Sarm.5923

Weirdly enough, for me I had the opposite experience at first. Sure, I was curious about the elite specs, but I had a thing that I thought was working for me in the base game, and I had started googling to see if it was at all viable to just stay regular instead of using one. Apparently a staff-wielding core elementalist does not cut the mustard. 🤪

Yeah, as a new player myself, I definitely had a couple of "what on earth" moments, namely: With HoT it was kinda whatever to me; you don't need much of an explanation to go after a jungle dragon when you're fresh off the boat from the original campaign, and I had the Sylvari stuff spoiled for me through NPC dialogue when the Festival of the Four Winds event was active. But since I already stumbled across the Silverwastes on my own and saw Mordremoth's stuff there, I wasn't terribly motivated to spend 1,260 gems for the sake of a single bizarre plot point. My friends did convince me to at least pick up Living World: Season 3 though, so I stopped the PoF intro as soon as I got the raptor and reluctantly liquidated my entire bank inventory (and grinded for a couple of days thereafter) to cover the gold for it. The content was enjoyable enough and I don't regret being able to experience it, but I didn't know the gem store was going to rotate out an item I was originally saving up to buy, which stung a bit. I'm lucky that I at least got almost all of LW4 for free, but I imagine even newer players are going to be in for a rougher story experience, especially since they're not necessarily going to know how to efficiently get gold in the first place. Come to think of it, could a free account theoretically access those Return To LW3 freebies without the expansions? Wouldn't you be doing those zones without a glider, or would you have been able to train it when the game gives you Ancient Magics?

I can't blame other new players for spamming 1 because when I was first trying out Weaver, that's exactly what I ended up doing as soon as I noticed that my autoattack activation range with swords is slightly smaller than my actual sword skill reach. Combine that with your character auto-turning to face your enemy, and all it takes is to be rooted juuuust out of auto range one time to "learn" that you really should be mashing that button whether the game's doing it for you or not. And I get so focused on trying to maintain uptime of the sword1 chain that sometimes I fumble with the actual class mechanics of keeping other skills on cooldown and rotating through elements in a timely manner. It's dumb, and I know it's ultimately my own fault and inexperience, but I find it a hard habit to break, especially if you're coming from another MMO where filler abilities like this have to be manually spammed. But I think the thing I've struggled with the most (and again I know this is ultimately my problem) was that the free leveling experience inadvertently taught me not to really bother dodging attacks unless I have a floor marker warning me. I chalk it up to a combination of being a max-size Charr and slathering enemies in spell effects, because when a lot of mook enemies are smaller than I am, I find it difficult to notice their attack animations when they're caked in fire and I'm eyeballing my cooldown timers. So because I ended up thinking "don't bother, you're going to get hit anyway," I ended up basing my gameplay around that and would just use my staff to AoE down small groups of enemies inside of Sandstorm blinds and try to kite them with chills. Going into HoT was like being bowled over by a ferris wheel because that didn't cut it anymore. Since I was trying to learn a set of Weaver sword skills, actually needing to dodge things this time (me changing the keybind for it twice made that process slower), and also dealing with not being able to play reactively with my spell 3-4-5s anymore due to being frontloaded with a 4 second cooldown now, I was fumbling as if I was level 1 all over again. 😛

As a new player, this is exactly what happened to me. And because I was on a free account at the time, I couldn't exctly go to those zones to unlock the masteries, but the game made every effort to remind me to do so anyway. This ended up coming back to bite me later on, and I know it's ultimately my own fault for doing this, but I got so used to tuning out the mastery notices as a result that by the time I finally did start HoT, I forgot to actually spend the capped out EXP several times, and then I'd feel bad for having wasted even more while temporarily stonewalling my progress through the story because I had to grind events to unlock the required steps to accept the next quest.. As for the leveling experience, I know this is just my own anecdote, but I didn't have a problem with the game dripfeeding the abilities to me. I was already pretty overwhelmed as-is by constantly rotating through weapons as I leveled and trying to remember about 60 weapon skills at once (elementalist, weapon spell options * 4 elements) while also getting used to general game mechanics that I don't think throwing access to the entire utility bar would have helped me. I can see how it might feel stifling to a veteran player, though.

