Sunchaser.9854

I do kinda wish there was more proper dumps for post lvl 30 luck or at least compression schemes to open up the artificer recipe to craft the 500 legendary luck even as a discovery option for 50x +10 lucks, but i think like the only population that hits over 300 luck is 1% of the population. Still, i would love a all year droobert who could instantly consume luck, or at least better luck compression and faster compression. There's some days i'm spending like 40 minutes compressing it and chucking it at a alt sometimes.

Pof: Here is a tribe of undead living under a city, a warring faction led by Joko of resurrected egyptian zombies enslaved against their will with zombie driven cities to fight against the branded, the flaming minions of balthazarr, a waring tribe, all these ranches for the skimmers, and everyone else. EoD: Here is a empty city with only 1 meta. The only time you even see 10 people inside of it is a story instance where after completion they despawn and never appear again, leaving you in a empty city. But sometimes during the blacklight meta you at least have mechs to fight and one giant mega mini boss. Outside of 2 npcs in the meta though, Do people even exist... or spawn.. or walk in New Khaheng though? Dragon's end has good gold and decent mini events. It's not bad, just i can barely recall anything happening in echovalds wilds other than it's empty and a annoying boss on ziplines that one shots all non mechanists with the insta incap if you're not behind a barrier the mechanists can easily shoot from is a bit annoying. Then the other area, pretty, but i think there's literally just a leviathan spawn there and nothing to do there?

I mean adding extra specs like Eod's is always a nice feature. If devs do work, it can be doable to balance at least the dps benchmark with number changes so all are within 10% of eachother. I mean other games can do a thing where each spec can be viable and brought to a raid pretty easily. The difference between a top tier and a bottom tier in Wow can literally just be usually just 2-10% dps difference, like say, Top class A brings 40k dps, B brings 39,998 DPS, C brings 39,900 dps, D brings 39,850 dps, etc. All the way down until F is just some class doing 36k dps. But every class would bring like a +5% group buff like +10% more intellect, +5% more crit for having a leader of the pack feral druid or hunter pet. Hunters could even bring a couple class buffs by pet instead to flex as 1 or 2 of any missing class. Demon hunters would have like 5% more magic damage done to targets they attacked, etc. Sure, there were top tiers, and definitely lots of gripes but snowcrows only lists the builds that are good for benching. There's some specs that have pretty much no one playing that it's anyone guess if they're like 15k or 34k off meta or just a boonless 32k dps class that while giving no boons or advantages over one that did 28k dps and Alak or 37k dps and ranged, was playable. In gw2, there's some randomly assembled specs out there that have 40 people in a soo won group doing 0.2k dps and 0.5k dps and you can only hope they're healers or using open world greens with eod as their first expansion, since it literally would take 56x 0.5k dps players to do the dps of one mechanist's autoattack benchmark. And you're gonna have days with 40 of those people in a soo won meta ready to report you if you say anything about a rotation. Over in other games, i think the gap between a bad player was 20k dps for a bad dps to 40k potential. In gw2, that's about a seasoned raider vs a snowcrows robot in a hectic, invulnerability one shot game. It's like having some half between heroic and mythic difficulty tier with 0 explaination as the only default difficulty of a game where most players only want to do open world content with 0.2k-1k dps checks. People go greatly below even 4k dps / 10% bench and it's beyond me why gw2 has such wide gaps in people's performance for a game that wants to cater to a very casual, open world audience with 0.5 sec gcds on a 100-250+ ms ping megaserver honestly. Half of your gcd is eaten up by only having one 'real' server, Na or EU to connect to while all the servers are just merged together illusions. It does hide the pop problem well and it never feels empty playing gw2. But dang. Some of the non mechanist eod builds just seem kinda useless/redundant. When every class is a dps that does less dps than a easier to play afk dps that provides boons, How many advantages does a 25-32k vindicator who can't dodge, alac, or quick provide over a mechanist who can always just press 4 lit buttons for 28k-35k dps and provide alac or heal or might or barrier if they want and has 2 dodges for one shot spamming content?

Oh yeah, taking a look at colorblind accessibility or color might be good. I think it'd been estimated like 4-8% of people can be colorblind to some extent, so if they're going for a casual crowd, just having some colorblind options to change each tag can be nice. Though as long as you know a tag is there, stuff like "Blue tag" and "red tag" are often used for map chats. Having more symbols like "sword symbol for event 1", and "Shield symbol for event 2" could also inadvertently maybe also help some issues, as well as colorblind support filter modes and color choices.

I've always thought it was weird that commander tags were like, Tied not to ingame achievements like lvl 300 mastery, tied to basic raid group setup, but instead getting 300G which while not surmountable and a fair new player hurdle. Can easily be circumvented not by having raid experience but just like someone spending 300g to bankstand with a tag in lion's arch or arborstone just to show they spent 300g on a tag. The mentor tag is useful but to put features like squad sorting or allow people with a tag to hijack seems gw2 only design. I remember seeing a strike and raid where the person was advertised to host a raid for content they wanted to try, and said they didn't have the ability to organize people in alacity or quickness groups(?), thus it was a raid without proper boons with 35 might but 20% alacity with 50% quickness and rng buffs, and it just fell apart into a disaster quickly. Subgroups and ready checks are almost basic encounter design and as seen from steam release, It seems like mmorpg's audience either need to be sold on mmorpgs from a non experienced perspective (But they can buy the gold for 10$, skipping the skill based checks). Or from other mmorpgs, where they might learn content but raids and strikes where squads are heavily needed can become boon disasters if someone tries to host without the ability to organize past self sorting. I think having more icons and rethinking 300g access to the tag, but instead perhaps multiple unlock methods, such as lvl 300 mastery, OR 30 completed raids OR 100 Completed strikes Or 300 completed metas while in a group or just unlocking it after 1000 hours in the game could be considerable. It's really such a basic feature and griffon already has a 250G gold sink and if they wanted to sell the basic tag for cheap, that'd be fine. People already turn gold into gemstore cosmetics all the time as well too.

