Wraith.3524

I've been lurking on the Arc Divider changes and from my perspective it seems like you're mostly an apologist for bad changes. You genuinely like the new ability, told people it's fine - even great (in virtually every thread on the topic)! Now that we can see it is bad as was pretty obvious it would be, you resort to calling people clowns for being disappointed that one of their favorite abilities has had its function completely altered. Perhaps English isn't your native language to which I apologize, but with how you type it makes it very difficult to find what you say genuine.

I'm looking in a mirror, welcome!

Agree. Completely different game than I'm used to. GW2 xpacs have always been an instant, obvious buy for me but I can safely say I would not have bought EoD knowing the current design direction. I left WoW nearly a decade ago for these exact types of anti-player practices. The turtle, DE meta and non-account bound jade bot (masteries used to be account wide) have left me greatly concerned for the future of this game. But hey, I guess the others are right and I don't have to play. The current devs are fairly inexperienced, and have a lot of learning to do. One can only hope they don't let pride blind them.

This might be valid, if improving actually increased your odds. There are so many random things that can happen in the Soo-Won fight that make skill less of a factor than chance. I was in an organized group of 40 the other day and we lost, it was chalked up to bad RNG with nonstop invuln-swoops. Why that's even possible, I don't know. Poor design, honestly. I'd say that your success within five tries is too small of a sample size for accurate data. It sounds more like you got a lucky encounter with favorable mechanics. Which, I'm glad for you, but it doesn't mean this encounter is good. You ought to keep doing it 20 more times, just to know what other folks are made to experience. It's a fun encounter to do anyway, so no reason you wouldn't want to spend 2-3 hours, 20+ times for sample data! One can be completely on top of the mechanics and know everything, never get downed, yet you're still reliant on open-world players. Even in highly coordinated, you're still beholden to random mechanic nonsense tacking on tons of time that can nullify the possibility of completion. If there were 5 minutes added and the RNG was knocked off some, it'd likely be possible for even the most disorganized maps. (Imo, that's indicative of poor design, rather than interesting or difficult design) This is all completely separate from the fact that over 10 years of content, people could just show up and succeed in open-world content with whatever gear, whatever spec. Until now.

Surely there's got to be irony seen when talking about fairness and balance surrounding the Dragon's End Meta and turtle. I hear you, though. I was disappointed to hear that the years-long consistency of difficulty for open-world encounters has been altered, and the means of obtaining mounts completely changed for the turtle. Maybe if there were titles for it like 'Very Lucky', and 'Not Very Lucky', the latter obtained after 10 consecutive meta failures. The meta is poorly designed and riddled with RNG, the turtle shouldn't have been gated behind it from the beginning. If you already have a turtle, your reward is being able to wave it at other players that have 20+ failed attempts for a week plus. You don't need another reward for being extremely lucky, or merely coordinated and lucky. My man wants to talk about fairness and cares not about the lowly plebs with 400+ writs and no turtle. 😭

Problem is the rewards aren't good enough to maintain the map. People are doing it and failing excessively to try and get their turtle (mind you, historically mounts have never before been gated for the average, disorganized open-world player). If either people get their turtle or give up, the map will rapidly lose players leaving only the highly coordinated players to do an unrewarding encounter. If you have the reigns of 50 players and 2-3 hours, there are a lot of other things you could go do that would be far more profitable than Dragon's End. I don't disagree with the challenge, but it should be a queued thing that these organized groups go for. Private/Public thing like Dragon Storm. It should be worthwhile. It's not unrealistic in this situation for people to have spent 40+ in-game hours and not seen a single victory. In an open-world map, you're at the mercy of other players and encounter RNG, in this case. The writ change will make the turtle more attainable, certainly, but it will end up being faster to ignore Soo-Won and switch maps to keep doing events that reward writs. If you want the challenge, that's great. I also want hard modes. Instead, advocate for it to persist but not in such a way that punishes people for existing. The current state isn't fair to open-world players that are sub-optimally built or skilled. It's not fair to the organized group that has to carry people they don't want to, either. Refusal to look at the negative effects of the current system is only going to lead to the map's eventual death.

I'm one of those people. Try to do well, do third party research, pull my weight and never get downed but.. I'm gonna have to get the turtle through the writs, I guess. Not only does it take a long time, but graceless fails are pretty soul crushing. Map I was in mucked up the 5-crystal phase right before the boss, then the map says haha, you have 1 minute to GTFO, bye loser. I don't know. I've already been on Soo-Won enough (at least 10 times, probably more but I stopped counting to keep motivated), it's a huge waste of time and the game is more inclined to say F-you than hey, you were so close at 7% - give it another try! Rather it's, spend another 2 hours you don't have, or hope you get into a progressed map - but that one very likely doesn't stand a chance. I don't raid because I don't have the time. Yet, somehow I've done countless endgame map metas without needing to beg a raid group prior to ED. Sure, I could burn more time getting into a more organized party but I've never had to do that for a map meta in ten years. The long established content difficulty hierarchy has been fairly destabilized in the name of finale epic-ness, I suppose. This is the first open world event, and expansion where I feel like my time isn't respected, unfortunately.

