Finse.8526

You haven't lost your chance to do the story; if you really want to play LS2 you can just buy the episode like most of us did. It's even on sale now and pretty cheap with either in-game gold or real money.

If you need other people to convince you to buy something, you should probably not buy it. The expansion will always be there in the future should you ever change your mind. Regarding the "worth" for its $25 price, this is hard to say. Not only does it depend on how you personally value the new content, it's also difficult to judge the expansion in its current "incomplete" form; parts of the expansion will be released in future follow-up patches. I also think that while it's expected that players are going compare these mini-style expansions with the old Living World episodes, it's important to realize how insanely good of a deal we've gotten with the previous system of just receiving all the content for free - it might simply not have been sustainable for Anet that way. For what it's worth, I personally enjoy the expansion so far. It might all be recency bias, but I quite enjoy the story now that it's not about dragons. The new maps are nice, too; I prefer them over most of the EoD ones. I haven't really dabbled in the new masteries too much, but so far I doubt I'll be using the rift mastery stuff very much after getting the relevant loot from those. It does feel really good to catch an updraft with the griffon/skyscale. Obviously not every map outside of SotO has those, but these masteries feel like a great QoL upgrade in the maps that do. Finally, I'm not entirely a fan of the new daily quest and relic systems, but those are changes to the core game and you get those whether you buy SotO or not. In short, only you can judge for yourself whether you think this xpac is worth it. If you're on the fence you can always wait for the follow-up patches to see what the complete package looks like. Hope this has been of some help!

Thanks for the calculations! It's a very minor thing, but I think some of the items from the Black Lion RNG box are unobtainable through the new system; the Perfect Black Lion Salvage Kit probably being the most relevant.

While I don't think the game is ruined, I do feel this update was quite disappointing. The new daily and relic systems were advertised as exciting new features, but they feel more like downgrades or nerfs of existing systems that were working fine in the first place.

I personally don't care that much about monetary compensation as long as we get the possibility to craft a legendary relic. Or rather; I think that for me there is no amount of gold that can compensate for the loss of QoL when relics don't come with a legendary variant.

I totally agree with how this change will allow for many new relic/rune combinations (and potentially new relic effects that perhaps wouldn't be possible while they were linked to the rune bonus). But as a player with MANY characters who went through the pain of making legendary gear (including runes) specifically so that I wouldn't have to bother buying gear for each individual character, this feels like a huge step backwards. Now, I wouldn't mind buying a legendary relic to re-obtain the 6th rune bonus effects that I already paid for, but I imagine many players don't have that kind of gold lying around. Also, we don't know if we're getting the option to buy a legendary relic to begin with. Overall I like the potential that this change brings, but I don't think it's surprising that players become upset when they lose something that they spent a lot of time and gold to get.

I thought they finally fixed this problem with EoD after a flawless story run with my first character. Started the story on my second character and got disconnected twice after the unskippable cutscene in the first story mission (where you wash up on the beach). How is this STILL an issue after all these years? None of the so-called solutions that people keep bringing up actually work and Anet, to my knowledge, hasn't communicated about this issue in years. Doing the HoT and PoF stories with constant disconnects was bad enough, but now we apparently have to slog through the story 9 times to get certain achievements... At least there's a checkpoint system in place now, making it less frustrating than it was in the earlier expansions, but it is still a huge issue. Please Anet, fix this problem or at the very least acknowledge that you're still aware that the problem exists.

I was in that instance, too, it was the worst DS meta I've ever seen. There were around 15 leechers from what I could tell. Worst part was that the afk-ers were constantly complaining about how the dps of actual participating members was low, that they should get better gear/builds, and generally blaming 'bad' players for the long duration of the meta- while contributing nothing (other than upscaling the event) and doing literally 0 damage themselves during the entire 40 minute meta. These people are the worst, and I would love for Anet to finally address this issue.

Thanks, but none of this seems to do anything...

I've been having this problem too for the last week or so. The loading screens take ages and when the game finally loads, it looks like in your picture. My character is often also invisible and it seems like I'm standing still when moving, except on the minimap. It's especially annoying for the Wintersday activities; I often get kicked from the JP for "being inactive" before I'm even out of the loading screen, and the choir is impossible to do because neither the sound nor the coloured notes are properly appearing. The race is also quite troublesome when you constantly get stuck behind invisible objects (Not to mention I probably look like a total idiot to others for bashing my raptor straight into concrete walls all the time). The Wintersday update might be the culprit, but I've seen others propose that the Windows december update or server changes are also possible causes.