Sunchaser.9854

Runescape is 21 years old, enough to drink and drive and still has 100k players active playing it anytime. It was celebrating it's ability to get to legally drive like 5 years ago.

Considering the more 'suggestive' side is like a snargle goldclaw writing fanfic in a strike zone of all things who looks more in tune with a Winnie the pooh monocle meme, I'm not sure how much I'd even want a 18+ gw2. What would supposed to be there? L4d2 or doom style gore upon every skritt kill via explosion or gore or some like goldclaw fanfic stuff like witcher or mass effect? It's been quite a couple years since a dungeon or raid update if they're even supported anymore. I'm not sure the limited development time available as is being used to uh... Create whatever people are thinking of would be a best use of any resources.

I mean are we looking at a darker tone vs run of the mill, you are the super good guy, you beat up every problem (including political) with good violence. Does the ambassador not trust you? Just kill them in a 1v1, yay. Because you are the good guy and now he is dead or in jail. Or are we looking at like witcher3 or red dead redemption 2 styled scenes or mass effect romantisible npcs? Or bdo chest sliders? I typically play mmorpgs to have the fun progressive loot grind having items and unlocks that dramatically can change gameplay. From even fan modded rpg servers where Phoenix armor could offer you self revive chances on cd, special weapons could have special attack effects creating shockwaves or rings of earth etc. I loved that. But I think a witcher content endorsed snargle in the strike zones would feel a bit off to me. Plus I don't think I want to think about a charr having to watch the lord Karen and Queen jennah and kasmeer mead storyline.

It's 10 years of content silly, and the 6 months without content is still 6 months of content silly. If a game has no dungeons for 9 years, you're still getting 10 years worth of updates! Just use your imagination. Gee there's just so much content! 😛 , You can even collect outfits as a endgame, gee. Didn't you know? They just made one of the most fluid combat systems of all time so everyone could be on a laggy megaserver so we could all enjoy the content made at launch. The content Is logging in to do nothing in arborstone for 4 hours, and logging out with +25% rested xp so after you log back in you can log out. But to be fair, eod came out only 4 7 months ago, and expansions are no easy feat for most mmorpgs. Still, i feel ya. Even fractals kinda lose their luster when you realize some of the maps seem to be repeatably re used with just boss changes for a focus on quantity on limited resources. I guess you can't blame em but like when they design a gear system where strikes reward 1-3 pieces of 300 strike prophet shards for a piece of gear and going to a meta and farming for a hour is 1-2 pieces worth, there's really not much point to do the content over flower picking other than boredom. I don't know why they don't do the 4 difficulty tier system but gw2 likes doing stuff only it thought of. I always thought the LFR Tourist mode / Normal / Heroic / Mythic or whatever ff14 does with normal, savage, and ultimate wasn't a bad idea. You have a tourist / entry level mode for people who accessible content / Justify raid content development to masses for funding. Then a middling mode for guilds or lfg to try towards that might revolve around, 50% optimized build use. Then a hard mode for people in their teens or who want a grinding session, and it helps a lot where it makes the content accessible but also can make it last 2-3x longer. Gw2 tries to do this but when you achieve ascended gear, most people just play 1 main so there's not as much of a treadmill or point to, so the thing just kinda breaks. Even if they add new raid content, why will anyone play it when it doesn't drop any new gear, doesn't offer accessibility for new players to learn the mechanics, depth for the talented players or rewards to strive for. Instead. Exchanging gold for gems and buying outfits and sitting afk in arborstone for 7 months is.. Kinda the endgame. i guess(?), But maybe we'll get a living season soon.

Hoarded mystic coins? Why not sell them? They already have a use, people making login bots and hoarding or prices rising or falling as they're used in masse for legendaries is already a pretty good dump. Sure, it might give login people more gold but also at the same time the reason a tp tax even exists is to prevent inflation and yet you wouldn't see anyone shed many tears if it went away until inflation came with it. Mythic coin hoarders don't need tailor made updates because if you're rich enough to hoard more than you can use, one probably chose to buy more than they could use in terms of wanting a easy profit. They already have a great dump for most people. Selling on the ah and letting supply and demand and the economy with gold from other activities fund demand. Now. 6879 Excess essences of luck past the 300 cap with a exchange rate only available less than once a year and extremely tedious to exchange on the other hand. You can't even do anything with luck 11/12 months of the year while you can sell coins on the tp anytime or make a legendary anytime. And people will properly point out that's a 1% problem having more luck than you can use, but how often does someone float past 250 mythic coins where a tp post is locked in all months but december? Pretty much never. 😛 , Coins are so much finer as is. It's literally the only people this would majority benefit are people trying to hoard who already have dumps lol.

