Lord Trejgon.2809

while at it can we have footsteps as separate wardrobe slot that allows us to pick the ones from legendaries we have collected?

A number of events require you to talk to an NPC to trigger, and said NPC does not always show the event indicator reliably. Outside of that personally I had no issue randomly stumbling upon most of events you mentioned (sometimes multiple times)

You are omitting here legendary armor mats that are so far only available from soto metas 😉 (and their map currencies). Also on a side note verdant brink, and auric basin no longer "have events all the time which progresses the meta" - daytime VB and pylons AB were decoupled from their metas couple years ago.

I will just toss this - in hopes that if devs read this thread they can have more narrow search for the crux of the issue - I am playing on rather not a very good laptop, (Ryzen 5, vega 8, 8GB ram) and with all settings set to low (with exception of character models quality/number - have both of these set to medium because on low it would make 5man instanced content... awkward), and I am not seeing any performance drops on new maps compared to the previous ones. Which heavilly implies that the source of the problem is enabled by the higher graphical settings 🤔

On one hand, I am enjoying my ability to slot rune of traveler onto my celestial gear, and rolling with nice relic, on another hand I can understand someone wanting more specialized stats and still having +25% movement speed with it.... 🤔 But if there is +25% movement speed relic it would make no sense for any rune to have it, which leads into a situation where I personally cannot see any clean solution to have both variants justified (barring maybe getting more + running speed rune sets to provide more specialized variants?)

Just FYI: everything from skyler.4986's post onward was it's own separate thread that was merged into yours 😕

Yeah it were a wild times - even tho personally I did not hate it and I actually enjoyed strolling through HoT on my half-trained druid (that for first couple days was halftrained because it costed 400 hero points - got instantly fully trained on the day the patch reducing the cost rolled in). I do have alot of fond memories of that time. That being said I would still hesitate from calling this particular period as "best time of GW2" nor I am not going to pretend that it was universally well received when it launched - it had alot of hype, but that hype train crashed hard as soon as all the meta berserks started getting stomped in the jungle 🙂

To be perfectly honest those layoff happened so long time ago that I am unsure why you brought them up in the first place. And that is not even taking into the consideration that according to AN communication, they took up alot of employees following PoF success, and the (forced by NCSoft) layoffs have nuked the studio to basically pre-pof size. Doesn't change the fact that just before they happened those... two? three? years ago does not invalidate the fact, that GW2 bloomed after they got rid of Colin following HoT troubled launch.

That is factually incorrect. There are rarely months that have decent amount of gold in them, but it is nothing compared to what I was able to do casually without grinding and with no "luck" on sales involved. Not from the login rewards. And family fame system is still pennies compared to what you can actively earn. I assumed that Neverwinter dids the same thing as STO does - so not login rewards at all And that "simple" point is also factually incorrect. Not only you can still log in and get rewards in GW2 (albeit less in monthly totals thatn before if all you do is only logins) you have a full control over what you are getting. And getting your limited inventory overloaded with useless items or premium store baits, is not "instantly better" than no login reward system at all. Arguable - more rigid to be sure, but much more rewarding. And within a week and a half, of not even doing all the dailies (or weeklies while at it) I was already able to amass more gold and valuable items that I could ever get under the previous system of login rewards and dailies. There are some rewards in the store that are locked, and a handfull of one time per season tasks that not only do not amount to that much of acclaim in the big picture, but also are all tasks invovling expac activities, so even if it was not locked, it would be impossibe to do regardless. Oh and from the rewards I did claim so far myself the only ones requiring the expac, are gloves skin and heavy crafting bags - everything else - so grand majority of "worth" I have got out of that system so far - is available to everyone. I am quite confident that you do not have statistically significant data sample to support the "many" not liking it. I would not be surprised if all the evidence to that was you looking at these forums, and maybe reddit - which is very biased sample, because most of the time people come in here (or to reddit) to complain about things, not praise them. If by any miniscule chance you actually did confer proper research with statistically relevant sample size among players not owning expansion, feel free to share the papers.

I mean I have personally made like 250g (alot of it just from wizards vault alone) within first week of SotO and I was not doing anything sweaty for it to get gems to buy the new outfit. So even assuming the estimates by OP are perfectly accurate (dunno haven't got quite there yet to try to got for a skin, still no egg to even do new friend) I would say that it is still very fair for a mount skin.

There is nothing stopping new player from exploring HoT without mount, and getting lost in TD all over again just like in the HoT launch day. The only difference would be that mobs in the area are less punishing than they were, and the metas are failing much less. Old LA was just a single city map, and in the end the changes LWS1 brought ended up being limited due to how alot of them got flat out removed with subsequent patches. The main thing to miss from that era is FOMO of having to keep up with story that is not waiting for you (and achievements). Meanwhile the post you are responding to was response to you making it sound like "experiencing maps like they were made to be explored" is something no longer possible. I think they meant the plethora of events that are going on on those maps practically all the time. Trying to pretend that it's only same rifts 1000 times is either disingenious or shows you ignored everything on the new map because you didn't want to experience them for what they are. Technically speaking you didn't even have a glider, you needed to grind the masteries to even get that. That is gross misrepresentation. The more accurate representation would be this: You ended the dragon cycle, aurene went to sleep, but tasked you with watching over everyone, but since everyone is doing fine, you have a moment of nothing to do. You get a tip from one of the colleagues that there is something interesting going off at Garenhoff, and while you investigate the disappearance of wizards tower, you discover whole secret society of wizards, and things go flat out bonkers with demonic large scale invasion, that as a side effect pulled fractal researches they were conducting into real tyria. Things going complete bonkers, during which you need to balance helping very real people from those mini-realities, helping wizards repel demons, and repair infrastructure that is meant to make those sort of invasions impossible. Rifts are just one of the small aspects of story and things to do. One you are presented fairly early to be sure, but in the large scope, of even just a first map - miniscule side activity. And those "literal existing places" are not "literal existing places" but chunks of alternate realities pulled into this one. Alternate realities specifically created by wizards "for science". Vanilla maps are fairly flat in their design. Some of them are definitely more flat than PoF maps. Each of PoF maps have aspects of verticality that was simply unfeasible pre-HoT. Coming from someone who played GW1, and have replayed grand most of GW1 just prior to EoD release, I would say you may want to take off your nostalgia glasses there.

