Darklord Roy.2514

Not really. Comparing prices on GW2efficiency at this very moment, the relic currently costs around half of what most gen 2 weapons cost and *doesn't* require any form of untradeable time investment like map completion or currency collection. You can get everything for the relic, even provisioner tokens, in 1 single day if you have the gold for it. Half the gold for no visual effects seems like a fair comparison to make.

My best guess is that they gave us the lanterns now since the map isn't fully released yet. They'll be expanding the map one more time in 3 months when the next update happens, but since they released obsidian armor with this update they still wanted to give people a way to get the gift even though full map completion is not "technically" possible yet. I'm betting that after the final update drops and the map is finalized we'll be able to get a gift through actual map completion and then go back to earning them through the lanterns afterwards. It's kinda clunky, but I guess it was the best solution they could think up without giving people the gift for only completing 2/3 of the total map.

Currently the cost of making a legendary relic is sitting just shy of 1000 gold total. The cost of the gift of relics is just shy of 700 of that gold, so the item that takes all of those lucent crystals makes up nearly 3/4 of the total cost of the relic. This is all taking into account that materials to create the relic are higher than they normally would be since it *just* came out and people had also been hiking up the cost of lucent crystals when they were rushing out legendary runes last month. The cost of the relic is currently artificially high, and will likely be some degree cheaper in a year or two. Compare that to, say, Aurora for instance, which at the moment from scratch costs over 1900 gold. And that doesn't even include the grind to get all of the untradeable currencies and items it also needs. I'd say the relic is still a steal by comparison to other leggies. The total number of crystals doesn't really matter when they still work out to be cheaper than a lot of other mats for a lot of other legendaries. Nobody is making anyone hoard up 70 stacks of crystals in their bank, you can refine them 3 stacks at a time.

What even is this argument? There have been thousands upon thousands of lucent mote and crystal stacks on the TP since they were INTRODUCED, years before this relic was even announced. The legendary relic has absolutely *nothing* to do with the amount of time people have spent crafting lucent crystals, nor does any other legendary really have any factor in how many of any other resource is on the TP. People get these things just by playing the game, and plenty of those people sell them in droves immediately upon acquisition. You only need 25 facets to make the legendary relic. This takes mere minutes to craft. A pretty decent chunk of the playerbase will have purchased all those lucent crystals instead of crafting them, so they don't factor into this "ecology" point. As for the people who spent time crafting all those thousands of crystals on the TP, as I mentioned before, they were already there before the relic. They've *been* there. Don't shoehorn in random strawman arguments that have nothing to do with the game.

Easier fix would be to just make it ground targeted.

My question is what of value would this system realistically add to the game? Like what do we as players gain from this? MORE grind to work towards? I get that there is a percentage of the MMO community that enjoys this sort of "gamble endlessly to fully min/max all my gear," but this game has never really been the place for it. One of two things always happens with these systems: either the game goes the predatory P2W route and throws an item in the cash shop that guarantees success on enhancement (one time use of course), or they give you no way to guarantee success and they ultimately kitten off their playerbase when they get to a 5% success rate and lose 3 levels on failure. There is NO WAY this community would let them get away with that.

Correct. The same thing would happen if you tried to replace the rune you had in non-legendary armor with another non-legendary rune, because that functionality is specifically tied to the individual legendary item. Let me give a couple of examples to see if this clears up why this interaction happens and why it is 100% intentional: You decide to put your legendary rune into one piece of ascended armor, but then later you decide for whatever reason you want to put that rune into a different piece of armor. You can freely remove that legendary rune from the armor piece any time of combat without needing an upgrade extractor to save it, which you could *not* do if the rune was not legendary. Because legendary runes are added to your accounts legendary armory, they physically cannot be destroyed or lost. Now let's invert it. Let's say that instead you had a single piece of legendary *armor* and you put an exotic rune into it. You decide later that you want a different type of rune in that armor. Same thing happens, you can remove that exotic rune from the legendary any time and replace it with a different exotic rune, because the legendary is specifically designed to work that way, but you still have to buy each exotic rune separately (compared to the legendary rune, which you slot in once and never have to take it out ever again). Hope this made sense. Legendary items work completely independently from any other item in the game. They are designed to be a self-contained convenience, they don't change the way that other pieces of equipment work. All non-legendary runes are always destroyed when slotting a new rune into non-legendary gear unless you use an upgrade extractor, full stop.