To quote samurai jack "When does the sale begin?" " . . . . . . . . . . . .. . ..... . . . " "There is no sale. . . Is there?"

Personal choice question: A: Is class balance one class played to all 5-8 /10 slots or 10/10 slots. B: Or is it each of the 9 classes having something to bring to the table? Because gw2, seems to view class balance as 1 class stacked 8-10 times. Especially from a "class diversity patch: Buffed mechanist +20%, removed warrior banner buffs, nerfed 2% playrate catalyst for being meta defining " It nerfed classes seeing 0.5-2% playrates to.. Make what should be a 3% playrate spec represent 40-80% of the meta(??) Now those pesky 1/10 warriors can't ruin class diversity by bringing themselves to a raid 🤨 . That was a real problem you guys know.. Having one class in a raid. Now we just use 8 mechanists. Gw2 is the best game ever. It solved the class diversity problem in a way no one else thought of unique to gw2. 🤷‍♂️ Who needs class balance. when everyone can balance themselves by pressing delete 10 year old character to all have 8-9 people play the same class, Spec, and weapon. That sure doesn't affect gameplay at all when people just stop talking in raids, autoattack, log out, and then not log in the next week to the thrilling combat of auto attacking simulator 2022. The most exciting mmorpg combat. Combat so thrilling, you'll watch netflix and play a autoplay mobile rpg for that thrilling auto loot action. Geee. It's like... The part of wow classic where paladin's only job was to sit in a 50 man raid casting 5x 10 minute long buffs on 50 different people every few seconds. Such . . . . . ... Engaging . . . Content(???) After all, this is the video game balance we're going to get. We just might as well just admit if all the other posts haven't worked that it's unlikely mech is probably going to get any serious changes. Honestly after about a month of gw2 i did my goal of ascended, i tried raids, it was all mech, i tried strikes, it was all mech, i looked at open world soo won, it was all mech, i went over to echovald wilds. It's all mech. And im not even a ele or a warrior. What do the other 7/9 classes even bring when mech does more than the other 8 classes bring combined? There's not even much raid loot, you play for fun and yet everyone is a afk robot. Or you go to living world and it's more afk robots. I think i've only seen 1 non mech pass past a 25k bench and it was some person doing 32k dps until they literally died from melee or lost the boon ball and had to switch mobs and had their dps crater 32k to 22k. Others classes are just zero reward for more effort. While usually providing less boons. And having less viable healing specs. Sometimes, some specs aren't even considered full or viable. There's few to 0 to any spots for a healer spec that heals less, provides less boons, or heck, Even just provides more healing but no boons or might. So much of the gw2 balance is smashing 5 people in a 5 man group together to get 25 might, 100% alac, 100% quickness, and maybe vulnerability / stability or survive one shots either with dodging or facetanking while double outhealing other classes off passive 400-500 hp/s regeneration vs 5000 hp / 30 sec comes into play. One class does it all, it's the jack of all trades, master of all but ones. While the other classes are masters of nones with 0 anything they bring other than 1-2 firebrands vs 5-8 mechanists. The only boon mechanist can't provide, engineer still can. Quickness, it can still provide with scrapper. The tool is just overly loaded while the other classes aren't as rewarding. Making them feel like they lack oomfph, payoff, or hard not to feel like some severe favorite child class favoritism is going on. (Benny #1 gets a car after he crashed his last one, you get to clean it child #9!), Mech/engi gets great 100% access to all boons / Alac/quickness / Might/ Self quickness in one class while the other 7 classes don't bring anything to a raid. All you have IS realistic risk without realistic reward. Sure, After all, Warrior no longer brings anything to a raid, but at least you can bring it and still do the content fine. It can hit a dps golem very hard where all boons are provided and then provide nothing to a group while losing more dps in practice vs a raid dummy. All risk, no boons, no rewards. So warrior is still viable. Just what does it do better? Does it range dps better? No. Does it practically raid dps better? On paper, not practice. Does it provide boons? No. Does it heal? Lol, no. Does it like.. Provide some group benefit? No. Does it lose dps if the target moves, yes. Does it do less dps overall when movement is added? Sure. Does it have banners do nothing. Sure. Does it heal? Lol no. Does it dps well? Lol no. So what does it do??? With mech, their upsides are they do every boon better than you, dps better in raid mechanics in practice, with less effort and 4 button mashing rotations vs 34 part 75-> 0-5 energy management rotation swaps with aura canceling. And your only reward is... To quote willy wonka. Pretty much Nothing. You can get to work harder because "you want to work harder", and there isn't a reward. That's Class balance rn. I mean i don't even care at this point, it's just a video game. But pretty much, video games are just a luxury. I got my ascended, logged out and stopped caring. So i'm just sitting here i guess. Looking at either deleting a 10 year old character to play a class i might not even like or enjoy or just log off the game or wait for a character slot update. Raids don't even get frequent updates, neither do fractals, neither do dungeons. Rotations are so much of how you interact with a game and if you take the gameplay out. What do you have left to do even? I actually liked the fluid gw2 rotation over ff14, but knowing there's no reward to them, is like knowing there's a worm in the center of a juicy apple. it just kinda eats away at the previous excitement you had towards finishing and wolfing it down when you notice the wiggling tail and hole around the apple you were previously eager to bite into and enjoy. If the top performing spec of skill based content is semi afk button mashing, what's really the point of getting invested and learning 34 part golem rotations, to compete with someone who went afk and autoregenerated 3x more hp/s than you?

