starlinvf.1358

With the change to Rune salvage, Jewels now have a 100% chance of recovery (since they can't turn into lucent motes). However, I do believe those items have a chance at Ectos, which BL kits help improve. But with BL kits becoming less frequent from the normal reward stream, I've found Master/Mystic being more cost effective, despite the lower drop rate on salvage. Theres also a thing where some high value sigils and runes go for more then items that contain them, making it worth salvaging for a side chance at ectos.

Yeah the catch with Dragon stand is that the map locks itself and closes after 15 minutes. This is a defined "loot phase" for those who participated, and is there to prevent what happened with OctoVine. I think the only thing that stopped them from importing the idea to AB was all the Free Roam elements it would disrupt if they did a scheduled map purge.

obviously the guilds I belong to are the best, because I'm in them. Even the one that hasn't done anything in like 7 months.

You forgot the part where those colors have to clash with each other nvm... you did say clashing XD

I would argue that this doesn't have to be a mutually exclusive choice..... A better design all around would avoid that contention, because too many bespoke solutions for each mode is how that problem gets out of hand in the first place. Or a better design philosophy and approach within each game mode, to get more mileage out of what little content can be made. I also make the argument that the nature of WvW, sPvP and Raids outright prevents them from being happy. They rely too much on the "best in slot" mind set, and goes so far as being counter productive, or even self defeating, with a paradoxical sense of trying to be "the best" while also requiring something better then them to compete against. And having spent enough time in sPvP and WvW, I can easily establish that the majority work on the same psychology as PvE players, just with a different set of obsessions. More importantly, only listening to the Top players of a game mode sounds good on paper, but causes you to ignore the situation in the massive player base "beneath" them. Same going the opposite direction, where the masses don't understand design interaction, and overly fixated on Outcomes; leading them to create the shortest path to it, often at the cost of collateral damage to things around it. A big issue across the board, especially after Raids were released, is that the game doesn't actively play to its own strengths anymore. In fact it fights itself to try and fit in with more conventional game design paradigms that it was fundamentally made to break. Raids are bad, because it rewards/requires a numerical magnitude focused mindset, when the class system was designed around PvP sensibilities of action/counter-action. sPvP is failing by trying to create too much definition between classes and especs, which started shifting soft counters into practical hard counters. WvW is borked because the game mode doesn't know how to handle the scaling problem, and further amplified by the player's clear preference for open field battles. And Openworld PvE's problem is almost never having an opportunity for a dynamic battle on a personal level, which ends up off loading most of the player focus onto the reward system. Fractals is the one thing that does what it needs to do right...... but ends up overstaying its welcome due to repetition from the low number of them, and a scaling system that eventually creates the Raid problem but with fewer solutions. And for the record.... calling WoW a Challenging game never meant what people thought it meant. Most of that challenge comes from actively fighting the poorly implemented game mechanics. I'm glad WoW classic took great effort to recreate that old experience as it was in reality, because it helped prove the game's design was NOT the reason it was remembered the way it was. After a month, when the novelty wore off, the player base quickly fell back into its "Normal WoW" habits. And the more adversarial design of the game flow is fostering toxicity rather then cooperation. The player's excessive self-interest is hurting the community building.... and the community building was the only thing holding WoW together, until they shifted to more casual friendly design choices. GW2 is on track for a similar fate, but in reverse, as its whole underlying design is conductive to encouraging ad-hoc cooperation. But the push into hardcore elements and best in slot group comps lead to the community shutting itself off into little fiefdoms, openly talk about their superiority, and trying to purge the other game modes. Unlike WoW, there isn't a single path forward that forces the whole community to deal with itself out of necessity. So when a GW2 player meets resistance, they avoid it entirely unless absolutely forced to. See Raids, See Legendary Trinkets, See Gift of Battle, See Gift of Exploration...... but notice how no one gives a crap about sPvP's barrier for entry, outside of that time they introduced Ascended Armor rewards?

so its worse then being dead....... Its Zombie Simpsons?

