Dunroy.1058

I think the new meta from this most recent update has started to see a lot more people defaulting to Raptors again, which I'm all about to be honest. Skyscale is essentially just a shiny at this point. I mostly just see them when waiting for specific events to pop because people like to hover on them showcasing their shiny skins. When it comes to actually moving after the target, the beetles start coming out. I also feel bad for the people who default to Skyscale for all aerial movement and haven't experienced swooping through New Kaineng at top speed on a Griffon. I genuinely spent about an hour the first time I went to that map just blasting through the skies, diving between the buildings on my Griffon.

I would argue that we've gone beyond Final Fantasy. I play XIV on and off along with GW2, and at least in Final Fantasy, the dumb anime stuff is thematically relevant to the IP and fits in world. Stuff like the giant cat pillows don't feel like they belong in Tyria. It's not helped by the fact that the colour palette doesn't even look like it ties in with anything around it. It seems to have a cell shaded sort of quality to it that makes it stand out, rather than blend into the world. That's honestly the only real issue I have with it. You want to add cat pillows for the people that want them and will pull out their wallets? Cool, do it. But add them in a way that makes them feel like they were made in Tyria. I think they missed that mark here.

I'll admit I've just been skim reading so this might have been answered already, but my question is essentially, why? I've mained Rev since HoT release across all content. Melee is just where it's at. Yes other classes have more ranged options, but that doesn't mean that they have any more optimal ranged builds than Rev. What exactly is it you want to get with another ranged option, because if it's just a different aesthetic, then just slap a different skin on your hammer. TL;DR Rev doesn't need another ranged option because there isn't any content that requires one.

I think the topic of gender in a game reflecting on the individual irl is just ridiculous. I'm male irl and also play almost exclusively male characters in RPGs. I will sometimes roll a female in games like GW2 where I've racked up thousands of hours so want a character who can have different fashion options to what I'm typically using, but at the end of the day my entire avatar is just that. A fashion statement. I pick my character based on what I personally think looks good. I play males because I personally think a male in a full suit of heavy armor looks cool. I also totally understand that there are people who like playing a female in heavy armor, in skimpy armor, a male in skimpy armor. What the hell does it matter to anyone else? Play the game the way you enjoy and 99.9% of the world will let you. That 0.1% who actively want to make you upset about your choices are a bunch of degenerates anyway, so who gives af what they think?

This right here does make me rather skeptical that you've played other MMOs before. This is a very common behaviour in all MMOs. I've also played WoW, SWTOR, and actively play FFXIV currently alongside GW2, and have seen this in literally all of them, very frequently. The only real point from your OP I have anything to say on is 4 though. At some point during the life cycle of this game, every core trait line for every class has been both overpowered, and underpowered, in relation to other trait lines, and synergies with the class, based on the evolving meta. It's not that "the traits still aren't balanced after 10 years". It's that their balance is constantly shifting based on the meta. Which to be fair is the same as saying the balance is constantly shifting based on how many Firebrands you have in your group, but the point still stands that you can't just balance core traits and leave it at that. Every tweak to every other skill or trait in the game requires constant reassessment of other skills and traits. Another thing I feel you'd be completely familiar with as a concept if you were an MMO vet.

I would honestly suggest you consider doing that. Yes you can cheese most of the JP requirements in this instance, but recycling JPs in various ways as part of various collections is a constant thing in GW2, and if that rather fundamental aspect of the game's progression is something you dislike that much, it does kind of seem to me like an, only a matter of time, sort of thing before you quit anyway. Not hoping you do quit, as I love this game and hate seeing people turn away from it, but it sounds like there are quite fundamental and mainline aspects to repeated gameplay loops that you really hate, so this genuinely may not be the game for you.

Really endgame is the content you do after hitting level and gear cap, that keeps you coming back to the game. In that regard, yes LW1 is end game, as is every expansion, every LW season, all content that is primarily done after hitting cap. Just because it's old doesn't mean it's no longer end game. End game in MMOs doesn't mean content at the end of the game, it means content at the end of the treadmill, and since GW2 has no treadmill, all content aimed at level 80 is technically end game content.