The problem is not the interface, it's that you're very clearly rushing the process. The UI is not complicated if you let the game teach you how it works instead of jumping into the PvP lobby at level 1 and trying to learn everything all at once. You set yourself up for failure. Weapon skills are universally locked to their slots *unique to each weapon,* while all of the slots to the right of your health bar are customisable. The game teaches you this as you level up and unlock more abilities. Honestly, the reason nobody is *just* outwardly saying this is because you didn't *just* ask an honest question. You decided to throw an adult fit and blame the game when you haven't even taken the time to learn how the game even works before deciding to jump straight into a competitive game mode. The only advice I can give you is to *slow down.*

Shockingly, the thing that beats a hyper glass cannon build with lots of mobility is a non-glass cannon build with lots of mobility. Who could've thought.

Because it really IS just a skill issue that you just refuse to admit. It's easier for you to call it broken instead of ever imagining that you might not be as good at PvP as you think you are. The horror. I've never, in any game mode, met a single DE that I don't completely face roll with my Spellbreaker, and I've seen plenty of mechanically good ones. All you have to do is land *1* CC on them and then the chain begins, just don't spam all your important buttons at once and then complain when they teleport and you have nothing left to throw. They simply don't do enough damage to kill me before I can proc magebane.

This has been the case for many years, and is an ailment of the MMO genre in general. Long time players of every MMO ever will go through regular periods of taking a break for extended periods, either due to content droughts or finding a newer game to play, or various other factors. It is not a specific GW2 issue, nor is it even a *new* GW2 issue. Older players will always come and go, and there's nothing Anet or any other company can do to prevent that. It is human nature. This is not a negative thing. It has been proven time and time again by countless other games that MMOs *cannot* thrive without attracting and catering to new players. It is their lifeblood. Since we already established that older players have a tendency to take more breaks, if an MMO is not attracting new players, that's a worrying sign that it's turning into a dead game. There are innumerable examples of this throughout the past 20 years. Again, I fail to see anything negative about any of these points. The Steam release brought a wave of new players to support the game. The OW legendary armor has been asked for by players for *years* and is a *more tedious* grind than any other legendary armor currently available, even the massively timegated WvW armor which is *already available to new players without SoTo.* Gliding was never difficult to get in the first place, and the original Skyscale acquisition achievement is already 900x easier and faster than it was when it came out. The rest of your bullet points I can at least somewhat understand as being pain points for some people (though not me personally), but why should I care about any of these things listed above as a veteran player when they do not affect MY gameplay? You seem to be under the assumption that "veteran" and "hardcore" mean the same thing. They don't. "Hardcore" players have gotten a pretty short end of the stick this release, I'll agree. They have HT CM as the last difficult content drop, and before that it was the final raid wing years ago. But then, "hardcore" players don't really care about new players joining the game and getting mounts easier than them. They care about *their* content drought. There are significantly more casual veterans than hardcore veterans in this game. People like me, who have played for 10 years and don't really care about messing with raids or CMs except in a lighthearted way. I still feel perfectly happy playing this game doing the things I WANT to do, rather than trying to find all the things to complain about with what OTHER people are doing. If you've run out of stuff that you enjoy, take a break. I and many others have numerous times. It will make you feel better about what the game actually has instead of worrying about what it doesn't.

If we're talking strictly PvE sure, shield isn't all that great. Herald shield is one of the few exceptions that's actually good and relevant after the 11/28 update. Engineer shield is meta in raid support almost exclusively for the protection uptime. Mesmer shield is just okay. All other shields are just kinda "meh" in PvE. Completely the opposite in competitive modes. Warrior shield is legitimately fantastic in PvP when used on lockdown power builds. Guardian shield is *the* meta offhand for group support in zergs because it kinda does everything you want for a frontline support. Engi shield can completely shred stability in blob fights when used properly. All in all, shields have never ever been a damage oriented weapon, so they are inherently weaker in the majority of PvE content which is more centered around doing higher damage instead of having higher passive defences. We have enough damage-centric offhand options that shields still fill the nice niche of higher defensive and supportive options when they're needed (again, not a PvE centric weapon).