GW1 wasn't photorealistic..... In fact, it accomplished it by being practically the opposite. Both games have an art style made to mimic canvas painting, using a very selective range of color tones. A lot of early areas have semi-baked lighting and light/shadows tone built into the textures, rather then proper dynamic lighting. Even many of the "light ray" effects when you have post processing turned on are not full dynamic lighting. Its both ironic and oddly appropriate that a lot of "advertising grade" photos of scenery have a lot of post processing done to them to increase vibrancy, contrast and shifting color temps to make them more visually pleasing. This creates a Hyper-Realistic quality that sits just of on the boarder of Surrealism, and is intentionally meant to invoke nostalgia-like feelings. Like a vivid memory of something, but you've never seen it before then. Just look for a "Comfy" thread on your favorite image board, and you can see this at work. The reason for the hit and miss in later maps ultimately boils down to how much time and man power could be spent on tweaking map visuals. Some location and material types don't lend well to the type of color control they use, which takes more effort to look consistent. A similar struggle was felt in GW1, as Prophs and Factions had pitch perfect coloring, despite the fairly wide range of locations. But Nightfall being mostly desert and waste land, and maps being a lot more flat, lead to a lot of visual fatigue. Color isn't bad at all, and structures were more interesting due to contrast of the bland desert; but after seeing the same 20 shades of brown for hours on end, with the only visual refuge being villages and towns, it gets old quick. POF worked hard to avoid this by frequently mixing Oasis elements across all the maps, and having the Desolation carefully broken up using striking terrain features. Orr is another good example. Despite being, overall, the weakest maps when it comes to visual stimulation, all the assets had the ground work done the same way you'd see in other maps. The difference boils down to how they handle light... as in Orr has next to no variance in light intensity, even around Fort Trinity. While you can make the argument that its supposed to be Oppressive (and I completely agree).... there aren't enough areas to modulate the mood, which creates that same fatigue found in Nightfall. When you look at it closely, Orr is actually incredibly well set up in nearly every other aspect. A wide range of colors, all using a consistant muted color tone, excellent use of shapes to break up monotony, certain areas have fog + wash out color filter to make it feel like a faded photo, with enough terrain features and land marks to make impossible to get lost. But if you look at every other map in Core Tyria, they all have a sense of Natural Light as a character; even in the areas (like Fireheart Rise) that are meant to be oppressive, you do get the sense that light is actively fighting to intrude on upon it. If isn't obvious yet, good use of Light makes the difference in video game. Even the illusion of light and shadow baked into textures is enough to convince us a scene is logical- and actually was the way they used to do things when ray casting was barely an option. For awhile, a lot of games and game demos went overboard with color vibrancy to push being "photo-realistic", but came off more as hyper-real with seemingly impossible colors for reflected light..... and sadly, a lot of people fell for it. Heres something fun to research. Find screen shots of all of the COD games from MW1 forward, and compare that to other Mil-themed shooters that came out around the same time. In the BF series from Battlefield 3 onward, its kind of comical how they handle light and color. Bonus hypocrisy can also be found in reshader projects, which doesn't really fix colors so much as signal boost outlines and readability.

DBL's strengths are also its problems. The division in opinion is largely caused by how you feel about what its accomplishing. Its nature as a hybrid between EBG, Edge and ABLs also seems to lead to people thinking its going "too far" or "not too far enough". Honestly I think its better to change the focus of the questions about what players think an ideal map should be like (and assuming they're going to use vague descriptors), to break down how DBL is hitting points for those demographics.

