Djimi.5167

Hit the nail on the head here; couldn't have put it better myself. One other thing which gets me is that everyone the commander meets seems to become absolutely fearless. "End of the world? Let's go, team!". It made sense with Destiny's Edge (being a group of tough fighters), but seeing Gorrik in the heat of battle having a conversation with the commander? Even if he manages to pluck up the courage to be in a fight, surely there would still be at least some sense of fear in his speech? Idk, for me it dampens the impact and tone of the battles... (Remember Kasmeer's reaction when she first sees Balthazar? That's the sorta thing that was missing for me in EoD.)

I've been thinking similarly about this. It doesn't feel much like an expansion, but more like 4 living world episodes bundled together along with elite specs and 'quality of life' features (which felt unnecessary). There's a lot of content (in the sense of "what's been made/added", rather than "engaging things to do") in the EoD, yet once I'd finished the main story, I couldn't help but think "was that it...?" I was quite excited at the start of the story, with the potential directions it could've taken... but what we got was a bit lacklustre for me (albeit along the lines of what I initially expected). The latter half of the story felt a bit too predictable, to the point where it felt like everything dragged until finally reaching the end. The dialogue wasn't the 'worst' (and it's definitely been worse in the past...), but wasn't exactly 'riveting' either - it had a few good moments though. I bring up the story, partly because you chose to avoid it, and partly because it would've been the main redeeming factor for me. The other stuff's cool n' all, but they don't seem to have much substance to them... Having new elite specs is great, and probably the most notable addition... but what do I use the elite specs on? Old content? The new maps don't feel very engaging (apart from the last one which feels like a raid-version of 'Dragon's Stand' - and not in a good way). I can't say I've tried the EoD ranger elite spec yet, but I've played the elementalist's one. There's one skill that pains me every time with it's animation, and that's hammer '2' in water attunement... It's basically the classic warrior greatsword skill 'Hundred Blades', but the animation cuts off (a little bit too late too, so the character does a weird twitch at the end of it). It looks so strange with a hammer too; it looks as if it's lost all of it's weight. I'd rather they just recycled hammer '2' from earth attunement. All that said, I don't feel like I'd been cheated in any way, as they delivered a lot of stuff which further-enhances playing plain ol' GW2. It's just that the previous expansions set such a high bar for me, and I naively thought this would be on par with them. I can't shake the feeling that the story ending was jumbled together at the last minute, despite having: the core storyline, multiple living world seasons and 2 expansions to build up to it. The 'grand finale' for this storyline didn't feel very grand... and the rest of the EoD content doesn't feel very captivating either. Idk about you, but I give it 6.5/10.

I've been suffering heavy ping spikes over the past couple of weeks, which I've never had before - I'm fairly sure it's just in the evenings (roughly 20:00 onward - UK), but not 100% sure. Each time I've used the GW2 diagnostic, it looks like the issue's notable on the 3 hops prior to the last hop (ncsoft)(^ vague description, because I'm trying to make sense out of something I don't fully understand :D) But yeah, as written countless times above, the lag's pretty much unplayable.