Razadune.9260

I'm enjoying playing it, but the pace is frenetic even compared to weaver at times. It's a handful to play, and it's only worth it if you enjoy doing it...not sure the utility or damage it brings really makes it worthwhile for most. The biggest problem I have with Catalyst is that the entire spec is the hammer. Tempest and Weaver are both still unique and viable specs with weapons other than their new weapon skills, but Catalyst basically doesn't even exist unless you have a hammer equipped...it's just core elementalist with an extra combo field. Its combo field application is janky when you have so much to juggle as it is. I feel like it should be a fire and forget PBAOE that turns the catalyst into a mobile combo field for the duration of the ability, rather than being another ground target. It'd be more interesting and a lot more practical at the same time. Augments aren't particularly interesting, either. The two most useful ones are Shattering Ice and Relentless Fire, and both are pretty much just a +% damage increase for short duration so you have to work them in. It adds another button press that the spec doesn't really need, and another resource to manage in a complex rotation since you have to time it for best effect. You're already separately juggling the combo field and its cooldown, 16 weapon abilities and their cooldowns, 4 orbs and their cooldowns, and element switches, heals, and other utilities. It's fun to have a lot of things to use at any given time, but adding multiple DPS cooldowns just makes it more unmanageable for something that's not really situational or fun to work into a build. They're just there, or your damage isn't, and that's kind of that... they'd be a lot more fun playing off of other aspects of Catalyst, like if one augment detonated orbs for different damage effects or another expended orbs you had up for AOE buffs/debuffs rather than just the alternate/3 ability to throw them once you've accumulated the orbs. I like the spec, and I'm having some fun with it, but it feels like there's some missed opportunities there to make it something really special. The orb idea is great, it's just disappointing that it's tied only to hammer and isn't something utilized by the augments to make the spec even more unique.

No, it doesn't, there's no leaderboards or scoresheets. Everyone on the map just fails it, no matter what your DPS was or your boons were or if your pinky was out when you drank your tea. The only thing I've seen it expose are the dregs of the community that are the exact reason why so many people balk at signing up for group content and would rather have functional open world events that they can participate in without judgment.

I definitely do enough damage to hold my own in any content I'm doing. Most people are not looking at their dps meters, because very few players are even running a dps meter in this game in the first place and they shouldn't have to install one in order to participate. I'd guess that very few people playing this game have any mods installed of any kind at any given point in time. I don't personally think there's any reason at all that, if someone is able to make it to Dragon's End in the first place, they shouldn't be able to complete it. If they're there, they should be able to complete it, and have fun doing that. I don't care if I have to carry them to do it. I don't care if they don't spend hours and hours earning the gold to buy optimal gear, surf outside websites in order to learn what their optimal build is, or if they don't want to join groups or Discord in order to just play their game and have a good time. All I care about is that they're there, they're having fun, and they're treating others around them well while they do it. I want people to walk away from any activity in the game that they do and say they enjoyed it and thought it was cool. People wanting to do better because they're having fun is one thing, but people looking to fix themselves because part of the community insists they're broken is awful. For everyone involved. Maybe it's years of playing World of Warcraft that have jaded me on that, but that is not something anyone should be actively seeking to have happen in a game's community that they're part of. What I don't want is for anyone, at any point in casually accessed content really, is to walk away from it wondering what they did wrong and why they aren't good enough to do this if they've enjoyed playing everywhere else. If that happens, it's usually because of community pressure and toxic behavior; but it can also be because of radical difficulty spikes making content seem inaccessible. For the game to be healthy, nobody should want either of those last two things to happen to other players. I definitely don't want difficult or demanding content taken away from people that want it... it just should be in a proper place where it's not creating those stresses on the players and community. And that's why people are talking about Dragon's End in the way that they are. It's not impossible, but it can feel like it. It's difficult and demanding enough that if it was Strike or Raid content, it'd probably be praised and it would be totally fine. If you were talking about your DPS expectations for other raiders, or strike team members, or your guild, that'd be totally fine. That's the difference here. People usually commander up and help lead people through content in this game because they want to facilitate a situation where other players are having fun and completing events well. Everyone benefits. With Dragon's End, the time tolerances are so tight that success becomes dependent on performance, and expectations are raised to the point where just having fun together isn't enough. That's all that the people here saying they want it fixed want: an event where everyone can come in and have fun together and everyone walks away happy, like almost the entirety of the rest of the game already offers when presented in this context.