You can be at the top of a class with a B- if your peers are C+s and F-s. But that doesn't mean that there aren't higher potential grades out there for self improvement. After all, in the real world past a public school, how many colleges do you go to where you can fire your teacher if you don't agree with the part where you said 2 + 5 = 25? While we might always want people to stroke and coddle us with praise, there's much strength to learn in how to use and focus criticism to become a better person, a harder worker, a more intelligent student, a smarter chess player. But all too often a common pit trap for people is to choose comfort over growth, and choose praise over criticism. It's only natural after all, but if there was never a critic for a airplane's dangers we'd never have the parachute and without the optimist we wouldn't have the plane. But if people just fell out to their deaths on the words of praise i mean. Some people love that in a world coddled only with positive feedback, it might be a easy mistake to never want to work on fixing your potential weaknesses to turn them into strengths. As people have pointed out, it's easy to fear it, but if gw2 had never added mounts, or (some) endgame group content (no fractals, raids or 'hardcore' content at release i heard), it might have had a much stronger holding. The first launch trailer of gw2 got 22x more views than the eod trailer even now, though it still chugs along decently well for a 10 year old mmorpg. Sometimes i feel like it has talent but sometimes it feels like it's sudden rise is just the other mmorpgs also surrounding themselves with yes men who agree that removing flight and mount use is the best gameplay (WoW), and that endgame content should be spending 15$ a month to rp in fancy houses. (FF14). And 'endgame' in gw2 is... Cosmetic outfits.. Yay. But it's still a fair model. It's probably just telling when your competitors are less caring about gw2 but more hoping microsoft will buy them out to change the Activision's management than they are worried about competitors. Most people honestly aren't any more aware that gw2 exists outside of gw2 as much as anyone who's not a Aion player knows it exists. People still pick Lotro sometimes over gw2 just because they're the same age and they like lotr more. Even some semi indie games with literally 0 advertising spending get millions of views like Cave story and Braid, Super meat boy, terraria, Undertale and Five nights at Freddy's (Like the game or not), really do quite well at getting exposure and winning fans over. Selling yourself and welcoming everyone from pacifist to genocide undertale players brought in a good community, and i think even Fnaf has horror games and kiddie collection games i think now. Gw2 has good open world but if content lasts forever, why not make more content for everyone(?)

Exposure is exposure, gw2 isn't a game you're expected to play 24/7. Even as a skeptical at some moments, it's probably fair to assume that even if not every player is a instant hit, people might be logging in for 10 minutes and logging off to do dailies or what might look like 3000-8000 players at any given time might really be like 30,000-50,000 players who spent like 1/10th of a day on a game maybe playing it for a few hours and logging off. For better or worse, gw2 isn't a game you log in and do like 18 hours like a wow might be after your leveling finishes. You get ascended, you don't do gear ever again. You don't get 5-8 pieces of epic loot over and over again with every month having a new upgrade to have the mmorpg experience being replacing new gears with massive loot drops. You grind gold for a hour and craft ascended or roll the rng lottery on fractals or strikes/raids where i think most people just sound like they end up crafting the chest/helm/legs at least anyways. 3-8k or not, those are new players and exposure for a game that people aren't playing 24/7. It might be a lot more than we expect and i mean even if instant success or not. there's finally a page on one of the most publically used mass reaching game store fronts where even indie games with 0 advertising like Braid get millions of sales just off the advertising a steam page and "friend is playing/friend recommends X on steam" can be.

