concept alone that it should be replaced on principle. I thought it'd have a Deadeye-style representative in a Living World season to justify its existence, but nope, it's nowhere to be seen in EoD. It's really just an attempt at trying to force together the idea of a Scrapper and the idea of a Summoner and doing neither terribly well. There's not much incentive to use an Elementalist Scrapper when Scrapper is already in the game and is more coherent as an overall package. Elemental fist-using martial artists are actually featured in EoD (Stonefist in the tutorial zone and Officer Aimi in the Janin meta) so if a Summoner is what you wanted to go for, I would check out Saint Seiya and get some ideas of what to do with the Celestials from there. Give it main hand focus with punches on 2, a projectile on 3, and Willbender's utility skills. Then fix up Staff and Scepter for people who prefer the more westernized Mage power fantasy over the more expansion-appropriate Far East Asian one (which is justified in GW1 when Cynn marries Mhenlo, for those of you who remember), and rework the conjured weapon system as described above, and you'd make everyone happy regardless of preference, especially with pistol on the way.

Hard agree here. What this entire beta highlighted for me is how unfun and poorly designed Catalyst is in general, as well as how useless Hammer is as a weapon outside of Catalyst. The devs seem intent on trying to boost the popularity of specs and weapon choices by making them powerful, but at the end of the day, more people than not won't care if it's clunky and unfun. For all of the rhetoric surrounding how Weaver is like "playing piano," Catalyst is the one that expects you to be pushing all the buttons and then cycling through all of the elements. With the other especs, there was always a decision-making process about why you're choosing to go into a particular element, and you could make various builds that allowed you to stay in one or two and still be viable in non-competitive content. I think what Catalyst mains find appealing about it is either just how powerful they've had to make it through buffs, them not understanding how Weaver or Tempest work so a "pushing all the buttons" spec feels more braindead to them, or one hell of a lot of copium. My guild and I did some testing and I made a variety of Ele builds. Here's what we found: Sword/Warhorn opens up a new era of gameplay for Weavers and Tempests alike, and you can make a multitude of different builds now for either. For Weaver, there are more "restricted element" (staying in one or only a couple) builds which are now viable for most content, with different levels of engagement depending on how exciting or how simple you want the gameplay to be. "Summoner" builds using the summoned elementals are now far more viable against champions and running meta events. There's a water-only build that is practically immortal and is great at support with heals while also doing a more-than-acceptable degree of outgoing damage. For Tempest, sword main-hand allows for a new chapter of exciting gameplay opportunities that I think Tempest mains will find lots of fun, and ease the transition into Weaver if they've been putting it off, since its actual complexity is only marginally higher once you get used to sword + overloads. Similarly, the more exciting gameplay will draw Weaver mains back to Tempest for a different style of gameplay. I made a lightning-only summoner Tempest build that is really good, has great sustain and is a lot of fun to play, and makes use of the Conjure Lighting Hammer. The Conjured Hammer is, quite honestly, a superior hammer to the equippable one in every way imaginable. It has a better and more fun move set, does great damage, has the leap finisher in a logical place on the hotbar, and is pretty much everything you'd want out of an elemental hammer. The only downsides to it are having to pick up the second lightning hammer to extend the duration, and waiting on recasting Conjure Lightning Hammer. I tried to see how hammer would work on this build if I used it whenever Conjure Lightning Hammer was on cooldown, and it was just terrible. Not only was the damage output inferior, even with a legendary hammer, but it was just so unfun to use and the weapon's kit was multiple shades of awful and useless. Unless you REALLY have your heart dead-set on that Thor power fantasy no matter what, it doesn't matter to me if they buff the damage. The kit is so terrible and clunky to use, there's no incentive to use the thing outside of Sword main-hand and dagger/focus/warhorn on off-hand. To make matters even worse, Conjure Lightning Hammer's leap finisher is also on 2 with AoEs on 4 and 5 which gives it amazing parity with Fire Element Sword. 3 being a knockback that does CC is also great. Conjure Lightning Hammer's Wind Blast (the 3 skill) does more damage and more CC than regular hammer's Wind Storm (the air 4 skill). The arrangement and organization of the skills makes it so if you're used to Sword Weaver, the skills you'd need for your combo finishers are all in the same places so it's ultra convenient. On Cata's hammer, you have to swap to Water and push 4 for your leap finisher, or air and push 4 for a worse CC skill. You can't set up a combo field and leap through it for a combo aura on Cata, at least not easily unless it uses sword. Weaver can do it and with sword, now so can Tempest, but Cata's traits are built entirely around the main hand hammer, and likewise, hammer's skills are designed completely around Catalyst's wells. Ele mains have said this enough over the years but I wish these things were a toggle instead of a time-limited thing. It sounds fun on paper to have the second one spawn so a friend can pick it up and have fun with it, but realistically this causes a lot of rotation problems. If "Conjure Lightning Hammer" was instead changed to "Conjure Elemental Hammer" and we could just have the same animations as Conjure Lightning Hammer with different weaponskill stats and visual effects, it would instantly be a far more ideal hammer than what Cata has to work with. It just serves to highlight how useless and poorly-designed of a spec Catalyst is. I honestly really think that since two NPCs in Cantha (Master Stonefist from the tutorial area and Officer Aimi in the Janin meta) use elemental martial arts, what eventually was turned into Catalyst was originally meant to essentially be Element Monk. Then, at some point during development, all the "Dragon Jade Tech" stuff was added and the Jade Brotherhood was given scrappers, ANet tried with haste to slap together an Elementalist version of Scrapper, with the four elements being tied to holographic representations of the now long-dead corrupted celestials from GW1 who we kill to go "Weh no Su" and gain dual-classing in Factions. It's like they tried to make it "Scrapper, but also FFXIV Summoner" (in lieu of not understanding how XIV SMN works), because all of the other especs from EoD are basically mashed together versions of several ideas that don't go together naturally, including bootleg XIV jobs. Considering the devs talk more on their social media accounts about FFXIV than their actual game, this - along with the obvious FF player bait in the gemstore - should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. I was expecting ANet to try and justify Catalyst's existence by having something like the Deadeye boss fight in PoF, where a major character was going to show up using this thing to try and market it to the player base, but nope, it has zero representation in the actual story and game otherwise. At least Willbender shows up during the guild hall acquisition quest. I get this is like CMC's baby but there are better hills to die on instead of doubling down on trying to force people to like Catalyst. It's the one spec in the game I think should be deleted and downright replaced on principle, due to how poorly thought out it was from the ground up. Element Monk still makes the most sense to me as the ideal EoD Ele espec, and is supported by GW1's story due to the marriage of Cynn and Mhenlo. Not to mention, all the Focus skins that still look like knuckles style weapons in other MMOs...