There's so many ground effects that it's hard to see what's even going on. I also had trouble keeping my camera adjusted so that I could see the whole battle, which led to some problems. I was lucky enough to finally finish it tonight (we won with seconds left, I actually thought it had failed at first). I guess I don't have much to say about it other than I was glad it was over by the time it was done. I have no desire to do it again and probably won't even attempt to.

I think the entire point is that if you always get "bad maps" and need to camp the group finder for an organized group in order to complete the meta, then it's obviously not fixed. That defeats the entire purpose of it being an open world map and not just another instanced strike or raid altogether.

Playing in prime time tonight we didn't even have enough people to start 2 of the 3 groups moving south. I stood alone at the western one waiting for people until it was obvious we'd never make the timer, so I finally just logged off. Mine nor Caithe's group still hadn't moved when I logged off. Playing this afternoon we got the farthest I've ever gotten on the map and failed before even getting to Soo-Won. Last night my second try failed by running out of time getting through the barriers to kill the dragons (it failed while we were about 60% left on the last dragon). I stayed and did what I could to build up the map after that and try again, we failed before ever even getting all the way south. I joined in the middle of another attempt to start the night, and my first attempt failed at the barriers, too. It's either from lack of players entirely, or because you don't have enough to start it on time and push south immediately to save timer, or whatever the reason is, but the changes were focused on Soo-Won's damage in that fight and that's not even the problem with the map in the first place. I haven't seen any indication at all that the average map even gets that far. In six attempts, I've never even seen the fight with her. I hadn't played the map prior to the changes. I'm glad you've been able to finish it, but the idea that you can join any map and succeed is just wrong. I've never seen a group fail at the last fight, random maps don't even get that far. Going by GW2Efficiency less than 14% of the accounts with EoD on that site (and that's probably more representative of hardcore players than the truth) have the achievement for finishing the meta in Dragon's End, so it seems extremely unlikely that my experience is out of the ordinary.

This hasn't been my experience at all. This is just straight lying, and is absolutely not even remotely true. I think the expansion is worth it for the new specs, personally, and fishing can be fun. If those are worth enough to buy the expansion to someone then I'd recommend it.

I still haven't even seen the last fight. In the last two days I've spent ~6 hours in the zone, and the furthest I've ever seen the meta get was this afternoon; we failed when Aurene flies off to go help Logan. I'm not actually even sure why we failed, but it was practically instant once that phase started. I think the worst part of that one is that despite fighting our butts off, I'm not sure people even knew why we failed it. So, I've done it 4 (?) times now, and have never even seen the last fight in the meta. Echovald is maybe 50/50 if you get enough people to even do the end of it there but at least I've seen success 3 of the 5 times I've actually done the boss fight. Kaineng City almost always fails on the first phase when the north reactor gets overwhelmed in my experience, which is probably just lack of people, and Seitung I've finished once and every other time I've played it we didn't have enough people to even make a real attempt at the meta there. Judging by zone chat, every one of these metas people seem to expect to fail before they've even really started. It's not even just Dragon's End, that's just the one everyone seems to talk about. I'm not sure I'd keep trying if I wasn't just looking for the xp to finish up my masteries, and I suspect that other people who already have maxed them have moved on and compounded the issue. So far my experience with Cantha is that everything fails more often than not, where it's Metas, or Leviathan, or any event that can't be really done effectively solo. It's impossible not to be extremely frustrated by it.

You don't get the achievement unless you fail at a specific part of it. I've never even made it far enough in the meta to even fight the dragon, despite multiple tries, so have never been able to get the achievement.

That's sort of the problem there, though, 121 is great heals but you don't hit without taking 122 and way too often wind up doing nothing at all.

