Sunchaser.9854

The Wow dragon to skyscale actually feels kinda reverse. WoW had flying mounts as well as lots of dragons before. Skyscale feels like a copy of WoW's drake, but they added a roll, And then Wow's new dragon copied the mix of the Gw2 Griffon's diving physics with the rolls of the gw2 skyscale, while the gw2 skyscale borrowed the fly anywhere mount, but made it like 33-50% of wow's speed and put a height limit on it. That's why as a former mmorpg player, i was super into the griffon vs the skyscale since it was novel to have a mount with physics and unique mechanics to me. Though many people want a unique all in one mount for 1 keybind like skyscale and it's pretty much a nuisance to use multi mounts without something like Radial mounts with (Remember last used mount) so i can just press Z whenever i want a springer / specific mount and V whenever i want a griffon etc.

Oh fair enough. It's been long enough but yeah. Dailies can be nice easy starter gold, but i'm not 100% certain if they're that much to sweat over in the end. As mentioned, after a certain point you can get 35 g a week for just buying certain items from a vendor used for legendary crafting via currency exchanges that you can stumble into at a max level arborstone. There are also many dailies that make 1g a day in a few seconds of effort, (such as the jade chest in EoD New Khaheng or something that always has 4 people advertising a tp to friend service). etc. Sure, after like, 250G for a griffon / 1000 Gems + 100-200G Skyscale and maybe 10g-300g for zerker or exotic viper/ascended viper armor. (Still trying to figure out if any Expac maps has a laurel vendor with vipers after finding my zerker alt gearing 20x quicker than my viper main), you don't really need too much gold after a basic set of gear, and maybe a griffon. Unless you're gunning for full legendaries.

Yeah honestly, i haven't heard too much gw2 hacking, but i did have a couple 9 year old launch characters made who got deleted before i was aware of the birthday presents. (They were literally joke/meme creations for the character creators), but it still kinda sucked to lose them at launch and all the dyes and birthday celebration items. I just had no idea since i wanted to start fresh and i got over it, but it was kinda lame knowing i missed out on 5/5 birthday prizes. Thankfully my 2/5 have been pretty good. I have a birthday cake launchers and i got 2 shadow dyes instead of 5 and im still happy with what i got. But man, if there was a 1 restore a month service, i'd probably definitely buy like some character slots during the next anniversary sale just to get them. Being a potential win win of buying more character slots to recover old accounts, and players having piece of mind. To prevent abuses, they could probably throttle it like most mmorpgs. Limit it to like one player selected restore of once per month and most people wouldn't bother. maybe unlimited if hacked just for peace of mind with hackers.

Probably just to drive expansion sales or let people know if they buy. Gw2 has a buy and own for life model. One of the very few for a mmorpg. (Most are either failed 15$ month + 30$-60$ expacs that went p2w f2p cashshops. ), So they probably need to drive sales somehow. Imo it's actually kinda a shame that i think a big part of what sets gw2 apart from other mmorpgs is that a lot of mmorpgs don't change weapon skills on equipped ones past Osrs's one special attack. (A big deal at the time was spec weapons like dclaws and whips both having different uses). But they make like.. the core specs like 2-3x weaker to drive sales steathily. Honestly i don't even blame them for wanting to make money, most overly generous f2p games just starve to death and don't get funding and gw2 is legitimately one of the games with a buy for life model. 3 months of Wow + Expac is a 45$ + 60$ =105$ purchase, with often 1 year content droughts. 50-100$ on Gw2 is a expansion collection with most or all living worlds. Yet buying stuff on sale since it was cheap and then having it go on sale and missing a refund by 1 day was a pretty poor experience 🤣 haha. So yeah that's why i've been working on completing the story while i wait for the anniversary sale and i make progress and i tell myself.. It's just a couple weeks away, but man is the story so disjointed if you do it out of order. I get like +25% more xp from arborstone and like +100-300% travel speed from mounts. But half of the story when experienced out of line is going to places to kill people you don't know, to meet up with people you don't know. And then this jarring time traveling experience where you know of Ls4 Braham as a charging bro Leeroy Jenkins while Ls3 Braham comes off as a complete jackwad for the death of a person they blame you for that you know you haven't met yet but were supposed to lmao. XD. It's a very unique story. Yeah. if you want coherence, do gw2 in order. If you want +25% Arborstone xp and mounts with a bank and tp zone, Enjoy the super fun mounts but a story that needs a lore recap video to make sense lmao. Gotta pick tradeoffs haha. But i wouldn't say you're punished for buying a expansions or playing in order for the story. It'll be very rewarding when the time comes. As far as dailies go. The 2g a day is mostly a nice starter thing but not a daily list. I ignore them often. You can theoretically make 50g a hour or use arborstone to get like 35g each week off a literal currency exchange vendor at lvl 5 and there are some items you can make that are 1g a day for a login. But.. The paradox is the more people that know about them, the less value they'd have. You can park alts at the Canthian Jumping puzzle for instance for a stone that dropped 1g to 0.6g as people learned about it. So there are some pretty nice low effort ways to make money without working hard that can easily compete with the dailies. (35g a week for doing nothing > 2g a day for hopping around). But if you share them profits go down. 😕. But you should be able to find them if you dig around a bit! Good luck, have fun!