I definitely don't think this speaks for the majority of players. 8 paths should not take anywhere close to 4 or 5 hours with a semi competent party, even on just core specs. You can do that in an hour to hour and a half (depending on paths) fairly easily and casually by just skipping all of the filler mobs in between the actual important events/bosses. Power creep has turned all of the bosses essentially into lightweight punching bags, and fully clearing every enemy on your path is a waste of time that doesn't reward you for doing it. If you're running paths with a party of entirely new players who *do* try to clear every single mob, then educate them and tell them that you have done this before and to stay with you. Claiming that rewards are lacking when you and/or your group is performing significantly sub-optimally is fallacious and doesn't touch on any real problem with the event.

Lol that's not how economics work. Gem sales don't have to go down for conversion prices to go up. The DEMAND for gems has gone up due to sales, I.E. more people are BUYING gems with gold. Unless you have an actual financial chart, you have no way to tell if the supply is also going down or if the price spikes are *just* from the demand currently exceeding the supply.

Okay, but that's a completely different discussion that belongs in another thread. That has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand. You're also speaking like someone HAS to play a Metabattle build in order to do anything in the game. You can play core specs in fractals and dungeons and experience no actual issues and 90% of the playerbase won't care. As I said, I've also seen plenty of new players who only own SoTo run the new strikes with core specs, and any group I've been in has not failed because of it. The remaining 10% would ban you on any elite spec anyway if you don't hit damage numbers they don't like, so they're irrelevant. Are they as strong as the "power crept from the beginning" elite specs? No, of course not. Does that mean they're completely useless and cannot complete content? Also no, they're slower but they'll finish runs just fine. I think you're forgetting that some of the better players in the game have done *raid CMs* with a full squad of naked players using only weapons. If THAT'S possible, then I have no idea how you think a fully decked out core spec can't do fractals and dungeons, which are mostly trivial content at this point.

That'd be fun, it could even just be some mostly arbitrary number like each stack does 10% more damage to targets under 25% health. I thought something cool would be increasing the speed that bleeding ticks happen the lower the targets health got, but that would be insanely broken unless they absolutely gutted bleeding's current damage.

When I'm with a zerg and the tag is in Discord, we'll often call out to target diamond players down immediately when we see them just for the meme of it. It's hilarious to see an entire zerg turn away from the majority of the blob to absolutely dog pile this one poor guy just for his rank. Outside of that, you should target based on the skill of your opponent and the metrics of the build/class they're running. Focus on dealing with the greater threat regardless of rank.

It is only a fallacy if you use the word "win" strictly with a single definition, in this case meaning winning the game as a whole. You cannot "win" any MMO, because by their very nature they are games without an ending. You can play them endlessly unless their servers shut down. There is no true conclusion to any MMO, period. That doesn't mean that an MMO cannot utilize P2W tactics. I mentioned earlier in this thread that one of the only examples of true P2W would be if Anet decided to create a whole new class of armor/weapons/trinkets that had higher stats than ascended/legendary do and made them exclusive to the gem store. Let's take that a step further and say that at the same time, they also decided to add gem store exclusive PvP gear with the same higher stats and also remove gold-to-gem conversions, so the *only* way you could get the new best in slot gear was to spend money. Buying that gear would not make you "win" the game, since we already established that doesn't happen in MMOs and therefore doesn't matter, but it *does* give you a numerical advantage over other people competitively. If you put two players of equal skill level against each other with the same class, weapons, and utilities, the one with the better stats wins. That is a P2W advantage. Granted this is an extreme example and I can't see Anet actually doing this, but other MMOs have in the past. Plenty of money-grubbing companies have added legitimate vertical progression into their cash shops.

What you are describing is power creep and buy to play, not pay to win. Again, every MMO in history that has ever released an expansion has added some degree of new, different, and powerful features to the game that *require* you to own the expansion to use. Locking features behind expansions isn't P2W, if everyone had access to everything without needing to pay for expansions then gaming companies would be losing profits on making them. F2P in this game was always, from the beginning, meant to act as a sort of "try before you buy" system. It exists so that people can get a taste of GW2 and see if they enjoy all of it's unique systems before they commit to buying it. It is not meant to act as anything close to a complete experience of the game. Personally I've seen plenty of new players who only purchased SoTo (and so have no elite specs) trying out strikes and fractals. They're never top DPS, but generally speaking most PUG groups don't really care that much if you're a little slow in strikes, fractals, or dungeons. I myself have never been in a group where someone has been kicked for running a core spec, with the exception of CO CM because you HAVE to have good DPS to beat it. And on that matter, core specs have no business playing CMs or raids because they are the highest level PvE content you can possibly play. If you want to legitimately try content at that level, then you have been F2P long enough to know you like the game and you should purchase an expansion to get your power creep.