Moving isn't so bad, although you have to tank some AOE's to get swings off at times. The problem is more with things that drag you around, like certain fights in EoD (boss fight in story, Echovald meta, etc). They make it act like you moved, so even though you might seem like you got a Dragon Trigger off (animation and sound play, ammo spends, flow is spent) it never actually does any damage and treats it like you moved before the attack happened. Those effects work against the spec so you spend the time, the resources, and the cooldowns, and never actually even get an attack off or do any damage at all. It feels like there's a short window between when the attack triggers and when it actually deals damage where CC can interrupt dragon trigger and cause it to do nothing at all while still spending CD's and resources as if it worked.

I don't like the HoT maps (Tangled Depths in particular I think is the worst map ever created for a video game, easily), but honestly...I'd rather do the events in any of them than the ones I have in EoD. I mostly just move around and do meta events, and other events as I roam. I wrote a long description of each zone and explained why I feel like I do and just deleted it because what's the point. In the end, End of Dragons feels like WoW's Shadowlands did to me, and it's part of what's making the struggle to play so bad right now. It's something you play because you're there and it's part of something you know you enjoy, but it's like ordering at your favorite restaurant a year after their only good chef left and they've changed their menu to attract a different crowd. You eat there even though it's not really any good anymore, but because it reminds you of a time when it was. There's not much reason to play in EoD. The rewards are paltry compared to areas like HoT's maps, and you fail the meta events more often than not because they're designed like they were made for progression raiders. You often walk away with nothing after a significant time investment, feeling like you'd be better off just playing somewhere else. Or something else. I do like the new class specializations, though, which I hope is enough to keep me playing until whatever comes next.

If anyone is doing them. The maps feel empty and as often as not nobody even does the metas. It's frustrating so far.

Nope, they're marauder. The only piece I have that's different than the build sheet is that my cloak is celestial because I can't be bothered to farm up and replace it, but the stat difference for just the cloak is negligible anyway. Link to in-game stats. I used the Assassin's choice on the amulet because without it I was only hitting something like 77.something% crit and not maxing out with fury, something I wouldn't have had to do if my crit rate in game matched what it was showing on the build site.

This is the build I've been using. Just as a side note, the stats it shows on the build don't match what I see in game; my crit rate on my character sheet in-game shows 80.95%, and Crit Damage at 231.6% rather than the numbers it's showing on that build editor, so crit isn't fury overcapped anywhere near what it suggests on that site. For a difficult solo you can switch out Berserker's Power for Might Makes Right, and the healing is pretty dramatic any time you start building might stacks with Dragon Trigger. Added in with Immortal Dragon you can heal through practically anything, but swapping either is a pretty dramatic damage difference...I was seeing about a 25% drop in damage on my big hits by trading for MMR, which is why I don't run it all the time, but I also noticed that I didn't really need it. Combat Stimulant is a really good heal, and there's benefits to actually having to use it regularly. 25k+ health is a nice buffer for damage, and >230% crit damage means you hit like a truck swinging a hammer made of other trucks. I easily one-shot veteran mobs and anything small near them, and even bigger stuff doesn't stand up much. I was quickly dropping shots on Tequatl between 220k-240k (and could definitely go higher), and even without time to build up might stacks I do ~90k dragon triggers on very short fights. It pretty much ends anything not a champion mob in one Dragon Trigger, and most Elites don't stay up long enough to take two of them. It's not built with the toughness and healing in mind, but even on harder hitting fights I haven't found that I really need it as much as you'd think... and definitely not enough to sacrifice all that damage on a spec that gets a lot of its fun from dropping the biggest hits out there. You're pretty survivable just with Mintberry Swirl and Marauder gear in regular open world play.

Part of the problem is just establishing what good DPS even is. It tends to be a number that a theorycrafter talks about in a forum post somewhere that everyone latches onto as being what that class/spec is capable of, and is then taken as an absolute baseline of where everyone should be. And then in practice, it's completely ignored by players who want to lord their DPS over someone else that those baselines were established on a training dummy in a perfect scenario and will almost never be duplicated in actual gameplay (especially in open world where perfect buff/party configs aren't guaranteed and are frankly unlikely). They also tend to ignore group/area-wide buffs that see a support character contributing damage that won't necessarily show up as being part of their own DPS numbers. Timely dodges, helping pick up a downed character, "imperfect" weapon choices that buff another player's damage at the cost of your own...all of those hurt someone's personal DPS but help the fight as a whole. Contribution is more important than DPS in this and every other game, and especially in this one DPS isn't the only way to contribute, and since there's no good metric that really tracks what other players are doing there's a lot of people who would be better off doing something other than pointing fingers and talking about damage meters as if they really paint a complete picture. That's not a solution, it's just looking for someone to blame.