For anyone wondering why steam players are so stingy. Game is literally a game where triple AAA play for life but singleplayer games are sold, sometimes GIVEN by the dozen in 1$ humble bundles, to the point i literally have all bioshocks, all assassin's creeds, dishonored 1+2, witcher 1-3, the entire tomb raider collection, GTA 5, as well as 600 random games for under 100$ total spent as well as a +200-400$ dollar profit for playing tf2 for literally 5$. Yes. You could at one point of time buy +200-400$ profit of games on steam for tf2 keys you could get trading hats and afking/idling for 10 scrap a week. I'd argue it might be debatable that for steam, players are comparing gw2 to games like Skyrim or maybe even experiences like ff14's lvl 1-60 trial with 0 "BUY EXPANSION NOW. YOU HAVE TRADING RESTRICTIONS. tHIS MOUNT will be taken away in 10 hours. But you also cannot buy any items, food, or sorting bags for 4 days or remove this ad banner taking up your screen. Old players if they downloaded steam to leave a review should try playing 1 game with a unlinked account and take a look at hew new player experience. Even the heroic 1-80 vs f2p 1-80 will feel remarkably limited and a much worse experience even if it's a cosmetic even if it's a small as a "FREE EDITION USER: PLEASE PAY TO UPGRADE" text over a product trial. Whether or not 1-80 is a lot of content on the f2p market (and imo, to be fair to gw2, it easily could be a free 50-500+ hr experience vs 4-8 hrs unique of wow's 1-20 trial and 1-20 osrs f2p with 2000-5000 hr if you want to level rc 1-99 as a sadistic ultimate iron man who can't bank and needs to drop all gear, walk to varrock, mine 28 rune essence, walk back and runecraft 1 inventory of runes. For purposes of new player retention, right or wrong, new player experiences might heavily matter to getting new players to come to a game successfully and growing legions of future players and gw2 gamers. I'd argue not something like everything for free, but maybe a 50% off pof sale on steam and for the anniversary, as well as the usual 20-40% off living worlds and the steam living world pack might be nice. We need to remember we're competing with a audience used to buy to own games forever and maybe literal 100s of games being given for free or even as epic game / unisoft entire assassin's creed packs. Also it's also a audience that gets 1-2 free games a week just for having the epic games store installed as well. (Yookalaylee, Brother:Tale of two sons, Tomb Raider, Borderlands 3, Bioshock Complete collection, Tomb Raider Triology, Darksiders 1+2, Hitman, Just Cause 4, Watchdogs 1+2, Wolf among us, etc. + 100s of unnamed indie games). Etc. We need to remember to get non gw2/mmorpg players into steam, we need to sell gw2 to people who've never played it before or want to try a mmorpg / Already have another mmorpg. Steam has routine 50-90% off triple AAA single player games (Skyrim, bioshock, dishonored 1+2, Assassin's creed), etc. Free games from the epic game store, (some VERY quite good, but not mmorpgs), as well as other mmorpgs (not buy for life but sub). We got to sell gw2's virtues like mounts or buy for life or like, try advertising them to try 15$ pof first before they dump 100$ on one of the 600 games they might not play. But it might really help to have a sale right now, or listen to their experiences to improve(?) the game, potentially, (maybe?))

If you want a expensive game, i remember getting a heart attack from mtg and warhammer. I was from hearthstone and the idea of someone spending 100$ to play a expensive deck 100 times in 1 month was atrocious. Over in magic the gathering, i met people where 'entry level' was a 100-1000$ deck with 5000-10000$+ spending over life just to play 2-3 games a month to stomp someone in world over a card game with unblockable minions or new player stompers. I think the person i played had a game shop deck specifically designed to have unblockable 5/1 and 10/1 attackers who couldn't be blocked with anti flying and kept summoning another 5/1 for each attack they made just since it crushed anyone at the shop who didn't make a deck just to counter his. That said, 100$ is still a lot to sell to a new player to get started. I remember advocating a lot for budget minded people to try 15$ pof + hot when it goes on sale and look for a anniv sale. But people kept saying "encouraging people not to buy the full 100$ game might be dishonest trolling!", so i held back. then it was "OMG, this game is 100$!?!? i am so not going to play it, that's such a horrible entry value?" So really it's a head's you troll, tails players don't join, I don't know man. But i hope they at least consider like a sale soon for it. The other anniversary sale events started a month earlier and had great stuff. There's only 1-2 times a year living worlds go on sale and that's the march sale and anniversary sale. I was as hyped as anyone else for 10 and there could still be stuff coming but man. I hope it's coming..

Yeah Eod is good for 1-2 zones with gold, and for gold farming gold and 25-30g a week is easy gold. There's not as many zones, and tbh mounts were so complete there's really not a lot of design space left for new mounts to fill other than merchant mounts. (Which might compete with leisure zone tps / pvp zone banks/ infinite salvage kits), etc. (Not that i care just like... infinite repair canisters still exist just to keep value with a patched out mechanic, etc. ) I don't think that's bad, for 30$ eod isn't a bad zone just like. Pof has like 5-7 ginormous full and lush zones, I remember crystal deserts with Ogre camps, branded, a temple of the past with kings and underground dungeons. A desolate waysland filled with castles and academies and VILLAGES dedicated to joko as well as teh free city of ammoon. Every map, meta or not has stuff to do on it, bounties, champions, champion trains, hidden easter eggs with entire zones such as the griffon quest temple and hidden temples to climb. Even the random pyramid feels huge. Eod by comparison. I think the meta unlocks are like uh.. 2-4 zones with 1-2 you use regularly. One has a fish spawn in it. the other is dragonfall you farm for decent gold and easily vendorable like 2-3g worth of jade if you want. The last zone is good. Just New khaheng is a city without npcs past the blackout meta and even the jade behemoth doesn't drop it's +30% mount chip often. It's not unknown to see 50 people trying for 40-55+ days in a row and not see it, give up. and just do favors for it. The drop rates are atrocious. But it's not a bad expansion. For 30$ it's not bad, just the others are better priorities/value for the money if one had to pick, but it's not that bad spending 50$-100$ to own all 3. I'd certainly put EOD over ls2 by far though.

