Sweetbread.3678

The espec thing would be nice, but other than that the only thing they really need to do is make it SUPER obvious that /wiki exists right off the bat. Like put in some loading screen hints or something, that's really all that it would take.

The issue has always been that active defenses, cleansing, mobility, boon strip etc. don't scale off of stats. If you're on a class like Mesmer or Thief, there's pretty much 0 incentive into actually gearing for survivability, because you're just going to be invisible, invulnerable, or uncatchable anyway. The way conditions work leads to a similar issue with condi specs. There's almost no point in investing into condi duration, because everything being a binary, all-or-nothing, full cleanse that'll remove 30 stacks of bleed just as easy as 1 means nothing will ever really get to stack that high. So we end up in this stupid situation where the game's damage over time effects have to be tuned to do burst damage and/or be infinitely spammable to counteract instantly being wiped out by cleanses and it just turns into this dumb af spam vs spam arms race between them, but then also condi specs only need to invest in 1 stat to effectively do damage in pvp because they're tuned to not rely on expertise or duration. The flow and feel of this game's combat is amazing, but so many of its actual mechanics and systems are so beyond terribly designed that it's literally impossible for the game to have decent pvp balance. At best it'll just be a rotation of cheesy terribly designed rock vs. cheesy terribly designed paper vs. cheesy terribly designed scissors, depending on how they want to "shake up the meta" for that particular patch cycle.

What thought process? You seem to actively refuse to develop any sort of problem solving skill or patience, rely on the wiki instead of taking the time to organically figure stuff out/learn (spoilers: solving puzzles, makes you better at solving puzzles), and then blame the game for not holding your hand enough. The reason you like ESO so much is that literally everything in that game is just "GO TO THE CIRCLE AUTOMATICALLY DRAWN ON YOUR MAP"; at least GW2 gives you the option to figure it out on your own and then has the wiki available for those that can't.

It's not the entirety of the issue, but it's definitely true that having a spec with an innate +35% modifier and a kittenload of condi damage baked into it's espec mechanic is going to inevitably affect the balancing of all of the condi weapon choices it shares with Weaver and Cata. Like we've literally already seen this happen with Hammer so I don't know why anyone's debating it. Yeah, I'd argue that Tempest has the worst trait design of the three specs. Honestly, they probably should've shaved the 5% off of Transcendent Tempest, because the only thing balancing out Tempest's modifiers was the risk of Singularity being interrupted. With Tempestuous Aria at only 5% it's now probably a functional dps loss to take it over Harmonious Conduit's interrupt immunity on most fights and that screws with the whole risk/reward paradigm of the entire spec.

Nah the issue was super obviously the traitline. The weapon was only overperforming on Tempest and Tempest's bloated trait modifiers had already got Hammer nerfed for every other spec. Tempest is by far the easiest Ele spec; it basically having +35% damage for simply existing has always dumb, but that kitten became just straight-up absurd once SotO dropped and it started holding Cata and Weaver's weapon choices hostage.

It looks decent on paper, but it's so slow and clunky that I can't see ever using it except *maybe* on Hammer Cata in pvp? They basically took the one way to immob lock somebody into a staff aoe at range and turned it into a slow af melee gap closer that's impossible to land unless the target is already immobilized...

We'd use common sense and not hold the entire game's balance hostage to cVirt because of an artificially overtuned 1000% optional mode that only rewards a title over regular ToF cm?

Or at the very least give the trait a built in way to actually apply vulnerability. Something like: "Chilling a burning target fractures their defenses inflicting bonus damage and vulnerability", on top of what it already has. GW1 had so much fun with stuff like https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Steam that combined elemental effects and played off of thermodynamics and physics. It would be great to see some of that synergy/creativity brought into the GW2 Ele traitlines, most of which are super partitioned and one-note atm.