I like the spec better than I thought I would, but this is definitely a huge problem. Champions will pancake the pet quickly, which maybe isn't unexpected entirely, but it's a problem even in places where it really shouldn't be an issue. It's even more noticeable if you play Mechanist for a bit before trying Untamed, the specs sort of work on the same concept but the Mechanist's bot can handle things the Untamed pet can't even dream of.

People have been soloing in MMO's as long as they've been around. It's well past the point where people should realize that it's a valid and extremely common way to play these games. MMO just means there's other real players in the world with you, not that you need to rely on them to do anything. The FFXIV developers have recognized it to the point where they're going out of their way to make everything possible to play solo in the near future, for example, and really GW2 does pretty well for letting you play solo for almost everything too. So does WoW, or at least it used to, and pretty much every other successful MMO in recent history.

When I did it a little bit ago some of the skiffs in the area of the heart worked, and some didn't. The ones nearest the heart didn't work since it just said you needed to stop to board, but a bit down the river to the east some of the skiffs were working fine. The villagers in the water worked ok for me as well, since you don't need to stop the skiff to interact with them, although I just saw the shackle in the water where they were supposed to be and no person was actually there. It did give heart completion for interacting with them, though.

I'm not sure you understand what the nerfs are, since it's not just torment runes that were nerfed. Most of the nerfs are for baseline sustain talents on their respective classes; you can't just build around that sort of change when the option isn't there anymore. I think in a few of these cases it's not just the nerf that's an issue, it's the severity of the nerf that's hard to understand; the Thief nerf in particular I kind of question, since the class has no other way to make up for that. Besides, if it doesn't bother you I'm not sure why you're even commenting the way you are other than to try and antagonize people that it does bother. At the very least there should be some understanding that people don't want solo ability nerfed at the exact time that new content is released that pulls most potential help away from the older content that they want to be able to solo. Heart of Thorns has always been hard enough as it is, being able to get Jade Bots somewhere along the line and only if you have the expansion isn't really a remedy for losing that sustain right now.

The entire topic is about making the attempt. There can be reasons why it's not possible to accommodate certain disabilities, whether it's budgetary considerations, or just being unable to program to navigate the particulars of what one individual can and can't do. Despite that, gaming companies should be making the consideration of what can be done, and many are. Microsoft has designed controllers that have been designed specifically to help people with severe motor disabilities, it's becoming standard for games released in recent years to have accommodations for color blindness and other vision issues, there's the press and hold option for QTE's that I mentioned earlier, and so on. There are limitations to what programming can accomplish in order to deal with disabilities, but the person you're sticking up for (and your own reply) is just saying that it's not even worth trying. 61 million people in the U.S. alone have a disability of some kind, and another 14 million in the U.K., which is probably a good indicator of why even the gaming companies themselves have decided that you're wrong and that it is worth the attempt to try and help people with disabilities play their games.

This is something you'll only ever hear from someone who isn't having any problems themselves, and is completely incapable of understanding what other people go through in order to try and play games. When I first got into the playing the game, it was a time when both my wife and I left WoW to find something else. I stayed because I love this game; my wife tried it, and was unable to play because the combination of lights and something with the movement gives her extreme motion sickness. She's far from the only one who's had this problem with the game, and there's posts about it from the time that GW2 initially launched, but there aren't any real solutions to it. It hasn't really been addressed at any point. Of course she's been let down by the inability to address that problem with the game; it's a disservice to anyone who's had the same issue that it has gone unaddressed all these years, and it's disappointing to me because the person that I'd like to be enjoying the game with can't play it. It could be an issue of being unable to track down the exact cause of the issue, or that the budget doesn't support trying to address it for affected players, but this is virtually no different than a game breaking bug for the people affected and it shows a lack of empathy by certain people posting here to not even make a base effort to understand what they're going through. I have Parkinson's. Games that require fast button mashing are virtually impossible for me to play; I can't physically do it. There's a really simple fix that can be implemented for that problem, such as press and hold to complete those sequences; some developers choose to do it, and others don't. I guess I don't buy that companies who choose to do nothing shouldn't be called out it. Try for just a second to put yourself in others' shoes and maybe you'll understand.

