Erise.5614

This can be solved by ANet for certain situations like boss fights where the server can decide far in advance when it should happen, send your client the information early and then verify according to ping whether you jumped. Also, I'm not talking about literally every encounter being desigend to test the same skill. Yes, different things will be easier or harder depending on lots of factors. Variety is good. So long as it's not mandatory to grind that's good enough. The existence of variable ping should not necessitate that everything must always be designed in such a way that ping is irrelevant. Just like I don't think OW should focus on increasing DPS checks. But rather create and keep content requiring it in its own area (e.g. raids or strike CMs). And use OW as jump in, jump content testing all kinds of associated skills that aren't boiling down to pure DPS. Like dodging. Or having to use CC. Or, to suggest one entire encounter. So you can properly see what I mean. Have a fight with 9 attack points. 3 active at a time. Appearing and disappearing a bit like Whack-A-Mole. So players need 3 squads that move around. Balanced around 2k DPS during burn phases. Then at 25%, at 50% and at 75% there's a special phase where one big target appears in the center that everyone needs to attack. It takes 0 damage but needs to receive X amount of attacks. Balanced around being impossible with any weapon or skill combination. But easy if half the squad has quickness. If you fail to deal enough attacks, it recovers 10% HP and will enter the same phase again. If you fail 3 times, in a row, the event fails. Balance the timer in such a way that you can fail about once per phase. Throw in some adds or different types of "moles" during burn phases with different attack patterns. And you have a perfectly fine OW boss encounter. It requires some organization, requires knowledge of exactly one boon, has some level of randomness, has no chance to fail due to lack of DPS. But has a real chance to fail if people do not understand the encounter or do not adapt to it at all. And as bonus it teaches more people about quickness as map chat will probably be quite full of people talking about it and requesting it. That is the kind of encounter I'd love to see more in OW.

You do not understand the difference between target DPS (aka DPS to the boss throughout the entire fight) and the DPS necessary during burn phases. Reaching 5.5k target DPS will require you to hit somewhere around 12k DPS during Soo Won burn phases. So, please. Do show me some logs of you managing that with such a build. Or admit you are just confusing numbers because it makes it so convenient and easy to ridicule others. Edit: Just to clarify. With showing logs I mean a Soo Won log of you only auto attacking and ending up with 5.5k target DPS at the end of the encounter.

You can see it perfectly in the video I sent: Here, for example. Soo Won burn phase ended. Greens started. They attack minions. Cleave DPS = usual. Target DPS = slowly decreasing. But even after 90 seconds of attacking adds it never reached 0. It just decreases by a few DPS each second. Because target DPS is counted from the moment the boss starts loosing health and only ends when you leave combat. This, different to Target DPS, is measured at the moment. It's not perfect because, yes. It does include any DPS output at all. Including adds running around. But you can use moments without adds to get a rough benchmark of what DPS players are dealing to Soo Won at the moment. This too is wrong. You were at 1.8k DPS because it's only displaying target DPS on the boss. If you look at the Combat Replay instead of the Statistics you can see the damage dealt and the target damage deviate. As DPS logs only considers DPS on Minister Li to be target DPS. Nothing during the two add phases on the larger platform is counted as target DPS. The recorded DPS is not divided or reduced by anything when displaying it on DPS reports. Ok. Let's go over it in detail, not counting your final target DPS but your average cleave DPS. I'll use raw value divided by 3 as that seems to be a decent approximation for Soo Won, though it's a bit less favorable than using your log data. 4266 * 1.25 / 3 = 1777 / 5000 = ~35% Your top DPS in your strike: 8500 * 1.25 / 3 = 3541 / 5000 = 70% So, you and your top DPS in that squad make up a bit more than one player worth of Soo Won DPS if we assume 5k necessary target DPS. Already accounting for 25% map buffs. Hitting 5k target DPS requires on average around 12k DPS output while attacking Soo Won. Which seems to be in line or possibly a very slight tad above what the meme video was dealing in DPS output.

