Borked.6824

I think you'll find the stunted quality open world variety, profession inadequacy, and rewards to be more of a problem than difficulty. Most of it is pretty easy or manageable with a little time investment, but this expansion isn't going to grab you like PoF, HoT, and the prior LW's did I can promise you that. As a fellow casual, I'm bored.

The fact that this is basically end of the line says it all. 2 hours later. New group. New problems. The antithesis of progression. Just put the kitten boss on the top of the stupid tower and let people bash at her until she's dead. Make her hard to kill. Really hard. People will happily go at it as long as it's not futile and insulting like what we have currently.

So I haven't really set foot out of Cantha since release, but I'm genuinely tired of the EoD maps already with these crap rewards. There's almost no purpose to play the expansion open world at this point. Are the old events flourishing well enough? I need some purpose or I'm gonna fizzle out.

No. There are other games out there that do raiding and instanced content 10x better than GW2 can. If people want that type of content, I seriously encourage them to go there, for their own enjoyment. GW2 IS open world events. It might as well be a bumper sticker by now. Literally no other game does what GW2 does, and is a reason why specific people play it. We either figure out how to healthily incorporate this content into the OW or this game dies a slow death of identity crisis. The play right now is to use the bespoke energy and creativity that gave us dynamic events and mounts, and apply it to group formation and organization. It's the linchpin for all the friction regarding this content.

As a whole I'm finding this expac to be tepid. I really can't point at anything and say "oh wow that is awesome." I'm probably an outlier, but even as a lore-enjoyer, the story did nothing for me. The maps are plagued with linearity from meta events, and really just don't have a fullness in activity that allows people to meander. For anyone similarly disappointed, I wonder how much of this is just residual disappointment stemming from literally all the new specs being garbage. If we got PoF/HoT quality specs, would the flat and short story have been more enjoyable just by associating that pleasure and excitement?

That's 4 hours too many. I think I'd rather wipe 50 times on DE meta than set foot in WvW for my Xth GoB. Doing WvW is like getting invited over to a party and once you get there all the fat-kitten dudes are huddled up in a dark corner, shirtless and slapping each other with wet fish . It's a cesspool.

This seems to be half the point the OP is trying to make. Finding, timing, building, optimizing, and coming to terms with your group (that you're 1/50th of) is literally ALL the difficulty of this meta.

I have yet to commit to liking any of the EoD maps, and I think this might be the reason. It puts the whole thing on rails, which is ironic, because GW2 basically pioneered and polished MMO dynamic events without contest and high praise for years, until it became its own worst enemy.

Group content can be unnecessarily tense, but it is up to your group to be realistic about your circumstances with the intent of troubleshooting pain points. They always occur. And if your group as a whole can't, you can. A simple gesture of motivation or contribution can literally make a hot-headed group stop in their tracks. Most people are as on edge as you. With that being said...one thing that continues to be a problem (perhaps THE problem) is the continued class limitations and power creep. It certainly reflects on people's ability to be confident. I wouldn't fault anyone for feeling scared at bringing a Daredevil or something into a strike. They're going to get opposition. But they should have every right to bring the class that they like and works best for them. It should remain item #1 on Anet's menu of reformation until it's fixed. It is a frontline source of discomfort in getting people acclimated to more challenging content.

The turtle mount is trash. If people don't know that by now, they will in short order. The turtle is white noise in this discussion, so stop generalizing that everyone doing the meta are only after worthless mounts. The important thing at stake is quality playable content.

I'm on your wavelength, and I think most people are; but it just comes down to reality and the nature of the playerbase. There's a kitten-ton of dad-gamers in this game...and in the MMO genre at large. They may want to stay in the flow and do what the game suggests, but if they barely have the time to devote to a portion of a fight, to just participate, let alone min/max a 2hr event of uncertainty and disdain, you're done. Your options are spent, at the expense of your enjoyment no less. Some days I'll walk outside on a cold-kitten winter day with just a light shirt and no coat, tired and resentful at my circumstances, attempting to make the day warm up by sheer imposition of will. Wanna know how many times I've been successful in changing the weather? Easy guess. Nobody wants to be the guy to crash the party for everyone. Nobody wants to be the handicap, but the drowning man will do what he must to survive. I don't condone dragging people down with you. A strong person should take the L like a man, but it is a perspective to consider.

I'm actually struggling to find people doing the meta here. Literally since launch I have yet to complete it due to dead maps. Unlucky or people just don't care? Seitung's starting to suffer the same fate.

I think it more has to do with exploring "uncharted waters". There are probably a lot of novice, or apprehensive, or less knowledgable people that want to do challenging content, but they need a point of entry. These people need help and time from other players to do that. That's where you're getting this friction. People want in. They want to see what this elite crowd is like, they may even be of a top-tier caliber to run with the boys, but they hit a brick wall at entry.

You're telling us what you did to beat the boss, but you're not telling us how get the map's inhabitants to get to that point. The former has been loosely known for a while now.