Yeah, maybe i got a bit carried away (my native thought process is a literal 237 wpm /apm from Wow specs, but i'm very keenly aware i need to trim down my posts down for the average person.) I think in a gist, ff14 did a rebranding since it actually had a NOTORIOUSLY bad launch, most mmorpgs rushed themselves out during the gate and had tons of launch bugs, funded by stockholder money in a rush to get out quick and unfinished hoping to fund themselves later. However, when people saw the game's horrible launches, usually they'd just abandon or scrap the mmorpg and never play it again. FF14 i think completely rebranded to a realm reborn and relaunched to avoid this i think. As mentioned, there's been a lot of dead mmorpgs that started with much promise but were later abandoned or assumed to be. Most games funded mmorpgs under the expectations of being the next multi Billion dollar WoW, but when 14 mmorpgs launched, all under banners of Revolutionary combat (Tera), gender locked races (Tera/Ff14), Exclusive race locked specs (Tera/WoW), personal story innovations (Swtor dialog options, Gw2's branching options 1-30 story, etc). Imo, it was easy to miss gw2 in a sea of new releases. Honestly. I think one of the strengths of gw2 is that it actually doesn't obsolete old content as soon as it releases it. I think that's one of the biggest paradox's in Activision WoW. They bought a game studio known for quality, and wanted to rush it to be developed as cheaply and shallowly as possible for maximum stockholder returns to the point.. They at one point literally fired their own QA staff and had "DEBUG TEXT: WRITE HERE" to meet a quarterly stockholder bonus... And then complained players were leaving and then went "If we lose 100,000$ of revenue, we'll just cut 300,000$ of content for the next expac you entitled players! Wait.. we're losing 400,000$ of revenue... Ah.. Umm. lets cut 1.2m of content.. What do YOU MEAN WE'VE LOST 90% OF SUBSCRIBERS!?!?! Stop publishing the sub numbers! .." ... [I actually like like 90% of this game, it's just i think 10% of it has weird and questionable decisions haha, but that's because it has high potential. I actually think, of the market options of Ff14, WoW, Tera Gw2 and New age and Swtor. That Gw2 and WoTlk WoW were my two favorites. I actually went into ff14 with high hopes, but just left kinda feeling disappointed a bit that it was the market leader. I'm proud FF14 found success, but it really feels like gw2 is the superior gameplay game and superior mount/race diversity game, at least heavily imo, i've not found any other game with mounts as fun. But loses just due to less brand awareness or knowledge it exists. As well as intentionally dead raiding and dungeoning scenes. It seems like gw2 actually has the solutions to the problems it'd need (Like it invented stat selectable loot to solve the loot problem. Then decided not to use it past a few pocket items in HoT / Living worlds. I do feel like, gw2's strengths are it's mounts, fun and diverse builds, the ability to play a self sufficient dps who can self heal and also support. (Dps healers are one of the more commonly popular but neglected builds in many mmorpgs) are nice. I feel like some of Gw2's weaknesses is that, aside from a deliberate NO wiki osrs ironman (where nearly every single item in the game has to be self made, from knowing you need to do a obscure fishing game to get a obscure item or do slayer of a rare 1/256 drop off dead content to get a fish to complete a quest 70 fishing levels early. Most of gw2's content is just.. made the way it is and assumes a new player will just know it, despite labeling 0% of it. ) This includes lack of say, a dungeon/gearing guide such as WoW that lets you search gear and research drops from a dungeon ingame (Gw2's system seems heavily reliant on wiking say for instance, what possible 2nd trinkets that can obtain viper stats are available to classes who cannot gear with laurels and only have 1 unique trinket from ls3:3. As far as gearing goes, i just used my other mmorpg experience to play the auction house to 1000 G in a single month and will literally obtain ascended vipers before a full 6/6 set + runes of exotics that'd have to be regrinded was obtained. (I guess i should stop though haha. my mind and writing is a native 230 wpm and i should scale my thoughts even if i think them all in my head. hmm. ) Yeah, i feel like gw2 is a a good game on the market. But i'm not sure if a reboot is right for it and would miss out on it's strengths. I feel Ff14 rebooted since of a bad launch, but it was brand awareness (final fantasy and word of mouth in WoW) that made it incredibly popular even though it's a pretty popular but mediocre game (at least, imo in rotation/2.5 sec gcd/boring story). At least as a past WoW player, i think people are just flocking to it, since the appetite for a good mmorpg is heavily there. And for many people, WoW, ff14, and Some Eso/BDO and WoW private servers are the only thing on most people's radar. Gw2 is actually a pretty good game on the market, one of my mostly overall favorites. I just kinda think they're missing out the point of advertising since a lot of people don't even know this game exists. I can't even count the time i said i was playing gw2 and 9/10, The reaction isn't "Oh gw2, i love that game!" it's. "I want to play that game, the griffon looks so fun! Is that black desert online or modded skyrim?!?!?" So yeah. Gw2 imo is pretty much so absent on advertising, i've had more people ask me if it's a skyrim mod or black desert online, even from other mmorpg players than gw2 haha. 🤣. From what i've seen, at least from personal experiences. When i show people the game and my gw2 reshader hd graphics. Everyone wants to play the game and try it. But nobody seems to know GW2 exists. Or that they can even play it 1-80 for FREE without buying it saying "I don't think i can afford to play that game" or "That game looks fun!... Uh.. What's it's name? I didn't even know it existed!"