From what i can see, trying to filter out some of the chaff for productive steam points. The wants: o F2p players seem to want to experience the game at their own pace, and while not minding the help of some veterans on bag spaces/food, items. etc. Seem to be annoyed when people start 'killstealing' or stalking them helping, so maybe giving them space to experience the game, but going from 2 starter f2p slots to 4 might help them. o The f2p mount trial expiring 10 hours in seems regarded as feeling "horrible!!" for new players. While being better than no mount before, seems to be a pain point that makes people quit instead of keep playing. They also want to wait for a 15$ pof sale, but the game launched with no steam sales. - Perhaps adding a 50% pof anniversary sale to steam might change reviews or incentivize new players to join and mount and convert into paying members. Or perhaps extending the raptor trial to become a 1 month trial that'd be repeatable once per year. Just to give them a taste of the mount and convert into paying members later? - Perhaps the 10 hour trial could include a skimmer and a roller beetle as well. Just to let them have more fun and show the unique ground based travel. And maybe a note when it expires maybe something going like. "We hope you enjoyed seeing these mounts. If you ever convert to being a member with the path of fire expansion, for only 15-30$ you could have these for life and enjoy these fun and versatile mounts!" o F2p can't buy many items from the auction house for botter protections. Alright. But maybe it should be relaxed a bit for leveling food so they could get xp buffs and sorted bags so they could sort their inventory. o The f2p game has a unremovable "PURCHASE EXPANSION NOW!" tag in the top left for the f2p experience, which while making it easier to purchase, could really use a click to hide option. At least the first time each login. it really makes the f2p experience feel much more in your face than heroic edition. o Perhaps f2p could also remove f2p restrictions by buying 5-10$ worth of gems or items, etc? So that way, even if someone is just playing the 1-80 game or waiting for a sale, they could clear their f2p trial restrictions waiting for a pof/ls sale by buying some gems, and then waiting for the expansions to go on sale, instead of losing a potentially paying member. o One common complaint seems to be wvw and pvp not having updates for years as well as raids/dungeons. Perhaps it might be time to perhaps look at bugfixing or adding a new dungeon or some wvw/pvp improvements? For example, condi classes can't hurt the frequent immobile object classes of gargoyle heads over power classes. But for game mechanics, why should one game mace attack do 0 damage to another mace attack just because one is condi and one is power? Who cares if a gargoyle trap head 'bleeds' from being smashed in the face with a mace or not. You could rename bleed 'rust' or 'puncturing impact' on dungeon objects at least so half the specs in the game damage them. 🙂 It could also be really fun to take a look at the dungeon/raiding experience to keep it up to par with other games. Though.. 11th year is the charm(?) (Limited updates in 9 years past launch) Once again, all these points are made to find and filter the commonly listed pain points of the game to figure out how we could experience them, with the intention of trying to helpfully interpret steam player feedback to make a better game as fans, etc.

yeah yeah yeah. For 30$ i don't really feel scammed and it still had a 1 day long story. It wasn't bad and it was a okay deal for 30$ and the moneymaking zones are actually boring but great. But the other 2 expansions, if one was on a tactical spending cash based tier list. Pof/Hot on sale (15$ or 50$ collection), > 10$-12$ Ls4 1-6 (Great story, just as much story, Zombie man was actually a great villain for the few chapters he was in. Purple Dragon boy has a great meta and skyscale is a pain but comes with the collection and a 4-40 day grind.) >= 2$ ls 3:3 if you want access to easy ascended 200 berry ring/backpack/trinkets for each character + 500 berry aquabreather (loot 50 berries a alt a day in 5 mins), >= 30$ EoD (Buy for specs/moneymaking, really. ) EoD isn't bad, it's just that pof/hot were better objectively to me in story, fun mounts unlocks, gamechanging gameplay alterations (mounts pretty much covered all of it.). And while 30$ doesn't break the bank and i think it's still something work unlocking, it's probably a mostly moneymaking/spec unlocking expansion vs gliding/mounts/story expac for me. The benefits of pof/hot change your game and how you move (+100-300% speed mounts, flight, epic story, avoiding death from fall damage with gliding, potential lean boosters for combat escapes with mastery, fun travel, gorgeous zones, flight). EoD just makes you 25-30g a week and has fishing and +25% rested xp and +1k-2.35k hp with jade bot cores. and maybe +20-30% mount regen energy). It has unlocks. They're handy to have and worth buying but i'd always put 30$ eod after 15$ Pof/Hot for me. But 50$ collection ain't bad.

Honestly in terms of game development, i imagine a change as simple as this could probably from a coding perspective, likely just literally be commissioning a jpeg design with a color layer that could be recolored with any colors. We'd probably be talking a color fill with a line art overlay here, and then just changing the jpegs. Probably like literally 5-50$ of art assets without commercial bloat. It'd probably literally be a bigger concern about where to add the npc to sell it than the art unless it's like spaghetti coded so each commander acts differently etc. That said, i could see some decent areas like just making the icon a default part of like the commander tags, and allowing you to switch between modes with a little small 1 cm "v" like arrow to just change commander tags. You could probably easily make one for ⚔️swords to attack, 🛡️a flat colored shield to defend, maybe a 💥colored explosion to mark metas / fights / champions, as well. It shouldn't be too much labor, maybe bar, you could add a quick toggle to swap between the stances like /sword, /shield, /attack or a little toggle menu. But 300G for each would just be dumb imo.