It doesn't make sense to me that they'd make an entire set of weapons and not allow any players to complete said set. That would be really silly to me. I initially imagined it to be kind of like the EoD preorder bonus weapon chest, which was a sort of early access/preview to weapons we were able to obtain more of once the expansion released. Normally, I'd feel very silly about even having to ask the question, but lately ArenaNet has been making decisions which appear to unashamedly fly in the face of basic common sense, and communication hasn't been great or timely, so I can't in good conscience be certain of what should or shouldn't be obvious anymore when it comes to ANet these days. I would at least hope they would come out and say something like "once Alliances come out of beta, the War Machine weapon skin chests will be available through WvW-specific achievements/reward tracks,". Doesn't take very much effort to say and gives an idea of what the plan is, at least. As for future betas, remember when they said Alliances were going to come out THIS YEAR? Yeah, I don't see that happening. There are still too many bugs and too many problems for it to have a stable release any time soon. Then again, EoD launched in what still feels like an unfinished state, and only one Cantha-centric LW season isn't going to be enough to fill all of the story holes and explain all of the lore torn to shreds and thrown out the window just to allow EoD's story to happen, so I can fully see them releasing Alliances in an unfinished, buggy state and then tell us they'd patch it up after the fact.

I was just curious if there will be a way to obtain more of these later. I really like both the sword and the shield, but it sucks to be forced to choose only one and not be able to complete the pair. Will these be a regular WvW reward eventually, or obtainable through some other way? Is there any ETA on when we can expect their implementation?

Will these reward weapons be available later? I really like the sword and shield but it sucks to be forced to pick just one instead of being able to get a pairing or set that goes together.

I'm aware of the trend. I think it's a dumb trend, though. As I wrote, ANet is practically leaving money on the table with this practice, and I know plenty of people who would just outright buy it if it were available. FOMO in the gemstore doesn't actually work if they're not even putting the things into the gemstore that people want to spend money on. As for there not being 16 outfit bundles, I see that as a component of the problem. Basically, ANet's financial model isn't terribly sustainable, which is why they lose talent (see my above post). It's the real reason why John DiMaggio no longer voices Canach (he's worth $33 million, Matt Mercer has a NET worth of $1 million, one of those two is more amenable to negotiation if you're making a game on a tighter budget). The "scheduling conflict" thing was just ANet PR being diplomatic about it, but DiMaggio has been pretty open about how he believes he should be paid what he's worth, along with his wife, who no longer voices Rox and a few other characters. To put it simply, they need more income to be able to justify paying these artists. They don't have that much money, so we don't get 16 outfit sets in the gem shop for them to recoup those costs, because they can't afford to have that many made in the first place. However, they COULD have that money by making some things available for purchase, so they could have more revenue in the meantime. So in the end, it becomes a big "chicken and egg" type of situation. They need more stuff to put in the gemstore to make more money, but they need the money to pay the outsourced designers (like Jiamin Lin) to make the stuff that goes into the gemstore. What prevents it from being a total Catch-22 is that they do have things they could be putting into the gemstore to alleviate that problem... they're just nonsensically choosing not to. The problem with making things available via black lion statuettes is that for those of us already sitting on plenty of them, that means there's no real need for me to whip out the ol' credit card and give them my money. I already did that before, when there were things in the BL chests I wanted (which hasn't been the case for quite a few months now). If they were separately purchasable for gems - and mind you, I have money so buying gems isn't an issue for me and I personally really do not mind supporting a game I like - then I could have an excuse to pay for something. I don't mean to seem like I'm bragging for having a paycheck and a few hundred a month here or there on cosmetics isn't an issue for me. I'm trying to highlight the absurdity of how much money ArenaNet just leaves on the table when quite a few people have outright reached the point of "I'd just buy it if it were available" and they're actively shooting their own profit margins in the foot for no good reason, so whatever their financial woes are, it seems to be a demon of their own creation (unnecessarily at that). TL;DR ANet's businessmen have forgotten how to do the whole "business" thing and apparently don't care about making money to sustain their project plagued by budgetary issues. Color me frustrated, confused and angry at trying to wrap my head around the business logic of what they're doing.

Agreed. I communicated the bug with my guild also, but we expected some sort of announcement by the weekly reset and patch, and what ANet planned to do about it. We understand things happen, game dev is difficult (my husband works for a major AAA publisher and knows all too well about the putting out of fires that happens constantly), and we try to be understanding. The problem is that we've gotten zero communication since after the weekend. Again, wouldn't be a huge issue except for the fact that this is a time-sensitive event with a definitive end date so it would be unfortunate for the advertised reward to not actually be available before said event ends. We need to know what ANet plans to do about this before we ask our guild members to waste their time in organized group events over the promise of something they'll not be able to obtain.

