Manpag.6421

I think this is a combination of player demand and the mini-expansion format. JW was explicitly made to allow them to make a new raid without devoting separate resources to it, so a big monster was needed to spin story/convergence/raid out of the same assets. Strikes are typically more popular than raids, and people tend to drift away from maps that don't have metas, so there's a constant demand for big monsters to kill. I agree that they don't all have to feel like world-ending threats though, and Drizzlewood Coast south comes to mind as a fun and rewarding meta that fights relatable, non-monster foes.

Definitely? I don't have Mistlock Sanctuary to check myself, but the wiki page for the tools merchant there doesn't have them listed, and the wiki pages for the tools themselves only list the LW3/4 merchants. I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, I know the wiki isn't always accurate/up-to-date, just that it would be worth double-checking in game if you haven't recently.

Breakable Unbound and Volatile gathering tools have always been exclusive to LW3 and LW4 maps respectively. There's no way they'd add them to an unrelated map, they aren't even sold by the gathering merchants who sell all the other glyph variants.

Not quite all the others; there still isn't a turtle rental post, either.

I stand corrected 😂 Maybe I'll rephrase then; the fun element, and the fact that easy, limitless flight is boring, is something that a majority of players don't seem to consider. To be honest, I think virtually any mount that can fly feels better than skyscale. It is pure utility without any of the same sense of momentum that other mounts have. I think it's part of its design, with the focus on being able to hover in place, but it just makes it feel very dead and static to me when compared to how other mounts feel fluid in their motion. Combined with its stamina gauge/dome of unassisted flight, the ways SotO works around that with latent magic orbs and ley lines makes whole sections of map feel like they're on rails. It makes flight more restrictive than navigating terrain. I still enjoy flying most things on turtle, unless I absolutely need the speed of griffon. It's a shame it needs so much support from Jade Bot modules to achieve, because it's a satisfying compromise between the distance/freedom of griffon and the ease of skyscale. Makes it a game of balancing side-to-side movement using air drift to boost the speed while conserving endurance as much as possible. I'll never get bored of jetting straight back up to full height and watching the skyscales scrambling up the wall, doing griffon courses on it, and carrying newbies across distances that skyscale wouldn't make.

Apart from the fact that infinite flight with no skill curve is broken and severely limits creative map design in the future while also pretty much forcing a single mount to navigate whole maps (see SotO maps with all their huge voids of empty air and unnecessary, featureless verticality), the thing I never hear mentioned in these discussions is this: infinite flight in a game like GW2 is boring. The warclaw infinite endurance bug is the first time I've actually wanted Anet to patch out a beneficial bug, because it triggers way too often, and instead of a mount where you have to carefully plan your jumps to scale cliffs and things, gameplay ends up being just "Press spacebar every 1.5s until you reach your desired height". Is it handy sometimes? Sure. But there's a reason why griffon has a large community of people who ride them just for fun vs skyscale being seen as just a function. The fewer physical limitations on flight there are, the harder it should be to achieve, else there's not really much "game" to it.

Especially if they follow it up with a new tonic for April Fool's 2025 that makes your mail carrier animation play every 10 seconds or something.

No new mail carriers have been added in years, but in light of recent events we definitely need one that's just Evon appearing and aggressively pelting you with mail. Maybe while wearing a party hat?

It is niche compared to other expansion features, though. Just looking at the most recent expansions, almost everyone seems to be using skyscale/skyscale fireball in open world a lot, and weapon master and enhanced weapon proficiency formed keystones of most meta builds and continue to be some of the most effective weapon choices out there. From JW, warclaw has largely replaced raptor/jackal as the go-to ground mount, and spear is meta on a lot of builds too. So yes, by comparison, something that a minority of players are spending a great deal of time using is niche.

Eh, it is pretty niche. Not as niche as raids typically are, but there's probably like 25-33% of players who are really sinking a lot of time and gold into homesteads (the ones complaining decoration limits are too low), something like ~50% of players who have enough nodes to make it really worth it for gathering and check in daily just for that but aren't really doing much with the space, and a lot of people who pretty much ignore it unless they need a shortcut to Janthir. The people who are passionate about housing and have wanted it for ages have always been a vocal minority. Anyway, in answer to the question, yes, I would/will continue to buy expansions on the current model. It's a pretty small cost to stay up to date with the latest build/equipment options, and as someone who spends a lot of my gameplay messing around with mounts, I particularly like the way new expansions expand on an existing mount and open up new gameplay options and interactions with other mounts.

My understanding is that metas (in any game) aren't strictly intended to be prescriptive. They're a commentary on what is popular due to being effective, and no matter how simple or complex a game is, as long as there are variables within player control, a meta will naturally form, no matter how marginal the advantage it gives over other options. People naturally copy metas when they want to perform better, and even moreso when they don't have the understanding, confidence, time, or mental energy to experiment with their own builds. And, in a game like this, over time enough people experiment and optimise to the point where the meta becomes as efficient as possible, or spawns variations that are more effective for specific situations or game modes. And then they become prescriptive, at least in instanced or competitive content, because people expect all players to be performing as optimally as possible there.

I was slow to transition from GW1 to GW2. I've learned my lesson since then, but that doesn't mean I'd swap immediately if a GW3 came out — rather that I wouldn't immediately dismiss it if the format was very different to what I was used to playing, and would probably buy it at launch. However, I'd probably make a few characters, give it a try, then leave it alone for a while so that I reap the benefits of old/launch character birthdays/anniversaries down the line, while I play GW2. GW2 has changed massively since launch, and I've no reason to think a GW3 wouldn't go through similar iterations from clunky mechanics/UI at the start to something more fluid and fleshed-out. It would be interesting to see where they could even take the series next, and what they could build with a fresh start away from the spaghetti code, but even if GW2 couldn't be kept running as long-term as GW1, it will run for as long as it's at least moderately active and still pulling in revenue.

If I'm in a situation where I can't use the door to go through my homestead, I use the Lake Doric portal scroll, which gets you almost equidistant to many of the WPs in Divinity's Reach, and makes WP costs pretty negligable as long as you've been there at least once before on that character.

Make the personal story cutscenes open-world dialogues like newer expansions? You mean take away my ability to skip the dialogues in old content, including the tutorial instance on every alt I make?

It's based on the height you either left the ground at (if you were already mounted on griffon) or mounted griffon at (if you mount in the air), but that doesn't mean the height you start at is the ceiling. You can go a little way above your starting height, but you can't go higher than that without either dismounting and remounting to reset it, or using another method (latent magic orbs/updrafts etc).