I mean to be honest. One of the major parts i got was trying to see a bit of both sides. To many players, a new mmorpg launch release with expansions is in the mmorpg market, usually dominated by power creeping all the past content (Mainstream potential 4-10x population by estimated numbers WoW/ff14), where only the latest expansions tend to matter. In eod, i played it and while the story for being 2x as much as pof/hot wasn't like the worst by mmorpg standards. And certainly not something i felt bad about 30$ over, it did seem a bit lackluster to the 15$ hot/pof expansions which seemed to be better eras of Gw2. And honestly if i was looking at a bang for buck metric, in terms of story delight, i'd probably put the fun of ls4 Joko + 5 living world zones + currencies for skyscale and ascended trinkets (even if slower than ls3:3), of the 10-12$ ls4 collection over a 30$ eod by story/skyscale and ascended unlocks alone. However, eod comes with expansions and a few easy money making.. zones, er. zone. I don't felt that burned out for 30$, i think it's brand new but. To be honest. All i do in Eod is pick up weekly items from arborstone, logout for a 25% xp bonus. And if i could get rested xp anywhere, i'd probably be in the pvp lobby due to like pc heat being a legit concern in the 100 F region im in. (Pc fan get's hot and starts overheating if i left graphics on high unless i use my 16 gb pc to go on low. Cooling vents and everything. 0 heat problems in most mmorpgs and even AAA games. Gw2 causes tremendous heat and seems poorly optimized but still a good game.) That said, Eod feels like, it's only just released a few months ago. So adding more to it is certainly expected. I hope that it still adds 1-2 more expansion zones and maybe feels more full when 2-5 new living world zones could be added if the game's future remained as ambitious as Ls4 adding a new zone for each area. But.. As is. It's not a bad deal for 30$, but pof and hot are great steals at 15$ sales and arguably most of the collection would be spent in pof/hot zones if it wasn't the +25% xp in and doing soo won once a week month to charge up favor 4 Stones. And occasionally doing blacklight meta in hopes of a +30% griff energy chip only to be disappointed each day when it doesn't drop for 40 days in a row.

There's actually some high demand for like heal mechs and alacity mechs and heal alacity mechs. And as everyone who raids know, you practically need to dedicate just like 2-3/5 slots of every 5 man into someone or a group providing 100% alacity ( 1 alacity mechanist or 2x viper alac renegades without boon duration runes and ritualists/celestial +- boon duration runes to hit 100%), or you could just take 1 mechanist. Then you take a quickbrand or healquickbrand or some other class for the quickness, then they self provide some might as well as personal quickness so in some really terrible pugs the quickness and might are really spotty because they might assume some classes are auto providing it. The content still clears, just in both pugs and first challenge mode clears, there's often only one class that's used in what seems to average to about 50-70% of all use in all raid groups, challenge or otherwise. It's just a incredibly favorited class that often is highly rewarded for fractions of effort put in, while providing extremely valuable boons and practical front loaded raid dps vs static no movement mechanics. Right off the top of my head, i remember a boss fight where 30-50% of the time was spent in a raid running away from instant kill pillars that would mean a class with 1200 range could have 20-40% more uptime in a fight than the melee, who weren't always able to have golem dps apply into practical dps. Torment by design loses 40% of dps for condition based classes if a target moves, and bosses often have mechanics where they become invulnerable, while simultaneously featuring one shots ability, deleted platforms, or mechanics that will kill you for tunnel visioning a rotation or crash your dps for tunnel visioning the bosses. It's just a lot of risk for very minimal potential reward. Do any rotation mistake to stay alive or take space to do a mechanic and now none of your mallyx torment pulses are applying and if the bosses move, there's -40% of your torment dps gone. If the boss isn't the size of a skyscraper, there's 4k of your citadel combardment or vindicator dps gone from just small vs large hitbox issues the building sized 20x20 golem vs 2x2 raid boss might have for cheesed golem hitboxes benches vs raid boss dps gaps. Of course they can be avoided, but i think the reason snowcrows removed their 'large hitbox' section was they realized how misleading it really was for golem results vs practical and reliable results. But nearly everything mechanist does applies directly into raid dps. it's not movement dependent, it bursts through 5 sec invulnerabilty phases, it has very front loaded damage, 1200 range, doesn't really have any mechanics punish it past reflects, it also has a +25% movement speed/teleport and doesn't need to even use healing ability keybinds to heal since it's a mass signet build. It just have everything, without costs. While every other class has 1 thing, with 2-5 downsides. But Gw2 itself has a very hyper fixated gap for a arguably, very casual focused game. People will argue that gw2 isn't meant to be intensive, but specs or classes that the average overworlder is only using to deal 5-20% of their potential spec's dps in open world just seems insane even coming from other mmorpgs. You often had like 60% bad rotation vs 80% average rotation vs 100% dps rotation gaps. Some of the optimizing was for as little as 10% dps. In Wow that'd look like a bad player doing 20k-25k dps to a good player doing 35k-40k dps. In guild wars 2, you have Soo Won metas where 40 people are under 4k dps and the top 10 dps are all 10 afk dps or support mechanists in the 20k-35k range and the first non mechanist is a 13k-25k dps player, at best. I'm not actually saying overly making it accessible against the masses is fine, it's just like a huge bummer to hear 8/9 of the classes you play, especially for a 10 year old game that limits you to 5 character slots without 10$ purchases that aren't currently on sale, that it really feels like a bummer to know you're putting in effort to compete with people who may not even be at the screen or pass 5-20k dps on others. And i did like 0.1% dps parse WoW raiding with a spec that bursted 600% haste at times, you didn't have to worry about attack abilities clipping each other, timing pulses or not having dps clip, abilities that did different amounts of damage based off if the boss moved or not. Hitbox issues, weapon swaps. To say that gw2 system doesn't feel like a orphaned system that wanted to be more skill intensive and rewarding. Yet decided to take away the reward. Just seems like a paradox. The players will play what's in front of them, but it really feels jarring having more effort for 0% more reward and watching videos where other classes are one shot just to play elementalists and mesmers as the top non mech dps, only doing 40-50% of the mech's dps while losing 100% of hp and dying to mechanics the mechanists soak with their barriers and survive with 20% hp through. It just make it feel like 8/9 classes, skill isn't rewarded. But then why did they pick a 0.5 gcd vs 1.6 gcd system in a game with 100-250+ ms ping megaservers(?). It's the fastest gcd system by far on one of the highest ping mmorpgs. While Wow has 1.6 sec gcds with ability quing on 30-70 ms ping and gw2 has 0.5 on 100-250+ ms, it feels like a strange design. There's all these design choices designed to make rotations punishing for other classes and each other spec provide only 1 boon or heal to provide many. Yet one of the most dominant classes isn't the one that dominates a dps golem on snowcrows with a warning label it might work on most bosses. But one that performs well at many roles while not really being punished outside of some pvp, while the eles get to explode to 0% hp while the mechanists yawn with 20% hp not even noticing the ele one shot mechanics as they barrier and autoregen health through it. It's not that mechanist is a sin to exist it's just like the other 8/9 classes, potentially 10 years old, in a game with only 5/9 character slots and birthday gifts go. People kinda forget the 7-9 mechanist meta kinda came after the "class diversity patch" which.. aimed at improving comp variation by taking away unique boons like banners and nerfing catalyst. But i've been hearing lots of warrior mains who used to have a 1/10 slot in every raid lament they made their mains, likely with 300-400G and 1000s of hours invested, and were just left with nothing to do and nothing unique. And while bladesworn rips through a immobile golem, for 10% more dps, i've heard it gets lot more 10-40% raid dps penalties for mobility, boss movement, extremely demanding rotations with raid mechanics that could easily lead to either failing. (A. tunnel rotation, die to instakill boss mechanic, or B. tunnel on boss mechanics, do no dps. etc. ) Honestly, to me, it just really feels like gw2 really isn't sure what it wants to be. Is it a skill based mmorpg with 0.5 s gcds that need to be executed perfectly with 100-250 ms ping vs it's 1.6-2.5s gcg 30-70 ms ping competitors? Okay. Is it nerfing the ele 20% again, okay. Is it all about boons to have class diversity, but only 1-2 classes bring them all, and often better uptimes as well with better dps. Okay. Is it all about making a accessible game, and opening up accessibility to the content, but only making it available to 1/9 class in a game that doesn't give enough slots to build all 5/9 characters without 10$ character slots or deleting birthday gifts? Okay, but like.. are they going to like.. bring it to all the other 8/9 classes, or do stuff like standardize skill cap vs skill floor. (narrow 10%-100% dps ranges down to like, 60%->100% dps floors vs ceilings, 2k -> 20k dps auto attacks, adjust damage loaded abilities but keep the dps the same so people still bench 30-40k, etc.) It's just really unclear what they want. Like they said they wanted more class diversity in the patch that made class diversity go a warrior, some eles, some mechanists and a bit of every class into 7-9 rifle mechs and benched the warriors or made eles quit. I'm not even sure what thiefs provide because i haven't seen a deadeye or spectre in content ever. Necros have open world afk farming and champion soloing specs and healscourge on boneskinner so that's fine. But there's so much class flavor and so much of class balance seems designed into making one class as stacked as possible and then +20% buffing it or nerfing it with patches that change it from.. 35k dps to 35k dps... And changing the high end 37k to 38k-40k somehow, based on the video which doesn't seem explained.