I wanna tell the following story to bring some much needed perspective to the whole discussions. Quests systems we currently know them are, for lack of a better word, "lazy". The sheer variability in quality between games using the same quest archetypes reveal a huge underlying issue I don't think people are actually paying attention to. Think of your favorite quest of all time (or can remember). Now try to think of a quest in another game that roughly follows that first quest's format. Odds are it won't be anywhere near as good, or non-existent if your play history is expansive like mine. Its entirely possible to have this problem in the very same game. The issue I'm finding is out tendency to oversimplify processes, and gloss over very important aspects of game and scene design that lend to the overall experience. I left out a detail in the above question that will help this all make sense...... Ask yourself that same question, and limit to open world MMOs only. A lot harder right? And if you do manage to find an example, its probably an instance away from other players. There are 2 major contributors to this phenomenon, among many, that lead to this situation. First is the cost and effort to craft a narratively strong Quest line that directly integrates into the game world. Something beyond "go to forest, kill boars, and collect their skins", and closer to "go to the forest, track down a high quality pelt, realizing that trying to magic/sword it to death ruins the pelt, and then having to formulate a plan to trap it with minimal damage" and NOT have the game give you explicit step by step instructions. Having to remember that there was an NPC Hunter wandering about, and asking him for tips. Or that theres a decently sized hunting camp on the other side of the forest, where a notable trap maker lives. Stalking the Boars the see what they eat, or how they try to escape when spooked. From that we went from "kill x Mobs at location A" to Monster Hunter lite. The plot line is simple, the mechanics are not difficult on premise, and players can skip entire steps if they already have what they need, and learned similar things in previous adventures. But its also asking players to THINK about the world, and asking the Devs to construct a non-linear system. Both of which rarely happen anymore, because they can no longer run the risk of Players getting stuck/frustrated, and building the safety rails to avoid that becomes exponentially more difficult the longer a player takes to complete that task. Everquest had this quest (early in the game) where you went into the basement of a Tavern to clear out a bunch of rats. When looting the area (because players), you find a ring with pretty worthless stats on it. You can sell that ring to a vendor, or carry around/use it. Later down the line, if you just happen upon a certain NPC, he'll recognize the ring as belonging to his missing wife (or something along those lines). This kicks off a lengthy quest chain that eventually leads to a run-in with a cult, who had a secret lair underneath the Town. But it raises the question......... is that good design or bad design that 99% of players may not even meet the requirements to kick off the quest chain, because theres no indication that the Ring had value beyond trash coin? This situation would completely unthinkable in today's RPG games, because players are displaying increases levels of FOMO when it comes to content. Its also from a time before the wiki-age, where every minute detail is excruciatingly documented and researched. GW2 had a similar thing happen with the Ember Bay Skritt piles. You had a rare chance to find a weird stone thats basically worthless, but its item classification alone was enough of a tell that its not trash loot. The community spent days figuring out what to do with it, and eventually discovered dipping it in lava pools around Tyria cleans it up. As you complete this task, its revealed to the be Rurik's wedding Ring, as a massive throw back to Guildwars 1's main story line. But this wasn't just one person having to randomly discover the trigger, and use their knowledge of the world to navigate an obtuse puzzle.... it was a major community lead investigation, with a substantial number of people cooperating to find a solution. When you compare how both of those stories were structured and executed, you start to realize that they easily fit into the established mechanical nature of the game, but are radically different in how the player interacts with it compared to typical quests. These are easily considered great ideas for quests.... but if you execute them the way a normal quests would be, they wouldn't be anywhere near as impressive. The Caladbalg collection is one such example that, while nice as a throw back and some lore filling, didn't actually feel like this grand globe trotting adventure to reforge a magical sword. And a lot of that has to do with how it lays out everything for you, and you just following directions spelled out in a text box; and getting a big prize at the end..... just like every other collection of its type. How many would had even started it, if they hadn't know you'd get an inexpensive Ascended weapon at the end of it? I could on about this for hours, really. But suffice to say, creating high quality quests, regardless of how the mechanics end up working, requires a level of Creativity, Originality, and a solid understanding of a game's strengths, to create something that stand above the typical, uninspired "Go here, Do X" quests that is our Standard quest system. And whats depressing is that most studios can't afford to do this on the regular. Running out of time, lacking enough people, increasing quotas, poor management, management pressure, shifting deadlines, changing focus, can all lead to cutting corners or skipping on quality, to meet aggressive goals set by project management. However, in trying to explain why that is, it would launch off into a whole new discussions about how game design and business models have slammed into each other, on top of what little respect game quality was given leading up to that shift.

