Crit.5123

Thank you for the replys everyone and the kind words and feedback to my comments. Apologies for the abbreviations, I sometimes forget that not everyone knows what HAM, ToF, GoB etc... mean. I can only apologize for this. @Sobx.1758 You are probably correct with your thoughts that people would just min max the same boss 50 times, it was only a suggestion though (in hindsight probably a bad one :D). I just think somthing needs to be done to get players engaging in raids on more days than Monday. Maybe a daily raid wing that gives between 5-10g or some extra Li etc.. Just anything to get people playing the content more than once per week and get LFG more active.

haha, edit done. ty 😄

After over 8000 hours of Guild Wars 2 I feel it's about time I shared my opinions and what I have learnt during my journey, what is great and what could be done better. This could possibly turn into a long read so either strap in or jump ship now! 🙂 I read these forums on a regular basis but very rarely get involved in discussions or topics of contention. So thought I would add my small contribution and shove a massive thank you in the way of the developers for a game that not only kept me sane throughout the worldwide Covid pandemic, but allowed me to meet some lifelong (hopefully) friends along the way! Is it perfect, of course not. There is very little in the world that is, but the positives outweigh the negatives ten fold. What follows is my list of what I enjoy, my suggestions on improvements, and the few things that I feel should be changed without delay :). For clarity my main focus is PvE with around 95% of my game time is focused on this mode. I occasionality dip into WvW when I need a GoB but as for PvP the toxic nature that surrounds it and the queue times keep me away almost permanently. Within PvE I now focus most of my game time on end game content, having over 3000Li and 50+ kp of each EoD strike cm (excluding HTcm of which I have less). This is not a flex, just for context on the content on which my opinions are based. Raids I enjoy these a lot. I'm lucky enough to be part of a small endgame community who clear these weekly, we still have to rely on LFG to a degree, but I've managed a clear of all 7 wings for a long time (2 years or so). CM's are tuned nicely and offer an increased challenge if you want them for more organised groups. I didn't like the change to the CM rewards that happened a while ago. This seemed counter intuitive to allowing more people access to raids. As now most groups on LFG will want to do all CM's (ex Dhuum and Q1 usually) instead of just 5, blocking access even further for newer raiders. Emboldened mode did alleviate this a little, but it's used very rarely and getting into raids for a new player is as hard as it ever was (if not harder after the CM changes). What I dislike most about raids though is the rewards structure. There is no incentive to run them more than once a week, so unless you can raid on a Monday finding clears is difficult. Put a W5-7 FC up on a Thursday, good luck getting it filled. Raids should as a matter of priority be given an incentive for players to repeat them more than once. Maybe something like a weekly achievement that gives 50g for 50 raid boss kills (this is just an idea but you get my point). LFG would be more active, raiding through the week would be easier and give more access for newer players, and I don't think 50g would break the economy, everybody wins. Strikes While I do enjoy these a lot they have undergone massive changes in philosophy over the past 2 years, all of which I'm not sure I fully agree with. Take IBS strikes, all rather easy apart from Bonskinner which for new players takes a bit of getting used to. Then we had EoD. In normal mode there is 2 easy ish ones and two which are a pretty big barrier for newer players. Then we look at the CM's, AH and XJJ are not too bad, doable by most end game focused groups. KO is then a huge step up in difficulty, a lot of end game raiders still do not have a single kill of this, and then of course there is HTcm. Harvest temple challenge mode was overkill on a huge scale. While I do agree that crazy hard content does appeal to the minority, for the vast number of players this kind of approach to content just blocks accessibility. In my opinion every piece of new content should be aimed at three different groups of players. Normal Mode : Clearable by mostly everyone, with maybe a little bit of practice. Challenge Mode : Clearable by the majority of end game focused players. Title : An extra extreme challenge for title within the CM, that people can grind for weeks/months if the like. ToFcm for example is a failure on a massive scale. Sure it generated some twitch views and some excitement for a week or two while everyone watched Hs and SC but 99.9% of the community was left out in the cold, and still is. Normal mode is fine, maybe a bit of a HP sponge but apart from this it's a well tuned fight. CM is overturned a lot, even after the 'nerf'. HPs are still way too high, the mechanics are far too punishing and most people just don't even bother with it already, just a few weeks after launch. Changes to the mechanics need to happen in order to make this fight accessible to the majority of the end game community. I know people complained about COcm being 'too easy'. Personally I think its close to perfect. CM can be punishing if you are not focused on end game content and just 'jump in' but what it is missing is an extreme challenge for more elite players. This should have been tied to a title of some sort that would take some time to master and work out. This way everybody wins again. Story It's pretty good, once. Dialogue is on point, the story arcs work well and are engaging, I mostly enjoyed it and had a fun time on my first play-through. After that it becomes a tedious and annoying blocker for what mainly boils down to one reason. Dialogue is not skippable. Want to play through again on that 2nd character, be prepared to listen to Taimi and Braham for 20+ hours that you cannot skip or ignore. It becomes so tedious and dull that I find myself shouting “Taimi just shut up” at the monitor on more occasions than I can count. This approach to story design is a fatal flaw that has plagued GW2 for a long time and continues to do so. Content