Smoky.5348

Ah, I see. So, basically the same as it was last time l checked.

Problem is, running away doesn't work everywhere. There are plenty of times where you're trapped at a dead end and have to wait for the dialogue to finish (with nothing happening to the environment for the whole two minutes, for those who think cutscenes set up gameplay). Plus, if you do skip dialogue by running ahead, you can't read the recap at your own pace because you interrupt it entirely. This would all have been much less of an issue if ANET had stuck with the cinematics from core Tyria's Personal Story, but for some reason, people prefer looking at characters standing around with no emotion, as opposed to being able to see them move their arms and faces with half-decent lip sync.

Wait, did they actually do that properly or do you mean the shortcut command? I'd be surprised they'd change their mind on it after saying for so long they're not doing it.

I have a very consistent lnternet connection, yet I've caught the options menu showing me as having an average ping of 800 for a brief moment immediately after a cutscene finishes. That implies it was in the 1000s in the half second it took for me to open the options. Whatever's happening in the game, it's messing with the client's communication with the server, as illogical as that sounds.

I've been seeing the same oddities and I have a GTX 1070. It only seems to happen on non-core Tyria maps, as far as l've noticed. While y'all are at it, please look into making as many visual effects as possible into a toggleable in a custom section. The post-processing option alone adds in a lot of stuff and there are many reasons people would want to disable or tweak any number of visual settings. In particular, l want to get rid of that fresnel rim-lighting the High option applies.

Mm-hm, l see. These are several somethings. The trickiest thing about this game is not knowing where to start; l was convinced chairs were a shop thing only. Good learns were had today, appreciate it. I'm still concerned there are still so few "normal" chairs, but this is one more that l knew about prior.

Wait, so you get the rested bonus in any hub so long as you sit in a chair and have the masteries? And to be sure, chairs are something you can only get through the gemstore because they never added any boring, generic free ones? I guess my point doesn't mean much 'cause you already need to pay for EoD, but it just seems odd to me that you need to buy a chair, too.

While GW2 really isn't a good candidate for VR with the potential for fast movement and overload of particle effects, I kinda wanna see 'em try anyway just so I can have arms in first-person.

Beyond the usage in Echovald Wilds and Dragon's End, the turtle is most useful for casual players. Anyone who can attain it with ease likely already knows how to out-DPS or out-utilize the mount. And, that's not to mention how boring it would be compared to the rotations they could already do without it. That's one of the things that makes me question why an instanced strike mission is required for it.

In a different topic that's likely a better home for this discussion admittedly, someone mentioned how these all-class armor sets typically only work for one or two classes. Getting a heavy-armor-looking set is gonna be difficult to mix and match with light armor. Though, l do also believe it can be done, it'd just be trickier to do well. Regardless, l don't see how interchangeability, dyeability, and class-mixability is worth 1,100 gems on a personal level. On a logical level, the math feels plausible, but l don't like it myself.

No, it is not. Steam is indeed not the all-be of PC gaming, but it has many features that people like integrated with their games. As such, yes, those people will complain that they can't transfer or link their accounts to it. It's not a binary situation here, it's a range of differing opinions that generalize to, "l don't direly need Steam, but it's much more convenient for me, so l will voice my concern."

I didn't say they were in the same category, I was saying that's the closest comparison. People don't just not compare things if it's technically one of a kind; the requirements for comparison simply broaden. No, you linked one particular armor set that matched with the Water Dragon set. I still had to look up all the other sets and reach the conclusion with my own findings. Actually, I think if you were the one to bring up the differences in how the sets work, l wouldn't have thought to look up the Outfit prices. q: I dunno, man, paying for a full-body look that can be used for any class costs 700, but paying for a full body look that can be used for any class and each piece can be dyed individually costs 1,800? Looking at it that way, it's more than double. I'm just not seeing it right now, but l'll try to keep all this in mind when more things are released.