I don't see it being normal for players to go PvP when their bored....... WoW already shows evidence against that, and even this game shows evidence against that. If anything, newer games are pushing PvP harder because it doesn't need as much in costly assets, gives the illusion of more content when all its doing is recycling things better, and on paper it looks like an easy entry point into that sweet, sweet eSports money. Don't get confused by a community subsection that keeps trying to push Battle Royale as if the solution to everything, because its the current hotness. Before that it was survival mechanics. Before that it was more open world maps. Before that it was Crafting. Before that it was RPG leveling mechanics. Lets be real. When PvE players get bored, they fall back on Farming. Its mind numbingly therapeutic. With no other anxieties to distract you, you do it longer. It always contributed toward "Progress", because most games are built around it on some level. They have way more control over the risks they can take. It can be both opportunistic or carefully planned. Its "down time" without being considered "down time" gives you the opportunity to consider what you want to next. And occasionally a random circumstance will give you a new direction to follow. Problems only really arise when the delicate Zen of farming gets disrupted. It can be the anxiety I mentioned earlier, your kill zone getting too much competition, open world PvP gankers, rate of loot drops, ramp up and ramp down time, quirks of the location, or the methodology being employed. If the farming fails to be placating (either via rewards or effort cost), it'll amplify whatever frustration they already have with the game. So no..... PvP is not the be all, end all of MMOs. If it were, we would not have had over a dozen PvP focused MMOs burn out in less then 6 weeks each. It also fails to acknowledge that Guilds/Community are what propped up a lot of those games, and provides an explanation to why their Exodus snowballs so rapidly. I've been In and Around that cycle for the past several years. I've witnessed guilds trying to throw their weight around to influence Dev decisions. I've seen a substantial number of attempts to court Streamers (by both), because of the pack mentality surrounding them. Once you start looking at the Social structure of a game, and how it fits into the Social Media Zeitgeist, you can start making shockingly accurate predictions about their Ebb and Flow.

This is the pale tree when seen from the outside..... https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/3/37/Pale_Tree.jpg I think the only thing close to it in size is the "Heart of Thorns" tree in dragon stand.

Okay. That's disgustingly tedious, if true. The system before simply gave you the item on drop. People complained about it being tedious that they ran out of bag space and had to spend all of 60 seconds going to the nearest merchant to sell them off, or carry multiple salvage kits to do it in the field. OMG that was so tedious and terrible and bad design and inconvenience and forced me to think ahead..... it was impossible getting anything done. /sarcasm UID added a step to that process, and is now more tedious because I have to process everything all at once rather then in small chunks like before. And the Use All button makes it worse, since it fills up the bag too fast, and I we're limited on bag space because its expensive and bad design!! I think we've officially hit the point where we just need to go "f*** it", remove the drop system entirely, and automatically convert all mats and gold into "Gear experience points" that we spend to upgrade all our gear from white to legendary. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from sorting out your inventory a bit at a time like you used to, the only difference is it's up to you when you do that instead of having to stop when your inventory is full, even if you're in the middle of something. And if you want to only open part of a stack you can hold down alt and click and drag it to an empty inventory slot to split the stack, then just open one of them.Thats the joke.........

And? As content ages it's pretty standard to lower associated costs in-game and lessen grind. Should be no different with guilds especially for smaller guilds that don't have a million people donating materials constantly. Has guild sizes changed since HoT? I don't think anything has changed about guilds to warrant a change to guild missions/halls. People slogged through a solo grind before if they wanted a solo guild. No, they did not. Because there's no way to "solo" guild content, although there SHOULD be, which is one of my points. The other is that new missions, etc need to be added."although there SHOULD be" And thats where the entire argument derails with a fundamental misconception. The issue at hand is that Guilds, Guild Halls, and Guild missions should ONLY benefit Guild Activities.... but they aren't. Whats broken here is that too much of the "Guild" system is built on "Personal Rewards". This is also why Guild leveling is a problem, and why people only want to join pre-leveled guilds, when they all want the rewards, but not want to contribute to any of the cost. This is a hard problem to even discuss, since players are rarely motivated by anything other then personal rewards. Guild Prestige has been almost entirely overshadowed by things like Streamers/Celebrities, which is rapidly scooping up all possible recruits. That type of community also comes with the side effect of "the youtube life", where streamers/CCs themselves have to constantly move around based on whats popular, in order to stay relevant. Before Guildhalls and guild missions, guilds were just glorified chat rooms. And contrary to popular belief, that meshed perfectly with the fact that Guilds had to organize their own activities in order to stay relevant. Guild missions gave Guilds something to do together.... but the rewards were needed to get them in there, and that eventually turned the whole thing into just another weekly routine to maximize possible rewards. Most guilds only still do them, because its less rewards if you don't. The problem with Guildhalls is how all the guild features for WvW locked behind it as a paywall, and PvE players only really see it as extra nodes, exclusive buffs and extra bank space. If anything... I've seen more Individual players then Small guilds trying to upgrade a guild hall, because its the only way to get the extended Bank space now. So I say again..... outside of RPing and Bank space, Guildhalls don't actually benefit guilds at all. Unless you count Scribing for the exclusive Sigils/Runes they can produce.