I'm very disconcerted about the radio silence for this. My entire guild made a big event to go into WvW and encouraged non-WvWers to participate due to the reward cosmetics that were supposed to be associated with this beta. The fact that there is still no word today on the subject does not bode well for communication. At the least, tell us that either the beta will be extended, or the weaponskins can be earned through some other kind of activity. Hell, some of my guild members were open to the idea of purchasing them from the gemstore if they were available. We don't need to know the specifics of what sort of fires the dev team is dealing with internally, we just need to know how players will be compensated for losing the entire weekend to earn those rewards during a time-sensitive window.

Yeah I just noticed immediately after putting this post up that they removed the mention of the torch and its associated image. If you missed it, it looked like a rocky hand with a lava/volcanic aesthetic. There does seem to be some sort of communication breakdown. WvW players and players who were trying out the beta to get the weaponskins still have radio silence about fixing the achievement bug before the beta period ends so they can get the advertised weaponskins. My guild and I were getting into WvW specifically to take part in that event, when normally only very few of us are WvWers, but we wanted those skins. The fact that there's no word about the status of things or even extending the beta to compensate is disconcerting. I don't know what kind of fires they are putting out internally, but at the least, they could let players know that either the rewards will be moved to the next round of betas while they sort out the issues, or they can make them available through some other activity. However, on the topic of the Gold Essence weaponskins, I think my overall point here is being missed. There's currently only a drip-feed of new stuff in the gem store every couple of weeks, which has been largely lacking until the Butler & Maid outfits came out. That certainly can't be good for monetization efforts. I spoil my own guild and buy them gifts off of the gemshop, but everyone pretty much has everything by now, meaning I'm running out of things to throw money at. It's a shame that something I WANT to throw money at, and for the time being is ONLY supposed to be obtainable through outfit bundles, isn't. I'm aware that ANet unfortunately lost some of the concept designers who worked on their cosmetics and other aspects of their game to other companies. One of their long-time in-house concept artists - the guy who designed the Ministry of Purity samurai and Reiko from GW1, Primordus and Jormag's looks in the Icebrood Saga - now works for Blizzard. His name is Zhengyi Wang. So they lost him, and Jiamin Lin, who designed pretty much all of the recent cosmetics, was recently picked up by Terraform Studios and may not have availability to continue working on more cosmetics if he's put on other projects. So at the least, for those of us who don't mind supporting the game and would like to complete the Gold Essence sets, those chests being missing from the past few outfit drops in the gemstore feels like a missed opportunity. Same goes for making the new emote something we can't buy as a gift. My guild members absolutely loved the Butler & Maid outfits I bought them, so it was a shame I couldn't also gift them the emote that goes along with it. ArenaNet is practically leaving money on the table for no good reason with decisions like that.

I noticed there was a big post today about the Magmatic Torch skin, advertised alongside the Phoenix Griffon skin. Unfortunately, it's not showing in the gemstore, and can't be found anywhere else. I'm guessing this is a bug? The notes also didn't seem to mention the Jade Bot ghost skin, so I'm guessing that was an error. Maybe that was the one intended to be advertised instead? Or was the Magmatic Torch supposed to be in the game now? I'm also surprised that the last couple of outfits in the gemstore didn't also feature the Gold Essence weapon chests. I've bought every single outfit that they came with and I only have three of the chests. I've been sitting on them, unopened, because I've been waiting to get all 16 to complete the entire set, but it seems the Gold Essence chests were discontinued? They aren't being packaged with new outfits anymore, which kind of sucks, because I do want the entire set (and I'm willing to shell out money for it) but it's not even available for us to buy even if we want to.

I believe it's new, because before checking that out, I heard some rumblings in the community that a new SAB world was indeed in the works. I could be wrong, but considering the player base has tripled, it would make sense that ANet wouldn't want to leave a seasonal event being half-done and probably now have the resources to continue with it. I have a guild member who is brand new and it's his first time checking out SAB, so with all the new people it'd be kind of weird to them to not continue with it, given that they are no longer needing to work on an expansion launch and can divert their resources elsewhere.

Do you have a firm statistic for that? Because the fight has been out for a month and more and more groups are clearing it regularly and getting their achievements. For all we know, you could be projecting your personal feelings, and/or be part of a very loud vocal minority seeking to reinforce and validate one another's feelings instead of... y'know... putting the excuses for why you shouldn't have to use effort and do mechanics aside and just... put in effort, do the mechanics and get the fight over with. Hundreds of thousands of people play this game, and yet we don't see those numbers swarming the forum or reddit about this. If we were to go by reddit upvotes as a metric, it seems the sentiments that this meta is one of the best things to happen to the game is far more popular than the negative sentiments, by a magnitude of several hundred to nearly a thousand.

No one's expecting you to do any math or equations. If you are geared for doing condition damage and your build and choice of weapon doesn't actually do condition damage, that's just being oblivious. Unfortunately, this happens more often than anyone wants to admit. My husband would tell a story of how he played Monster Hunter World, a game that is all about hunting specific monsters to craft weapons and gear with stats that would be advantageous against other monsters, due to each having their own element. The hunts support up to 4 players and the difficulty scales upward as more players join the hunt but doesn't scale back down if people leave, which screws over the other remaining players who now have an uphill battle to fight. The mechanics of what is weak to what is a very basic common-sense rock-paper-scissors style logic a child could understand. I forget the exact details so forgive me for misremembering specifics, but if I recall the story correctly, they were fighting something like a water monster and someone showed up to the hunt with a fire weapon and fire-element gear... which, as you might imagine, is inherently weak to water. So my husband would ask, "why are you using that?" and the response was "it's the only one I have,". To which my husband would ask, "okay but then why not go hunt one of the previous monsters to get the thing you need? You're basically just going to be tickling this thing and it'll be more work for everyone else here,". And the guy just shrugged and was like "I dunno," because he didn't feel like showing up prepared and didn't understand he was basically dead weight since if there are 3 deaths the entire hunt fails. Just as it's common sense to not try and enter a fight against a fire-breathing dragon covered in gasoline, you wouldn't want to show up to an encounter not wearing the stuff relevant to said encounter. If you are doing power damage and not condition damage with your build (which you can see by mousing over your skills and reading what they do), then you should be geared for power damage. If you are wearing the wrong stuff and the stats aren't doing anything for you... maybe you should change that. Berserker gear is super cheap to get on the trading post, and if you're in a guild, you can just outright buy ascended jewelry from one of the guild hall vendors. It's not like you have to go horribly out of your way to get the stuff. It's just stubbornness on the part of players because it's too much effort for them and they don't feel like it.