I'm seriously confused. Are we talking about the same thing? The 7k or 5k or whatever are total target DPS. Not cleave DPS, not current target DPS. Which means you only reached about 45% of the required DPS. And that is already considering the 25% buff. It's barely 35% without them. I wouldn't call that "almost" the required DPS. Again, no one in your strike squad reached the required damage if we go by these numbers. I did say I was arbitrarily adding 25% on top to make it comparable. And yes. It is indeed not high for experienced raiders or otherwise quite hardcore players. I myself can almost double the requirement on my current main DPS. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it is very high for an open world meta event. Requiring that kind of performance of everyone. Requiring that as average. A lot of metas can be done with a average squad performance of 5k current target DPS or even less. Soo Won requires several times more. I mean. Obviously dying and being knocked around makes it harder. But again. The base line necessary, assuming you have excellent coordination (like a squad with 50 people listening on discord), is pretty darn steep for OW content.

That's true but it comes out as effectively the same in the video. Either it's target DPS and total target DPS. Or it's cleave DPS and total target DPS. Depending on how the commander set it up. But in either way you can get a pretty good idea of how much DPS they are capable off and how low that DPS becomes over time. I mean. Isn't that just proving my point? People talk about 7k or 5k or whatever average target DPS throughout the entire boss fight. I'm saying, due to downtime, that's about 1/3rd of the raw DPS one can deal as far as I can tell. Various factors play a role. But that is actually kinda close to your example. Your raw DPS was 5k, less than 2k got recorded. And just to roll that point out. Even assuming a 25% DPS buff, no one in your strike squad cleared 5k target DPS. Neither when calculating from the log (result multiplied by 1.25) nor from the cleave DPS in your screenshot multiplied by 1.25 and divided by 3. (25% buff, target = 1/3rd cleave). I don't think it's a good comparison. The strike and Soo Won are different in quite a bunch of ways. But yes. Exactly that difference is what I'm talking about. What is overlooked by everyone saying it's so low and so easy.

Yes, at the start they are roughly equal. Reaching over 650k average squad DPS. Then before it resets the first time after burning around 60%, they are at ~5k DPS total and still 15k-20k current. You claimed it was only due to adds. But clearly they manage to reach these numbers before the first adds spawned as well. The commander also said they ended up with about 5k average at the end. 5k total. Not current. Not sure what exactly you are trying to explain with your Kaineng example.

You can see in the first seconds of the video that they reach these DPS numbers without any adds nearby. Just like you can see the average squad cleave DPS during that time reaching over 650k. While being called a 5k DPS run.

What are you even comparing here? Kaineng basically doesn't have DPS downtimes. Which is why current DPS and encounter DPS is basically the same. 5.1k / 5.1k. Compared to the video I just linked. You talk about how easy it is to reach the second number. When the benchmark you and others keep bringing up is the first number. Which seems to be somewhere around 1/3rd as high on average during Soo Won. 4.6k / 20k 4.3k / 17.9k 5.4k / 16.5k 4.9k / 15.2k You and so many others keep talking about how low encounter DPS is and proclaim how incredibly easy it is to have higher current DPS. Higher burn phase DPS. Yeah, no kitten that's easy. But you don't get that kind of Soo Won burn phase uptime.

You compare apples with oranges. Encounter averages with training golem values. Just as example for what 7k encounter average means. The top DPS on that HardStuck all minion necro meme run had somewhere around 7k average DPS after the first two phases. While they were between 15k-20k DPS while attacking Soo Won.