They should bring all the professions into the elite spec power scale at their core level, which would mean E-specs would become different ways to play rather than straight upgrades with little nuances. They shouldn't be stronger but should be just a different and potentially more diversifying portion of your class; This then would help with balance and future E-specs to be more nuanced. Thats a lot easier said then done when you actually take a good look how the Especs work. Core classes, by design, have a glaring weakness that was intended to counterbalance them against other classes. Especs ignore this rule in favor of counterbalancing the Espec against the Core Specs of their class. HOT Especs are largely designed around filling the design weaknesses of each Class, which is why they are seen as pure upgrades. POF Especs took the same concept, but had the added purpose of upsetting every Meta across the game by trying to break each class into Meta roles they were previously failing at competing in. Scourge and Spellbreaker where made to help combat the Boon Share meta via boon rip. Firebrand and Renegade are attempts to diversify Chrono's dominance by giving them access to Quickness and Alacrity respectively (The 2 support classes now having a Raid capable Support build). Deadeye was there to give Thief a Ranged Support/Debuff option that later got totally redesigned another DPS build. Holosmith gave Engineer a straight forward Damage build for PvE and PvP. Soulbeast pulled double duty as a way to refocus power distribution from the pet back in the Ranger, and give them a raw DPS option for Raids. Weaver gave Ele a stronger dueling setup with a competent Melee. Mirage I'm not clear on what the goal was, other then maybe giving them a way to deal with multiple targets. To elevate the Core "Profession" related trait line to Espec, they are forced to choose between leaning into the class weaknesses [whose inherent imbalance was what was keeping many of them out of Metas in the first place] and power load to compensate, or trying to address those weakness through the Profession mechanics themselves. Both of these require the other 4 trait lines to be completely reshuffled on the assumption of the Espec being the cohesive element in the build; which is EXACTLY how they designed Revenant..... and we all know how that turned out. Theres also the ongoing problem of each Class being power loaded differently, where the "Core as Espec" approach requires at least half of a class's power to come from the Profession mechanic and Trait line. This is made worse by most Core Profession mechanics not being universally flexible, or requiring other Trait lines to make them useful. All of that needs to be totally reevaluated to make this work. Before I was totally onboard with this idea. But my mind has changed over time with how Anet has been handling the POF Espec Mechanics, and they're nearly fundamental misunderstanding of how Players look at traits and effects. Deadeye's unique debuff mechanic made perfect sense as a Support feature, until you realize its the Grace of the Land situation all over again. Scourge is so heavily power loaded into its shades, that small changes to how it works can make or break its viability. Weaver leaned even harder into Ele's existing reliance on Damage bonus traits, and then nerfed the baseline damage of many Core elements to reign in the scaling. Warrior Adrenaline stacking traits being nerfed to single on Esspecs, despite the fact that the difference between Lv1 and Lv3 is substantial, and most of its numerical balance centering around Lv3 effects. Then theres Mirage Cloak mobility nerf, making it less effective then a normal dodge roll; and actually would had been ok for new baselline, had interactions with Teleport utility skills been brought into its design focus. They've been trying to fix mechanical problems with numerical tweaking, and trying to fix numerical scaling with major mechanical changes. The 2 approaches to balance they have been using, aren't being executed properly either. When they do Shaving, the period between shaves is typically too long to reach equilibrium in a reasonable time frame. When they do Big changes, they're relying on the level of disruption to force players to sort it out, and get blind sided when we find loop holes to exploit. More over- the players don't have any real motivation to seek a balanced meta, and that directly hurts the potential for a good testing environment. And thats not surprising, since the game itself values only a hand full of things in each content type..... so players will immediately optimize for them exclusively.