Honestly for Wow a lot of people don't spend subbed for the months they aren't playing so its more like paying for the months that were worth it. But I think ff14 raised It's trial to lvl 60 of 80. 30/80 in wow is literally only the first 4-8 hours of the game with chat disabled and the starter 60% speed mount. It's not there to give you a major experience and you can't even talk to other players first unless they specifically have a third party addon to talk to other f2p players with same addon. Which is niche at best. That said, I think playing multiple games both lets you know what are strengths in one game and weaknesses in the other. Gw2 for instance has smooth to use instant mounts, but kinda choppy lag and horrible cpu/raid lag optimization where leaving players on lags or heats the game. While WoW you could have like 200 people in gear and nameplates at 120 fps and 0 heat or input lag but it'd hardly matter since wow has 1.6 sec gcds to gw2's 0.5 gcds. Gw2 shines on open worlds and hearts and metals attracting big swarms without kill 20 spider quests. But WoW for better or worse usually has those quests with big flashy +23000 exp flashes per turn in and has you stack 3-9 at once. So its more like kill 20 spiders, collect 15 guts, loot 12 field rations, throw 6 buckets of water to put out a fire, rescue and escort a npc, play a sudoku chest mini game to unlock it. Look for hidden chests for xp rewards, etc. All goes well until the 14/15th spider guts drops all 14 in the first 20 and the last leg never drops. I think all games have their perks and pros and cons, but it's up to someone if they want to spend 15$ for the months they play and lapse or 50-500$ on 5 to 9/9 or 50 character slots, 30$ unbreakable volatile tools, 5-50$ bag space per character, etc. We could beat it to death. But f2p 20 in f2p wow is a trial to make sure the game runs. 1-80 gw2 f2p is potentially a full game with chat but second class experience without mounts, only 2 bag slots. And not much ability to trade for the first 4 days. And you lose the mount after 10 hours which is a #feelsbad moment for f2ps as I listen in-game and on map chat. Maybe at least 2-4 weeks of use per year for the trial might be great and a 50% off pof sale or a 50$ eod + pof bundle for players on steam perhaps?

70% of something might possibly be worth more than 100% of nothing and a potential negative review or turned off player from not buying it or being charged more without sales unless they do a sale later though. unless the steam page is literally only to serve as a advert for the game that guides people to the anet launcher.

Yeah it was nice they put the collection on sale, but the complete lack of any sale yet for a 10 year anniversary was surprising. Many new players seemed hyped up for gw2's big release in hopes of what we thought was advertising. But what they wanted or expected seemed to be regional pricing, steam deck support (399$ 16 gb ram gaming tablet), and guild wars 2 launch sales. (100$ entry is a lot to ask for a new player who only sees 2-4k gw2 steam players playing for a 10 year old title vs 10k player 8$ witcher, 105k player f2p tf2, 23k player 10$ skyrim, etc. ) Theoretically, with Living world on sale for 20-40% off with 20% off gem sales, the best possible theoretical price could have been 24-32$, and then 15$ + 30$ for the full expacs for 45$, You could have gotten the full gw2 collection with 69-75$ spent vs 100$ for all content, If there were any sales right now. (Steam anniversaries are some of the only few times a year that living seasons tend to go on sale. [bar march sales]. It's really odd that we haven't seen any sales when most anniversaries started a month earlier, and lasted a month, no less. ). The lack of sales is listed as a major pain point for new players trying the game and told if they buy just 1, they might not have the ability to buy the living seasons later on steam directly. As it's only sold in a 100$ collection instead of a 40$ addon that requires Pof+EoD to purchase. And no 50$ eod + pof bundle for off sale purchasers is offered, only 30$ + 30$. So it's more expensive for them to start and a audience that while eager to try more games, is much more experienced to getting AAA games for free or 50-80% off on sales such as 80% off witcher 3 for 8$ vs 40$ or 75% off skyrim, 12.5$ vs 50$ etc.