Honestly ff14 got rebooted since it got like terrible launch reviews. It needed the reboot to repair it's reputation, but then found success by word of mouth and ff recognition. And then while minor, just a few people in wow mentioning A good mmorpg to a hungry audience led thousands of people from wow to ff. Enough that even though I found ff14 boring, it was filling up to capacity to the point they ran out of server space and had to throttle it since they were making so much money and revenue their servers couldn't handle the flood. Ff14 got hundreds of thousands of players by letting people know it existed to a hungry audience. Gw2 made a good game and then... Well did 0 advertising and mostly just by it's self inflicted flaw, has strokes of genius but then elects to advertise off literal blink and missed gas station cups and... Pretty much 0 advertising. (There's a reason I played this game at launch next to rift and archeage and swtor and wow and star trek online and 2-3 dnd onlinr mmorpgs and still literally assumed it died after 7 others did.) The ff14 gameplay itself though? I didn't stick around too long, but I remember being let down personally by lack of race choices (5 humans with female only bunny ears with.A content expansion for male bunny ears...) Vs the orcs, night elves, charr and trolls and worgen and vulpera just seemed so bland to me. But hey I mean. A critical mass of players who want to raid and make the game a success as well as general notoriety just even inviting some wow streamers to play is wonders of free pr. I'm part of a non mmorpg game with 22-27k active players as well that's more of a hobby thing, and we legit have people dumping 100-3000$ on the game in literal terms there very often. Its a bit of a gacha game though but we'd offer like youtubers something like a code for a 2x exp booster or a -50% off purchases. Ff needed a reboot since it had a bad launch, gw2 had a good launch with middling endgame or advertisement. A reboot to eliminate the good built up content would make no sense imo when the lack of advertising or public awareness in non gw2 circles is close to nil. (Nothing). Gw2 always came up next to dead mmorpg games like Rift and Archeage and gw1 and even everquest when I remember people talking about it. There was so much appetite for a f2p mmorpg that went past 1-20 and was a good experience. And gw2 had a silver bullet it was sitting on not advertising at ALL. It's actually a pretty good game but a reboot isn't the problem imo. The lack of advertising to a population that wants a good mmorpg f2p past level 1-20 is there, and gw2 advertises itself as well as a mime who doesn't want to go to work, wants to advertise itself in the middle of nowhere. and is sitting on it's bum while the more mediocre pop divas ff14 get filled to capacity but engage their fans. It's a genius game in some aspects while being stuck in the medieval ages of gearing systems of others. Many games have reworked gearing systems to be grindable yet clear. Gw2 revamped a 10 year old wow, but still somehow innovated some aspects (stat selectable gear) while staying in the past (hundreds of near worthless stat affixes that sometimes no spec desires with 0 personal loot or favored affix personal loot system. ) Tl:Dr I think ff needed a reboot since of a horrible launch/bombed reviews. But got to be a success since it reached out during the wow exodus. (Ff14 got so many wow players from a few mentions so successfully in fact, To the point it didn't even have enough servers to fund demand. Even though it had mediocre 2.5 gcd gameplay and infamy for making dps meters a bannable offence, it still filled up to capacity on servers because people were so hungry for a mmorpg.. ANY decent mmorpg other than declining WoW people flooded in masse. They'd pay a 15$ sub fee just to sit in a house and do nothing. Because people talked about ff14 at least once at least. Gw2's mentions were literally 0. How can you hear of a game you've never Even heard mentioned at least once per decade before? (I literally did not ever hear one person talk about gw2 for 9 years in my circle until I wanted to play a unique mmorpg race like the charr again and went "WAIT... the game actually still exists when 14 other mmorpgs all died next to it.. and it never once let anyone know?!???") Gw.You could play it at launch and Literally never hear about it again just like swtor, rift, fusionfall, arrcheage, ddo online 1-2, lotro, tera, star trek online. Failed mmorpgs that were abandoned 1 year into launch were a common trope. Everyone was informed on the latest mmorpgs, nobody talked about gw2 once ever until this year. How was anyone supposed to know it was alive when 14 other dime a dozen mmorpgs launched and were abandoned in their first year if nobody ever got to know about them? (There are still people who pay 15$ a month to sit in ff14 houses just because they don't know other mmorpgs exist. When the mmorpgs don't advertise. At all. You can't buy a product you don't know exists. That's gw2's problem imo, not lack of reboot for a poor launch. )

Runescape had it worse, there was a child in Slug Menace who was 10 years old for like 10 years. So they made him age up 10 to 20. Problem was, runescape was pretty much about efficency so people doing the quests in order would have him literally age up 10 to 20 in a single quest. XD. For people who had played chronologically, it made sense. But for people who played jumping in, they were aware enough to put in magic as the solution and poke some fun at themselves with little references like "Weren't you 10 years old last time i met you?" "Yeah! I used some magic to age up, incredibly ain't it?", and just poked some fun at themselves. XD