Wait gen x kids are now old enough to have kids old enough to play GW2? 🤔 And they were able to live off of minimum wage? That is not something us millennials could/can do >.> EDIT: disregard, I screwed up my generations, Gen X is the one preceeding Millenials (Gen Y) not succeeding them, therefore nothing wrong with the post I was responding to.

Here is a thing you don't seem to take into consideration - if someone does all the dailies, all the weeklies, and all the special tasks, the total AA generated over span of 75 days is in great excess of what is needed to buy out every single season-limited thing in the store. Which without the cap would mean that you could play very actively for one season, and then buy out most of next season stuff on day one.

a post on reddit, which starts out with "this info has been taken from achievement panel, and vendors in the new expac areas"

HoT release was definitelly not "encapsulated" considering it changed trait trees for elite specs to make any systematic sense. Special tab only contains tasks that can only be done if you own SotO. Overall, pretty much all the questions You have OP, everything was covered in pre-release press, which you have admitted in fear of getting story spoilers - I have a good news for you - there is hardly any spoilers there.

my bad, when you said "already have legendary but just want the skin" I interpreted it as wanting the new legendary skin, not astral ward skins. I think you are right in here 🙂

they definitely removed it from refreshing activity timer prolly removed from defence participation with same change.

cannot comment on sanctified shoulder dye channels, sanctified gloves are quite fair in that department.

1500 so it's nice and round 😉

Fully maxed out arborstone also have some Canah's club events, but indeed there is more things going on in Wizard's Tower (adventures, race, couple events)

When people who got WvW/PvP armor wanted raid skins, this forums answer was "man up and do the whole thing if you want those skins". Now that we are getting OW legendary armor with it's unique skins, we are supposed to feel sad for raiders having to take their own medicine? Personally I would not mind some alternative sets of cheaper collections to unlock just skins if you already have a legendary armor, but that should have to apply to all legendary armor to be even remotely fair (so if someone get WvW/PvP armor, they should get a discount collection to unlock raid skins as well)

Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't "they/them" popularized to be used as gender neutral pronouns couple years back? NPCs refering to commander with these pronouns is not the case of Commander being non-binary, but more a case of NPCs not wanting to assume 😉 (and of course cost cuts, if they can record everything with neutral pronouns once, instead of recording it twice....)

I am unsure what's up with people trying to push subjective opinions as "kind of objective fact". "the most bland" <- subject to tastes and preferences therefore by default subjective Wizard Tower vs Arborstone hubs: Objectively speaking, in terms of functionalities, Wizard Tower having all crafting stations, trading post, bank and mystic forge all focused in small area around the waypoint, and requiring only one mastery tier for full rested bonus (as opposed to Arborstone requiring whole mastery tree to get to the same place) makes the Tower functionally superior hub. Visual design is subjective matter. Good to know that Edge of the Mists is the only map allowed to do floating islands - Amnytas is otherwise nothing alike. Completely different methods of navigation, completely different aesthetic. "There is no such thing as no more soul left to the game" that is one weird structure of a sentence, so weird that it no longer means what I think you wanted to express. You basically denied existence of a notion of "no more soul left to the game" Which is opposite to rest of your post claiming lack of soul in the new maps. Anyone starting now can still explore vanilla maps in old-school way. Stating that IBS maps "blow out of the water" soto maps, is heavily opinionated piece. That is not saying alot about the state of the game, that says alot about your opinions and preferences (and/or how much attention you have paid to which map).

1 purchasable, but unsure if map currency is equivalent, never looked at the amount tbh - saw the thing I remembered needed for leg armor, and have stuck to that so far 🙂 The source I provided was sufficient. But regardless I will humour you on this one: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/first-contact-the-kryptis-and-rift-hunting/ https://massivelyop.com/2023/08/01/guild-wars-2-teases-secrets-of-the-obscures-new-kryptis-enemies-and-rift-hunting-mechanics/ + the roadmap, specifically stating which quarterly update will get what kind of "higher tier rifts" that I have already provided. At this point I have proven beyond any reasonable doubt that AN is planning to release "higher tiers" of nascent rift content with quarterly updates, aimed at groups, and most likely providing more essences thant the 3 tiers of the rifts we have currently. Interest in running event chains in HoT map did not die out due to "lack of rewards" but because AN have detached them from their original meta events due to complaints that full rewards from HoT Meta events required you to invest approx 2h of your time in advance to run all those chains to their conclusion.

My claim was: they will be adding higher tiers of rifts, which will most likely drop more of essences we have right now. In case you failed to notice there is one declaration of a fact in there, and one speculation. The source provided supports the factual bit (higher tier rift content - the copy pasted row from the table from the link specifically was called "Rift hunting"). Speculative part is only logical - there would be no point adding higher rifts destinied for groups if they didn't reward more than the on launch 3 tiers of rifts. As for older blogs "not just referring to Tier 3" - because those blogs stated that there will be more rift tiers in subsequent quarterly releases, so it cannot be about tier 3 which shipped on release. Does that estimation take into consideration hero choice chest giving the ready thingies that are otherwise 500 of map currency?