It sounds like you're relatively new to the game, and just need to get some of the basics down more consistently. I've been rerunning the LW stuff with the return to event and haven't downed in any of the instances. Granted I'm running on a Renegade which is the easiest solo PvE class, but the fundamentals are still the same. You need to not only combine dodging, with stun breaks and heals, but also use your own hard and soft CCs to lock enemies down to further reduce their threat. The game does have a difficulty curve that jumps quite significantly with HoT, and reduces again for PoF, but groups are never required for any of the story content. If you understand your class, combo fields, and bring a suitable build, you can easily solo all story/LW content without issue. I recommend looking up a strong solo build for Engi/Scrapper/Holo to use for these instances. I'm afraid Engineer is my least played class so I can't offer any specific support for a viable build, but you shouldn't have too much trouble finding one if you take to Google. This isn't intended to be a "git gud" post, so I hope you don't take it as criticism. GW2 is just deceptive with it's complexities. Combat isn't just watching your cooldowns and dodging at the right time, like it presents on the surface. You need to learn how to combo your utilities and weapon skills to apply additional effects if you want to be able to more efficiently run solo content.

Hot take: If your totally unique and original character name you wanted to use is already taken by someone else, it's not that unique or original. Pick another one.

I think people assume the amulet is free (read, a reward from completing the return to LW achievements) because the achievement shows that the full amulet is the reward for the final tier, not a component that will still require some spenny additions in a Mystic Forge. So unless they make one of the return to LW achievements, create a mystic tribute, it's quite likely that this amulet is "free" comparatively.

Personally I disliked most legendaries anyway, regardless of appearance. For me, weapons like The Shining Blade, Flameseeker Prophecies, and Claw of the Khan-Ur are deserving of the title legendary as we know their history and lore. They feature prominently in the franchise as a whole, as weapons that defined entire arcs of history. Then you get stuff like Eternity, which looks "legendary" but is just a cool sword. I think the term legendary weapon is used too liberally to begin with in this game, but I know they need to have a weapon of each type per generation and not every weapon type has a historically important entry, so it is what it is. Along this vein, since the Commander is helping Aurene to define this period in Tyria's history, I actually think the weapons based on her are more fitting of the title than random entries like Incinerator, despite visuals being lackluster.

I want to just start out by saying I think that people should be able to play the game in whatever manner they enjoy, and receive rewards appropriate to the level of commitment they have to that game mode. In that sense legendary armor having an OW acquisition method is something I'd be ok with. I just want to add something that OP didn't appear to consider with their initial post though. That is, other people having to play your preferred game mode to acquire their legendaries. You don't want to feel forced to play PVP, WVW, or Raids to acquire a legendary set of armor, but to acquire any legendary weapon, outside of buying a gen 1 off the TP requires running countless metas in HoT or PoF for Gift of Maguuma or Desert respectively, or for crafting a gen 1, exploring every core map for a gift of exploration. As a WvW player who does T4 Fractals for a cash injection when I require it, running this mindless repetitive OW metas for said gifts is the definition of tedium, but I don't have an alternative. I'm not coming here with suggestions, or to belittle your request at all, but I do just want to point out that you are able to do most of your legendary crafting in your preferred game mode without setting foot in another, aside from WvW for Gift of Battle. But one reward track in WvW is much faster than the multiple meta grinding I have to do for a Gift of Desert/Maguuma if I want to head into your preferred mode for a component for a legendary. So I guess this is sort of a count your blessings comment. No you can't make legendary armor in the OW, but you can get 2 trinkets, and every weapon. Which is more than any other single game mode.

To clarify, I don't actually want HoT difficulty, I want the difficulty HoT felt to be at the time that it came out. IOW I want a difficulty that exceeds anything we've experienced so far, but in a way that felt like a barrier that could be overcome with time, practice, and learning mechanics, like back when HoT first released.

Alt+1 -7 for each mount, but I use the radial mount wheel addon to actually mount up and dismount, which I have bound to holding shift to have it pop up, and then you select your mount by moving the mouse into the quadrant it's icon is in.

So I may be wrong here, as I only have two chairs, the golden Joko style throne, and the Norn chair with the wolf, but afaik, no chair has ever been dyable.While I understand your frustration, as mounts always have been dyable, the fact that it wasn't mentioned on the store that it can't be recoloured is prefectly normal, because no chair ever has been recoulourable. Really the exception would be that they WOULD point out if it COULD be dyed, not the other way around, because it would be a unique selling point.I 100% understand what you wanted, and also 100% agree that would make a way better offering on the gem store, but at the end of the day what was advertised was a chair, not the ability to sit with your mount specifically, so I think it's more of an expectation adjustment needing to be made, rather than any changes to the item listing on the gem store.

That's good to know. I thought I was losing it how certain I was that it was the signet.