I think it's interesting to observe this fourms, how often when a player will present one idea such as {'This content is old, and i am struggling to beat group content it was designed for'}, another player will take things at face value, and then turn things into a he said you said war where it seems to come off as more important to one up some virtual video game nonsense. Myself i play a lot of games and i've done a fair bit of optimizing. In WoW i would regularly optimize my builds to the point i would be in a group dealing 40-80k dps while the other players did 5-10k and then do my best to try and keep everyone alive, but if they were salty while i was trying to help them, i'd take a fair chance at trying to help them before giving up or literally leaving them in a pile dead the entire dungeon while timing the mythic +18 key. I think what's missed here, is that there can be a variety of success in builds and even as a min maxer, i'll often get people chastise or completely miss the point of subjects. Such as gaps of gear availablity and viability of certain specs, means that the less optimized players might get a build they love and think they're "skilled" at, only to fail to 1-5k dps or blame another. While another class might afk to 20-40k by design with up to 1-4 button presses, while others perform 20 key rotations with stat swaps to easily get 4k-10k if piloted blind despite likely playing at a higher apm. I think, (to a educated mind), that perhaps less educated or more simpler minds simply see things as a side of war to take. One camp believes the content to be nerfed, because their build isn't able to handle it. Another believes that balancing the content to make it easier makes the game too easy. But often one of the more successful mmorpgs i've seen is to offer tiered yet rewarding scaling, where players can experience the content at 100% or 300% stat difficulty, but be rewarded with stronger rewards in other games. However since gw2 is more of a group game where not all access to affix gear is available and others are fine with it. (some specs having gear literally potentially cheaper than their ascended equivilents, if they do raiding), while others can literally set a piece of gear for 2g. I think one mild concern is that for a new player launch, one of gw2's unique niches as a mmorpg that's fun is each weapon has a unique ability set! And yet. instead of like, buffing the content to embrace the build diversity. They tend to make things highly unequal between certain classes while others are extremely versatile without cost. I think maybe a developer solution might be needed to fix the underperforming specs or lesser performing abilities and specs that perform at like, 20-40% the capacity of their peers or even worse. Games can thrive on HIGH skill ceilings where people are willing to put 2x the apm for a +5-30% dps increase. Or continue the way they are now. I've mostly had struggles with one champion in core spec, then optimized my abilities and spec. And it's really not uncommon for a elite spec to like double or triple a core spec's dps and then optimizing rotation to vastly increase the dps again. [ tl;dr Perhaps if they're planning on making a launch to steam that will likely bring in 100,000s of thousands or millions of new players. They could embrace their unique strengths (fun build diversity) instead of making them crippling?] 1. Built in dps meter for easy player access. Even if personal dps only and blurs the teammates's name's out. ) (No toxicity, but allows to see performance at least, like #2, #1 on dps, etc. 2. Perhaps, buff grossly underperforming abilities/rotations, etc? (20-33% dps specs/weapons) 3. Have a variety of fun casual friendly and elite friendly content, but focus on making players fight the encounters, not yell pvp or flamefests etc? (gw2 is actually pretty good on this ingame. I've had good experiences, the fourms is iffy) As far as things go, i do highly recommend a dps meter for more than elitism. A great amount of gw2 dps isn't transparent at all and sometimes pressing more abilities actively lowers dps over a more passive approach. Having a dps meter can inform you when a build is built so weird that pressing abilities actually lowers your dps.. It's super backwards for a mmorpg to have a skill curve include... going afk and auto attacking to higher dps. But a big part is knowing what parts of your spec are optimal to a dps rotation, and what parts punish you for.. playing the game more actively... .... Only gw2 does this, as far as im aware(?) [Short: A dps meter and a gw2 build guide like https://metabattle.com/wiki/MetaBattle_Wiki can actually do tons to improve soloing ability. A dps meter and a rotation practice on the golem even for open world can dramatically increase soloing ability (if needed). Good luck, have fun. ]

If people ever get tired of reading, why even bother coming to a fourm they say they don't like reading? 😆. To me, that's like walking into a shoe store and complaining you came there to buy shoes and they have too many shoes. There's tons of places where if you don't like reading, you can just close your eyes or not even come to the fourms to make posts about not reading haha. Anyways yeah, i suppose there's always good and bad, as people age, their reactions slow down. Gw2 as far as mmorpgs seems good on rewarding open world exploration. Though it doesn't seem to always reward apm by spec's and practicality easily. As it figures though, i don't blame players for using mechanist, it's a build notorious or famed for being very easy to pilot to the point that while other classes might require kill proofs. People will just take a mechanist with the reasoning that "if it can't fail a rotation because it only presses one button, there's no need to filter out a glorified auto attack presser from a experienced one!" 🙂 XD . But at the same time, you can blame players for using builds that succeed with minimal effort and that means more time can be spent on game. The counterpart of the issue is when only 2/9 classes have access to dev favored specs, it's pretty hilarious to see a mmorpg where one class afks or autos to 20-30k+ dps and still gets buffs. But 50% of people will think they're the hottest thing ever, like a sniper who can't hit a moving headshot or a dps player who does 2k dps and fails a event. Sure it's all a video game, but it's kinda hilarious that some specs are designed to be 20-30k on auto attacks or 1-4 button use, and others are literally designed to be 2-7k if you auto chain them without highly specific auto attack builds and proper ascended and gear runes. Tl;dr: Yeah it's kinda weird how people will come to fourms, a place literally designed for reading, to complain about reading lmao. But yeah, best of luck, For what it's worth, there are some specs that can be light on the hands. Bets of luck on your journey! {If you install a dps meter, many of the pug johnsons are just mechanists pressing 1 to top 4/5 of the top dps spots of most 50 man pugs with 20-30k autos, to a unskilled userbase of 25+ players under 2-5k dps. Many players vastly overestimate their ability, while massively underperforming. Without a dps addon, it can be easy to see that apm does not always translate into dps, many times, 60-100 apm on a build can lead to a 2-4k dps, just because gw2 seems to have a philosophy where only a few abilities do a majority of your damage, while others are dps decreases. Which means.. being more engaged with a rotation can actually be a dps loss in some cases for classes, making interaction unrewarding, while others afk to practical 20-30k results. for a perplexing balance design. This section is meant for those who care for detail. If your brain doesn't like words, if you're not at a level able to understand it, just skip it like the asura would. Your eyes can move for a reason lmao. Posts about "WORD LONG, DON'T LIKE READ" seem to be pretty useless lol. 🙂 XD )

I kinda miss the branching story content of the personal story of the first 30 levels. It made leveling alts really Fun. But shame its just a tease that goes away. Behind the scenes it probably raises the development cost of story content, but it was a real fun feature to have. I suppose instead of like 5 races x 3 choices a race for each lvl 1-10 branches and + 5x3 x 2 mini split branches for 20-30 it'd take a lot more time to develop though. But it was such a tease having a game start you on personal story then go cold turkey trehearne and ham fist the dragon story on ya. It's pretty awkward being in a position where you were supposed to bond with a character but the bonding was in a story dlc so instead you just know your character is supposed to like it but the player bond falls flat. Very quickly does the story of starting your own personal customized character turns into the pact commander using the good dragon to fight the evil possessed dragon 2-3x over plot though.