Definitely how it feels.

Even from a financial standpoint it doesn't make sense. I've bought a lot of mount skins and there's tons of variety in any single mount category. It would make them more money if everyone could get turtle and buy skins for it. I can safely say I'd probably buy at least one turtle mount skin, but that generally requires the turtle being obtainable. I don't have a reason to consider skins until then. I genuinely don't mind that the difficulty exists, but it's plainly in the wrong spot given the history of GW2 content, especially mounts/masteries.

I am pretty prone to nausea in games, mostly tethered to Field of View. Nausea (for me, anyway) usually happens when there's a change in movement that doesn't match what the brain expects. Some console ports have an unusual FoV due to them being designed to be played on a couch far away, rather than a computer monitor. Early GW2 I minimized this by reducing the sway (Rotation Speed in options) when turning the camera, since there's sort of a stylistic panning motion on side to side. Before touching that I got pretty ill from just looking around. I'd also recommend trying to tweak the FoV slider to something that feels more natural to you. If you already messed with those settings I'm not too sure of other options. Some folks turn down/off post processing since it really blows out an already arguably oversaturated color palette. Sucks to have that happen, I pretty much can't play Borderlands because of the nausea. In Skyrim I gotta edit the FoV to 90+ degrees, and the camera zoom/shake when sprinting is rough. My sympathies, I hope you can find settings that help your situation.

This would vastly improve things and be more in the line with.. every single mastery up until Jade Bots.

I agree. I thought one of the masteries for the Jade Bot would be 'wireless power' to make you have infinite charge, and as a bonus it could remove all the battery clutter from maps. The buffs kind of become tedious after repeatedly getting them over time. I did think the waypoint utility would be nice, since I thought it would be like an invitation to the Lily but wherever I wanted.. however that's not how it works, haha. Plus if I do get used to a feature like glide-boost, the lack of account bound utility makes hopping to alts jarring. Where any of my characters can use any of my mounts, there's a process for simply enabling the Jade Bot per character with a core. I don't really see myself doing that 20 times for all my characters.

Good to know, I spose. Creative insult too. 🤣

Wait, just found out supposedly after getting lucky and completing the Dragon's End meta, you have to do a raid-style Strike Mission? As someone that's played since launch with a small handful of friends, I'm pretty surprised by this. End game mechanics wise, it feels like this expansion was designed by an entirely different team that didn't play the game or wasn't aware of what made it so special. HoT had its flaws and I felt PoF was great, but all this gating feels like implementation of reasons I quit World of Warcraft ages ago. I loved that seeing other players was never a detriment. I loved that my legion of alts was a benefit and not an inconvenience. It felt like my time was respected (unlike WoW) but not so much this go around. I've never been blocked by a random for speaking in map chat before this expansion (In Dragon's End, I asserted to a player with an addon that it's unreasonable for players to know their dps since the game has literally never informed the player of that info. Got called a drooler and was blocked.) I don't PvP, and the PvE community was always helpful, polite and pretty funny during map metas. This marks a sharp turn for the worse, in my anecdotal experience.

I disagree with this. Heart of Thorns was trying to find the game's footing, and I think Path of Fire was great. This expansion though, not a huge fan of unfortunately. I like the jade bot effects but not being account bound is pretty frustrating for alts. Plus the battery mechanic gets old. The fishing mechanic is closer to pong than fishing, and for some reason Simon-Says color/beep games are hard pushed here. Being pushed into playing elite specs to get their collection is foreign from the game's past design philosophy. I can find entertainment in legitimately difficult map metas like the final one in EoD, but putting a mount behind it feels like a poor decision. I'm not sure how many more times I can be in failing metas before considering it a waste of time to attempt. I'm a warrior main (lol) and Bladesworn feels poorly executed or undercooked. The game's whole thing is moving and dodging, but this spec is based around rooting yourself for not great damage and generally clunky gameplay - especially compared to Berserker. As someone who played GW1 I'm not too keen on the story's hasty resolution but I guess some could like it. Not enough time with Soo-won or Ankka to be invested, void went as fast as it was introduced. Mai Trin's Scarlett Briar 'stance' opens some unanswered questions about Revenants. No real story breadcrumbs hinted at gives the end gives the feeling of tying everything up with a bow. I don't feel many of the concerns are hyperbole, but rather think they are an indication of quality versus Path of Fire, Icebrood Saga, Dragonfall, Grizzlewood Coast etc, which were all really well done imo.