Yes, they're important! I didn't realize how much when I started playing the game in earnest, and how tied the achievements are to unlocking cosmetics and other things throughout the game. They aren't quite like Xbox achievements or Playstation trophies where they're just throwaway kudos to say you did something, there is a good purpose to gaining some of the achievements in GW2. The benefit to doing some of the achievements in the game isn't really obvious at first, since achievement systems in most games are just self-congratulatory and don't really have much bearing on anything...but in GW2, it's a good idea to find some you want to do that give you things you'd want, and work on those (like mastery points, or cosmetic unlocks, or titles if you're into that). But also...no. They aren't important. They aren't really a measure of skill or much of anything other than the amount of time you've spent playing, and what you've spent that time doing. Don't sweat the number unless you want to hit a milestone unlock or something. You aren't, and you don't. It's just a video game, the point is to have fun...so, do what's fun to you, and if you're enjoying it that's all that matters. Nobody worth paying attention to is going to judge you by what you've done in a video game rather than by what kind of person you are. Someone that's nice to be around and fun to play with is worth the world to others, in game or out of it...far more than any arbitrary achievement score ever will be, for sure.

Female human for me. The emotion that she can convey and personality with just her voice makes it impossible for me to play anything else. I think it's one of the best VO jobs I've ever heard in any game, not even just this one.

In my opinion, the Griffon was harder to get than the Skyscale. The Skyscale is definitely much longer, and you have far more stuff that you need to do, but none of it is difficult at all and anything that requires getting a group together can be skipped with Skyscale treats. There's nothing like the Second Spear Nayrim or Corrupted Facet in the Skyscale chain that can't be easily skipped; the only thing that comes close is the meta in Elon Riverlands to kill Josso Essher, but there's always people around doing it. Feed once before reset, feed again after the reset, and you're two thirds of the way done on the same day. Feed again tomorrow after reset. It isn't three days forced, it's just two resets. Although I wouldn't recommend it necessarily because of the tedium of the gathering quests, I did the entire chain in three days. The griffon took me just as long because it took me two days to get a group together to successfully do Facet, and another to finish Nayrim. Depending on how you play, it's almost guaranteed that farming 250 gold for the griffon takes longer than the Skyscale quest, too. You can get the materials all in one chunk by doing the Return achievements for LWS4 that started last week. You don't need to grind them at all that way; not that any of that is nearly as bad is it's made out to be anyway, just play the maps for a while and have fun and you'll get it. You also don't need to wait for a world boss to be frozen, go to Bitterfrost Frontier and you can finish that step in about 30 seconds pretty much any time you want. The metas you need are easy to just do, like Augury Rock that's up every 2 hours, or Shadow Behemoth that's on the same timer. Metabattle has a good guide to getting the Skyscale that makes it all pretty simple and easy, with any tricks that might help you avoid frustration. The Skyscale questline is unnecessarily long and is incredibly boring, and is full of padding in a way that it just does not have to be. But it's not even remotely difficult, even to get casually, and the longer you're willing to take to get it done the less oppressive it is. If it's not imperative you finish quickly you can even just wait out most of the resource grind and buy materials each reset in Dragonfall if you really wanted to, making that the only map you'd need to play much for its resource; if you have the volatile magic from doing the story and just playing the maps enough for half the resources, you can do the other half of the resource grind in a little over two weeks playing the maps that way. If it's frustrating or boring just let it take a little longer, play what you want in the meantime and maybe dabble at the resources, and in a couple of weeks you come back to it and it's all but done. If you already have the griffon you can do pretty much anything you could with a Skyscale already anyway.