Alakazarm.1847

This is pretty disappointingly sparse, but maybe I was expecting something unreasonably thorough. I think the thing most obviously missing is some sort of commentary on the general power level of builds relative to each other and relative to past or future states of the game (not with respect to the spec itself as you alluded to with the power budget section, but specifically to other builds). As someone who thinks the game has been powercrept a little too hard, I'd like to see overall damage output reduced by some small percentage (15%ish, maybe?), but regardless of my limited perspective I'd be curious to see what you guys have to say about it, since I imagine you're very much the people through whom power levels of various specs get adjusted. I also think that boons probably warrant a more thorough discussion. It's been discussed to death, but the smothering power of quickness is absurd, especially relative to alacrity. I think the strength of the actual effects these boons provide is worth considering, despite the fact that players consider them a given in any given team composition. Perhaps it's the case that you just don't consider solo or open-world content when talking about things like tradeoffs or "no bad decisions" or whatever, but it is legitimately impossible to make a good decision if that decision involves forgoing quickness and/or might (and fury for power builds). The other boons are good, but nowhere near as important as those two in terms of dps output, which is where you see most of these tradeoffs (% modifiers most frequently, obviously). In any area of the game where you're not playing with other people you're communicating with, every decision to forgo boons is a bad one--which is ironic considering it's how many people play. I dunno, I think it's worth talking about. Finally, and this is another point that's been discussed to death on streams and the like, the overwhelming advantage certain builds like firebrand and mechanist have in that they can sacrifice parts of their build for the sake of utility at much less overall cost to their build's output in their designated role. The fact that these professions generate quickness and alacrity off so few skills means they have so much more space to play with when it comes to taking extra stuff. They're not the only specs like this, of course, but they're the most common. That's a fun situation to be in--as a firebrand it feels fantastic to know your class well enough that you know how and when to sacrifice parts of your healing or damage output to bring critical CC utility. Conversely, it feels really, really kitten to play quickness herald and know that in order to provide utility you have to kitten your boon output--unless you're willing to swap your gear, but imo gear-swaps are unacceptable in situations like this because of their inaccessibility to such a huge amount of the playerbase relative to the completely consequence-less decision to switch a utility skill or trait. Classes like elementalist having so much of their damage output be tied to their utility skills should also be a part of this discussion. Thank you for your efforts to improve the game, and I look forward to seeing reaper, dh, and daredevil get completely neglected in November. Fix bloody roar.

sick

you absolutely do not barely use hammer, conjures work just like they always have. pick up, blow two skills, drop immediately. You spend like 85% of the rotation on hammer cycling orbs.

Generally, catalyst (hammer) feels fantastic on a golem and pretty great in open world PvE if you don't think about playing it well. However, the insanely long animations on earth 2/5 make chaining your circular projectiles extremely difficult in real scenarios more complicated than a golem--especially without quickness. Same goes for water and air 2 to a lesser extent. Maybe it's a skill issue but personally I feel that making the hammer 3 skills instant-cast or extending their base duration by a small amount (even 1s would make a huge difference) would go a long way towards making the spec dramatically more fun to play in open world, and would remove a great deal of the dps rotation's jankiness. Unfortunately any elementalist dps rotation involving a conjure weapon will always be miserable due to the stiff, unreliable nature of picking up a bundle, but it's exacerbated by this spec's extremely tight windows for maintaining it's dps buffs and EE stacks. Those tight windows are incredibly fun to play around when you're not swapping weapons or being burdened by 3.5s skill cast times, but as it stands playing catalyst feels like you're fighting the game mechanics, which can't be good for anybody. Also the air and water utilities are pretty not good and the elite's cd is way too long. Especially compared to bladesworn's elite. Also maybe jade sphere should grant pyromancer's puissance? Also getting your grand finale ripped away from you because the buffs expired right before your cast was about to finish feels absolutely awful. If I press the flipover skill, I feel like I should get the reward from pressing the skill. This is actually probably the biggest issues with the "feel" of the spec aside from the difficulty of projectile uptime maintenance.

What's going on with the mordrem commanders from HoT? Specifically Adryn with his seer-evocative design and Hareth with his decidedly norn sounding name/build? My impression has always been that they're not mordrem in the same way that sylvari were corrupted into mordrem guard, but are probably more similar to previously living species (Hareth perhaps being a plantified norn for instance) that got assimilated in the same way that those mordrem wolves with regular dog skulls did, whatever it may be. Alternatively, are they just big mordrem that happen to have maverick fashion sense?Also, what was actually going to happen to logan and zojja had they been left in blighting pods? would they have been turned into similar beings? It's understandable if nobody on hand can actually answer those questions considering how old that content is, but as an alternate: Have there ever been talks of updating old content where plot threads were dropped (ala dutchess chrysantha, the pre-PoF sidestory content, ALTAR OF GLAUST?) in some sort of current events-style release, or does most of your effort need to be focused on 'fresh' content to keep the narrative moving? It's somewhat hard to imagine guild wars 2 actually releasing purely narrative content in the game itself rather than on those dope sidestory posts you did leading into episode 6, but I think I can speak for pretty much everybody when I say an update to some of those old HoT story threads would be really cool.

I wouldn't have any problem with the system whatsoever if there was evidence that all of the effort of the people making mount skins wasn't going towards the cash shop instead of helping pad the in-game rewards that need so much more of a bump--especially since there are a ton of down to earth mount skins that would fit just fine as an in-game reward. Of course, mounts will inevitably go the way of the glider, except without legendaries. I don't even have a problem with the RNG aspect of the boxes, although it would be so much better if people could buy the skins they wanted at a premium. Bottom line is, there's an unreal amount of work that went into making the skins that should have gone towards making in-game rewards to keep people invested. Resource allocation like this will sink your ship. PoF may have sold well, but it's an absolute failure in the eyes of the dedicated playerbase. Now it's clear where the effort of constructing rewards went. I don't play on buying any gems unless/until mount skins become available as in-game rewards. This is disgusting.