Absolutism is rarely useful. So no. It's not the mere existence of a limit no matter how loose it is. Content is a DPS check if it can at all fail when players with poor builds and poor rotations try to do it, successfully do all mechanics but still fail. There is a need for a time limit. Both for technical reasons and design reasons. A map where no one is trying to do it shouldn't keep the event alive forever. The number someone calculated for average DPS throughout the event is around 7k. That was a while ago so it's probably a bit lower now. But that already includes downtime. So the DPS you need while attacking is much higher. I mean, sure. That's still gonna be below average DPS for raids or fractal CMs. But I'm not sure I'd call that below average for open world. And, to point that out as well. It's the "likely" in this sentence that bothers me. That leads me to call it a DPS check and what I dislike about it. This one is kinda close. I think ANet has struggled with it often and neglected the potential behind this direction in design. Faulting dungeons and the personal story is a bit of a cheap shot. They did go through power creep and are extremely outdated. I'd expect flawed design and especially for the story, I'd also expect it to be quite easy. But yes. A lot of content ANet creates runs into this problem. Obvious examples that come to my mind are Boneskinner and Goreseval. Instanced content that even leans strongly towards hardcore. And the default meta is to ignore key mechanics by simply "out DPSing them". If that's what hardcore players enjoy then more power to them. But at least for OW, I really don't understand why they don't focus more on such secondary mechanics instead of also focusing it on hard enrage timers and building it around DPS. At least a soft enrage like the islands being destroyed on Dragon's Stand would be nice. Instead of what we have right now where Soo Won just nopes out after 20 minutes. DE has two choices. Do medium DPS (above average for OW metas) and do all mechanics very fast. With one timer representing all actions. Or do high damage and ignore most mechanics. This would already be improved if the timer was per phase. Giving more specific feedback about what performance ANet expects. Only, this doesn't work with the style of DPS check they are going for because they want to randomly disrupt DPS and throw in things like tail. So instead, they dilute feedback and only have a single timer that gives a yes / no feedback to 50+ players simultaneously whether they did everything well enough or not. I honestly believe this is where this myth comes from that DPS doesn't matter and low DPS would end in success if people "just did mechanics". Because the performance feedback is so indirect. You must have a map with above average DPS for open world meta events to have any chance. Exactly because it spirals out to waste more and more of your time with things other than dealing damage.

This is actually correct. The mechanics of DE are easier than quite a bunch of meta events. With the difference that ANet still wants it to be challenging. Still wants it to fail. The only way to do that is to increase the DPS requirements drastically. Hence, me calling it a DPS check. If it was balanced for similar DPS as Octo it would need to cut down all HP bars by somewhere around 50%-75%. At which point it'd be unlikely to ever fail even on a half populated map. Because the mechanics aren't actually difficult. It's made difficult primarily by requiring higher than usual for open world DPS. And I'm saying I'd much prefer mechanics challenge that comes from the mechanics while having an easy time with the map wide DPS requirement. I'd like more challenge that doesn't come from raw DPS. Challenge that can't be skipped with raw DPS. Open world is not the right place to have satisfying DPS checks. The DPS difference between players is too large. It's impossible to balance it in a way where it's an enjoyable, satisfying challenge to most players. Being either way too easy or too steep depending on who you play with.

That's not entirely true. The question whether it's a DPS check or not depends on whether you can reasonably fail dealing enough damage within the time limit. This is not the case for most meta events. Most metas require too few people on the map to fail due to lack of DPS. There are, however, meta events that can fail regardless of how much or how little DPS you deal. AB is an example. A map can fail to do 4 different mechanics that are unrelated to DPS. Made harder by enemies that you can not kill. The primary challenge is simultaneous death of 4 sides. Made harder by putting all sides out of sync. They do not reach DPS phases at the same or even just a similar time if played regularly. So it actually requires mindfulness of other groups. DE has the split up, kill close to one another mechanic. But it merely requires to distribute DPS semi evenly. There's no barriers or secondary challenge to it of any kind. You can jump to other sides if you notice a discrepancy. And at sufficiently high DPS you can burn all down from 100-0 within the time frame you are given to synchronize. This is not testing other mechanics and is an extremely mild form of this group collaboration. Because the meta is not focused on such mechanics. It's focused on being a DPS check.