Huh, no I didn't. I think I assumed it to be part of the phase transitions every 25%, since that's how it felt like it lined up when I did the encounter. I'll keep that in mind if I ever redo the scenario, but frankly I sucked way too hard to ever pull off the DPS for that. 😛

I had to doublecheck the chapters because I got 4 and 5 crossed in my head, but for the most part, I enjoyed them. Braham was annoying but I kinda get it; I don't get the impression that the game wanted me to like him in that moment anyway, and I assume the character is just in a low moment before the story starts to pull him up. I thought it was funny how my character started schmoozing with the human queen, but I didn't find it objectionable or anything, and I liked how an NPC even joked about how odd it was for me to be there. There was one uncomfortable moment where the game pointed out how she walks around barefoot which gave me bad internet vibes, but I might have just been taking that moment too cynically. The Caudecus fight ripped me a new one, haha. I heard it used to be much harder, and I certainly complained about the fight to my friends, but I also know I'm still trying to break some bad habits I learned from leveling up in the base game, so I don't know how much of it was really my fault versus the game. It was mainly the add golem repeatedly ragdolling me into endless AoE, along with me not-yet-knowing I could keybind the special action button, so I was often failing to mouseclick it in time because I was too busy fighting with the confined camera angle. I didn't even mind the Balthazar reveal that much. Yeah, it was pretty weird that I didn't really know who Lazarus was in the first place, so the fakeout of "this villain you don't know is actually another villain you don't know" didn't land, but I'm also aware that I'm new to the franchise and jumping into a sequel so these things are just going to happen. And the context of the scene was clear enough that he was a big deal of a human god, given that one NPC freaking out and having a crisis of faith to the point that she ran away in the middle of battle. I think the only thing that really short-circuited me was the oath itself, especially on the word of a character who failed to endear me to her. But after I searched the forum a bit (which I suppose I should have done before posting this thread), I can see I'm not the only one it didn't land with.

That all makes more sense. With the Mordremoth stuff, I think I assumed the Dream to be the Sylvari's central nervous system of a sort and misunderstood how they shared information. Thanks for clarifying for me. I think I'm a little relieved to hear that the initiation doesn't come up again. I couldn't really think of a way that could be further explored that I'd like anyway, nevermind something that would most likely take place in an omni-race quest.

Does the whole matter of the Shining Blade initiation ever come up in later content? I'm a kinda newish player, never played GW1 and missed out on LW Season 2 so I'm still trying to digest the setting as I play it. Going into HoT finding out that I apparently adopted and promptly lost a dragon egg was weird enough on its own, so when I started PoF and things went upside down again with "actually we need to preserve the dragons now," my friends suggested I pick up LW3 just so I could have a proper story bridge in between the expansions (I only went as far as getting a raptor). Overall, I've been enjoying the story, but my character is a Charr, and the part where he functionally sells his soul to a secret underground police force and swears to protect the lands and royalty of a formerly-hostile-and-only-recently-and-tepidly-ceasefired human kingdom blew me away with how out-of-place it felt. And all I got out of it was for a character (who can't go two lines without sassing you three times) gush about her plan to reenact the plot of Castlevania 2 on a villain that I hadn't properly interacted with yet. I get that the racial storylines ended a whole expansion and 50 levels ago, but from what I've gathered from the setting so far, didn't my character just commit treason against his own nation by doing this? And (in theory) can't even stand with them anymore if peace talks were to break down because the Shining Blade magic oath would instakill him if he took up arms against Kryta? Even if the game would never go in that direction, I would assume the characters can't know that, so my Charr accepting this in such a blasé manner was weird. Doubly so, since I've liked how the game was utilizing small branching paths to let you nudge the way you go through the story. I can't recall if the other LW3 chapters had this option, but I'm a little surprised that it wasn't (or couldn't be?) utilized here of all places. Actually, come to think of it, shouldn't this oath be impossible for a Sylvari? I thought they had a communal borg brain or something.