Ehh, i'd rather have a character slot as a new player when there's 9 classes and 5 x 3 personal story branches. Honestly, i'd rather have at least 9 free slots with expansions, or at least each one giving 2 with purchase if it's a 100$ model but i mean. 50-100$ buy to play, 10$ character slots, 5$ haircuts, 30$ unbreakable tools, 5-15$ mount skins and 5-10$ salvage kits qol is the model i suppose. Still nice they at least give us like 20 leveling tomes a month though. Character slots for me, imo, are MUCH more useful than 250. if i run over 250, i just use a character as a 70 slot bank that can easily hold 250 x 70 of whatever resource overflows. if it's tradable i sell it, if it's 500 berries.. Just use one bank slot. If it's 2000 dragonite ore or eternal ice, the alt has 8x 250 stacks of those. A slot is so much better for me with packmule inventory management. But adding both probably wouldn't hurt either too. I mean.. if someone is spending 100$ + 30$. For a game that well. advertises itself on consumer friendliness, it's not like it directly costs money and it gives a taste, but i know we're just dreaming haha. XD

Yeah, a 50% off sale for at least path of fire or a "Return of living seasons week. Each week, 1 highlighted chapter each week will be free each week, up to a whole year rotating between each episode to welcome new players back into the game!" like last week, or a living season highlight where perhaps, each player could choose 1 chronological season unlock per 2 weeks they played as a login reward or at least on the 28th day login chest could be nice. I mean some might call it greedy, but someone would need to literally play for 5 years straight to get content other players got for free. Not lapsed, Consecutively logging in for 5 years for 40-50$ of content. It'd at least trickle feed and might even invest more players into the game to come back at least? but who knows. At least i hope a sale comes at the very least, i mean the only 1 time a living world goes on sale is usually in march and i already have ls4 but i've been waiting to buy icebrood and the rest of non ls3:3 forever just to see if it was worth the wait.

Kinda in a summary, in a sense. I don't think rewarding entry level classes are bad, but mechanist is often in a tuned spot where 98% of players playing complex builds don't or on average don't outperform it. Thus making it feel like those classes feel unrewarding to play by comparison. Even for a game like starcraft where you can have a player at 200-400 apm and another player at 20-50 apm, a massive x20 input difference, you don't have players doing 10% the dps with their marines unless they click 20x more buttons per second to chamber each bullet and stim each marine individually or deal 10% damage. Thus i feel like for feedback, Mechanist by comparison almost feels like a game of competitive chess where a person is hooked up to a robot that can use autocalculate to 'play' the game for them, often dramatically outperforming most average players, and even sometimes for all that work, it's someone trying to compete just to break even with a afk dps in practicality which is a horrible feeling for the other player. The build also has many portions that translate directly into raid dps very well with 1200 range, and in the intro what's neat is the first 2-10 seconds, the meter isn't reading 35.5k, but 50-100k first few second burst damage. Which seems to indicate the build which is also bursty, also likely does even better in raid scenarios where say, a boss goes invincible for 5 seconds, a condi has to re ramp 5k to 10k to 20k to 30k dps to re apply all their dots. The front loaded dps of the mechanist would probably allow them to burst with all the dps in loaded cds (Pausing the timer on the first 2 press has a 1/10th second snapshot of '160k dps' at the first ability use at 0:09, stabalizing to '60k' dps with 130k damage dealt in under 2 seconds. taking about 7 seconds at 350k damage before it falls under 50k burst dps.) The numbers are of course, not sustained, But this probably is why it translates so well into raid mechanics where condi is slowly ramping up 5-15 seconds of torments. Because it can burst for about 50k dps for the first 7 seconds of combat, (and this is post 'patch/ post nerf' by the way), it seems likely what's going on is mechanist has dps that very easily transfers into real mechanics, while other classes might only be good at hitting a immobile target that does not move or dramatically vary a rotation or have invulnerability phases that clip condi's +5% edge lead with -90-50% torment clips on quick adds kills, or lose 40% of their golem's dps if a boss moves (as it goes 16k to 10k). So balancing on a golem vs raid logs might be also what's leading to the performance gap. Especially since many challenging gw2 raid mechanics often require full attention on both screen and rotation. And being able to press a rotation that basically amounts to 4 buttons off cd makes it easier to do mechanics. In the same video above, there's a scene where golem dps translates into raids. The top dps are 3-5 mechanists once more, but if you take a look, the highest engineer is pulling 35k to 38k to 40k dps. The highest non engineer is a mesmer pulling 20k-25k dps while routinely losing 75% of their health in encounters while the boss is frequently moving out of range likely dipping torment ticks for the revenant if mallyx is used. There's even a spot at 2:16 where the elementalist Bajo, just dies and is one shotted and downed by a mechanic that leaves all the other players 20% alive, potentially indicating they might have major survivalbility issues surviving basic raid aoe the mechanists seem to also be facetanking(?), as well as frequently losing 75% of their hp to unknown mechanics that aren't even hurting the mechanists. I don't play a mech, but is their barrier really that strong that not only is the rotation easier, but they can ignore the one shots that are meant to kill other classes or just mesmers/squishies in general(?). It seems like for other classes, there's more than rotation, there seems to be parts when paying attention the piano rotation can kill you, looking away from a mechanic can kill you, and it feels like of all the mmorpgs, gw2 has one of the most fluid combat systems but punishes it the most and one of the most commonly overperforming builds is a class that afks it. But a real question is. Do you buff all the other classes to simplify the rotations or buff performance gaps / auto attacks / dps loss abilities in general or nerf the top class to balance, or leave it as is so 90% of players feel a soft urge to all switch to one of 9 classes in the game to provide 70-90% of a 10 man's 7-9 mech, 1-2 firebrand/druid raid comp?