Always is a bit of an exaggeration. There's a surprising amount of players who rarely use LFG. And a smaller but still surprisingly large amount of players who don't even know it exists or how to use it. There's a reason most games support organization and structure but offer systems to get you playing and having fun without needing to do any of it. OW is that for GW2. I mean, yes but no. All that you do is getting damage buffs or getting rid of debuffs. Direct (tail, green buff) or indirect (thornhearts decreasing DPS by knocking players around). It is entirely built around keeping the DPS to Soo Won's HP bar high enough throughout the event. Everything in the fight is directly tied to DPS. Everything that lowers the DPS speed decreases success chance. Everything that increases DPS increases success chance. But this necessarily means that the base conditions. The base DPS the players on the map can deal affects the fight to a huge degree. Which is why you can skip a whole bunch of mechanics with high enough DPS. If you just push phases fast enough, you can avoid tail and a lot of bites from ever happening. it is less likely to kill mini bosses out of sync because they all after ~30-40 seconds of spawning anyway. Any timer ANet might put up, any mechanic they add is borderline irrelevant while maps with lower DPS as baseline are punished for that lower DPS by having to deal more damage in general and having less time to do so. Raw DPS is rewarded exponentially. It snowballs in both directions. High raw DPS and it gets more more easier. Low raw DPS and it gets more harder than just taking a bit longer. So yes. If everyone would have done the mechanics well it would likely have succeeded. But people could also be worse at mechanics and still succeed if they had more DPS focused builds. Which creates a lot of design challenges. Some of which are literally impossible to solve to something even remotely to everyones satisfaction. I wonder why ANet feels the need to try this instead of creating a system for people to self select into content, assume a higher baseline of skill and being able to design a tighter encounter to that more specific target audience. Any form of DPS check inevitably leads to this problem. It can not be balanced for the general playerbase. Like, even if tail comes up the difference is extreme. The difference between an unknowledgeable and inexperienced player and a very knowledgeable and experienced player is up to x10. 1000%. No matter how the fight is balanced, this can not work out. If we assume two groups on both these extremes, that means the experienced group still deals about as much damage during tail as the other without tail and while they have the green buff and while Soo Won is exposed. How can this possibly ever end up balanced and as enjoyable experience for everyone? It's an impossible task.

So, two points. First of all. The skill that's being tested by the fight is still primarily dealing DPS. There's some mechanics that lower or increase DPS if done right. But at it's core it's not testing anything but DPS. Different to, for example, Octovine or Dragonstand. Which are possible with pretty much any amount of DPS so long as you do the mechanics right. Split up right and react to what's happening. No one would think to talk about or look up DPS numbers there. That's the difference between a fight that's focused on DPS. A DPS check. Versus an encounter that tests secondary mechanics. And when I say secondary mechanics here, I mean subsections of the combat system as well. E.g. CC, dodging, etc. And secondly. The 7k DPS is actually a misunderstanding. Used as argument for how little DPS players need to have to still succeed. While the number itself doesn't represent the output players have at one time but the output throughout the entire fight, including all downtime. Which is how you get people like that HS meme Soo Won commander running an all necro squad saying stuff like "we only dealt 5k DPS"... which is true! BUT, it's overlooking the important bit. They did manage 10k-15k average DPS throughout the squad during burn phases. And that's the important part. How quickly can you get Soo Wons HP bar down? Neither 5k dps nor 7k dps average during a burn phase are anywhere close to enough. I'm pretty sure if I take my 9:20 minute run and stretch all DPS we dealt to 20 minutes I'd end up with a number of like 5k-7k average DPS as well. But that's a made up number. Because it's just extrapolating from extremely successful runs. Neglecting that the slower you are at burning through the HP bar, the more time you have to spend on secondary mechanics. The less time you have to burn Soo Won's HP directly. The more often you'll get tail mid burn phase. The more you have to do them and deal the few million extra damage necessary to deal with the mechanic. The more bites you get. The more tails you get. Again, my quick run last weekend had 0 tails reducing necessary damage dealt significantly because we bursted through individual burn phases in literally ~30 seconds. There was no time for tail to come up. While the day before, we had 3 tails we couldn't ignore. That's why I call it a DPS check. Because it's all about how high your average DPS is during burn phases. Because the encounter changes drastically depending on how high or how low your average map DPS is during burn phases. Nothing is wrong with LFG in an MMORPG. But it is be possible to do DS if you were simply early enough. It is possible to do almost any meta by simply being there a while before it starts. LFG is making it more reliable to jump in late. To optimize playtime further. But it's not necessary. Unless we get a bunch of extra power creep or further nerfs, I don't see that happening for DE maps. And again, I'm not saying that would make DE as a meta event better. It's designed fundamentally to be this kind of challenge. But it's not going to get much better for DE maps. They fill up faster due to the smaller map cap and most players have already learned to be there 45-60 minutes early. We have advice here on the forums to straight up ignore squads that show up a mere 30 minutes before the start of escorts. Experienced players expect certain things of their commanders or won't join at all. Decreasing chances of those squads further. Combined it means getting into a successful map is more dependent on LFG than ever. And not just any LFG. The right LFG posts. As it needs not just a taxi but an organized map with a commander who knows what they are doing. Requiring more attempts to join full maps than ever before. And it's less likely than ever to stumble into a map with any chance of success. I wasn't even suggesting this kind of collaboration shouldn't exist. But to make a clear distinction between two types of gameplay. One focused on gimmick mechanics, novelty and planned for repetition. The other focused on the combat system, performance, structure and organization. With a clear path from one to the other that one can opt in as convenient. Rather than simply introducing one into the other. Also, and this is just a side note. But most MMOs nowadays consider LFG to be a matchmaking system. Not a lobby browser. Lobby browsers like GW2s LFG have mostly disappeared from modern games. I know it's more complicated in GW2 and because of several of the strengths of the game it's less possible to do automatic matchmaking. I'm just sharing the observation that the type of LFG GW2 uses has become very rare as games in general moved away from it intentionally.