Honestly, I'm sure you've seen this in a million other similar threads before, but you should pick your class based on your personal enjoyment rather than what's "meta" or what other people think is good. I spent years playing a banner slave warrior in raids because it was an easy spot to fill, and I thought I enjoyed it. I mostly then dabbled with guardian and revenant as off classes because, hey I had the heavy legendary armor, so why not just use that on everything. It was only a few weeks ago that out of the blue I picked up an Engineer and realised what a blast scrapper is in PvP/WvW, and how uniquely cool the Holosmith is in events. I now have a new favourite class and am enjoying the game more than ever before. That's really just a long winded way of saying if you play what others recommend, or what you think you should be playing, you won't necessarily enjoy it as much as you could by simply choosing what you personally find the most fun.

I think that's the warrior elite signet. Try changing your elite skill and see if that removes it.

whats the legendary Pistol?Now compare to the Legendary Greatsword. You can answer this question yourself. So it's based primarily on aesthetics? I guess that makes sense, actually. There's no guarantee that the skills a revenant greatsword gets are going to be actually useful, but it is reasonably safe to assume that from an aesthetic perspective, a greatsword is going to be a greatsword.That's why I'd rather pistols personally. The legendary GS may massively outclass legendary pistol in terms of individual aesthetic, but the overall aesthetic of a character dual wielding pistols is immensely cooler than one just holding a greatsword in my opinion.

I don't understand all the GS on rev requests. Both other heavies have GS access. What about pistols? Where's their heavy class representation?

There are a great many builds out there that are literally optimally played with a single key press in many content modes. I can think of a dual pistol 3 spam deadeye, and dual axe berzerker off the top of my head that are literally optimal content performers with next to no active interaction with the keyboard. Less mechanically dexterous players do have meta build options that don't require dexterity.Reducing the skill ceiling for the vast majority to cater to a minority isn't the answer. There are available answers for that minority to allow them to perform on par without compromise.

I personally disagree. While I totally see where you're coming from, and don't fault the logic behind a streamlined system that allows people to all perform equally without needing 10X the key presses, I enjoy in-combat swapping. Having multiple weapon sets or elements that change my abilities in combat is something other games I play don't have. Other MMOs have the larger total skill pool for each class, but GW2 has weapon swapping to allow on the fly adjustments to your play style, be it swapping to a ranged weapon to pick off something that won't let you stay close, or swapping to something with heavy CC to lock someone down, the in-combat swapping adds a level of fun that I personally otherwise find absent completely from the game due to its extremely small pool of available skills.I'm sure there is a solution to what you propose that would appease everyone, but I'm unable to see it with my complete lack of expertise in this area so I'd personally rather not see it change to avoid the risk of a more streamlined system removing the enjoyment I do get from combat in GW2.

Wait... You want them to remove Glint's theme from the Dragon's Lair outpost in Prophecies for the elite that channels Glint? I can get behind an option to disable it so that people who don't like it can mute it, and admittedly I haven't played Herald enough for it to get on my nerves. I remember thinking it was one of the coolest little details of the spec when it came out though, that the more facets you had up, the more complete Glint's outpost theme was.

To answer the initial question posed by the title of your thread - because the devs don't want it to. We can dance around the physics of Tyria vs Earth, or a million other possibilities as to why GW2 mounts only glide or gain elevation for very brief, restricted durations, but the plain and simple fact is, the devs have not had the inclination to implement a mount that just flies. Whether or not an individual believes a fully free flying mount would ruin the experience of exploring the world is another case, but it's false to assume that Anet keep "getting it wrong" when they in fact haven't even tried to add a fully flying mount to their game. They impose these "artificial restrictions" to their "flying" mounts to encourage a mixed use of all mounts, which by their design philosophy, they believe provides a better experience. TL;DR - the mounts in GW2 don't fly because the developers of GW2 don't want their mounts to fly. That said, have you seen people with true mastery of the Griffon mount? They do seem to be able to fully gain and lower altitude however they please at jet fighter like speeds. I'm trash with the Griffon, but I have been lead to believe from videos that it is in fact capable of complete flight in the right hands.

It's the lazy look to them that bothers me most. I thought 2k gems for a single mount skin was steep, but at least it looks vastly different to the base skin, even if I don't personally like the look of it. These licence skins look like the equivalent of a retexture. But since we can dye our mounts, they couldn't just to a retexture, so had to make minor changes to the shape. They don't feel like cash shop skins to me, they feel like the equivalent of a common reward drop from an event in most other games. I'm sure that there were some artists and devs who did put time and effort in to these skins, but it just doesn't look like it in game. RNG loot boxes or no, my main plea here is for Anet to please not try to rush out 30 lacklustre skins at once again. Please just focus on one at a time, so that they actually look nice.