I mean, of all the times, perhaps a launch if there's a time for price wars, might be considerable? Or well, at least a 50% off path of fire for new players might be good, or a return to living worlds. There's still until the 28th right? They've made it free before, maybe something good is coming. we're getting freebies. I mean. If price is a concern, tanking prices to maybe just hope to gain early steam players, maybe taking a loss on early players to gain later players and more steam awareness could be possible right(?). But not low enough to encourage hackers. I guess one thing is cheap accounts could spur more afk farming and login accounts. So you can't give it away completely free, but maybe things like starter achievements to earn untradable 10 slot bags, perhaps the removal of 2 bag slots to 4 for free to play players, perhaps lifting f2p restrictions if they spend at least 5-10$ in the game without any credit card fraud issues occuring, etc could help the experience. Maybe also remove the blazing unremovable "BUY EXPANSION NOW" in red, (or make it transparent) not to make it feel like a blatant trial but go away on click after one click each login, and feel more welcome to the game. Making the living world pack seperately purchasable for steam players or a "Buy to complete" type package might be good. As someone mentioned, binding of issac has warnings and notice you can only buy it if you own a prior dlc for follow on dlc+. Maybe they could figure that out and offer a living season bundle, or figure a way out? Gw2 is still a game people could spend 100-300$ on bag slots, unbreakable tools, 5-15$ mount skins, chairs, gliders, outfits, world boss teleports, 10$ character slots, 10$ shared inventory slots, 5$ haircuts (Jeeze), maybe it is freemium... but.. you can still play for life on 15$ comfy if you don't like.. Compare yourself to the person who has 300 bag spaces and spends 50$ on haircuts? (Why isn't there like a 10$ option to unlock haircuts or tmogs for life tho. )

There's also some minor things like with subscriptions you can binge, like say, unsub 11 months, sub 1 month, which the expansion purchases are kinda meant to tie in. Normally it's 60$ expac + 15$ sub, so 15$ for path of fire is a good deal. But i think it's kinda like, self counterproductive, people would tell new players, 'NO! DON'T listen to that troll, if you don't spend 100$, you'll never get the full gw2 story! buy the whole thing or not at all and don't listen'. So people wanted to buy the full experience, Then it was 60$ + 15$/month wow and 50-100$ full gw2. Then people started talking about how like haircuts are 5$ a pop, mounts are 5-15$, unbreakable volatile tools are 30$ and also give more loot, faster harvests or extra mats over the f2p tools, WoW gave away shadowlands free (honestly probably a long term greed move more than charity lmao. long term returns they know.), and you know the longer you play each game. The more you see and appreciate the aspects each game does well or the most basic stuff. (The only way to get a appreciation for a LOL unlimited haircuts, unlimited style changes, changing character's haircuts on whim and unlimited tmog on whim is to kinda take it away.) Nobody is going to rave about like getting 60-120 fps in a game with old graphics but when you go 30 to 60-120. After so long in Gw2 while i wasn't playing either game for fps i had some fun spazzing around my camera with 120 fps just jerking it and seriously going. "wait, if gw2's inputs are faster, why the crap was it never much optimized better to be less cpu/heat hoggy?" Still there's both great games, Gw2 leans more into, do random tasks which feels like freedom. But Wow has the Kill 20 squirrels, look 8 squirrel ribs, have quest dialog. (even if people skip it, there's usually a little quip for each quest. Such as a infamous Grizzly hills questline where the townsmen you're helping turn out to be werewolves, followed by arriving back at camp, and eating some seeds as a snack, starts a quest doling out 23k exp while you get a warning they were a druid's rapidly growing seeds. And that unless you use the outhouse immediately, or wish to have a internal garden you need to get them out asap with a "visit outhouse" 23k xp quest lmao. As far as cost goes, it's normally easily much more expensive to stay in wow. but people have fair points. In terms of 15$ a month vs say people who pay 100-300$ for 3 cable channels or NBA/football. 15$ a month isn't much of a budget, but you want games to have content. While gw2 can let you play all the content forever, some parts of content like dungeons (major in many mmoprgs), have gone like 9 years without a new dungeon added. And while fractals are decent, it seems like a lot of the maps are re used or recycled(?). While even if a Wow's expac was relatively terrible, the sub money is intended on paper to pay for 5-7 new zones every 2-3 years, 7-20 dungeons, 3-4 new raids with 4-10 bosses each, 3-4 mythic+ seasons, usually like 5-20+ free mount skins in a game with 1000s. (Though they all fly the same as a 2x speed skyscale with 0 endurance). But the minor cons are yeah they're more stock driven. Mounts have 1.6s cast times (unless druid/flight form), and while they add tons of content, they also tended to obsolete it rapidly. (hence the appeal of playing classic servers to experience content without a lvl +20-30 player instantly one shotting the 10-15 raid boss fight in 2 seconds for a mount drop.). But yeah, imo, it can both be reasonable to spend 100-300$ on gw2 or Wow over like a period of 3 years. Though with wow, you can often just binge play it 2-4 months once a expac and be fine just like you can wait 12 months, sub for a streaming service, watch 10 hrs of mandalorian, and unsub while you wait for the next episode/season to come out.

Yeah, honestly arborstone is a good hub upgraded but i wish the rested xp buff wasn't tied to the place but just global so you could still use other places or the lower computer heat zones. A +25% rested xp after unlocking arborstone for wherever you go, (or at least major cities/inns), would be nice. That and the "Im Rich, you know" and "more violets, less violence" npcs could really moved down to fill up more space, perhaps the center or the training hall challenge.