I remember buying the 50-100$ collection and it came with both 2 inventory slots and 2 lvl 80 boosters, and I think only +1 char slot from eod, but I think buying those separately is cheaper. So you should be fine on sale but technically you can get it 5$ cheaper by buying pof on sale for 15$ + 30$ vs 50$ collection and 20% off gems on a 20% off sale for like 1300-1500 more worth. But I think the deluxe still comes with a.. Kinda meh raptor(0-400/1200) character slot (500-800), And a makeover kit (0-300). It's up to you but as mentioned you only need like one lvl 80 boost for a main and you get 14-20 tomes of levels a month of logins.

Mechanist takes 4-9 slots as alac dps, ranged dps, healing alac dps, as well as barrier, self healing, survives one shots with 20% hp remaining while auto healing through it in raid encounter fight videos that mash the eles to smush, and I can't recall the last time I saw a bladesworn pubically pass 25-30k in a strike, but I'd need 85+ fingers to count the times I've seen a afk mechanist or someone get the top 5-10 dpses with a 28-35k mech gap to the first non mech dps in a squad of 50 being 17-26k and then dropping off a cliff to 1-10k. Mechanist fights for all roles, firebrand is A group support that does one job and from what I hear can have a fairly revolved rotation. If 4-8 mechanists are used a fight but only 1-2 firebrands, I don't see them as much a population problem as take that role away, will they alac dps like mechanist? Will they afk or outdps 98% of non 25k+ benchers or 0.1% of over 30k benchers. Idk. But their role is about as oppressive as a 9 class game having a 1/10 slot for a 1/9 class banner warrior. I don't think a class that takes 1/10 of the spots that aren't 8-10 mechanists is bad. One spec that should be 3-11% of the population is 7-20x more represented than it should be which means other classes are just given all risk, no reward, no boons or range identical or lower dps gameplay. Can you name one thing that Thief provides that engineer cannot? Actually, lets go one step further. Can anyone even name me a single trait that thief or warrior can even provide that engineer can't? At all I guess, even? They even removed the shiro's presence from rev. They literally removed near every 'unique' buff except the buffs firebrand and mech provided, which made it all a stacking fest with less point to bring warriors, revs, thiefs and eles and mesmers and rangers. Pretty much every class in the game that's not mechanist brings nothing to the table they can't do better. And if they did, had it deleted war banner/rev shiro's presence style.

I remember something like this came out when people who bought the original 60$ launch boxes of gw2 and the original sc2 wings of liberty campaigns when they went f2p. "What do we get for our investment?" And they answered the last 7 years of being able to fund it and play the game before anyone else. And new players to play with and a wider community. Personally I'm glad that they've added these, its nice to have at least one skin for a mount you use and while I rolled some rng boxes and got two roller beetle skins, a skimmer skin that's near identical to the base, and a near identical bunny skin, and stopped rolling. I can now finally have a Griffon skin without rng box rolling. Though I'd still have liked a living world sale and I'm barely logging in past 2-10 minutes a day after ascended and dailies/weeklys just since I have nothing to do. Might as well make gw2 a mount driving game tbh and at this point without a gear grind I'd be happy to mount grind just fun mounts to use like Wow if there's not epic gear shooting out the 3-8 drops a boss per 5-10 minutes like a raid boss or dungeon chest. It's nice they're giving a once per 10 year freebie and I don't want this ruined. The gift was having it for several years before other people and getting to pick one more skin of your choice.

Just for brainstorming/meme/novelty purposes. I think as discussed all bases seem pretty full, but thinking of some mount ideas for novelty all I could come up were novelty mounts, zone specific interactions, or personal preference mounts. But just for fun and brainstorming here's a couple novelty/meme ideas. Living world 6 Jade Beyblade: A highly fast spinning beyblade style combat top akin to the Top of Zelda: Twilight princess. It could feature fast momentum and the ability to ride leylines by hopping on top, tony hawk style, richochet off walls and have a living world twilight princess style 'wall riding mechanic' where the outer edges of the rims could be a gear to solve puzzles, spin gates open, wallride crannies in the walls of a living world designed for it. As well as having potential utility like a bounce ricochet ability where crashing it into a wall fires it off at 110% SPEED the other direction while being able to spit out shiro style poisoned combat blades to either attack enemies or being used as mock propellers for semi hover flight/fall damage negation. It'd likely have to be a living season locked mount in a area that disabled other mounts and could also probably power jadebot charges just via use as well. It's purpose mostly novelty but it could have a niche as a fast moving blade spinning combat mount for tunnels and also wallriding and puzzle solving within a open world, like jackal vs raptor. Norn wolf sled?: Featuring a pack of 4 siccable wolves, This could be just a more qol preference novelty in between mount between raptor and roller beetle. It could travel at 80% of the speed of a roller beetle but MUCH faster than raptor while having much better acceleration, handling, and turning with the energy bar used for a 60% distance raptor like wolf jump as well as having it's engage be siccing 4 combat wolves, inflicting bleeding, crippling, vulnerability and damage for the first 10 seconds of combat. It could be mostly a novelty mount as a hybrid between raptor ANF roller beetle. Master of none, but often more rounded than a master of one with fast speed, good turning, and 60-120% the best of both worlds of turbo speed, jumps, and rapid acceleration. Meme ice cream/food truck: Moneymaking mount for the excuse of novelty. A mount that could sell food items to npc as well as provide stats for the player and act as a cooking station. It could be hard coded to have some joke asuran/jade food delivery service with rocket thrusters in the middle of new cantha, selling packets of ice cream to npcs as well as periodically generating expirable food (vanish 60 minutes after logout) ice cream buff foods and utilities. Perhaps not dps buffs but karma, magic find, health regeneration and selling 5-10s+ ice cream for some 30-50g a hr joke mission. Not a greatly wanted mount just a meme mount searching for a reason to exist. Could also probably rocket thruster to run people over, carcrash dominos style, and explode Michael bay style when crashed for massive air damage + burning as the car explodes in the distance. Why exist? Why not is the only answer...

