Sarm.5923

Don't know if this will work, but I'm still logged in here via browser cookie so I figured I'd at least try to post this as some sort of acknowledgment that I actually sent in a ticket about this. I don't know if the link I was given is required to be clicked to activate the ticket, since I can't sign in on the guildwars2.com website when prompted. Account info and display name is the same as what I'm using here to post. Edit: Well at least I'm not locked out of the forum too.

I can only speak for myself but this was basically my GW2 experience. Kinda rambly, maybe good for a laugh, and also a look into how a self-professed megacasual saw the game for the first time. In spoilers so people can scroll past my post easily if they want to skip.

I can't agree with this little snippet because Ryland visibly flips out and tries to murder Smodur on the spot after the hostage is stabbed, and is only stopped because Crecia (who had just finished trying to appeal to him through a mix of honor and family, if I remember right) shielded Smodur. Both of these actions ended up breaking what little trust Ryland already had and pushed him away forever. As an aside, I never played LW2 (there was no way I could afford the gem cost in gold, especially if it didn't even unlock maps along with it) so I don't know what Smodur was like back then, but the Olmakhan of LW4 were a real treat for me for what little time the game spent on them. It's funny because I remember telling the friend who got me to try GW2 that "I wanted to make a charr elementalist because the look and class reminds me of something I read about Olmec werejaguar shamans on Wikipedia" and then a month later, I'm having a play elemental-summoning fight with Olmakhan cubs. That was a real treat for me. ❤️ It's also why I really sucked into IBS at first; after having done almost all of my leveling in Charr territory and hearing about how much the race distrusted magic and hated the Flame Legion, it was easy to imagine/headcanon how distrusted my character would have been before the player character makes a name for themself. So the parts where Ephram's group was starting to reassimilate was like a good stand-in for my guy being accepted too. Coupled with his imperator seeming to make the exact same mistakes the original FL did, it made me hope that the parallels would be brought up. (Also I may have pretended to help along with my own fire magic whenever Rytlock and Crecia teamed up to melt ice walls with Sohothin) Hopefully it's something that might get brought up in future content, since Bangar never died. Assuming he wasn't executed off-screen after Jormag died.

Yeah, Drizzlewood in particular just boggled me. I could kinda get Sajuuk's explanation in theory, but Smodur ruining the parlay made no sense to me. I would have thought that a charr in particular would uniquely know just how important a warband is to the individual, and trying to tempt Ryland back over wasn't even going to bring a sure end to the civil war anyway; it was just flipping an enemy asset. So stabbing Ryland's sole remaining "family member" in the back wasn't just ruthless, but entirely wasteful and counterproductive. I guess I could be overthinking it, but my character is a BL charr elementalist with the shaman sire background, so the first half of IBS's story was resonating with me really hard up until it all just flopped on its side later on.

Admittedly I didn't do any difficult content in WoW myself while I played it, but everything I've heard about that level of play there is that the high-end content has been sucking lately because it's too draining for players, not because WoW's failing to provide a good challenge. The barrier-to-entry for difficult content keeps going up as the playerbase becomes more demanding about performance (which might be unavoidable), but the excessive expected grinding to keep yourself optimal is causing tons of burnout. That's not even taking into account the game's population issues from its faction divide. WoW's casual content has been suffering too, in part because world quests are mostly recycled from the leveling content you've already done to get there, and everything feeling designed around making players feel obligated to log in every day. Their incredible patch delays have only made this worse.

I recently finished the game's story and while I'm still trying to figure out what the hell happened to Smodur (wasn't he supposed to be the most level-headed and progressive of the three?) one thing that constantly ran through my mind was the parallel between the frost and (old) flame legion. Maybe I missed some dialogue, or I just happened to forget, but did anyone in the story actually bring up the fact that Bangar's plan was essentially repeating the same mistakes the charr made in the past about becoming enslaved by whatever gods the flame legion discovered centuries ago? Given that their culture developed into a literal militant atheist one as a backlash from "wtf we want our own gods too", when I saw the charr go "wtf we want our own dragon too" coupled with repentant flame legion remnants rejoining at the same time, I fully expected someone like Ephram Greetsglory to bring this up. Did it really go unmentioned, or did I happen to overlook / forget some dialogue that calls it out?

