Teletric.3821

That might be the case, but also it's very much an optional thing since there are much easier and less expensive things you could be doing for AA. I think clearing a raid wing would be great in the "special" category as sort of a seasonal goal to get people raiding. And if people don't wanna do it, they can still do other stuff and get all the rewards they want from the Vault.

I definitely think the shortbow would work much better as a kit in its current state, with the toolbelt skill allowing you to detonate all the mines at once. Imagine detonating all the mines at one time and then swapping to use Hammer 3 to perform leap finishers from all the different field types at once as a Scrapper...

They have the tech for swapping weapon skills as you can swap the Hammer skills on Ranger outside of Untamed, so what if they applied the tech to Engi shortbow to let you choose different essences? Basically, the idea is that you could swap out the essences the blog post mentions in slots 2-5 to different ones, like you can with utility skills. What this would do is change the types of Chain Reactions you'd have access to. In the example in the blog post, they talked about how the Essence of Animated Sand creates a big AoE of sand that gives allies barrier, and its Chain Reaction effect causes other arrows to grant barrier on the initial detonation. But imagine the ability to swap out the essence in that slot to one that has an inverse effect: creating an AoE of acid that decreases enemies' incoming barrier, and its Chain Reaction effect causing other arrows to inflict damaging conditions (depending on what type of arrow it is) on enemies on the initial detonation. Essentially, you could customize whether you wanted more support oriented Chain Reactions, more damage oriented ones, or maybe a combination of the two. The way I see this in my head flavor-wise is the engineer deciding what kind of arrows they want to keep in their quiver/Universal Multitool Pack.

I've always hoped for a Rambo-inspired elite spec for Engineer with traps and explosive-tipped arrows, and this kind of does it for me. The emphasis on support does worry me a little but I'm not going to "nock" it until I try it.

As many others have said, there's practically no reason to use sword outside of Holosmith because it relies heavily on the heat mechanic to be optimal. At the same time, though, it's the only weapon that interacts with the heat mechanic and rewards you for engaging with the intended high-risk-high-reward playstyle of Holosmith (for example, variable quickness duration depending on heat level for Sword 3). Other weapon skills should also get amplified or additional effects depending on the heat threshold for the sake of consistency. I mean, you guys gave Weaver 30 new weapon skills specifically for the Dual Attack mechanic to account for every Attunement + weapon combination — it wasn't just for sword. And every weapon base Warrior could use got a Primal Burst skill for the Berserker elite spec when it was released — it wasn't just torch.

But then we can only have one kit at a time...

You make a great point and it actually raises my excitement for the next story. If demons are born and/or sustain themselves off of the negative emotions of Tyrians like Deimos did with Saul, it would make sense why the demon in The Deep would latch onto the Pact Commander specifically as opposed to their other allies. Perhaps the demon has already had its eye on the Pact Commander for quite some time, and it was playing the long game to eventually lure them to itself after the threat of the Elder Dragons had been dealt with, knowing the pain and suffering they would have endured. There are so many interesting routes they can take with this concept.

Depends on the race event. In the Pavilion Pursuit, you get 3, 2, or 1 additional Festival Coin(s) depending on whether you placed 1st, 2nd, or 3rd respectively. Some race events (like the standard PoF ones) give you an achievement for placing in the top 3. Again, they aren't huge rewards but still some rewards nonetheless. I guess it may be different for you, but for me the fun and excitement in a race comes from trying to get first place; that's what makes it a race in the first place. Otherwise it'd just be a time trial... I mean, if what you are saying were the case, wouldn't everybody just do the time trial version instead? Hell, they aren't even on a timer like the races are -- you can do them any time.

Charr Siege Devourer Skin for the Siege Turtle. Need I say more?

I hope this doesn't discourage ANet to stop the recent trend of giving warhorns unique blowing sounds; I just think that this should be a treatment that is also given to pistols and rifles. A lot of the guns in the game really do not sound like how they look, especially in the case of skins like the Jade Tech Pistol and Rifle. In promotional material like the launch trailer as well as with the NPCs in game that use them, the Jade Tech weapons are shown to have unique sounds when fired. When you actually get your hands on them, though, it's disappointing to learn that they have the same sounds that pretty much every rifle has had since 2012. Some guns, on the other hand, just look like they'd sound different like the Inquest 2.0 rifle and pistol and it's just... underwhelming. I'm not saying they should go back and retroactively change the sounds of existing guns to make them fit better (though that would be going "above and beyond"), but rather just focus on newer weapons to avoid the mismatch going forward. Plus, it would boost the immersion and roleplaying factor as well.

In all honesty, the consumables are pretty cheap to craft so I don't think it matters very much. Plus, less items in the drop table means the other items have a higher chance to drop now (like the candy canes you need to make those consumables). It's more cumbersome to get them, sure, but it's not too bad IMO.