If you speak to Moto outside of SAB, there's a hint a new world is in development. I don't know what it is with you WvWers who pretend like all the WvW-centric patch notes or roadmaps they put out explicitly detailing stuff about WvW don't exist. You are aware that they're getting Alliances ready to come out of beta, right?

Hard disagree. I'm not American, or even from the Western Hemisphere for that matter, and I think it's really offensive that you'd assume that if someone doesn't speak English as their native language, they'd have difficulty understanding the correlation between a stat called "condition damage" (which, if you mouse over it, outright says "increases condition damage") and the outgoing conditions. That's quite insulting to peoples' intelligence. This is an issue of basic literacy. If you're typing on this forum in English and speaking on the behalf of people who don't speak English, you really ought to speak for yourself here. I have a Brazilian guy in my guild who speaks Brazilian Portuguese as his first language, and if you repeated this to him, he'd think you're treating him like an idiot. There are plenty of people who play this game who are from France and other places in Europe who I speak to daily on Discord who feel this line of thinking you're broadcasting is really offensive and it drives them up the wall. You are trying to make a mental gymnastics argument to avoid issues of personal accountability. Yes, it is common sense to say that if a stat says "Condition Damage" and if you mouse over it, it explains that it "increases condition damage," that it does exactly what it says it does. The connection between the two is, by definition, an issue of common sense. How people are raised and what their social values are is irrelevant, but you're making that argument to avoid the point in the same fashion as Bill Clinton arguing the definition of the word "is,". It's a distraction. If you don't know how to read or understand English, but are choosing to play the game in English, then it is up to you to take personal accountability and use a translator, which is exactly what English-speakers do if they play a game that is not natively available in a language they understand. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from doing the same. I have friends back home who don't speak a word of English, but they have enough sense that if they play a game in a language they don't understand (which some of them indeed do) and there are gear stats, it's on them to look up what those gear stats are and what they do, instead of blaming external factors. They can use translator apps like everyone else. They'd never in a million years blame the game. Take it from those of us foreigners who are from halfway around the world... this is an incredibly offensive and borderline racist argument you're making, which is only to absolve effort-averse people from personal accountability. That makes it even worse. Much like the community's misuse of the term "ableist" just to attack MightyTeapot and Snebzor out of jealousy for having cleared when they were trying to help people, it's insulting to the very people you are trying to represent, and you should cease saying things like that immediately.