I know I hadn't replied before now but I did read everybody's thoughts and I appreciate all of the feedback. It's nice to hear that a couple other people have the same hang-up, although it's reassuring to hear that it's mainly my mindset that's holding me back and that most of you don't see anything wrong with using off-type weapons based on preference. After giving Catalyst a tiny whirl, I think that spec might help break me of that habit too, lol.

I think this one actually makes perfect sense of you stop to think about it. It's just funny because I don't think it's something you'd expect out of a beast race, but take any fantasy race that's both literate and hooks up, and the two would be bound to cross over at some point. 😛

I think you have to pick and choose visual elements to ignore when it comes to immersion, and that dividing line is going to change based on the player. Everyone is simultaneously both the commander and not, which can be any race or appearance. The way I see it, dressing up as a clown is part of that experience, because you really do have people who like to look gaudy. And if you stuck them in a world where magic exists, they're absolutely going to find a way to incorporate it into their fashion. They're balanced out by people who prefer the down-to-earth look, and I think both help each other stand out. If everyone looks bizarre, nobody is. But if everyone is drab, then you're all forgettable. So in that sense, not even flashy wings or glowy armor stand out as immersion-breaking to me. I think it's part of the charm of a fantasy game, because it lets you play around with stereotypes or tropes and explore ways to break them.

This is something I've been chewing on in my head for a while. For transparency, I'm just a solo megacasual-type, only been with the game for three months, and have only played elementalist so far, so I probably have a fair share of ignorant biases about this topic. But I'd be interested in hearing what other people think, even if my thread comes off looking stupid. When I was first leveling up, I didn't really have a concept of what was good or bad at the time, so I largely just leveled up as water/air/arcane with a staff and was enjoying myself. I rotated through my available weapon types a few times as I went, but I usually kept going back to staff because it just felt the most comfortable for me. I liked the slower cast times, the long range, and the overall "theme" of being a ranged caster (I didn't know about the buff-sharing murderball meta yet) so I guess it was easy for me to not know what I was missing. But after I bought the expansions and got over the initial difficulty jump of HoT, I tried out Weaver for the first time with the brand new sword the game gifted me, and I could really FEEL the difference in damage output. But at the same time, it still felt kinda weird, if that makes sense. Up until then, I was just treating my time with the dagger as a "sometimes food" between staff upgrades, so when I switched to the sword full-time (and lacking vertical progression as an excuse to rotate through upgrades, due to being max level), I felt like my character was a bit stuck in a melee build that seemed to fit too well for it, instead of the way I was playing before. I still feel this with Tempest, to a lesser extent. At least there I get the benefit of playing with a scepter since the warhorn's only an offhand, and I think the weapon type's pretty cool as well. But whenever I think about switching it up, I get this nagging thought of "why aren't you using everything the elite spec is giving you?" and wondering if I should even bother with foci, offhand daggers, or my old staff. I certainly don't hate my elementalist at all, but I find myself still feeling undecided with weapon styles. Typing all of this, I realize what I'm really getting at is a question of one's gameplay priorities instead of anything regarding class or weapon balance (even if it started out this way with my impressions with ele staves). How do other people balance fun through effectiveness VS fun through mechanics?

Yeah, I guess you're right. It's probably just a lot of wasted effort on my part. I was trying to do them anyway because I figured if I wasn't at least attempting to make use of all of my attacks while leveling (even if it gets overwhelming at times), then I'd just be that much worse off if I ever try group content. I'd rather fumble and mess up while solo than if people are expecting me to pull weight. :x

This could just be inexperience (and/or I'm just a terrible player) but unless an enemy was noticeably larger than my charr, I found it difficult to read enemy attack animations for the purpose of dodging attacks while leveling in core content. Between my character taking up some visual space of the enemy, and my spell effects caking the rest of it, I ended up learning a bad habit of "you're going to get hit anyway, so don't bother dodging animation-based stuff and use Sandstorm blinds to tank instead." HoT quickly whipped that out of me, but I still have an underdodging problem because I'm too worried about conserving stamina, so meh. I think what makes this a little difficult to compare to Dark Souls is that those games don't involve DPS rotations. You have a light and heavy action for your left and right hands, a two-handed option, and if you're switching to other toolkits, it's because you have a specific purpose and not because you're trying to keep things on cooldown. This lets you keep more of your attention on how the enemy moves. Moving out of red circles on the ground might not be as immersive, but I feel that it communicates information to the player in a quicker and more consistent fashion. Even if you don't know exactly -what- happened, you have a better idea of -when- it happened, so you have a clearer visual to work off of when watching for the same mechanic.