Delivery This kind of pairs with story but as content is more than just story it deserves its own separate heading. HoT, PoF, EoD were all fantastic, big content dumps, lots of story, lots of content all made each one seem worth waiting for. SotO's drip fed approach is the total opposite. I don't like it at all, waiting 18/24 months for the next big content drop is not a problem, there is plenty of game already to keep people occupied while we wait. Season of the Dragon's while a band aid idea was fantastic. More things like this between big content drops would be an awesome approach. What we have now of an hour or two of story every 3 months and half a map, does not work for me at all. I would have preferred it all at once when it's ready so I can sit down and get stuck into some fleshed out content! Game Balance This is a contentious issue, everyone has a different opinion with different goals and wants. Me personally, I think we are pretty close to things being 'good'. A lot of focus has been placed on buffing various heal builds recently, this is only a good thing. The HFB/Druid meta got shaken up. HAM arrived with EoD, hScrapper is pretty awesome now, hScg getting alacrity was a nice touch, even heal warrior with a bonk stick is nice. BoonDPS still needs some work I feel. A lot of them still do not have access to some critical boons that they are usually asked to cover alongside their main one, stability and /or aegis being the usual culprits. Take qHarbi, a fantastic and engaging quickness provider that is fun to play but lacks stability access so it almost always gets sidelined and a herald/scrapper/fb taken instead. This needs to be worked on and the boon access of these sidelined classes tweaked so they can become a firm part of the meta. There are of course more examples of this, but this was the first that came to mind. As for DPS classes, this is a mixed bag. I play with a disability to my left hand so I almost always run a Li build of some sort. Mechanist/Vindicator/Scourge are all good examples of these but all have received nerfs of some kind over the past year or so. Why? Because they were too good? No, their bench was no higher that some of the top performing DPS build, they were nerfed because people complained. Yes I hear you that complex builds should perform better than simple ones, but I disagree. If I see a scourge hitting 40k it's nice but I'm not impressed. If I see a cata doing it, then this is impressive, I almost always mention this to the player and congratulate them on their awesome performance with a difficult class. This should be the difference. Let's use Mehanist as an example as it is the class with the most headlines over the past year or so. There was soo much hate towards it from a minority of people that it was nerfed and nerfed into oblivion. To the point that pMech is almost not viable for end game content and a lot of groups just flat out refuse to take one if they join from LFG. This is bad design. I just never understand the hate. Maybe it needed tweaking slightly, but what happened was bad for the game and for players. Pmech introduced a LOT of players to end game content. Maybe they have a disability like me, or maybe they have concentration issues making mechanics + a hard rotation difficult. Pmech solved all of these, so many people got to experience end game content for the first time because of this class, and instead of us celebrating this as a community it was just slammed into the ground by people complaining that my condi weaver does not let me flex any more. Moving away from classes and focusing on mechanics balance. Currently the big elephant in the room is ToFcm, and while there is no need to go into big detail I would like to point out one thing. Visual noise. GW2 has a lot of this, like a whole lot. And balancing mechanics around small things that people need to see is a poor approach. Using the greens as an example, there are three of them (depending on the strat you take ofc). Each one has a small spinning indicator around it to see if enough people are inside. This is super hard to see with everything else that is happening on screen. If the whole green circle turned blue when three people were inside (and then maybe pink if there were more than 3) this would solve the problem instantly (with maybe a colourblind menu option also). There are a lot more examples of this in the game, and visual indicators for critical mechanics need to be made more easily visible as a matter of priority imo. Performace GW2 is old, over a decade since release and it shows. Not in how it looks, I still think this stands up well and large parts of the game look beautiful. But the performance still needs more addressing. Take the Wizards Tower as an example. New content and the FPS are really poor here, whatever approach is being taken to designing new maps needs looking at. I don't have a top end rig, but a 9700k + 4070 should be able to supply me with more than 25fps in a 'town' area. And convergences, eeek. I've seen it dip as low as 12fps when everyone is bonking the Sorrow. Content should be designed around the engine and performance you have, and convergences does not work. 50 players all within a 600 radius of each other and a boss going bananas is a recipe for disaster. Conclusion I love GW2, I mean really love it. It has helped me though some difficult periods in my life and I have met some fantastic people along the way. I do feel that some more Dev focus should be applied to fixing bugs that have been around for a long time, some just get overlooked and ignored. (KOcm 33% phasing for example) but on the whole I think what we have is a fantastic and engaging game that has kept me hooked for 8000 hours and will continue to do so. My opinions are of course my own, it's ok for yours to be different. Everyone has differing views on what would make the game perfect, and I guess the Dev's have the difficult job of finding a middle ground that keeps us all happy. I could have gone into a lot more detail with crafting, gem store, legendary access etc.. but these were the main points from where the majority of my focus lies within the game. I just though it was about time to get my points/ideas across and once again drop a massive thank you to all the developers past and present. Ya'll are doing good ;).