It looks like you might (or might not) have misunderstood. The Water Dragon set applies to all classes, so it's worth 1,800. Meanwhile, the prior sets only applied to light, medium, or heavy, so they were priced 800. If one wanted all sets of a past armor, the cost would be 2,400 for three bundles. The new set is actually quite reasonable, it appears. Exceeeeept...the majority of Outfits are worth 700, so...what's the deal with that? Paying a premium for interchangeable pieces?

We can live without Steam, but it has good features that are nice to have. It has a central hub for screenshots, artwork, guides, and controller setups, has an in-game web browser, is easy to add money to it physically, and we'd be able to spend the digital cash on more than one game. No, we don't direly need those things, but there are people who will want those features and will not be able to utilize them all without starting over. The Jade Bot skin's price was described as overpriced in a number of threads in previous weeks. The comparisons were against mail carriers because the Jade Bot is visible just as rarely as them. Heck, the wiki claims that the skin doesn't even show when controlling it. Just because there's only one of it, doesn't mean it can't be considered pricey. As for the armor, all of the armor sets with individual pieces are priced around 300-500 each. The difference is whether light, medium, and heavy are combined or not. As such, it appears the bundles that cost 800 only provide the skins of its respective class, while the bundles that cost around 1,800 provide skins for all classes. That's a pretty subtle detail to notice, so l was mistaken the first time l looked into this. Ultimately, the Water Dragon bundle is not expensive, it just looks that way because other bundles are 800. My bad. I just wish someone had pointed that out to me so l wouldn't have had to look it all up again. No, no, no, wait, now l'm looking up Outfits and those are all around 700! Now l'm not wrong?! Why are so many Outfits worth 700, but this armor set is worth 1,800? Are we paying a premium for interchangeable pieces?

Uh, crud. I double-posted by accident.

The topic moved on a bit, but l feel like pointing out the Jade Bot skin is 1,600 gems and the new armor set bundle is 1,800 gems. Sounds to me like ANET is already upping prices on things.

Yes, l love installing a different storefront for every publisher who has the money to do so just so l can be unable to add funds to the account. At least on Steam l could've bought the expansion directly and not rely on a friend to buy me a key (which l'm incredibly lucky to even have as an option).

Huh... That's a really good point. l always felt armor damage was a moot feature since it was free, but since dying's only punishment now is the waypoint cost... Might as well allow travelling mid-combat. What's the worst people are gonna do? Leave a boss fight mid-battle to AFK leech, which they can already do by standing still anywhere and dying?

I've said before that this "only can be" a grudge because there's no way to get any evidence because ANET doesn't say anything about it. But okay, l'll recount the best idea l have: They made the Watchknight Mk.II in an attempt to introduce the retcon, and now that they successfully ignored all the complaints about the Twisted Marionette, they're forcing it onto the MK.I since it's been out there for awhile. That's it. Because ANET's not very open about their ideas, and they wouldn't talk about this anyway. lt's not a great deduction, hence why l act skeptical towards it myself, so don't jump down my throat for saying it. Only reason l think it is because l see no other explanation that makes sense. Hm, and since you said l'm "grasping", nearly 90% of the people who are fine with the change have grasped at their own straws and had ridiculous takes in this very thread. You're one out of, like, three people who have had reasonable takes, so that's not a jab at you. Did l say the art team has to code boss fights? There are plenty of model-based things that ANET's art teams need to fix. As l already said, there are clipping issues in EoD all over the place in Seitung and New Kaineng that they could be fixing. Lots of optimization they could do as well by making new building models instead of slapping two together and hoping the added polycount doesn't hurt. It wasn't lying in death, it was lying dormant. They didn't delete the files from the client, they merely disabled them from access. The coding and interactivity did need a revamp to suit its updated context, but a model's look has nothing to do with that. Since the model was still lying around ready to use, I see no reason to change it in such a context. Can't say it was for optimization when other models are more complex and l haven't lagged out on Zhaitan. There are two facets to this. First, old models being changed—not updated, but changed—is a bad thing to do, and people did complain then after all. Second, those past changes did not affect the wardrobe; the Watchknight in particular does. Changing something in the wardrobe is a really bad thing to do. Unless...what you're saying here is an extension to your previous point about the content being revived? In that case, it's like l said, it wasn't revived. The content was never dead to need reviving, only its events needed repurposing so the still functional models could be used again. It's not like they changed the model format in an update that broke Season 1 models, did they? No, can't be, because the Watchknight stayed the same until recently.