I know this is outside of the scope of my thread so I'm going to stick this in spoiler tags just on the off-chance someone else is still working their way through the story as well and doesn't want this spoiled for them unprompted, but the other day I finally finished LW4 chapter 3, and I was pretty kitten enraptured by it. To be honest, I'm not sure if the game's going to be able to top that for me. I loved it all so much.

Yeah, I get that the game needs to seed future story bits in order to keep the plot going, and there's always going to be an element of the hero being thrown into wild and wacky situations or else you don't have much of a hero's journey story to tell. Doing that seems perfectly fine to me. It was just an extreme whiplash moment that the player character seems to jump right in without question, given that Charr having an opposing background compared to humans. I don't know how the other races fare politically with humans, but I remember my leveling experience being very upfront that the ink on the ceasefire still isn't dry, and racial tension felt like a strong secondary theme throughout the zones. That's what made the cult-like death oath stuff so wowie when I saw it last month. 😛

From what I understand, Might's duration doesn't actually stack at all. Instead, its potency stacks instead. So if you were to trigger all four of those effects you listed, you effectively have 3 separate Might buffs: 2 for 9, 5 for whatever on interrupt, 3 for 10. And the game condenses those all down into a single boon timer that grows or decays as the individual sources appear or go away "off-screen," so to speak, which is why 2 stacks of might fall off after 9 but you still have that one leftover second of 3 stacks because of Thrill of the Crime. My Fury is stacking in duration, though. I assume because it's a static +20% crit, the same way Swiftness is a static +33% boost, so additional buffs to it are tacked on instead of layered in intensity.

When I did it, I remember the Zhaitan fight being a 10 minute slog where I got overwhelmed by adds that I had to constantly chew through while dying over and over and over because the NPCs decided moral support was all I needed. I remember the cannonshot tooltip saying that you had to hold down the button to shoot further, but apparently that isn't actually necessary so I was delaying shots for nothing, which just made adds catch up and gank me more often. Then I'd have to clear them all out and try again. It was only in the final minute that a couple of the NPCs started aggroing stuff; up until then, I thought I really was meant to solo it all. It actually felt tiring to get through the fight because of it.

Oh yeah. You're going to be salvaging a -lot- of gear throughout the game, so one thing you can do is right-click a salvage kit and select options to automatically dismantle everything in your inventory that's blue/green and below. You can also right-click stacks of unidentified gear to automatically reveal them all at once, provided you have the inventory space for everything. Rapid-salvaging in this way priorities items from left to right, top to bottom. So if you're a little crunched on room and have way more than 25 items to break at a time, move any unidentified stuff to the very last inventory slots, autobreak what's available, then continue IDing more. Just make sure you leave yourself a couple of empty slots so you don't risk becoming encumbered and getting stuck trying to awkwardly sell stuff for space.

Also, if you weren't aware, the game's story has content that goes in between expansions called Living World. There are 4 of them in total; 2, 3, 4, and Icebrood Saga, and none of them are bundled in when you buy the expansions, so you'd have to make separate purchases (or exchange gold to gems and buy that way) if you want that content. Season 1 was limited-time only and unavailable, although a summary recap is available when you finish the core campaign. If any of your friends care about story in games, they'll want to know about that going in, because you're going to have some context-whiplash moments if you try to go Core -> HoT -> PoF like you'd might expect.