I hate it when people shout this kind on nonsense as a fix. The OP is 100% right with his/her issue. I play in action cam due to a disablity and i would not be able to play the game at all without it. Content should be designed around all input methods and options available to the user. To the OP, jumping to the platforms is indeed a nightmare with AC on, although it is not impossible unless you get the raised one. I have caps lock bound to enable/disable action cam though and this works very well. I get into posistion at the edge, disable AC, jump over then re-enable it while in flight. Once you get the hang of it it probably only adds about 0.5s to the time it takes you to reach the platform and still leaves plenty of time to burst it down even if you are heal.

Honestly i agree with OP 100% on the first 3 points. Im not quite aligned with No.4 but we can get to that :). Aiming CM content at the 0.1% of players makes no sense at all. As OP said if you want to gate content to these people, then make it the title. Your above average end game player can then engage with the content weekly and it still leaves a challange for the people that want to hardcore grind it for months. NM for everyone, CM for your more end game focused raid/strike players and Title for the hardcore gamers in the community. Everybody wins. As for point 4, im not quite with you on this. I love KOcm, imo it is one of the best encounters in the game but i do agree that wiping on the final phase sucks. Happened to everyone A LOT while learning. What they need is a training mote of sorts, where you can pick a phase to jump stright into and practice. No rewards for it ofc but you can then perfect each part as a group and bring it all together at the end. Anywhoo, thats my 2c on the matter. Anet missed the mark with ToFcm by a long way,

Well....for DPS quickness bring the Hearld. That's all i see here. No word on the mess that is now qScrapper. Is it easy to maintain quinckess uptime, sure it is. Is it fun and engaging to play it..hell no. "Ok i need to proc quickness....wait is there a field on the floor.....no...ok drop field, spam finishers in it" ...this was playtested and detemined it was fun??? Scrapper was in a PERFECT spot where it was, if you wanted to take an extra utility instead of a gyro all you had to do was increase boon duration a bit to compensate. You didnt need all gyros and you certainly did not need to spam them all off CD. If you wanted to improve Scrapper start with Bulwalk gyro, people only ever take this for the toolbelt skill to apply stab, hit this at Mama or TL etc...ouch. Its basically a dead utility slot when you need to take stab. Give Bulwalk group Aegis or somthing and let it compete with qFB (PvE viewpoint only).