Honestly I think they've kinda done a good job covering all the niches, it'd be hard to release anything that didn't encroach on other mounts or be semi redundant (skimmer vs skiff without fishing), or another gemshop item like qol mounts such as akin to a how's traveler mammoth or longboy with tp houses (bl merch), repair vendors (endless repair canisters) , Crafting stations (city hubs), etc. Perhaps a souped up griffin that could gain flight and fly from standing height with a prerequisite to own both previous mounts (griff + skyscale) could work, such as osrs resolving the torva powercreeping handle re release problem by making the bis gear require it's predecessors to craft a best of both world's item. You could have like some feathered bird dragon with the flight of skyscale, the dive of Griffon, stronger overall flaps with perhaps lower height loss and flap pulses. Or make a two seater flight mount. But they could just as well just buff Griffon to have a stronger starting jump from flats and sky scale to have greater base speed as a upgrade as well. Other than that could be more mobile combat mounts, perhaps with lances and nests meant for rapid farming, mob clustering and mobility at like a jackal level speed with hooknets. But then again any combat mount has to compete with elite specs which might be a balance issue. Too strong and the mount overshadows specs. Too weak, zero point. Equal strength, why bother more actions for same reward? You could make fun to use mounts like the beetle and maybe a go kart just for the fun and turn gw2 into a racing game. Hover jets, motorcycles, go karts, maybe even glider upgrades to make it compete with griff and the wow dracthyr evoker who I think they want to give griffon flight abilities on a base class. But I just can't think of any untouched mounts past qol vendor mounts, two seater flying mounts, or just fun to use mounts. PoF covered everything well. The only thing you could sell is redundancies or upgrades.

It seems like the difference in ability use between two power mechanists, one autocasting their mech abilities, and doing a mostly 4 button rotation with grenade kit, and a snowcrows rotation is a 35k-35.5k vs 36k difference, about a 1.4%-2% dps difference, though it is unclear if the other person is using infusions on their gear. For the condition spec sure, a 37k difference is +2% potential dps but might open itself up to damage clipping or parts where the spec will punish itself if not properly snowcrows performed. If by going to the toilet you mean 98% of your dps vs 0-10% of most other classes, then sure. the mech doing 98% of the potential peak of damage without any risk of 10-40% dps punishments for suboptimal presses is in the gutter. There's always a skill gap but it's a class that can do only 1.4% less dps than the snowcrows bench for very little investment while also autoregenerating hp, surviving ele one shots, being given the option to teleport, wait a few seconds on using cds, has no auto attack chains it needs to manage to do the bench, as well as no weapon swap + stance or attunement swaps. Though yeah the kits are closer to most other classes or engi etc. It's one of the only classes you can go for a bathroom break and get a +20k dps bench for going afk and range and instant power and 28k dps for the autoattacking part and 7k dps from abilities isn't much to sneeze at in a game where suboptimal rotations on other classes may only result in 20-40% dps for 90% of the average population or a red splat on the floor of the eles and bladesworns who focused too much on rotation and went splat to the one shot the engineer didn't even know they afked through and autoregenerated their hp through. It's represented in 40-90% of pug content and 40-80% of challenge mode content for a reason. It's a class that doesn't really punishing inactive play and it has good performance without the punishment while also having great boon coverage, sturdy self healing while afk, and also good ability to take range and do mechanics while ranged. While most other classes just get one, but not the others.