JDub.1530

NA, Skrittburgh, Griffonfall I played most days of the beta Tues - Sun, around 9-10PM EST for about 2-4hrs each session. I did select a WvW guild, which was a small guild with no larger alliance. The matchups felt less balanced than normal. There seemed to be a lack of commanders during my play sessions, and many of the people who did tag up, seemed to do so only to fill that void. There were several occasions of having our map queued yet there didn't seem to be anyone actually around responding to things, perhaps due to a lack of commander to rally around. The Skrittsburgh matchup felt better. The could have been a factor of being longer. Or maybe participation numbers dropped of as the Beta progressed. Multiple players from both matchups expressed the opinion that our server was comprised of the "leftovers." Certainly the issue of people not being placed on the correct server was an issue, and could have driven people away, rather than dealing with or waiting on Support to fix things. But I didn't personally experience that issue, nor anyone else in my guild who participated.

No, it makes NON-torch weaker, because they don't gain any benefit from the trait.

But you also lose the AOE burning proc for other weapons. So now it's almost entirely a Torch trait

Am I misreading something? The changes to Radiant Fire are stated to enabled off hands other than Torch, but it seems like it's packing all the benefits into Torch instead.

You can filter any undesired game modes out of the list.

Don't even trust Blizzard? I didn't realize trust in Blizzard was a currency that still existed in 2023. But that's a different discussion. GW2 has been around for more than a decade. Where have they earned a lack of trust with respect to exploitive monetization? If anything, they've improved some of their monetizations. They eventually added mount selection licenses to counter the RNG of the original adoption licenses. They added Black Lion Statuettes to BL chests, so even if the RNG fails you, you earn currency that will let you select items you specifically want, which BL chest items will eventually rotate into. And even more recently they reworked the statuettes so that items don't rotate out, so older items will remain available, so you don't have to wait for the item you're looking for to make it back into rotation If anything, the new system is an overall benefit to players, as we'll be able to pick our rewards for basically doing existing dailies. And I see no reason to believe it's a prelude to some sort of cash grab. If they want people to pay money for special items, they can just put it in their already existing gem store--where people have shown they'll buy them.

This is nothing new to the game. Those Black Lion weapons we can purchase with Black Lion tickets cost 1 ticket when they release. If you don't buy them before the next set rotates in, the ticket price goes up. Every festival has a meta reward for doing the Annual achievements. If you don't complete the annuals by festival end, then you'll have to purchase it next year with festival currencies. Current dailies will reward you with 2g. If you skip a day that's 2g you miss out on forever. So fomo and limited time pricings are nothing new to GW2. And without specific rewards/pricings, we have no clue how easy or hard it will be to catch up on missed rewards. Bear in mind "seasonal" items aren't the only rewards available, and we don't know if the pricing structure will force you to go for seasonal items or general materials. Maybe if you skip getting some mystic coins or clovers you can still afford the unique items. We'll have to wait and see, but these changes don't seem so drastic as to panic that GW2 is suddenly like "those other games" with "exploitive battlepasses."

I haven't tried it, but I would think LB WB would be best for kiting. Hitting at range and using Virtues to maintain distance. Whether it's effective at that is an entirely different story. I'd imagine you only have a short window before you're forced into closer combat.

Agreed. I couldn't give it a full workout as I had no access to the Runes I needed, but it felt pretty good.

Just pulling what I read on the wiki.

I was expecting one of those follow up patches saying they fixed the Alac duration for GotL. Probably not terribly hard to accidentally type in a wrong number.

Agreed there. I honestly thought it was a mistake when I saw 3/4s of Alacrity (with zero boon duration). And honestly from my brief experiments, the whole CA kit is irrelevant, as spamming the 1-skill seemed to stack Alacrity better than any of the other skills. Which is why I feel removing Alac from the 1-skill and greatly increasing the duration for the rest might be a way of making it better while avoiding overstacking issues (with 1-skill spam).

Funny that you said it's more important to maintain Alac on yourself than your party in order to provide group Alac 😆 But this doesn't feel promising, because on top of being super sweaty and rigid, it has zero fault tolerance. You regretted demonstrating this build/rotation with the CC golems, but I think it was perfect, because it shows how fragile it is. Your rotation got interrupted, and you let things just completely fall off waiting for your CDs to come around again. That seems worse than just using a less sweaty build that has sub-100% uptime.

According to the wiki: What tactician wouldn't take advantage of all the tools at their disposal, i.e. firearms, infused with the power of their virtues.