You misunderstand what I'm saying. The point isn't that the balance is off. I would agree that they can't do much to improve the balance of the encounter as it is right now. My critique is that they chose a DPS check as format in the first place. Not that the balance is off. Because it is the thing with the widest gap among the player base. Having up to an order of magnitude difference between players. There is no balance that supports the usual OW experience while also having any chance of failure at all. Because it's OW built around a DPS check, it's never gonna be quick and easy to group up. You can not reasonably succeed without LFG. The chance to stumble into a successful map by accident is tiny. It's still too difficult for the kind of ad hoc cooperation we see in other metas. So why is it open world? If you essentially need to organize an instance via LFG and actually solid commanding. Not just taxing. Then why isn't it instanced content? You aren't walking around an open world. We just recently had a thread by someone who's been trying for days and failed over and over, not even knowing about LFG. It's good they learned about it now but it's not good it's required for open world. Especially without explicit tutorial. But honestly, personally, I believe it shouldn't be necessary at all in OW. It can make it easier. But it shouldn't be absolutely necessary. OW ad hoc cooperation is one of the things that really makes GW2 special compared to so many other MMOs. The more it moves away from that and towards this style of lobby browser "join -> ok -> join -> ok -> join -> ok" gameplay cycle. The more it strays from what makes GW2s OW so special. Jumping between groups to find a meta map is less enjoyable than dealing with LFG for instanced content. And I question whether ANet should put further focus on that kind of experience.

Honestly, I think the win rate has increased further as I'm seeing far fewer groups than even a month ago and there's been a bit less bite shenanigans. The comment you respond to is hyperbole and a bit over the top in a few ways. However, they did mess up Soo Won pretty bad in several ways. Yes, tweaking is normal. But they've "fixed a bug with bite" 4 times in a row now. And several side factors are not ideal either. Some mechanics. Like certain animations moving the hit marker so far away you can't see it anymore or attack indicators sometimes not showing up on low scalability settings. Though also the fundamental design philosophy behind the fight. I really don't get why ANet tried a DPS check for a meta event at all. It's literally impossible to balance and they knew that years ago. Just this weekend I've been on a map around 5pm CEST. Full subgroups with quick / alac. 1h before it starts. Everything on high. The whole shabam. Failed at ~10%. I was top DPS with ~23k average throughout the entire fight. The day after, 1AM (so 32 hours later). Squad formed ~30 mins before start. Everything high. Some have full stacks. I was 10th in the squad in terms of DPS with ~26k. We finished with over 10 minutes to spare. Ignoring tail was a squad rule. We never had a single bite and only one or two attacks per phase because of how quickly we burned through the DPS phase. Meta events like Soo Won can not go for a DPS check. Because no matter the balance, it is necessarily simultaneously a joke to groups experienced players while also being failure prone if the same players randomly tag up. The fight is simultaneously too easy to be any challenge at all. It's a literal joke in certain squads. And too hard at the same time. It's still too inconvenient to just hop in or tag up yourself. Meta event DPS checks can not be balanced to be fun. Squad composition is too important. It's too many people, too little control and too much a departure from other meta events. So why go for DPS checks rather than testing coordination, reaction speed (e.g. dodging or squads splitting up), usage of utility skills (e.g. reflect) and other things that are important in instanced content combat too but aren't directly tied to raw DPS. I disagree with how it was phrased by the comment you responded too. There were several positive aspects to the expansion. For example, I'm very positive on Strikes. They too are flawed but they are only flawed in minor details. That can easily be tweaked / fixed or frankly just left in. Overall, all 4 are the best combat encounters in the game in my opinion. And CMs are a worthy step up while being just as good in terms of quality. But I do hope they draw a lot of lessons from Soo Won and do not try something remotely similar again. If it's a at all substantial DPS check it's gotta be designed around one squad and it's gotta be an instance. I'd be very positive about meta CMs. It's not about being petty and wanting to deny people who like that kind of challenge. But it's just not suited for the regular open world.