It was a derailment about the new player experience. I had a post talking about how new players often get a incredibly disjointed experience where they have to pick or divide their resources between unlocking the living world stories, gearing, and getting and finding rewards for the game, so it got derailed into a "I am too lazy to read, therefore I win" dime a dozen discussion that basically just led back to how gw2 players are just so conditioned to their game being how it is. It's akin to a parking lot that only lets you park if you wear a platypus on your head going "why would anyone consciously design it like this?" And staring at 20 people go "ISN'T IT OBVIOUS? platypuses go on heads." and the only reason is that it's always been that say for the parking lot. But for sake of derailment, lets just say for 1000 gems. A new player can pick between one item: a set of living world seasons, 250g for a certain armor set or 10g for another. If they only pick one season, they'll get a incredibly disjointed experience. But the rewards are top heavy, so it's set up in a way for players to experience a disjointed story when the story is missing parts and this could be a thing to work on polishing for the steam release. It'd be a highly trivial manner for a solution such as just increasing the drop rate on certain gears. Let me go think of a shorter way for the average intellect that doesnt think in as much detail as mine, Hmm. New players can pick one thing for 10$, / Time 1. one living world story of 4-5 for 10$, 2. one set of exotic viper armor for 300g or ascended for 300g, 3. Griffon (250g) or sky scale (100g) The game is set up so gold making is like 2$ a hr, so I think picking a critique at how gw2's story is overly reliant on all its part to make sense. While it completely lacks simple solutions such as a complete entire story pack discount or publicized plan sales date could be nice. The original repost was a comment to sometime talking about how the stories could be incoherent out of order. Someone fixated on 14-17 g viper exotic is a bigger number than 14.5 g ascended. I've actually been working on ordering the 300 items necessary to level all three plans and obtain the recipes. I too wouldn't mind a new living world soon, but for the new player experience I hope they do something about their storyline being pretty hit or miss on coherence without all the parts. Tl:dr. New players have to pick between story. Gold and resources as well as leveling. ( 10$ = living world = skyscale /= story appreciation /= 250g = Griffon / set of viper gear. ) Tl:dr for cavemen: ooga booga. Money buy stick. Stick hit. Harder.. 1/7th of story when ooga?

Good on you for trying to lead man. I already got my egg, but it's a minor pet peeve when people say dps doesn't matter. Followed by "OMG. EVERY CLASS SHOULD DO AT LEAST 20K AUTOING. PEOPLE UNDER THAT HAVE NO EXCUSE" 20k dps for auto attacking is a generally not a thing created equal or with practical survivability in mind. Downloading a dps meter in was pulling off a rotation with 15-20 abilities, only to my analytical mind's dismay that gw2 is a game where some abilities can lower your dps from auto attacking. Alright fine. But every time I use the golem's rotation on a open world mob, im aware that the boards fill with 3-5 mechanists I'm every squad often doing 20-40k while 25 other players will be doing a literal 1-5k dps. Yet, the kicker is. Sometimes execution speed doesn't even matter, it feels so much about the class. Mechanist afks or presses 1-4 buttons I hear from the people saying they afked top dps to 30k while another did 4 weapon swaps and stance swaps and found it felt like twice the effort to go half as far. There are some really fun specs out there and I do enjoy the game overall. But I find the attitude perplexing. New players will want to play all these diverse classes and enjoy the uniqueness of gw2. But they have this weird mix of "play whatever you want! Then get spawncamped if your build by mechanical limitation sucks or was powercreeped". The novelty of that really fun and flavorful spec wears away when raiding guilds don't even care about benchmarks and just ask mechanist. Sure not everything can be viable. But it's kinda a huge disparity that anyone talking about dps should try a meter and find out that some other classes need literal 15-20 button rotations with second wide swaps and generally less available prefix gear to get the results another class can spend 1 click on. People want to help their groups, how can people not see the irony when 90% of average Joe squads have everyone thinking they're the hottest stuff on earth and a afk mechanist pressing one button to 20-30k does the literal dps of 10x 2-3k dps who think they're doing 20-30k, going gear doesn't matter and thinking everyone else is a problem too? Sure, some people do it to flame, I actually just want to improve my own experience and want to help and carry my weight. Faster dps means faster catching up. More efficiency means I can catch up to masteries faster. and I need group content to get my runes for +20% dot duration and dps. Mmorpgs are a group experience. Designing a class to auto to 20-39k dps while 90% of players flail buttons to 2-5k dps while making dps checks is messy desjgn. as far as auto chains go, 7-20k dps from auto chains isn't global. Some tested alt auto chains are only 2-4k dps or even lower. The content is designed so some presses and rotation literally are traps that lower dps from a game design perspective or have been so power creeped by ability buffs that like 90% of dmg might come from one button and 4 dead ones below autoing dps. It's really strange design. Good game overall imo, but very still strange game design for a mmorpg. And players get mad when content fails. But what kind of healthy game design is 90% of the group's dps for 10% the effort?

Alright so I'm well aware. My thoughts and actions are done in 230 wpm/apm wince I came form mmorpgs where 666% haste and 240 apm to perform the specs was the norm. Because i needed the apm to perform said actions in other game's, my finger reflexes got faster. I tend to have a strongly analytical mind that min maxes and optimizes. I look at the game and 90% of people not mechanist literally average 2-5k dps.. Or below. While the lowest mechanist I've seen hit 15-30k dps by saying they literally ark or sometimes press 1-4 buttons. To simplify things, basically I have a alt. He uses medium power armor. My main uses viper. My main has literally been working on 3 pieces of viper as well as amulet and 2nd accessory and ring to get a few affixes and doing strikes. His viper gear will cost 200-300g and the runes to obtain it are only from dungeons where dps and healing are important. But are usually topped by a mechanist or firebrand. My alt literally got basically full geared for 2g. Let me think of a way to simplify this. Tl:dr. 17g exotic is a bigger number than 14.5g ascended viper. But berserker gear is dirt cheap. New players unless they spend 60-200$ out the gate will have to pick what items to buy. Tl:dr 2: imo, If bis gear is less accessible, it may forces new players to pick between buying stories, content. Gear and resources. That means when one spec's armor costs 300g while another person fully gears for 2g, it punishes players and feels like effort is unrewarded and you do twice the work and jump through hoops only for them to gear in minutes for 10g on a ah vs 300g. If exotic gear is more expensive than ascended. Guides will often tell you to go for 14.5g ascended over 14-17g viper exotic. Because 14.5 is smaller than 17g and lasts longer. I thought I said that three times already, but here's a fourth I suppose. I also made the text bold, in hopes your eyes can navigate to brighter text. 😂