Those of us who have commanded the encounter have outright watched other players standing in AoEs like deer in headlights and not moving or following the obvious call-outs that Aurene gives, and then crying they don't know what to do because no one's explaining mechanics to them. There's a lot of shifting of personal accountability for obvious stuff and you have an NPC literally doing shot calls for you, but it's always playing the blame game against someone else. I have not seen anyone say "I'm a better player than you" or "just git gud," regarding this fight. I HAVE seen people like you claiming that's what other people are saying so you can accuse them of elitism. It's not elitism to expect people to be observant and cooperate with basic mechanics. The same goes for when people grow obstinate because they decide they don't want to do some of the things the encounter expects them to do. I have seen people outright refuse to help with CC or even prepare for it prior to the fight, and I have outright seen players sit on the airship and throw the fight instead of getting right back in and helping. Nobody is saying "git gud," but they are saying you are accountable for pulling your weight in the fight and not expecting others to do the heavy lifting for you. When we have outright watched players wipe and then complain in squad chat that the fight should be tuned for the effort-averse, this is a problem. I have watched people sitting auto-attacking. I have recorded my runs of the encounter to review with my guildmates, which is how I know they are only jamming the 1 key and sitting in telegraphed AoEs with more than enough time to move out of them like deer in headlights. These are observations, not put-downs. This has nothing to do with ascended gear or optimized builds. The rhetoric of this being a raid-level encounter is extremely silly and getting out of hand. It is mechanically simpler than most normal-mode encounters in other MMOs that are even simpler than this one. I would even argue it's mechanically on-par with the Scruffy fight in LWS1, just with a time limit. My clears have never been fully-optimized raid groups of people doing their rotations. We did, however, cooperate with one another and we didn't have people talking back to the commander or AFKing. Everyone just tried their best. I did this in groups with very poor boon comps that failed both wisps phases and we were able to clear, before the fight was nerfed. I also saw people grouping up to do meme runs to prove they could. Turns out all you need to beat this fight is doing the very simple set of mechanics properly, work cooperatively with others, listen to the commander and try to prepare during the pre-event. Because there are a lot of passive players who are outright voicing in no uncertain terms that this should be zerg content they can do without thinking, refusing to bring CC skills or damage because they insist on playing support in an encounter where that's not needed, and complaining that this is mechanically on a raid level when it isn't, so they can validate feeling overwhelmed on the internet. There are a lot of effort-averse people who play MMOs and feel entitled to rewards without having to work for them, and a lot of people don't remember how Tequatl or Triple Trouble were when they were new. That's not elitism, you should stop misusing that word. When we have commanded squads and seen people argue, grief, get stubborn about not wanting to show up prepared and feel entitled to a clear just by being there, getting demanding that it is somehow the commander's responsibility to tell them the mechanics of a fight that has been out for a month because they refuse to put in initiative on their end to look up a guide and expect everyone to spoonfeed them the miracle solution on how to win or carry them through the content, those are real things that have happened to us and it's tiring. We have watched Snebzor and Mighty Teapot go out of their way to try and help people and put up guides and get flamed for it, because people want to be angry and want to feel validated moreso than acknowledging that the fight is indeed beatable. People don't want to admit that there's a solution because they don't want a solution, they want to be mad. If these complaints about the fight's mechanics or difficulty were legitimate, people wouldn't be flaming them and instead they would see they're only trying to help. Snebzor got flack from people for trying to be positive and encourage people because he knew clearing was possible. The truth is, the community, yourself included, are making this out to be something which requires meta-level raid play and it really, really doesn't. The rhetoric here has gotten out of control. It's a fairly basic fight, and it just needs people to do its mechanics. If meme runs can beat this encounter, there's no reason you can't. You just want to act like it's impossible for the community at large so you can make these talking points. Treating everyone who points out these observations as though they're being "elitist" is sideswiping the real issue, which is one of personal accountability, observation and effort. If you are truly giving the fight your all, and doing your best to pull your weight, you wouldn't be dismissing legitimate observations. ArenaNet wouldn't be taking measures to ban griefers and AFKers from this fight if it wasn't a legitimate phenomenon people are observing. Claiming that we're just being elitists who are demoralizing you is refusing to acknowledge the reality of the situation and forcing accountability onto someone else. The game isn't the issue, but there are a lot of effort-averse people who have outright argued on the behalf of being effort-averse in youtube comment sections and in-game, so when we see that, observe it, record it and screenshot it, and you try to gaslight us by telling us that we're just being elitists, that's really heavy denial and shifting of accountability. If you're unable to clear, then maybe you should ask yourself what you can do differently. Take some initiative to look up the mechanics (it has been a month, there are guides), and take whatever measures you can to at least ensure you yourself are performing to the best of your ability. If you do that, and if everyone else did that, there should be no problem in clearing. Instead, we are seeing people who are pillars of the community who are attempting to positively encourage others to show them what can be done to help make this easier for them, being on the receiving end of hate, tantrums, and misuse of labels of the "-ist" and "-phobe" variety which has caused ACTUAL demoralization, and those of us who ARE actually in the category of people who would be legitimate victims of such terms are offended the GW2 community would resort to that. I myself am still in a lengthy recovery from an accident, for which I was once wheelchair-bound, and still have to walk with a cane. And I am outright appalled that the people who want to be fervently against the state of this fight would accuse Snebzor and MightyTeapot for being ableist. THAT is actually offensive, to misuse that term just to attack someone on the internet, because people are jealous that they cleared. Conversely, the more you keep wanting to argue that this is a raid encounter which the casuals shouldn't be subjected to, and arguing that open-world content should be pajamafied for the average player, the more you delude yourself into believing this encounter is more involved than it really is, and the more you dismiss what a lot of us who have cleared have experienced when we compare what we have endured and observed with our clears versus our failures. Honestly, I disagree that the turtle being locked behind this meta at the time was an excuse for nerfing it. It's not like the Raptor's canyon-jumping which is mandatory for being able to progress through the story of PoF and prevents your progression if you don't have it. It's a status thing for people who were able to prove they could work together and cooperate to overcome an encounter, hence why the mount is all about working together cooperatively. It's a fun thing most will get bored with after 5 minutes of playing around with, aside from showing off they have it as a status symbol, but it isn't needed and doesn't gate progression. Mounts are often rewards for content like this in other MMOs so I don't see the problem and I don't agree that this is an "expansion-defining feature" as Mukluk likes to say. In Final Fantasy XIV, if you want the Omega mount, you have to clear the Omega Savage Raid series, specifically the fourth and final boss of Alphascape on the Savage difficulty. Having it is a status symbol. No one feels entitled to have it just because they bought the Stormblood expansion and feel entitled to it. I personally believe it should be restored to how it was before, locked behind completion of the meta, as proof that whoever earned it honourably did so through being cooperative with others and giving it their all. I'm not a raider, and in all of my clears, I'm pretty sure what I was doing wasn't on-par with raid performance. As I said previously, my runs weren't good boon comps at all. We failed both wisp phases. But we didn't argue, we gave it our best shot, and every time people took the fight seriously and gave it their best, I have been in a successful clear run. Every time someone made excuses they shouldn't have to try, argued with others in the squad, or tried to deflect personal accountability, that is when we have seen failures. In short, the divide you are describing ultimately depends on which of those two kinds of people you happen to be talking to. Either you're talking to people who are active players who are eager to overcome a challenge to the best of their ability and make sure to do what they can to prepare for the encounter, win or lose, or you're talking to entitled, effort-averse people who are blowing this encounter's difficulty out of proportion so they can act as though victory isn't realistically attainable for the average player, not because that's legitimately the case, but it's because they want it to be that way so they don't have to be expected to pull their weight. I've played enough MMOs and I've seen enough pajamafication of the content and how that's negatively impacted communities to know exactly where the mindset is coming from, and I've seen that be the death of promising games. No thank you. I'd rather raise the skill floor and expect more of people so that by the time they get through to final boss content, they inherently understand enough about the game's expectations to be able to apply everything they should have learned up to that point, than lower the skill ceiling and floor and dumb everything down because effort-averse players argue that open-world content should be tailored to the lowest-common denominator.