Pretty much what Solvar said. Took me a while to get enough people for this also. In the end i saw that some random Twitch streamer was doing it so there was enough people on the map to get it done. Just need to be lucky i guess

How long did it take you in your private instance? Been sat going between points 3 and 8 for over an hour and no sign of him 😞

Also worked for me, 1st attempt to get the layout and then got it at the 2nd try. Many thanks!

100% this. Before the last round of nerfs people were playing it because it was close to the best dps output (in an actuall encounter). It isn't anymore but its end game representation has only dropped slightly. The try-hards moved on to Virt and everyone else gets left with a really enjoyable class that is fun to play. But yeah, for 'balance' let's screw it even further. Side note : The Mechanical Genuis changes will be close to a joke if they happen. The pet AI is nowhere near good enough for that to be a thing, you can press 'recall' and nothing happens half the time....wp!

More directionless balance. Does anyone on the dev team actually know why people take certain specs into encounters? I don't play FB but i really enjoy scrapper, it gets pushed aside most of the time due to its lack of stab and aegis. Take Bulwalk Gyro, 99% of the time you take that for its toolbelt skill, the acual gyro is usless. Add 3 stacks of stab and 1 stack of aegis to Bulwalk (and remove its curent stuff) and you now have a elite spec that can compete with FB for both a quickness role and healing role. Would it be as good, probably not, but it would at least be a very viable choice and help stop FB dominating group comps so much.

I see which side of the fence you fell onto...all good 😉

Nah not really, i was using an extreme example. The DPS output on Mechanist is not crazy high, it doesn't smash through the 40k barrier like condi Ren used to do etc... The problem is it can reach 70%-80% bench doing virtually nothing. If people are pressured into playing it becasuse they dont want to drop down the DPS meter a bit.....then thats on them. Raising the skill floor would solve this problem. But as i said in the original post, this is just my opinion on it. Depends on which side of the fence you fall i suppose.

Armour : I use a mixture of Berserker's and Diviner's and run at 56.6% boon duration. Weapon : I usually run rifle and use F2,F3 and barrier signer to upkeep alac. If i switch to Mace/Shield i drop barrier signet as you get the extra alac uptime from the mace auto attack chain so the singet is not needed and you can take a dps utility instead (grenade kit etc..) If using Mace/Shield i also take more Berserker's and less Diviner's and drop my boon duration down to around 45%. (My rifle is Diviners and the mace and shield Berserker's so just weapon swaping sorts out the boon duration). Traits : I take AAR in Explosives instead of Explosive Temper but apart from that they are the same as yours. Runes : Scholar, as you dont need the extra might uptime from strength runes usually. Sigils : I take Air and Force. (Edit : Just double chekced - my boots are Assassins :D)

This is a player base issue though not balance. If Scourge for example was buffed to the sky tomorrow and could kick out 50k DPS i personally would not switch to it as i find it very unsatisfying to play. If you feel pressure to play a specific class that's kind of a you problem imo (not you specifically but whoever it bothers). Renegade was hit with nerf after nerf over time (yes some were needed) but i stuck with it because i enjoyed it, and couldn't really care if it wasn’t the 'best'. I switched due to the rifle changes and actually play rifle Qscrapper now more than pMech. If people feel the 'need' to play a specific class so they can look at some numbers instead of enjoying the game...then meh. As i said at the start though i agree Mech does need some changes, 25k from 0 apm is just silly. Making some skill floor alterations though would not put it out of reach of people that want/need Li as there is plenty of headroom to change stuff and still keep it < 20apm. This would just hinder people coming into content and just pressing 1 and out DPSing your average SLB, which i agree is totally stupid.