Just to point that out. No LI / KP LFG for raids is pretty much empty the entire day. It can take hours of watching and waiting and may not at all come up that day. Most of what I've seen the past ~6 months were training teams looking for 1-2 to fill up the squad. Same with RA and various other communities. Getting into runs without joining a static is a real challenge as they fill up so quickly. A friend of mine has been getting into raids the past months. And manages like 1- 2 Wings per week. Playing and looking to clear them every day. Because he's not had W3 or W4 training, can't find any opportunities both on LFG and on multiple training commtunities / guilds. And even W1&2 where he's fine joining semi training and low KP runs he's struggling to find any. Again, with a bit of luck both per week. Regularly 1 and with a bit of bad luck none. And asking in a group that's not explicitly training is a very poor experience. If it's not leading to a kick then people start leaving after one or two attempts. You are entirely correct. It's not nice to not ask. To not speak up. But if that's the best way to get experience then it should not be a surprise that it happens quite a lot. People who try to do it nicely and respectful to everyone make much, much, much slower progress or don't play at all unless they have 9 friends who wanna teach / try it out. Edit: To clarify. I'm not condoning that behavior. I'm just trying to provide a bit of context for why it happens.

I pretty much agree but would differentiate a bit more. Support can be intimidating due to the secondary jobs but rotations to maintain your boon uptime or heal appropriately are mostly very low intensity. It doesn't need a lot of skills. Fundamentally, fulfilling a support job on HFB or HAM is quite low intensity. However, it does require better game knowledge. You need a better overview over what's happening, need to anticipate things and react usually before they happen. E.g. greens on vale guardian. Needs pre heal and post heal. Or granding stability in time for a big attack. Due to the very low intensity rotation you don't have to watch your cooldowns as much and get more time looking at and caring about everything else. Whereas DPS doesn't really require knowledge about anything unless it kills you / your team. But rotations are mostly quite high intensity. For people without very good muscle memory that means it needs a lot of experience or requires a lot of watching the skill bar to use the skills on cooldown. Taking away time where you can watch the environment and therefore making some mechanics harder that need awareness. To take vale guardian as example, when playing DPS I overlooked the TP areas more often, and learned boss mechanics much faster once I switched to primarily play support. To me, support was much easier to play initially and took away a lot of stress and pressure. Especially now that Mechanist support was added. It's what I'd recommend to get into harder content as you can fulfill your job very easily and have lots of time to observe and learn the individual boss mechanics without screwing over your team. Though then again, we have gained some lower intensity DPS roles as well via mechanist and virtuoso which perform well enough with relatively few different skills and quite low APM. Long story short. I think it mostly depends on what kind of gameplay you are more comfortable with. The skills necessary to perform well are so different that it really comes down to the individual. Both the various support roles and DPS can feel easier / more comfortable depending on what you know and what you have more experience with.