I'm in 3 guilds with halls in Isle of Reflection, Lost Precipice and Gilded Hollow. Recently, we just got the upgrade for Isle of Reflection for the guild hall music. Since the other two halls have their own regional music, I was certain that of course, this hall would come with some Canthan tunes to complement it. Unfortunately, it doesn't, and I also learned there's no regional music for the PoF hall, either. that's kind of a letdown. Can we please get some of the music from Seitung Province to play in this guild hall? All of the other music feels really... out of place, given the setting. Additionally, someone else already asked this and didn't get a straight answer, so I figured I'd try my hand at asking it again... where exactly does the hall's expansion... err... expand to? Gilded Hollow and Lost Precipice both had northern areas with an additional waypoint, but like the other person already pointed out, we can't seem to find where that would be in this new hall, after looking at all of the fly-throughs. Does that mean there isn't one, and it's just a massive resource sink for no reason? Both of these things give me the feeling the hall wasn't exactly finished, and still needs some work. Can anyone from ANet chime in as to whether or not we can get some Seitung Province music in the hall, some Elonian music for the other hall for those who have it (to be fair to everyone) and also regarding the "further exploration" for the hall? Please and thank you. ❤️

This isn't raid content. You do NOT have to know a rotation to beat this meta. Mechanically-speaking, it isn't even on the level of a Final Fantasy XIV normal mode trial from A Realm Reborn content. It's a very basic and simple, mechanically. These arguments of trying to turn it into "casuals vs hardcores" or "raiders vs everyone else" are really silly fabrications so that effort-averse people who want to be able to sleepwalk through or get carried through content and get the rewards don't have to work for their rewards by arguing this is content designed for only the hardest of the corest in the hopes that ANet will dumb it down so they can clear it without having to try. The truth is, there's a very big spectrum of players. A "casual" isn't necessarily effort-averse. A casual player can try their best and still put in effort to prepare and do mechanics to the fullest of their ability. They aren't 1%'ers, but they understand this is a game where content expects the players to adapt to whatever it throws at them and it's their responsibility to overcome challenges, including showing up prepared for that content. That doesn't mean they're all of a sudden raiders. This is a ridiculous talking point and I really wish people would stop making it. My first clear of this meta was in a comp that was very poor for boons and most people weren't raiders, doing meta rotations or using optimized builds. My second clear was exactly the same situation. I have seen people beat this doing meme runs using all Mechanists for the lulz, and I have seen people beat this for fun without doing the pre-events and organizing groups that show up at the last minute without the 10% bonus. Every time I have been in a group that has failed, usually at least one of the following has occurred without exception: 1) People acting entitled to a clear simply because the game allows them into the area, without believing any basic preparation is necessary on their part. I have had people tell me this is "gatekeeping," but then other people swooped in to say it isn't if you're struggling to clear the content. This is a videogame, it's "final boss" material, and that means you should be applying everything you have learned up to this point in order to clear it. If you neglected to learn up to this point, that's on you. Just because the boss is accessible and you can reach her, that doesn't mean you should be able to clear the fight without basic preparation. For whatever reason, a lot of people who lump themselves in with "casuals" are also averse to gearing sensibly for what they're doing or how they're playing. This is super counter-intuitive; if I wanted to make life easier for myself without having to overextend my efforts, it'd make sense for me to gear up as much as possible and take whatever food buffs I can since my stats go way up, including my damage and survivability. I prepare because it makes life easier for me, not to flex over others about my damage numbers on ArcDPS. This also includes me knowing that a fight with CC mechanics is going to expect me to bring CC so making sure I make life easier for myself by bringing a decent CC skill along. And yet, people act like they shouldn't have to do any of that simply because they're able to be there, therefore they should be able to get a clear just because. Gear up and make life easier for yourself instead of demanding the content be nerfed because you're too lazy to prepare. 2) People refusing to use CC skills because they expect other people to take care of it. I have commanded squads running DE where I have outright asked people do not know what CC skills are, clarifying that I was just trying to help and there's no shame if you don't know, we just wanted to make sure everyone knew what to do. No one would answer. I would spend time explaining it anyway, under the assumption that people were shy and didn't want to incriminate themselves in not knowing a basic mechanic, and others would see where I was going with it and chime in, too. We spent time and effort explaining the Defiance Bar mechanic, how to know what skills use CC, and that it was crucial to the fight. When CC was going too slow to clear the fight, after the fact people would say they didn't have any CC equipped. WHY!? We spent all that time going over it so you would know to do that, because it's needed. It's because they don't want to, that's why. Even though they were told it's essential to clear the fight, if they don't feel like it, they're not going to do it. People who expect carries refuse to accept that this is an "everyone needs to do their part" kind of encounter. You aren't entitled to rewards because you expect everyone else to do the heavy lifting. If people spend time trying to help you with the clear and you don't take their advice because you feel like you shouldn't have to, and that the game should bend to you, then you're being entitled. It's not a radical change to your playstyle to bring one utility skill along or have an alternate weapon to swap to in the event that the defiance bar pops up. You can always swap right back. It's a momentary thing, and not a huge deal. Refusing to accept that the game accepts things from you and blaming the encounter for not letting you steamroll it is a personal accountability issue. 3) People not listening to the commander who is trying to help them, and talking back. This is an MMORPG, and group content requires teamwork. Just because we've had zerg content in the past doesn't mean everything in the game is that way, nor does it mean that everything has to be or should be that way. If you choose to be obstinate instead of a team player, you shouldn't act entitled to a reward for content which expects everyone to pull their weight. 4) Conversely, bad commanders who don't know what they're doing. Plenty of people put up their tag for the power trip, but haven't cleared the fight and don't bother to know mechanics, let alone have any real leadership skills or experience commanding a squad. 5) AFKers. I keep seeing people hanging out on the airship after they die, not immediately rushing back into the fight. 