Okay. That's disgustingly tedious, if true. The system before simply gave you the item on drop. People complained about it being tedious that they ran out of bag space and had to spend all of 60 seconds going to the nearest merchant to sell them off, or carry multiple salvage kits to do it in the field. OMG that was so tedious and terrible and bad design and inconvenience and forced me to think ahead..... it was impossible getting anything done. /sarcasm UID added a step to that process, and is now more tedious because I have to process everything all at once rather then in small chunks like before. And the Use All button makes it worse, since it fills up the bag too fast, and I we're limited on bag space because its expensive and bad design!! I think we've officially hit the point where we just need to go "f*** it", remove the drop system entirely, and automatically convert all mats and gold into "Gear experience points" that we spend to upgrade all our gear from white to legendary.

You're aware the entrance to the thing is in a different part of the map, right?

Bonus music because youtube reads my mind.....

Having racing music helps too..... Some suggestions: and of course......

"Praise Path of Fire" PRAISE JOKO!!!!!

So you went from "it doesn't matter", to "realism" and role play, to "dictate how long you can play before we punish you for it, unless you obtain expensive items to not suffer it". The hole you're digging keeps getting deeper. The fact you even brought up an "Energy" right after I brought up the WoW Rest EXP bonus (with word play referring back to its early incarnation as an Exp penalty) shows you're completely misunderstanding the fundamental nature of what those Energy systems are for, why they're being used in a lot of games, and why people are against the idea. its forcing an arbitrary upkeep ritual that actively breaks the flow of the game to be a prominent distraction/inconvenience, and then saying its "OK" by selling a solution that costs additional effort/time (or money), despite pitching it as 'encouraging players' to take a break. The psychological tricks invoked by the whole concept aside, the idea you're presenting falls on its face by suggesting that its there to prevent burn out by forcing people to take a break from whatever they're doing, only to invest a huge amount of effort/gold to obtain the item that removes the debuff that lets them resume whatever they were doing before. You're not getting them to play less, you're provoking them to play even more to counter act the system, for the net result of doing twice as much work for the same amount of rewards. See... normal people logic would recognize the obstacle and deal with it in the most Effort efficient way they can think of. But Gamer logic is built on the conditioning of every obstacle existing for the purpose of being overcome, and is meant to be overcome through action. This is EXACTLY why so many games are monetized the way they are now, because our engagement with games have always been prefaced on the idea that interactions are meant to be "active". If we are expected to wait, there has to be a thread of logical reasoning that runs through various parts of the game's systems that support this as a part of the underlying game play...... NOT as an aside and/or external element imposing its will, and running contrary to what the game is actually doing. The difference is like having to wait for night to attack a bandit camp, because they'll be asleep and stealth becomes an option.. Verses only allowing people to use the rides in an amusement park in blocks of 2 hours, but then have to take a mandatory 30 minute break at the park's special rest stops....... unless you paid for a special pass to keep going, or sing the Russian anthem backwards while spinning a plate on your nose, so you're allowed out early. Its not as hyperbolic as sounds at first.

Remember Modremoth's invasion of the lvl 15 zones? And how the scaling system was broken due to the Mordrem not having properly scaled Sub-80 stat block (effectively making them 3 levels higher), Lvl 80 Players being scaled down more aggressively due to the Zone's level, Low Level players scaling the whole event up, but lacking the Damage, armor value, Defensive or Control skills to fight an enemy designed around needing a shut down strategy, and can dish out enough CCs to stun lock you, and then roll you over with more damage then you knew was possible at that point. I'm pretty sure the Awakened Invasions are scaled properly... but that difference in their attacks is so substantial, they go in looking like this...... http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Spongebob-Happy-spongebob-squarepants-154897_338_432.jpgbut come out looking like this..... "The day I set foot on that beach in Normandy, I never wished more that there was a god in heaven, and I was never more certain that there wasn’t."