I make that point frequently. Gold is a valid acquisition method as it allows everyone to gain the item. You can make the argument that they should be sold by merchants with different prices in different modes to accommodate for average player gold per hour. But it is fundamentally accessible. Pretty sure that's related to population sizes. Also, just to point that out. Hardcore players are by far the loudest relative to their population size. That's where you usually see the X000 post users in every discussion. A lot of those threads are made by people who are genuinely new to the forums with a few dozen comments. Before being attacked on their choice of words, that they are just lazy for wanting it, etc. Yes!? Raids are instanced content. Not OW!? Are you suggesting that the only reason raids, WvW and PvP survive is because armor is locked behind them? Implying that almost no one wants to play these modes but suffers through them for the rewards? Because I disagree with that statement heavily. I know it's just meant as strawman, exactly as the point above. Purposefully trying to make a mockery out of arguments other people make. But suggesting this is just wrong. And, yes. Players enjoying their time with the game is important. Everything else just leads to burnout very quickly. I mean. Most of those "suggestions" are just trying to bait certain responses so they can in turn ridicule people for being lazy. Deliberately using absolutely ridiculous numbers that come out to something like 3+ years and 2000+ hours for one set of armor. Because the person making the argument feels so elite and superior for their gameplay that anything but 20x the amount of time spent playing would not be "fair". Which is quite easy to spot when the people behind such suggestions are wildly opposed against OW armor before and after making the suggestion. There's no point in discussing specifics unless everyone agrees that the addition would be good. And the remaining ones are usually quite high on like and thanks emojis. There's not much to respond to when people agree. It's disagreements that keep threads going. What a lovely example of how a strawman argument works. Make up an easy target and then ridicule that made up argument. Yes, LW amulet was the easiest to acquire. You can get it done in somewhere around 50 hours of playing with no time gates. A deliberately easy acquisition method to get people back in time to preorder and play EoD. Deliberately replacing the newest legendary item that the fewest people have (being not just the newest trinket but also PvP exclusive). Considering the main purpose of legendary items being long term goals and material / gold sinks (aka, taking out materials and gold from the economy to limit inflation) it obviously has to have a significant cost and time effort associated with it. About 1.5 times the gold of the average weapon and account bound currencies that take drastically longer than any of the weapon collections.

Keeping QoL exclusive is probably not the best choice. Making QoL as accessible as possible is usually a good idea for retention. Least resistance is to significant amounts about reward structure. Not necessarily about type of quest / content. What's wrong with the path of least resistance so long as it keeps players engaged?

I kinda agree but neglecting the importance of rewards and progression systems entirely is a bit naive. It's obviously important. See the constant complaining by raiders, WvW players, discussion regarding the new strikes and new meta maps. Content being inherently enjoyable is very important too. But without short, mid and long term goals there will come another game before soon and drag away player attention. As I mentioned in my previous comment, one possible solution I see is keeping cost and unlock duration comparable. Basically introducing a middle tier. Something between ascended and legendary. A smoother progression system leading players from one to another. The goal should be to create compelling journeys and give players who are looking for it a structure. There's no inherent need to invalidate or remove existing unlocks and leaving players who do not search for such structure to do their own thing. That's what GW2 excels at (for the most part)! Allowing you to do what you want, at the intensity that you want in the speed you want. And also, as mentioned, it's really not about teaching players. That needs solutions at an entirely different point along the player experience. And is even mostly unrelated to gear. I mean, even a significant amount of raiders and hardcore end game content players do not do any theory crafting nor have they created their own build. They just look up snowcrows or metabattle. Despite understanding the combat system. So I'm not quite sure what exactly you are trying to advocate for here or what that has to do with legendary items or OPs suggestion.

Agreed. As the game is right now it would not be received well if further unlock systems were added. But I do think there is something interesting and valuable in the basic premise. Of expanding the progression system. Especially when there are items in the game that completely invalidate a substantial part of any future rewards in that area. This leads towards players funneling all attention towards gold per hour which is not healthy and will only lead to struggling content, poorly perceived new expansions or rising inflation speeds. Also, at least personally, I doubt this would impact learning or streamlining of gear acquisition in any meaningful way. By the time you finished your first full set of legendaries you could have crafted ~40 ascended armor sets. Assuming 0 drops ever. Recrafting is like 1.5 gold per piece. Meta really doesn't change that often. This is not related to the onboarding experience anymore. If that's the goal then it has to happen with either exotics or at the very least ascended items. Legendary items having more elaborate progression systems really is not affecting whether new players understand the combat and build system. It's not affecting their progress in regards to game knowledge. And having to invest effort into new stat combination isn't a big deal either. There has to be a viable build for pdps, cdps, boon support and generalist available from the start. Probably with defensive stats too so it's not the min maxed version of the build. But very much viable. Expanding the stat combinations over time. It's an excessive amount already anyway. I don't know a lot of people who know more than like 5 from the top of their head.