Not sure we can really consider buying expansions to use the features of said expansions as "P2W." If that's the criteria we're going with then every online game that has ever launched an expansion is P2W simply by nature, which dodges the concept of what that term actually means. I'm hard pressed to think of a single MMO that is legitimately entirely F2P, where spending money doesn't give you *any* gameplay benefit over a free player. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think a game like that really exists. That being said, defining P2W in a game with (almost) entirely horizontal progression at endgame is kinda tricky. Many would claim that buying a level 80 boost is P2W, while I would argue that GW2 only really actually starts at level 80. Everything from level 1 - 80 is pretty much just a preamble for when the game really opens at max level, where gear and builds actually matter. None of that really matters much at all in core Tyria content. P2W in this game would need to involve some sort of vertical progression. Like if they decided to make a type of gear that was exclusive to the gem store and stronger than ascended/legendary quality. But not even NC Soft is dumb enough to do that.

Three things. 1). The gem store item only unlocks *expansion* hero points. You have to own an expansion to be able to get hero points from it. If you're a new player who has yet to purchase any expansion, you cannot use the item for anything. 2). Myself and others have already mentioned this multiple times on this thread, but there has already been a way in the game for you to completely skip every expansion hero challenge for *years* now. Proofs of heroics in WvW can be spent to do this, 10 proofs for 10 hero points. A single skirmish chest, which drop like candy, contain 6 proofs each. I'm a casual WvW player and I can unlock elite specs in no time at all without spending a single dime. 3). They don't work for core Tyria hero points. Still gotta manually do every single one of those for map completion, which is infinitely more annoying than doing any expansion HP.

Individual bleeding stacks do less damage than individual burning stacks, but it's also significantly easier to ramp up much higher stacks of bleeding than burning so they end up realistically not being all that different. Condi virtuoso, for instance, has been one of the highest damaging PvE specs since EoD's release and 90% of its damage comes from bleeding and it pumps out TONS of bleeding stacks. Flip that over to something like willbender or firebrand, which are primarily focused on burning, and they actually have a *lower* benchmark than condi virtuoso despite burning doing more damage per stack than bleeding. The rule of thumb was always that burning has higher burst damage, while bleeding slowly ramps up to more damage over time. The actual differences between them have lessened since Anet changed how conditions stack all those years ago, and even though they both *somewhat* still have their own place, I think it would be neat for them to be more unique in function. Just not really sure what they could add to it without further bloating the total number of buffs/debuffs in this game.

That has always been a constant though. We are earning roughly the same number of mystic coins per month that we were from the old daily login system, so that point's moot. We are certainly able to earn more total gold in WV than we used to from the old system, but is it so much over the old total that it would inflate gem prices by 40% by itself? No. Not even close. Gem prices probably are a little bit higher in general after the release of WV, but the *direct cause* of the current large spike is the sales, just like all of the other large spikes in the past. There are enough easy ways in this game to make large amounts of gold that most players don't need the WV to do that for them. I think you'd be surprised how many of us have hundreds and hundreds of spare gold lying around to convert whenever we want to buy something in the gem store. Sales are *always* going to lead to higher gem prices, the reason that things are so inflated right now is because of how GOOD these sales happen to be. That's all it is.

The beta only lasts 5 days. I highly doubt any sort of progress you are being currently denied is worse than if we didn't have a live beta and the weapons were released without proper testing. You would be more impacted for a longer period of time.

I'm not gonna tell you not to feel annoyed or anything, but let's not spread ignorance. Buying hero points is *not* pay to win. It's a convenience noob trap at worst. It is not giving you any form of actual gameplay advantage over another player in any game mode whatsoever, it is literally just doing something that you would be doing on any character anyway, but faster. No character is in any way stronger than anyone else because of this. If you have been fine with people being able to spend money to buy gold directly inside the game client via gem conversion for the past 11 years, I don't see why people buying hero points is suddenly the end of the world. It is not going to affect your gameplay in any way, shape, or form.