This is flawed premise on multiple levels though...... especially on a technical level. If we completely disregard the social aspects of the situation, Companion NPCs are still a massive problem on their AI alone. The amount things required to compensate for that is very extensive, and have (over time) have been adding various forms of soft immunity to them during Story missions to prevent them from being a total liability. The issues are as follows: The AI is incredibly simple, and can only manage "move to marker" and "IF target_inrange=TRUE, THEN attack; IF FALSE THEN move_toward_target". Their attacks fire off cool down with some conditional caveats (like delays before they're allowed to use them), or fired off in specific sequences (became a new standard form LS3 onward). AI lacks the ability to be fully aware of their surroundings, nor playing off other ally's actions, or form complex strategies. Those elements have to be baked into the level/event scripting, group compositions, and their individual skill times/sequences. The above conditions make them incapable of opportunistic behavior that isn't governed by single IF variables. Heroes would not be able to understand buildcraft or skill rotations and combinations, which is foundational to how these classes operate.How and when they decide to engage has always been a problem, and off loading that to the player requires very granular controls.The reason Heroes even worked in GW1 was a fluke of the Skill system, and mobility/positioning being practically a non-issue to combat. The freeform skill bar let you organize skill chains using simple left to right priority, and the targeting requirements of most skills made for easier conditional checks. That set up allowed for functional combat with very reactionary AI, and the Trinity Comp structure mitigated a lot of the edge casesRange and positioning where much lesser issues, since the majority of skill were single target, targeted AOE or PbAOE. Cleave didn't exist, dodging didn't exist, and any skills with a cast time required you to stand still. Why this doesn't work for GW2 as it stands: Despite AI being superior in terms of reaction time, Positioning is too important in any combat that isn't just a 1v1 slug fest. The moment you introduce AOEs , CCs and highly mobile enemies, combat shifts very heavily toward predictive thought processes, counter strategies, and dynamic threat prioritization. I remember fighting Modrem in the Silverwastes BEFORE the overwhelming damage and shutdown power of Especs..... at a time when the only substantial difference between a player and NPCs were players using dodges whenever they took too much damage. The feral mordrem WRECKED an entire population of players, because the majority had never actually fought something that could fight back before. Even at its height of environmental awareness, the AI never got much further then understanding what an AOE circle was, and simply moving toward and past the closest edge. The only major advancement in their outward behavior since then is how they handle target selection. In order to be even marginally worth using, Heroes would need the following systems added to get past the liability threshold. Positioning control to avoid ground hazards and lining up multiple targets. Since AI will probably never get that far, this falls on a granular and easy to hotkey Waypoint system, and complimenting behavior controls when and how far to engage targets. Considering the GW1 implementation, and some of POF missions explicitly built around this concept, theres no way this will work without monopolizing the players attention. And given how much attention is needed to survive combat in post expansion content, even one Hero becomes a heavy burden on management. But without it (using the current auto-pilot minion behavior) you can't hope for anything greater then Ranger pet's 2 state system. Heros would have to have their own bespoke skill system designed to work around their AI. The problem I see with this off the bat, is how those skills would have to be incredibly strong to be even marginally effective. This has a compound effect with how their HP and defenses have to be managed, since its nigh impossible to replicate a player's efficient use/management of Dodges and active defenses without stronger predictive capabilities. For defense, the next closest feasible solution is a matrix of defensive reactions tailored to each class/type skill profile of enemies, so the AI knows how to appropriately act when fighting one. This sounds good on paper, until you actually start making a list of attack types found across the game...... POF mobs have almost entirely bespoke attack skills, while HOT uses modified versions of player skills. Core Tyria Mobs use either older/modified versions of Player skills, or use the same archetypal skills as Ranger pets. This could easily give the Mystic Forge a run for its money on manual upkeep. Theres also a risk of their defense reactions majorly interfering with their offensive actions. In fact.... if we look at the behavior of players, most go all in on offensive for a faster kill; as being put on the defensive is can quickly snowball with how strong many enemy attacks are. And even with all that in there, it would STILL need most of the special advantages already given to major named NPCs during story missions, in order to offset the substantial difference in combat effectiveness between Players and everything else. Things like universal damage reduction, downstate replaced with temporary disable, and condition purging/immunity. However, I still have one more HUGE problem with the whole thing.................... Allowing this in open world creates a whole new level of scaling problems that is currently isolated to WvW. GW1 never had this problem, because the entire game is instanced based. Heros also had an entire game structured around a party system that they could easily slot into, and would not change any of the balance considerations since they are (at best) comparable to a player. But with the open world format of GW2, and how its balanced around Solo players.... if a Hero NPC is even close to supplanting another (even casual) player in terms of combat power, this creates a power creep problem that the open world Events/Metas and random enemies are going to have to take into account. With companions, every player that congregates in the area realistically adds an extra 30-60% to the damage output on top of the their own. That means events and bosses would have to scale as if there were 50% more players then there actually are, otherwise risk them being finished way too easily. We've already seen several instances in the past where event scaling was broken in either direction; and shown us how delicate the tuning for these things are. When viewing the idea as a whole, from a purely technical and game play perspective, the only way this doesn't break the game is to limit it to Story instances. But theres a catch 22 in which Story missions wouldn't require more systems then whats already being used, since it would be far more efficient to bake many of those options into the story missions themselves. IE.... Its either a create system that has to be universally compatible with old content (which is difficult, time consuming, and breaks a couple of paradigms the game is built on); oooooorrrrrr........ build missions and mission areas explicitly around this concept, and limit it to that content block only. In nearly every conceivable way, the latter approach is as optimal as we can get, based on how the overall game is designed.