6) Passive players who insist on playing "support" against a fight that's a DPS check because they have the fantasy of being "helpful" without actually having to output a whole lot of effort. If you want to main a healer, because that's what you're into, that's fine and all, but different content is different, and you need to adjust to the needs of each encounter. There's a limit to how many boons players can receive, so a group only needs so many support players. Players need to be able to read the room and realize when their "help" isn't actually doing anything, when what would really help the group to kill something under a time limit is more damage. If half a squad is running support, when the group is struggling to break CC bars and get past DPS checks, that's an issue. People need to realize that the build and equipment system enables everyone to be a veritable swiss army knife to bring the right tool for the right job. Just as you wouldn't use a scalpel for road work and you wouldn't use a jackhammer for delicate surgery, there's a time and place for everything. The problem is, people either get stubborn and refuse to adjust - which is not a problem with the game's design, it's an entitled player issue - and blame the game for not holding their hand to something which should be self-evident as a way to avoid personal accountability for not thinking before they act. The fight is, first and foremost, a DPS check and a CC check. This much, you should know after doing it a couple of times. If someone refuses to try and bring damage and CC because they insist on being a support no matter what, then at that point, that's practically griefing, because they know exactly what the fight expects of them but are choosing to go against that at everyone else's expense. 7) People who blame the game instead of being observant. Aurene literally does shot-calling for you and tells you what to do, but none of that should be necessary because no matter how much you want to say "it's your first time," if you've even made it to this point then you should very well know that if you see an orange area on the ground, that's the bad, and standing in the bad will get you killed. I see people freezing like a deer in headlights when the Tsunami mechanic happens, as Aurene is calling out what is happening, and get stomped by it, and then blame the game or it being their first time, instead of... y'know... moving out of the way. I also see people not run to the tail when the commander tells them to, and they still attack the head when the head has the damage resistance buff which only goes away when you break the tail. It's super noticeable because it'll be the only blue icon she has amongst a sea of red conditions, and squad commanders always put out squad messages to go to the tail. People don't listen, so the tail doesn't get broken in time, and they keep attacking the head. While Aurene is also shouting out loud to break the tail. But it's the game's fault, apparently, because basic mechanics that make Leviathan Normal Mode from ARR in FFXIV look challenging by mechanics are now "raid-level"... smh... Rhetoric is one hell of an opiate for the masses... 8 ) Griefers. Yeah, sadly this is a thing. There are people who intentionally throw the encounter. ANet has been pretty good about dealing with them, though. 9) Expecting someone else to spoon-feed them all the fight's mechanics, even when there is ample time before the fight to mention if you're new and don't know what you're doing. The encounter has been out for more than a month now. There are guides. People who have been nice enough to try and explain the fight beforehand get burned out when all they receive in return is people talking back to them. After a while, they're naturally going to assume you have done this enough to the point where you know what to do. If you don't... it's your responsibility to speak up. There are 50 people in a squad, it's really entitled of you to assume that the squad leader should be at your beck and call and ask you personally whether or not you know what you're doing. And yet, I see people arguing this is what squad leaders should do. And then I've seen squad leaders do it, see everyone be silent, and then I've seen squad leaders go over the mechanics anyway only for nobody to listen because people want to be stubborn. If you have made repeated attempts to clear and failed each time, it's not someone else's responsibility to spoon-feed you anything. You should take it upon yourself to look up what to do, and then focus on making sure you are doing your part to the best of your ability. No organized squad should be necessary for this encounter at all. The mechanics are basic, you just need to know them, be observant and do your own thing the best you can. If you do that, and pay attention to what's going on, and then if everyone does that, then the fight is an easy clap. But if you refuse personal accountability for what you can do to make your part in this fight easier, then that's on you. You should take the time to look up what to do and take your own initiative, instead of demanding other people do it for you. I never played the early portion of the game. I'm a booster and a skipper. The thing is, I have played enough videogames to know that if there's a big orange shape on the ground, that's the bad, and you don't stand in the bad. I've played games like Monster Hunter to look for the obvious tells the monster does and dodge out of it. When people were constantly shouting "use CC" and I didn't know what that meant, as FFXIV doesn't have a defiance bar mechanic, I didn't expect anyone to give me a sermon about it ahead of time. I asked, and if there was something I was confused about, I'd take it upon myself to look it up. No one else is responsible for your lack of initiative to learn if there's something you don't understand. 10) Internet tantrums. It should come as no surprise, but this is actually the #1 reason. When Teapot and Snebzor cleared, they were accused of being "elitist" and "ableist" (in a complete misusing of both terms) because people didn't want to acknowledge that this fight was totally beatable if you just did your part. They wanted to be mad on the internet. Teapot put out a guide on how to clear and he got harassed for it. Snebzor tried to positively encourage people to realize they had it in them to succeed in this fight, and he got flamed on reddit for it. Firstly, it's not elitism to say they've cleared by just doing what the game expects of them. Unless anyone's saying "I'm better than you," and trying to use their clears to flex over you for it, that's not elitism, nor is it elitism to point out the very fact that any of the above situations have indeed been realities we have seen inhibiting clears. We do indeed see people just freezing like a deer in headlights in the middle of an orange puddle they should probably move out of, at a point in the game where there's no legitimate excuse to not know to get out of the orange area because that's where the damage happens, and then complain that this fight is impossible. It's not elitism to say that we see basic failures of common sense occurring in this fight. It's an observation, not an insult or a put-down. If you're engaging in any of those behaviours, perhaps try not being a boon to the stereotype? Secondly, as someone who spent the first couple years of her foray into MMORPGs in a wheelchair following a horse-riding accident, I take umbrage to the use of "ableism" as an insult against people who are just able to clear some videogame content. That has nothing to do with "ableism," it's actually an incredibly insensitive and offensive use of that term against people who have cleared, and the people who have said that should be ashamed of themselves. But of course, it has nothing to do with that. We live today in an internet outrage culture, so when people want what they want but don't want to put in the effort to get it, they think throwing a hard enough tantrum to get the game to bend over backward for them is the path to success over putting in the work. That's a terrible lesson to teach and I'm wholly against it. When I got into FFXIV, I was what I would call a "casual" player. I wasn't an effort-averse player; I tried my best, but I wasn't going out of my way to clear Ultimate raids and brag about my parses. When I got onto a Discord server to ask a benign question about how a particular trait worked due to the wording being funny and one of the raid community's mentors took the opportunity to be an ACTUAL elitist, belittling me and telling me I was in need of remediation for daring to ask a simple question, and going out of his way to make me feel like I'm incapable of succeeding at high-level content, did I cry on the internet about how he was being a jerk? No. Did I use my disability at the time (being confined to a wheelchair) as an excuse to say he was being "ableist" and should've been more sensitive to my inability to want to push myself to perform beyond my means due to getting PTSD of my accident (which is a thing I would indeed experience when being put into those situations)? No. I come from fighting games. MMOs aren't what I would call hard, even at their most challenging. People who complain about rotations being "difficult" have never done Order Sol's Dragon Install Sekkai consistently, or done the Daigo Parry challenge in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. I played FFXIV to relax and have virtual legs to run around in, but if I want a challenge, I play games made of sterner stuff. So you know what I did instead of crying about it? I got into raiding, to prove he was wrong. And when I cleared a raid tier with orange parses, using a more demanding higher-speed and higher-performance rotation than what he was prescribing for the game's most demanding job to play, while he was booted from that raiding community for being outed as a cheater who automated his rotations, I was vindicated, and it felt good. Put up or shut up, I say. If you think someone's being elitist, then prove yourself up to the challenge to shut them up. I don't think whiners about this content who just want something to rage at on the internet should be validated in the slightest. I think, if anything, the turtle should be locked behind it again. It's quite common for mounts to be rewards for content clears, and it's rather fitting that the mount which involves teamwork and cooperation to use is locked behind an encounter which requires teamwork and cooperation to obtain. In my eyes, it should be exclusive to those who are willing to do what it takes to get, and serve as that status symbol. You want it and can't clear? Learn to play nice with others and be a member of the community, in this massive multiplayer online role-playing game. I'm not entitled to Dhuum's scythe just because I want it and think it looks cool. I understand if I want it, I have to work for it, and if it comes from instanced group content, I need to know how to play nice with others. The turtle as a status symbol does just that. It's also powerful against some of the mobs in DE. I don't think something like that should be handed out to just anyone, especially since it's not compulsory for clearing the story the way the raptor and its canyon jumping mastery were in PoF. It's a fun bonus which, in all likelihood, most of you just want for the sake of having, will play around with it for 5 minutes and get bored, or only want it to show off to others that you have it, in which case, we get back to it being a status symbol thing. If that's what it is to you, then it should be in the hands of those deserving of it through their efforts, not in the hands of anyone. For this fight, I had trouble clearing for a while, but made an effort to clear before the changes were implemented, because I wanted to get my turtle the honourable way to prove that I could do it, for me, not to anyone else. I wouldn't be satisfied with myself if I didn't get my clear in before any changes to make it easier. As someone who became a raider in another MMORPG while being in a wheelchair and made to feel I wasn't able to do something, I needed this for myself. And for me, it was fun, and very easy, with the only obstacles being the sort of people who weren't pulling their weight for one reason or another in content that expects everyone to do their part. My #1 problem with this fight is that it's too easy, and future content should do a better job of gatekeeping players out of story until they show they can understand basic mechanics. The tutorial area was a nice step in the right direction, but it's not a true tutorial if it doesn't absolutely make sure players repeat the same task multiple times to show they understand what they're doing before letting them proceed. Making it a heart vendor and allowing people to pick and choose a small set of activities in a public space, instead of forcing a private instance where the player is FORCED to break the CC bar 3 times before allowing them to proceed in stories. Players need to learn the hard way that they're not deserving of a clear just for being there; this is a videogame, and each boss fight should be an evaluation of the player putting into practice everything they have learned up to that point, so that by the time players get to an end-game boss like this, they all know the basics of CC bars and the like. I just get flashbacks of Leviathan from FFXIV ARR, and remembering how for an easy beginner fight, at least Levi would slam the platform, causing players to slide off the arena if they weren't observant of the obvious tell he was going to hit the platform and didn't quickly run to the other side. I think we need that to weed out all the people who very clearly don't pay attention to obvious tells and blame the game to avoid personal accountability for not paying attention to what's happening around them. If a 40-year-old mum who barely has time to game between a full-time job, physical therapy, a child and four cats to look after, while recovering from surgery, can do this, and if one of her guild members - a grandmother in her mid-60s with rheumatoid arthritis can do this - you have no excuse other than laziness or the desire to make a stink on the internet to feel self-validation for why you can't do this. It's not an issue with the game... it's an issue with you.

Updated bug report: the event de-spawned on me prematurely (not during the onset of the nighttime meta) and didn't spawn again.

That's not good game design. I know which one you're talking about, and not only across the bridge, but occluded from view, so it's incredibly misleading. It'd be one thing if it were just outside the circle but still in view. Instead, it has the triple-whammy of being outside the circle, occluded from view from the rest of the event area, AND it is not in the market where the event is supposed to take place. I don't blame people for not finding it under those circumstances. Not to mention, this event doesn't even spawn properly 99% of the time. It's supposed to show up every 10 minutes, but it doesn't. Since it's bugged, this is yet another thing about it that might as well be adjusted, too.