Alright to boil it down in a nutshell. The bis affix gear for berserker/power builds is so plentiful a mechanist can easily buy their exotics for 20 silver to 2 gold, despite being a flooded 1 button build. The gear for viper or expansion affix gear is notoriously scarce, that buying a piece of exotic viper gear (14-17g can be seen as a waste) since ascended can be made for 14.5 g In a nutshell. It feels like when one class can get 2x the rewards for 2-4x less abilities/apm, while also having easy access to easy 0.2-2g exotic gear while another's is harder and more obscure to obtain. That you're doing all this working hoping for a payout rewarded in most other games only to start questioning if the efforts feel rewarded. Anyways, im well aware these might be wasted words. I do enjoy gw2 as a game and I'm glad I can buy and play forever. It has some really fun mounts and good ideas and bad ideas. I loved the first 30 levels personal story the best and how dynamic it was. I'm kind of sad that the game starts off teasing you with such a fun and incredibly diverse path of customizable options for your choices, but gearing and accessibility is quite wonky.

This community seems a bit bipolar, you see posts expecting and demanding top notch performance but the travesty is I just got back from a person literally trying to explain the LITERAL literal prices of viper gear was 14-17g A piece for my spec and ascended I had to Google a calculator to even figure out how to make and plot the recipes was 14.5g A piece. After spending two hours with a person they went "no it isn't, no it isnt, no it isnt" After about 30 minutes I gave up and I got someone who literally told me gear wasn't that bad to get since their berserker's gear was literally 20s to get and getting them 20k dps by pressing a literal 1 button and asking as mechanist, while my no viper Condi build I chose for gameplay and enjoyment as a past 100-200 apm literal build enjoyer constantly witnesses things die and only sputter to 10-15k dps without the timed runes to extend my dot duration and craft axes and makes for swaps as well as a complete 300g set of gear and a 15-20 move rotation with 1 second wide stance swapping windows while they were literally complaining it was unfair for their auto attack gear to have mech dmg included. All I got out of it is, gearing in gw2 to a new player is like if there was a parking lot that immediately parked your car upside down and towed it away and then hid it in a unknown country to a newcomer. They stare at it confused, the locals all point. "Isn't is obvious?!!??", you go to the neighbors and you study the parking lot. Any good parking lot would have notes. But there isnt, so you give up. The person gives you a 5 hour speech on why it makes perfect coherant sense that gear doesn't drop in dungeons, there's no personal loot selection system for untradables that makes even dailies likely to reward you in gear for a class. Finally. You give up and you go " how do I have to park my car/obtain viper prefix gear if I want to gear", and people stare at you dumbfounded. Go. Its so simple to most mmorpgs, You don't gear in dungeons, you gear in completely unlabeled parts of thr map and do a 20x longer rotation to deal half the damage while the other class m1s and gets their bis affix for 20s a mechanist's berserker while auto booning vs 14-17g a piece. And trying to explain to people that having to look at gear guides to check not only stat select ability but zone vs 20s auction house gear I've already accepted is something that flies off most people's heads. Like how numerous several other mmorpgs do a dungeon finder that just have people tested before the ques to say provide their dps/heal/tank/boon uptime and people go, what's wrong with the current system. To just trying the manual way, and just running into literally unexplained dungeon design like p2 catacombs where people just accept that while other games will have gimmick designs, but explain them, pugs in gw2 just seem to have untalking masses of people just randomly zerg in random directions who meet a mob who is just randomly completely undamagable by conventional means, but has a weakness to exploit that just makes a face slamming pile of un speaking players spin around mute. A mark of a simple but often easy to take for granted game design, is designing parts of the game to be reasonably communicatable to a player. Like a parking lot that only accepts parking tickets if you wear a platypus on your head, gw2 seems to have pelicular systems in place to stand out from m morphs common practices that seem... somewhat intentional. But it seems like they reject time tested tropes like dungeons dropping equippable and usable worthwhile gear while coming up with a good stat selection system, only to make some affixes easy while ignoring others. They say they want to increase build diversity, yet the latest balance patches have reduced it and now there's a lot of guilds and raids where why even bother trying to make a 15-20+ button with energy swaps, rotation swaps, selected availability affix gear available, when a mechanist can press 1 button, buy their gear a literal 80x cheaper for 20s berserker gear vs 17g viper gear. Press a button, go afk. Maybe 4 buttons, and have a golem atk their rotations while all the other classes can press 20 to do half? Gw2 has some good ideas for sure, but it seems very stubborn, some parts of it to a newcomer seem perplexing. It seems to make some really fun and exciting looking specs. Then make gearing for one class a cakewalk and another a nightmare based solely on who's gear gets to be 20s and who's gets to be difficult to find 16g exotic while the ascended are literally 14.5g. The reason the guide says not to bother with 14-17g exotic viper is while you can try a Condi build without, you miss out on 33% of your dps + 20-30% extended duration and dmg from runes + 5-10% ascended stat differences playing a class that doesn't m1 while some certain classes such as mechanist are very lucrative rewarded whole another could have expectations to handle 15-20+ abilities + weapon swaps + stance swaps with 1 second wide opening timers, it's hard not to come into gw2 feeling like the game doesn't equally reward all players or care to communicate about itself. Such as say advertising or having too much social media pressence when Wow players were hopping by the millions looking for a good mmorpg in the market and turned ff14, A kinda okay but eh game into a success by not advertising itself. as well as having completely missable story mechanics. Or having a story that makes almost no sense if it expected someone to hop in back from launch without 9 consecutive years of play. I actually have a 9th year birthday gift from the mmorpg launch craze, but it seems a bit bizarre. Gw2 definitely has good ideas, I love the mounts a ton. But I don't think it's story jumbles or lack of like maybe a personal desired loot system that could say, have a better chance to find untradable loot equppable by your class drop from dungeons every 10 levels or a in-game (where can I obtain X stat for Y slot ascended?) areas a bad idea. I know some people with berserkers literally just buy their gear for 20 s to 2g a piece but I've had to use a wiki to find a second viper available trinket and literally this is the only game I know of where the wiki loot table is more styled by drop availability markers from literal achievement procs, with x and y for yes or no to obtainable via raiding or story or achievements or crafting or fractals or 9th year birthday parties or holiday events or living seasons or random rng loot boxes or certain karma venfors while most other mmorpgs just ask if you want to dungeon or raid etc. I want to do respectable damage. If a mechanist presses 1 button and spends 2-4g for 20-39k, I need to spend 200-400g on ascended and find my optimal runes as well as optimize my rotation as well as hope the mobs I target live long enough for at least 12 seconds of dots (LOL) TO.. Sigh. I don't have a character slot for the press 1 afk for 2x the results for half the results class alright? I thought this class was fun, but it's gone from fun fantasy to feeling likenim doing 2-4x the thought into it to see half the results as someone who literally can't fall below 20k dps by afking while 20 buttons on this class gets 12-15k with a 17k no viper sim since of missing runes and vipers. It's like every top 3 dps is just a mechanist pressing 1 button to get all the results while dots get clipped if something doesn't even live to 12 seconds long.