Except food and drinks played into the resource system as Mana recovery, something this games DOES NOT have. Even if it did- the target pacing of this game's combat would implement it in a way where Mana would reset to baseline between fights anyway, and its time to exhaustion no greater then 60 seconds. WoW's entire combat system is built around Quest-long endurance, which was the standard for when it came out. Guildwars and GW2 are built around shorter, but much higher stakes skirmishes, drawing more from contemporary action games. Its also why health regens so fast out of combat, in order to reset engagement conditions. I also can't believe anyone from WoW would ever advocate for a long term upkeep debuff given the game's history, and its affect on game design over the last decade. Everyone at this point should know about the global XP penalty thats been there since the game's beta, where it lowers your XP gains the longer you play.

Lightsaber noises would be a problem, since it would require code injections to either the game files or memory space. The Reason ArcDPS gets away with what it does is operating off of screen captures and image recognition. Shaders are something of a grey zone because it doesn't alter assets mess with memory space, but the way it intercepts calls CAN/does change visual results of shader behavior at both the API and GPU level. The main reason this has been a non-issue all these years, is due to how the game treats most visual states and effects as Binary for the sake of competitive modes. For instance, the stealth distortion effect (which would be the most obvious thing to target) is only used on allies, while enemies are not rendered at all. Tab targeting means precision aiming is not needed. AOE warnings are simple geometric shapes, and are adequately visible even when clustered. Lighting is not used in any significant way for combat. Very high FPS doesn't give much of an advantage, since all attacks are animation driven. And the server loop for most skills means latency has a much bigger impact on overall combat performance. Theres nothing locally that you can really take advantage of. That’s not how arcdps works nor why it gets a pass. The d3d9.dll is loaded automatically when the game launches and hooks into the client/server messages at a certain point before those messages are overwritten. The creator worked with ANet to ensure compliance but it’s still not supported. Gw2Hook, like arcdps, was also looked at by ANet to be TOS compliant. Again, not a sign off that it is supported as they can change course at any time. Like with all mods, use at your own risk.Then I've been lied to by a lot of people explaining it to me...... Now I wonder why.......

Except they've already addressed this with the first skyscale pack. The problem is back porting mount pack with the skyscale only has a 1 in N chance of giving the player what they want, and an N/1 chance of requiring the player to buy a whole different pack just to get the 1 or more skyscale skins they want. The only ones who benefit are the ones who already own everything (and shown that money is not a limitation), while simultaneously breeding resentment in everyone else. What they ended up doing makes the most sense from business standpoint...... They created a new Skyskale pack that includes a set of skins made to match other Theme'd skin packs. This puts a minimum investment, like all the other mount packs, but increases the odds of people who want multiple skins are getting them without having to buy multiple packs. Whats surprised me though, is I assumed they would had released a larger number of 2k skins for the Skyscale by now; since thats a huge money making opportunity given its current novelty.