They should probably just rename Powerful Aura to Mirror of Ice or Icy Prism, then it'd at least be thematically appropriate. My dream patch would have something like Sphere Specialist getting reworked into something like "Comboing your jade sphere fields transmutes auras you've applied. Transmuting auras increases the duration of boons applied by jade sphere by 1 second."; or maybe something similar incorporated into Bountiful Power.

When paired with Smothering Auras, it actually works really well on quick Cata for condi heavy group content. I usually end up running something like http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PGQAIlpyoYrsN2LOySuRfA-e for those situations and mostly top the charts for cleanses without taking much of a dps hit.

Yeah the only situation I can see using it is maybe like Hammer Cata in pvp? I feel like the only Arcane skill that really came out ahead there was Arcane Shield and that was already probably the strongest one.

Agreed that the Cata UI (or basically any UI after Path of Fire really) is severely lacking. The spec's perfectly functional, but most of that is just practice building up muscle memory / an interior clock. It's just weird how they already have functional energy UIs for stuff like Holo and Druid, but couldn't adapt that to Cata. At least Ele pistol doesn't work with Cata; that'd be a true nightmare situation.

I'd say it's a combination of Daniel Dociu leaving as art director in 2017, the animation department looking like it was hit particularly hard during the mass layoffs that followed in 2019, and then SotO probably being sort of a buffer expac while they fully transition to the new yearly expac development pipeline. GW2 visually peaked with PoF imo, and those first 2 things line up with that. It's also likely that a portion of the animation department has been shuffled to the mystery Unreal engine game Anet's been developing; a new property like that probably requires a lot more animation/model rigging than a game with 10 years of assets to pull from. SotO's not bad by any means, but the level of asset reuse and the weapons releasing 6 months in leads me to believe that it needed more time to cook, but it was probably a scenario of either having a 9+ month post-Gyala content drought or releasing an asset-light expac as a sort of catch-up buffer while switching to the yearly model. I guess we'll just have to wait for the next expac to see if that's true or not.

Cool.

Jesus Christ, they gave away the content for free to anyone who logged in a single time during it's release; didn't even have to be an active player, just a single 20 second log in within a 2-3 month window and it was given out for free. And then they gave it away for free AGAIN during the Return To events. A player could easily have dropped $30 on Path of Fire in September of 2017 and gotten every piece of content released up until EoD in February of 2022 for free. That's $30 for roughly 4 and a half years of content, and you're over here acting like its some shady extortionist business practice. Want some context for how absurd that is? Wanna compare that to WoW? Even being generous and equating LW4 + IBS to just half a WoW expansion and then throwing in 2 free months of subscription, that would still come out to $90 in upfront expansion purchases and another $765 in sub fees. Once again, zoom the kitten out and get some perspective please. I am under 0 illusions that Anet doesn't have a profit motive here, they do actually need to fund the game to continue it's development after all, but I'm also aware of the fact that they've pretty much been the patron saint of customer-respecting business models in the live-service gaming space for more than a decade and that that context matters when say... people decide whether or not to start accusing them of fraud and demanding personal apologies over a poorly communicated blog post (a blog post about handing out free legendaries no less). Also, the whole "they have a profit motive!" thing works a lot better as a justification for feeling economically aggrieved when, 1. every single business on earth doesn't have to have one to simply keep existing, and 2. the company you're railing against didn't literally just spend half a decade charging less than 4% of the industry standard for it's product. Honestly though this is pretty pointless; y'all are transparent af and pretty much beyond parody at this point. Anet can provide 4.5 years of content for $30 and it's not enough. Anet can decide to hand out a bonus 1400g legendary to anyone with at least 1 legendary rune (when they were only really required to compensate those with 6 of them already crafted) and that's not enough. There is no 'enough' for a mindset like that; you'll always find a way to convince yourself that you're owed more. The sad thing is you actually seem to believe that your pile of economic justice buzzwords is an actual justification for this kitten and not just an obvious smokescreen to obfuscate your infinite sense of entitlement. You don't give a kitten about consumer rights, you just feel that you're owed free content and you'll jump through any mental or rhetorical hoop you have to to justify it.