LordMagus.3279

Sure, and that was fine because Anet made it clear that was the deal. But I don't think anyone in this thread was made aware that our access to these specific rewards - which was previously advertised as a benefit of SOTO specifically - would be retroactively taken away.

To those users saying "But this was the case with SOTO, you should expect that to continue" I can certainly appreciate that. I think that's entirely reasonable for Anet to place some rewards behind the latest expansion. However, I feel the past information on this is now coming across as misleading and in some ways as making false claims. Per their previous published articles on the topic: "Once one of your characters reaches level 80, the Wizard’s Vault UI will be accessible to all characters on your account, regardless of which expansions you own. If you do not have Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure registered on your account, some rewards will be locked, and you will be unable to visit the in-game location of the Wizard’s Vault. The system will be fundamentally the same for you otherwise" Note however that the information does NOT say "if you have not unlocked the latest expansion, in this instance Secrets of the Obscure, some rewards will be locked." Therefore this previously published statement may have been misleading and did not hint at existing rewards ever being locked in future to later expansions. If I was aware of this being the case, I would have considered this in my purchasing decisions.

I don't begrudge Anet for deciding that certain drops from the Wizard Vault should be locked to the latest expansion. My issue is that (to my knowledge) they never provided this information that the Wizard Vault would lock EXISTING rewards to the next expansion. So without warning you are forced to pay money to maintain the same feature you already had access to. This unfortunately seems like a bait and switch where you are promised access to certain rewards via the Wizards Vault and this is retroactively taken from you. For those players that own multiple accounts, this is even more egregious as this would require buying the latest expansion on all their accounts just to maintain access to the same rewards they already used to receive.

The only hypothetical design goal I've discussed with others was nerfing boon corrupts to reduce pirate ship meta. The boon corrupt skills that were nerfed all tended to be ranged abilities and leaves us only with the wells. Now to counter a boon ball there will need to be more melee engagement and boon strip/corrupt by other specs.

It took me only 10 minutes of benching my DPS scourge on the golem to hate it, pull out all my sigils, and change to harbinger. Why even allow a maximum of 3 sand shades if it's impossible to reach that many after the opening? The actual impact on damage isn't massive, but you end up spamming F1 so much and your weapon skills feel a lot more disjointed. It's just chaotic and unfun now.