And when a greed and stockholder driven game gives out 60$ retail valued worth of expansions and level boost for free shadowlands minus the 15$/month sub bait, that technically includes all past content for free, sub is used theoretically for development with at least 7-20 new dungeons per 2-3 years, a new expansion on the line adding absorbed flight hoping to siphon gw2 mount players, as well as even giving the Griffon flight abilities to the dragon race dracthyr evokers. And the wonderful charity of gw2 now has to compete with 100$ of gw2 for a complete collection vs 105$ to play wow 3 months becoming 15$-42$.. That makes it a really bad spot. Blizzard isn't lowering their prices to be q charity but technically you can get near 200 spots in that game. Haircut without 5$ fees, tmog to your hearts end without cashshop or transmutation charge limits, unlock mount skins, have new dungeons ever year to raid and do mythic+. But then eventually run into issues post honeymoon in both games like Wow deliberately leaving 100s of wow servers dead instead of merging to sell transfers, or gw2 still having unbreakable 30$ gem store volatile tools with higher profit, very limited free mount skins vs 100-1000s of wow (to the point mount collecting 1000s for toys is A thing), smooth 60-120 fps vs heating 30-60 even on 16 gb ram (no cpu bottlenecks). Wow isn't offering those discounts because it suddenly feels like being a charity. Its to get people to go "Wow! WoWs free. And only 15$ to start with free mounts. Free past content and frequent dungeon updates and raids and comes bundled with wow classic. But you're saying gw2 usually goes on sale and hasn't yet? Hmm. Wow already made shadow lands free, I might as well play that etc over 100$ to play a 3k steam game" The twitch exposure does some good stuff. It lets people know the content exists but even for the 100 fractals it seems like maps are frequently re used with the same jumping puzzles and zones, just with different mob combinations. Wow isn't trying to be a charity. Its baiting people with a cheaper upfront cost and hype of a new expansion when it's freshest since it wants to make more money over time. Greed driven or not, how do you sell a 7x more expensive to start product that has gone on sale, but hasn't to a new player getting wow for free? Wow is trying to run gw2 out of business by offering a impossible deal.. FREE tm expac with 15$ sub. Vs 100$ buy in. But if players only buy 15-30$ eod/pof. They can't buy the ls collection on steam making it heavily feel like a 100$ buyin for a game they don't even know. New players might generously perceive gw2 as "dead/dying" as 3k steam players, 10 years old, and if we want to retain our players, it might be a major time to reconsider the new player options. Would it hurt to slash gw2's steam prices to a 50% off pof sale to get people in, and buy to complete model. Perhaps a return to living world where all living seasons could be unlocked each week, or each 1-2 weeks, there could be a rotated free episode on cycle. Using the model for rewarding player retention or pay to have it now model, etc? Last I saw, living worlds used to go for free and return, even if single chapters at a time. I've been watching forever and I haven't seen any ls2-3 or Iceblood go free, ever these last few months.

Right and like. Gw2 can easily be a game you can spend 0$, 15$, 100%, or even 300-500$ on 90 to 300 bag slots, 50 character slots, 20 shared inventory slots. Cosmetic mounts for each character. Numerous salvage o matics and unbreakable tools sure to someone who spent 60$ on wow and got all the mounts and lost access to the game. But like come on. That's at least not a game where bill gates walks into a raid, spends 7000$ on the nukinator and gets a p2w cash armor set that gives him 10x more stats than the raid boss and entire team combined, and then puts in a p2w Diablo immortal loot key that gives like 500x more loot for spending 20$ to raid a easy dungeon than a f2p. You can still spend 100-300$/+ on either game but bill gates isn't buying more stats than you. A raid team on lfg... Maybe.. But I'm a person who likes to win my achievements. The idea of paying someone else to beat the game for you is like paying money to Not play the Game. But to some. That is "winning", but a hollow one, no?

Imo, at least to me, as a tactical consumer I think the main three primary models for mmorpgs are o sub based (wow/ff14. You can unlock 100-1000s of mount skins for free, change hairstyles for free, buy cheap 30+ slot bags, there are no breakable tools since unlimited is default, you don't have to buy character slots, you start with like 10-20+ or unlimited per server. ) o freemium (no stats are sold, but if I pay 30$, I can have unbreakable tools, haircuts cost 5$, I can spend 30$-50$ to go 90 to 300 bag spaces in a freemium, purchase mount skins for 5-15$ but they are either unobtainable or rare without, etc). o free to play, Pay to win ( f2p players are explicitly kill fodder and skill is not necessary required. I can buy cash shop gear tanks for 700% hp, 500% dps, 300% range. And I can miss 6 times in a row, take 6 point blank shots from a more skilled f2p, but instantly kill them with one shot in 7 landing with 500%/700% remaining and kill 30 players who then leave the game.) Imo, gw2 is a decent player model but in terms of spectrum, my personal definition would be not p2w (pvp stats aren't sold, ascended can be obtained for 6-40g a piece vs 1700-3500g legendaries and traded.) But it could very well hit a mixture of free to play, buy once, own forever, and sold tools/haircuts/mount skins/backback space freemium models. Sub games can definitely be more expensive easily over time and 15$ pof + 10$ ls4:4 as a budget minded consumer is a great price. But steam only has 2 options. 30$ each or 100$ No sale. It could easily change with a sale. But when the new player hears they might want 100$ of all expacs, +30$ if they want full bag space, 30$ for unbreakable tools that also give more loot, no regional pricing. And that you have to earn legendary armor but 8/9 lfg raid groups are raid sellers or no win guaranteed training groups. It can be easy to see why looking at all the 100-300$ of qol instead of just being happy with 15$ of pof or no sub can give people major sticker shock. It doesn't help either when you'd argue the wow mmorpg looks cheaper on paper but longer term as 3 months of wow costed 105$ (60$ box + 45$ sub). Includes all past expacs for free (but obsoleted). So instead of seeing it as a long term deal, they see 0$ + 15$ sub for wow and 100$ for gw2's complete single player story content, 30-60$ on if they want unbreakable tools / 10 character slots, 5-15$ for mount skins. 5-30$ on salvage o matics. And the competition on steam for buy once play forever are literally 2.5$ past single player games like skyrim/portal/witcher. It's a harder sell to do 100-300$ than 15$ a month and when the competition makes it free it just becomes a way harder sale. Gw2 is a good game but players are scared of the 100-300$ sticker shock over trying it for free or being happy on 15-25$ pof +ls4 gameplay. Much less for a 10 year old game that they don't know or might not have played before. Plus gw1 for better or worse still competes with itself as another buy once Own forever model with even less shop.