I didn't actually try out Catalyst's beta when it was available (neither hammers or the supposed magitech theme vibe with me) but I have a question about a couple of the mechanics for those who did, from reading the wiki on their abilities. How does Elemental Empowerment work? It looks like a slow ramp-up maintenance buff that will end up falling off if you spend too long out of combat. Between that and energy decay, the impression I get from reading the spec is that you'd want to run around and try to chain enemies together to minimize your out-of-combat time, which sounds absolutely miserable and stressful. Is my impression correct? It reminds me of trying to incorporate those Diablo 3 temporary power orbs, but I never liked those either. And if I'm right, doesn't that clash with the design of the jade sphere fields being stationary? It sounds like a mechanic that can only shine (and thus be balanced around) stationary boss fights, because it looks like building up the resource punishes you for not having a go-go-go mentality with enemies, only to then turret up at full power when those same enemies are already worn down (if they don't move away) so you won't even get a solid benefit out of using them. But trying to save it for another pull risks buff decay. Am I looking at it fairly?

I love everything about this concept from the weapon choice to the 5th element and the skill mock-ups and now I'm bummed that it doesn't exist.

This just sounds like the newest variant of people complaining about "lazy kids these days," which is a complaint that's been going on for millennia. 20 BC: "Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt."

I haven't actually played Catalyst myself and have only looked at the wiki, so maybe I'm off-base in asking about this. But from a glance, does the F5 sphere option really need to be an F5 ability? Given that elementalists already use F1-F4 slots already, could the spheres be incorporated in the UI the same way Tempest uses an Overload ability by swapping out your active attunement's button for the sphere mechanic instead? That way, you can just double-tap your chosen attunement instead of reaching for the F5, since it's not like you can deploy spheres outside of your current attunement anyway.

I dunno, I still can't help but sympathize, because I'm relatively new myself and the whole Living World stuff came as a shock to me too. Informing people that these episodes used to be free at certain points, while true, doesn't really do anything to smooth over how it stings to end up playing a story that's disjointed and out of order based on your character's gold intake. If you're jumping (back) into the game now and get the LW stuff later, you're effectively doing chapter 1, 3, 5, grind for gold, 4, 6, 7. It's pretty weird. This isn't $110 spread out over a decade of a game's life, but what appears to be an almost all-at-once upfront cost for Welkin. Although if you end up changing your mind and decide to stick with it, but you'd prefer to play the story sequentially, what I'd recommend is to pause after the free campaign, and at least do your daily quests along with the Ley-Line Anomaly (spawns every 2 hours, 20 minutes after an even-numbered hour) and participate in that to get a free Mystic Coin every day that you can auction off for money. It's something I wish someone had told me, because that's a good 60ish days worth of coins that I had no idea existed, because I mistook it for a Brand Rift event and was doing those daily instead. Then as you save enough to buy a LW season in bulk, you can play through them bits at a time to spread out the content a bit. Also log in and at least claim chapter 1 of Icebrood Saga from your mail right now, and then at least hop on once a week thereafter until you get the other chapters, so you won't have to spend gems on it at all. It still royally sucks to have missed out on this, but at least getting a little over 4 gold a day before farming can help bump you along so that you're not doing something more mind-numbing like farming candy corn or trees all day.

For me, I think it took a little less than a month, but that's because I'm basically solo PVE only, and leveled through my character's racial zones and followed the personal story up through Orr. My first dungeon attempt felt awful and it kinda put me off from trying any of the others, and I heard the feature was abandoned anyway so I didn't have much of a push to go do the ones I outleveled. I don't remember how much gold I had but it was nowhere near enough to buy LW2, so I passed on it (I assumed seeing the state of Silverwastes was enough). Bummed around for a few days afterward while deciding if I wanted to get the expansions or not, but the Twitch discount special was going to expire so I didn't have the time to just farm up gold unless I wanted to spend more real money later. I was lucky in that I happened to start my first character during Return to LW4: chapter 2 onward, though.

I think there's a small mental aspect to it (or at least there was for me) in being initially resistant about wanting to spend money on Living World content because no matter what you pay, it's kinda weird to require a second purchase shortly afterward to keep from having a disrupted story experience. I had poked around the gem store before I bought the expansions so I knew that LW had its own thing in the Upgrades section, but that didn't stop me from checking "just in case" to see if my purchase bundled them, even though I knew they weren't. An additional purchase requirement means an additional chance for second thoughts and doubting if your first decision was a good idea.