There's a certain group of solo-players, many I would say, that have an inferiority complex, where in the wake of opposition, they make the call to just not participate, or not play by the apparent rules. Likely brought on by constraints they can't control. Time, for example. Simple opportunity cost. "I don't have time to kitten around with a guild, or deal with a group of randos, so I'll just do my own thing and hope for the best." Start to mess around with people's agency over their own time and you get lots of pushback. The unfortunate byproduct is there are no demands other than "it is what it is".

Any chance you're using Reversal? That's a 1 way ticket to downstate. I run a power GS+Mace/Sword build with a mix of Zerk/Celestial for solo play, and almost anything dies well before it can kill me. This spec can kite almost anything to buy time as well, so abuse the dozen teleports at your disposal, most importantly Crashing Courage. That ability is practically designed for cheesing stuff.

Just got back from the gym tonight. Normally I'd log right into GW2 and plug away, but tbh, I can't be arsed about it tonight. Nothing meaningful to do other than bash face against the meta. We'll see if tomorrow fares any better.

There's not much wrong with this in principal. I think anybody at any skill level can respect going outside the norm to defeat something worth beating. That's the drive of the game. But at some point you're going to start asking the question "when does this end?" If the answer to every question ends up being "just play these 3 specs or else," you're basically nullifying any of the nuance of even having new and alternative specs in the first place. It's literally what's being peddled, is that the absolute key to winning the fight is to play certain classes. That doesn't bode well for people like me that are particularly attached to their shiny new Willbender, or their Bladesworn, or their Virtuoso. I'll play Firebrand if it means blapping this fight, but if the next one, and the next one keeps revealing trends like "lfg, X boon classes required," that's when I start to lose my cool.

With the advent of the DE meta, the egregious thing I'm finding is the difficulty in sharing boons compared to other classes. Not my usual stomping ground, but comparing it to my Harbinger. It has as multiple un-traited modes of sharing quickness and other boons. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but Willbender has access to a small amount of alacrity, and the only way to share it is via Virtue GM traits at the expense of dps, which by the numbers isn't insanely high to begin with, compared to say DH. When groups are baseline requiring either some boon support, or phenomenal dps, Willbender is pretty convincingly left in a question mark zone. I don't see any harm in getting that alacrity shared via easier or multiple means rather than one reasonably convoluted build.

I like it a lot too. I even don't mind the rng or the lengthy map prep. What I don't like is the lottery roll in getting a coherent group to knock it down.

Hot take, FB is the most bloated agonizing gameplay this side of floor elementalist. I couldn't remove my FB build template fast enough once EoD came out. The spec could literally manifest clovers out of its kitten for me and I still wouldn't play it

Or..."God loves you and wants what's best for you." It's not hard to recognize that people really don't know what they want or what they're capable of. That's why we should firmly "listen" to what Anet is trying to tell us, at least until it's clear we're swimming against the current.

Up until now I was a defender of the current situation, but I just completed another fail with an extremely well coordinated and prepared pug. It appeared to have failed simply due to a couple people just not fully paying attention (missing a breakbar by a few %, a few too many folks getting smashed at once). That's forgivable honestly, because barely anything is predictable in this fight! The tolerance on this fight is too much. It's asking too much. When you manage to get the whole map fully prepared with most of the buffs, full buffs and legion stations aplenty, commanders doing callouts, that should be a guarantee that you're going to clear the fight. You're doing everything that the map suggests you should do. Anything else is just not giving people their due diligence. It's insulting their time. It's 2 hours of people getting in the correct headspace, and the fight just says "no." The one thing I'm gathering is that the success of this encounter hinges on having voice communication. Straight up. I haven't done it with, but it's probably a hilarious joke with people that can accurately and swiftly communicate outside the chat window. I'm no longer as firm a defender of this particular fight.

Yes. Because even though I'm casual in my time, I'm not even close to "casual" in my skill. I don't have time to be a cog in an active guild and by extension I don't have time for raids/strikes. Playing next to clickers and keyboard turners is honestly a bit insulting to me, but it's the circumstances I have to deal with. If I don't get some sort of challenging fulfillment in the few avenues I have (basically, open world), I'll burn out and leave. People like me need the challenge. Edit: The question to answer is how do we get people to accept having content going uncleared for days a a time. Someone like me are totally fine taking a stab or 2 at a boss and fail every day. I know I'll kill it in good time. I kitten spent something like a full month wiping hundreds of times on heroic Anubarak in WoW before we got server first. This is nothing to me. But it seems like literally EVERYONE else can't stomach that idea.

I honestly don't give much of a kitten about the final meta encounter, but I do despise this whole Dragon's Stand design of maps. The fact that the whole map in its entirety is hinged to this cyclical and obviously divisive encounter almost completely tarnishes the fun of the zone. The moment you set foot in the zone, you know exactly what you're doing there. You're spending the next 2 hours doing content on rails.