I mean, that's a fair reason. I remember coming back into Gw2, i purchased it at launch, loved the personal stories from the creation of each race and all the variety (Wow, 5 races, 3 branches x 2 options of what to do 10-20 + 3 branches x 2 options lvl 20-30! + 3 branches 30-X!), then i heard Swtor added dialog options at the time of the mmorpg rush 9 years ago and hopped to others to experience SWTOR's story, where regardless of where you started, or what path you wanted to take, you still had a seemingly coherent story that made sense no matter where you sided, Dark or Light sith or Jedi, since you were your own character and followed your story. Started in Sith, escaped the academy by force or murder? You left another area, and even though it was a brand new story, the world wasn't built around you being a grand and mighty force. Instead, someone struggling with fantasy blackmailers would be say, holding a family hostage in return for ransom money and it wouldn't worry about it since you weren't darth Potatus or Jedi scrapper to the person. The story felt involved since you decided where to go, you saw the family and you could decide how you wanted to react to it. (Say, a dark side sith who felt pity for the family and decided to save them, or a light side Jedi who felt disgusted with them and went to defend them, or a dark side Jedi who was tired of following the light and decided to just stab them or frag em.) The story, while it wasn't planned at all, could feel interconnected yet work segmented. I still enjoy gw2 a great deal, but i think a common problem of "You are the chosen one, the only one who can save our world! (just like everyone else!) Uh!!.. i have no idea what gender, race, species, or even height you are man/Madam/Charr/Darth Sithius / Murder MChappyface!.), Please! although you have slayed gods, i REALLLY need your important help, the world is at danger, and i need your help to fetch my 80 cabbages stranded at the end of each mountain in a 17 part series quest to unlock cabbage flying! The world is at stake, but so are my 50 cent cabbages! YOU MUST FORGET THE STAKES OF THE WORLD AND SAVE MY CABBAGES IF YOU WISH TO FLY TO THE END OF THIS STORY MISSION HERO!" XD I got a bit derailed. But honestly in a Nutshell, even as a mmorpg player of 10 games and enjoyer of many old in depth stories, such as the classical Lotr and Frodo's rise from reluctant anyman to heroic savior who found himself on a perilous journey for reasons he didn't understand. All Gw2 made me feel like was a very confused but happy mount chasing Amnesiac patient, wondering if this was what Alzheimers probably would feel like. Having people talk to me i was supposed to know while having NO clue who they are, and worried about items i bought going on sale every week or if something i buy might go free or camping sales that never predictably come, waiting months, only to give up and have them come the next day. XD My personal head story was probably supposed to be i was some kind of epic Hero who escaped and forged a Charr legion and was supposed to have saved the world from a couple dragons i never met, befriended a couple, and then somehow came in possession of one. But my personal story experience is more feeling like i was a escaped Alzheimer patient having a fun adventurer in someone's backyard who knew me and let me steal all their horses, told me i was a hero, and also was aware i had amnesia and decided i wanted and loved to fly griffons anyways and then explored the continents and got lost while several people who declared themselves as my life's enemy were waved at while i was aware i was supposed to know them but just killed them anyways while flying off into the sunset yelling YEE HAW 😄 XD. I actually enjoyed it! But if you ask me what was going on. I felt more in tune with a don Quixote finding out the windmill monsters was real and getting to fight them then i did any fantasy hero lmao. I actually find it hillarious how after many MMORPGS stories, GW2 clearly has one it WANTS to tell about personal story, trehearne, and magic epic all powerful dragons. But i can't afford the story and i still need to get this impossible to find gear. I can't afford to do it chronologically while undergeared looking at dps sims where the gear is even hard for geared players, and im missing 50% of dps in sims alone just because i don't have the right Gear affixes and the chance to obtain one from a random drop is probably a literal 1/180000 to roll the right armor type, 2% viper affix, 1% exotic, while WoW i just walked in, did a raid, had a item drop and equipped it. XD. It really sucks some classes get bis gear cheap as rocks for 1-4 button rotations while you can find out you can have a 15 button rotation and still only do dmg by the time the mechanist pressed 1 and literally 1 shotted it on 2 g gear. It feels like the devil's trifecta. You want to play the story in order, but you also feel pressured to get mounts and +25% xp and Proper affixes to handle your own in the murder jungle Where the difficulty curve is reversed Tl;dr: I enjoy Gw2. But even as a mmorpg vet of 10 games and min maxer. But story wise, All i felt was extreme confusion playing Gw2 out of order and worry about gearing, time gating, hero points for a coherent spec to play the story in a logical order while struggling with uneasily available gear prefixes keeping me from properly gearing up my build and the wiki for exotic heavy armor gearing being more full of holes than a block of swiss cheese. (Extra fluff)