The base idea behind it is definitely intentional. They just didn't think ahead about what it means to dismount with a ground mount while you're in the air. You accidentally hit Raptor mid-flight, then you might fall somewhere dangerous if you don't have a flying mount's key memorized for a panic. That's the only problem that needs fixing, really. And in my opinion, it can't be that hard to disallow ground mount keys while midair on a flying mount. It should be a few simple "if" statements and maybe a "switch-case". It doesn't need to be vice-versa, either; it's desirable to press a flying mount key on a ground mount. Thinking out loud, dismounting with a ground mount midair is rarely desirable. You'd have to be low enough to the ground to not take fall damage or else you waste an extra second waiting for combat to wear off. If it works, it's a quicker mount switch, but it's a pretty tight window and anyone who's good at that could probably just manage the flying mount key and move to press the ground mount key.

You know what? That did seem oddly high... I had guessed it was because it was several items at once, but most do look to be 800. Except Foefire. That seems to total at 2,300 at cheapest, but that one's weird and only lets you buy three pieces, plus two individuals? I dunno, but still. That 1,800 for the Water Dragon set did feel strangely high, especially considering individual pieces are still the usual 500.

You clearly don't know what you're talking about because the Watchknight is a Combat Tonic. That is the closest thing to a playable race an NPC can get. It stays active in combat and can even be used in WvW. The fact that there are times l go several weeks straight using the Olmakhan tonic makes it statistically probable that there are people who preferred to wear the Watchknight tonic just as often. There is no transformation tonic of the Great Jungle Wurm or the Shadow Behemoth. No duh we aren't bringing them up because they're not part of the player's wardrobe. (And if they were, they wouldn't be Combat Tonics) I feel like that is not an excuse to completely redesign a model. There are ways to optimize a model and keep its original look. No, ANET had some sort of grudge against it, as far as l can fathom since they can't say anything specific. As for the time it took away from development of other areas, that can't have been a literal copy-paste, right? That'd mean multiple boss-quality models on screen at a time. So, l can be sure that's not entirely the case, so they must have spent some time on it...and no matter when they did it, there's always something more important for ANET to put their time into. There's never something that doesn't need actual fixing. But, maybe that's a moot point. After all, we know they felt it necessary to waste time rewriting dialogue instead of just rerecording it (remember Mai Trin?). Honestly, l'm more concerned they felt compelled to "optimize" a boss model, but they can't be bothered to fix all the clipping issues in EoD or alleviate the poor optimization the expansion maps and Lion's Arch have.

I think what would really help is fixing the fight itself. The group can bring its scales boon down to two stacks, then it suddenly shoots back up to max. But once it's zero, it stays zero the rest of the time...until some random moment towards the end it goes back up to max stacks? It's certainly completing more now than it did during launch month, but the mechanics still feel just as sporadic.

It's definitely proof ANET is trying to get casuals to play instanced content, but l can say for certain it isn't working on me. I see people wanting to do Leviathan, l offer my skiff to help. I see a multi-path meta going on, l go to the least populated branch to bolster its strength. But, the Strike Mission l don't ever want to touch again. At least with an open meta, you can roll your eyes and shrug at the people complaining to the void, but with a small group size, you can get passive-aggressively singled out for doing your best. I don't need people complaining about the profession l'm using in such a small group size where it's impossible to shake the feeling they're referring to me. ANET at least got me to try a Strike Mission, but it's confirmed l do not want to mess with that type of content.

From what l recall in the thread, about three or four people spoke with believable genuineness about their purchase of the skin. Hmmm, but all that does is offer insight into the minds of those who caved or don't care. Can't really tell how much of the silent majority got the thing with real cash, other than the price itself not changing now or in the future.