I don't believe we're going to see the new weapons tomorrow. The Beta is just lifting the Elite Spec limitations of existing weapons. The new weapons aren't slated for the SOTO launch, so they're unlikely to be in this beta.

I'm already running Condi WB for raids/strikes. Does great damage. I suppose Axe will only up my game.

It may not have been the most exciting balance patch for Guardian, but a baseline CDR to pretty much all our utility skills seems like a massive buff. I haven't analyzed the remaining value of traits without the CDR component, but I suspect several of those traits across all classes have become lackluster, and will probably see a rework, or have some new component added in a later patch (but there were too many for ANet to work on that before this patch). As for Willbender, while I've only played a few sPvP games with it, so I can't make a full accounting of it's performance there, I've been loving WB since EoD. I have a solid open world build with a good mix of sustain and damage. I have a raid build that puts up great damage numbers. And I have a WvW roaming build I've been having a blast with the past couple months, and even with my pedestrian skill level, I've been able to win 1v1s and even some 1v2s, making great use of the much maligned OH Sword, which is decidedly a competitive game mode weapon only.

No defense? Both Guard and Warrior mace have defensive skills. Why do you assume mace will have no defense?

3/4s Alacrity is nuts. At first I thought someone just input the wrong value. With near 100% boon duration, I can stack about 15s of Alacrity by spamming the 1-skill, but it feels like you can hardly do anything else. It feels worse than the former Spirit spam. My suggestion is drop Alacrity from the 1-skill, and greatly increase the duration on the other CA skills. Skill activation should be meaningful. That's what ANet says they want. But this is 1 skill spam.

If you equip the Turtle Siege Enhancer 3 (I'm unsure about lower tiers) and board someone's turtle with already loaded ammo, it shows the correct amount count on your buff bar, but the skill ammo count is zero. If the ammo count increases while you're in the gunner seat, the ammo count of the skill increases as it should, but already stocked ammo is inaccessible. Boarding a turtle with 5 ammo already loaded means you can't ever shoot from the gunner seat (since it won't gain anymore ammo charges).

It doesn't have to be limited to returning LW1 events (but Escape from LA was one of my favorite releases), but can also include future instanced content they devise.

Everyone seems to support keeping the public instance of Marionette. If ANet intends to continue adding this type of instanced content, then I suggest they set up a daily rotation of public "raids." For example: on Mon we have Marionette/Dragonstorm on alternating hours. Then the next day have two other instances on alternating hours. Etc... That keeps them from overloading the schedule and keeping the instances populated and allowing people to continue to experience the content with a chance to succeed. And the private instances still allow people to access them on off days or hours. And this scheduling can just expand as they add more instances.....up to a point, as you still want these events to come up fairly frequently in rotation, so it's not you miss the day and have to wait weeks for it to return.

I don't see how WoW Classic is sustainable. Sure it will make a big splash on release and draw in a lot of players. But eventually everyone will hit max level, do end game content, and then what? I doubt there is going to be significant content releases (probably just annual WoW holidays), so eventually people will get bored with a static game and either go back to regular WoW or elsewhere. Sure it will likely maintain a small dedicated population, but outside of that WoW Classic has an expiration date IMHO. As for GW2 itself. We COULD see LW Season 5 come out in August. That would be about 3 months after the release of War Eternal. I'm thinking that's a bit early though, and it will probably be another month or two until S5 (but if ANet pushes it much further than Sept/Oct it could be risky). Personally I'm looking very much forward to LWS5. It will be the first major content release (that wasn't already deep in production) since the shake up at Anet, and I think will give us a good indication of where the game is headed in the future.

Archons, as in Priory researchers of dangerous knowledge.

There is nothing that states the efforts of individual parts need be equal. Aurora had druid stones, which seemed to consume much greater time and effort than most other portions of that collection. But every Legendary seems to have 2 things in common: massive resource sink, and timegating. The timegating for PvP, WvW, and raids are pretty straightforward. Not so much for open world PvE, where they don't really have a strong setup for forcing you to play content for so long to get required items. Druid stones seems to be an ad hoc timegate for Aurora. Astral (and Dragonsblood) weapons seem to be the timegate for Vision. And it's a fairly soft timegate too, because (1) people could have already had them farmed from when those episodes released, and (2) there is no hard per day cap on materials. Druid stones were a per day account cap. But you can send any number of alts to Thunderhead and Istan to farm hearts. Map activities always drop the materials, reward tracks can be repeated, and while Branded Mass nodes have a daily account cap, meteor strikes don't. That's not to say it's not going to take time--I think it's supposed to. That not all maps require the same amount of large time dedication is what makes it appear the collections are imbalanced, when this is likely working as intended.