There's a matter of definition here and a matter of opinion. Small task is relative. Obviously I don't mean something like the Skyscale collection. But on the other hand the current recipes for new stat combos is too fast. It would need to be dialed appropriately. And the reason for getting legendary items is a matter of opinion. Is the main reason really that you will never ever have to do anything? Or is it the convenience of free stat swapping and the associated freedom to experiment with builds? Right now they create a serious challenge in reward structure. What rewards can ANet hand out? Recrafting only requires one recipe which is extremely fast to get. Then there's skins. A nice way but desirability is extremely subjective. They can basically only make it more shiny, more attention grabbing to make it generally desirable. Which makes visual clutter worse (e.g. see Aurene on kill effects). And requires a lot of resources. And then we only have raw gold value. Resulting in lots of complaints from everywhere about it being too low, lower than in content X, etc. The game doesn't have vertical progression. Which is brilliant. But both legendary and ascended gear end games are built in such a way that they mostly invalidate the already optional horizontal progression (really, it's only there for min maxing. The existing stats are already more than enough to make a viable build for every playstyle) This means ANet has fewer rewards that are considered valuable. I'm not at all advocating for a gear treadmill. GW2 has the beauty of keeping your gear relevant even if you take a break for several years. But additional upgrade paths for legendary items (and frankly even for ascended) could be a nice thing that is relevant regardless of what items, skins or play style you enjoy. Opening up the end game a little more, encouraging more varied playing of the existing content. And, so long as it doesn't have a significant gold value associated, could act as a tangent to existing progression paths. Giving you a secondary mid term goal alongside the big, legendary goals. If I understood that correctly, a bit like what they try to do with weapon right now. Where crafting your legendary item changes your perspective on the game significantly. Not just in terms of freedom to change stats but also finding a lot of stuff to do and reasons to revisit various pieces of content. Where you need to go on an additional journey to "complete" it. While drawing all value you really want / need out of it very soon. Just to clarify. As I said in my comment I think it's been too well established that you just get new stats and that new stat combos are really quick and easy to obtain. Players who already grinded a lot of legendaries and came to expect not having to do anything for their gear anymore would likely be very upset with lots of extremely negative dynamics in and around the game. But I do hope the variants are only a first step and they look into how they can keep pushing towards that direction. Frankly, it would be absolutely brilliant if they were to drop the price and duration of gameplay needed to get legendaries further while stripping away some of the skins and convenience (e.g. as suggested here, locking stat combos initially). So you have more of a journey with your item while seeing and feeling progress more regularly. And even expanding the overall investment into completing your legendary. Giving reasons not just to play new content but also revisiting old content. Adding new categories of rewards, new material and new currency sinks into the game for older content. With relatively little developer time and in a way where more can be added with every expansion with even less developer time but to great effect!

It sounds like a brilliant idea but may be too late. Having a small task associated with unlocking stats of a certain region could be a fantastic way to motivate engagement with new content and add to the completionist fantasy. However, PvP has no way to get those meaning it would likely be quite awkward. And WvW doesn't have the opportunity to make acquisition particularly special either. Past implementations were testimony of heroics and a bit of silver. Meaning alternative acquisition methods couldn't be much more complex than that either. But since it's almost free and doesn't require time investment into new content it may end up as annoying fetch quest. Rather than as reason to explore new content more thoroughly. Would've been magnificent though if they had implemented that originally with a small barrier to craft new stat combos. For legendaries, ascendeds and exotics. But unfortunately I don't see how it could fit into todays game without being perceived as mere annoyance.

It's not usually worth it to moderate the forums until release but you can remove basically all old threads. So it's more economical to just leave them to it for now while farming wishlists to maximize impact upon release.