Lfg is a basic system in almost every game in the mmorpg genre. Nobody is saying use it for the hardest content. Heck I think I just joined one random gw2 dungeon group and it was mostly a randomly group of players with elite specs all doing their own things randomly while everyone used their self heal. 1 person was 450, another had mastery lvl 2, everyone was getting lost and randomly hitting things(?), but there didn't seem to be death enrage timers like wow so sure while no alacrity might not be optimal. How much worse could it be than just 5 people running around blindly, vs when off is instant, most people learn the content by doing the content in the same way a person told to sear a steak 100 times will naturally go from burnt to delicious while someone who never cooked one will worry. Once people start getting easier experience, even new players tend to pick up dungeon paths within a couple hours pretty quickly just like anyone who learns how to sear steak often is able to repeat it again. , in wow general heroic dungeons were made to do a daily bag easily because, it offered a pretty easy way to mingle and have fun. I know gw2 wants to avoid the holy trinity and having 1 headless chicken vs 5 self healing headless chickens is uh.... Something new but... I think almost anyone who's used the tools like these, typically tend to change their mind quickly after trying one. Like punch cards computers vs the first handheld calculator, people will always be happy to use what they grew up with, but if you tried the system and Tried to go back, it just seems like a waste bringing 87 folders of punch cards to do a calculation in 30 minutes when you can type 746374 x 19 / 4 on your calculator or what have you anytime you want. Work smart and efficient with limited spare time right? Not waste it for some arbitrary reason of. "We're always done it this (slow but not necessarily enjoyable way) , and it works, so why should we have cars, trains, or horses or wheels when walking by foot over 1000 miles over a airplane ticket works? Nobody sane ever recommends a completely random dungeon finder for the most challenging content. At least. Not without a basic competence test. Sure people can lie, but by forcing them to be competent enough they're passing dps checks in healing gear and tanking tests in dps gear at least implies that if the set is done right enough right your 28k dps alacrity beats the 2k dps core rogue with no meter to know what's going wrong, it's probably (?) A sign they could do their job fine(?) At least for the easy content. It'll always be a general system for putting people together to have fun. Wow did both, it had easy automatic lfg for easy dungeons, and then grouped selective content for +300% stat mythic +18 bolster fortifying etc. Any Serious content that requires coordination. like literally having 40 part mob pulling maps to tank will always be a organized effort that needs communication with strategic plans for mob percents to add up precisely up to 100.0% to 100.2% but no more than 103% to pass a limited timer content in Wow, but the general que is more meant to designed as a fun social way to gear up basic gear (like untradable rare/exotic tiers), while having fun. It also makes it much easier to casually invite people into a game as well. While subtle, ive seen people often recruit 3-5 people into a game by asking if they wanted to dungeon with them in wow or over watch, or play in a team on LoL. Gw2 imo really is a good game but lacks on the advertising or inviting /playing with friends department. Adding a easy que where you could add a friend and que together could really help improve social dynamics and maybe a daily reward. People could always split to use manually or que but 99/100. Most people prefer to que with it and theres usually a slight +10-25% xp/bag reward for selecting any que vs specific. Which helps keeps times down by rewarding and incentive ing players to be able to que for anything. Obviously most mmorpgs have a lfg only Tele or at least a manual only summoning stone to group with. So any automated lfg system benefits from a portal, otherwise people get lost. We grouped into one of those gw2 group systems and literally had it open to anyone only to spend it watching 2 people get lost for 20-40 minutes because we had to manually all scan the entire world map to find the dungeons... And the f2p players had no mounts or waypoints and another dude was like literally stuck in like Elona and had no idea how to find it on the map.. Its just archaic not to have the system imo and really its something so small. With a lfg tool you can invite a casual friend easily and go 'hey, want to play a dungeon with me? Quick, eady 5-20 minutes, in and out, it'll be a blastl", vs .. The strsnge silent mass that runs towards objects to whack and doesn't talk. They hop, you play. You have fun. Gw2 meanwhile like uh... It has it's own take.. But.. Its "Hey. Want to travel to a random unmarked location you may or may not have access too, while 2-3 people get lost, taking 20-30 minutes to arrive with no directions and being kicked only for a 5-10 minute wordless smacking fest? The prime new player experience is watching people get completely lost while wordlessly running into walls right!?" Yeah. I bet new players getting lost for 40 minutes while a random group they don't know is yelling at them for being eaten by wolves 20 times in the shiverpeak mountains is just EXACTLY the kind of prime experience adults with maybe 2 hrs spare time on 8-10 pm breaks want to experience with their life. XD before their limited spare time runs out for responsibilities and they have to tab out. I don't mind challenging content. I did +18 mythic+ bfa wow, I just would rather fight the content then scheduling or finding lost players imo haha. love gw2 but.. If you want people to Olay group content with a smaller by number population. Its wouldn't be that bad to take basic steps to make it more accessible imo.