Full disclosure: I have all mount masteries (including the "bond" abilities) and even went so far as to grind for Mount Energy Booster 3, yet I would still like mount races to be fair to everyone that is able to participate in them. I think OP is on the right track; mount types should either be enforced or every mount type should be available to rent to keep races fair. Perhaps somewhere later down the line, we could have races actually designed with mount swapping in mind (almost like a relay race). Yes, winning a race doesn't really matter in terms of rewards, but the fact of the matter is that the game does give you additional rewards -- albeit not big ones -- for placing in the top three. Plus, it's just a good feeling to win something -- a feeling that should be attainable to everybody who has met the prerequisites to compete in the races. Kind of similar to how winning and losing doesn't matter all that much in unranked PvP matches either, yet anybody who is able to participate can win matches if they have the skill.

I agree, we should have an option to just turn off ambient dialogue. I do like ambient dialogue because it makes the world seem more alive, but hearing the same conversations play out again and again does the opposite.

The first time I recall them doing this was on the Flame Serpent weapons, but you can also see the shine present in some of the Black Lion skins and – most recently – on the Decade armor and weapon sets. My theory is that they're doing this so textures can look reflective on settings where reflections are disabled — a good thing for players on low settings (though it could just be that they brought on a new texture artist on board relatively recently and this is just their style). I don't think think they look bad or anything, but I find it gives those newer items a different aesthetic than the rest of the game. I'm just curious as to how many other people have picked up on this and what your thoughts are.

I really like how they did an Anniversary Event this year which lets all players get in on the big new thing (the armor set) as opposed to being locked out of it for potentially a whole decade. Hope they keep this up.

That makes sense — thanks for the response! The connections are still interesting, though — especially when you consider that the name "Ishan" has ties to the sun and its qualities.

This may seem like a stretch, but Ishan and Shiny have names that are almost phonetically reversed (Shine-ee and ee-shan). His name also stood out to me because one of the cultural inspirations for Elona was India, where the name "Ishan" originates from. It isn't too far of a stretch for me to believe that he was either given or adopted the name Ishan as he matured. This would also explain his willingness to defend mortals as he was raised by one of them. If the developers did intend for him to be Shiny from GW1, it would make sense for them to give him a different name for the EoD story as his original name would not fit the tone of the story they were telling.

The thing that is frustrating me is not necessarily the RNG, but the fact that the spot disappears after you fish from it once. Hoping this gets patched tomorrow alongside the Dragon's End changes.

Mechanist has always felt like a downgrade to me because of the lack of a toolbelt, which offers much more utility and customizability than you can achieve with the mech. Not having a mech underwater and a single F skill which I think is supposed to make up for it really only solidifies that for me. If they couldn't get the mech working underwater for whatever reason, they should have at least let us have our toolbelt and just replaced the elite toolbelt skill with depth charges.

I am mainly concerned about the size of the map and also how it connects to Echovald. I hope it's not just explained away through some giant tunnel or that we get to Echovald via airship because stuff like that really takes away from the exploration aspect for me. That being said, I think the map looks great and the direction they took with the design makes sense.

What if we aren't running mace? Will the mech will just not use Rocket Punch? Also, the toolbelt is the core mechanic of the Engineer profession, why not just make it like the last 2 elite specs where the the F5 turns into the profession mechanic and we retain our F1-F4 toolbelt skills while the mech isn't deployed? The tradeoff for playing mechanist is simply too great for what we get, because we're essentially losing 50% of the utility of all our utility skills in the process.

After experimenting with the mace more, I don't really like the direction they went with it. It feels like it is trying to do multiple things at once (condi, barrier support, some power) even though it was stated to be a condi weapon. One thing that I think will help mace greatly is if it were to change with trait lines just as the mech does. If you trait for power for your mech, your mace would gain more power-oriented benefits; if you trait for condi, your mace would gain more condi-oriented benefits — and so on. Perhaps even the skills could change, just as they do on the mech.

The breakbar in my experience has been generally helpful, but I do think it goes down too fast. However, I don't think that's a fault of the mech's design as much as it is of breakbars. Breakbars are balanced for player attacks specifically, not AI attacks, and some mobs (like in the HoT zones) can spam CC to the extent that no player can. Of course, usually you can evade that CC, but the mech isn't really able to do that.

I kind of understand the design choices for the spec, but the problem is that those design choices throw a big wrench (ha!) in build diversity. As many people have said before, once you don't have your mech, an entire traitline is being wasted. Furthermore, you become a stripped down core engineer that has no toolbelt skills, which isn't fun at all to play. And that is also what you become when you enter a body of water, because you lose your mech entirely and in place of it you just get an AoE damage ability. At least let us use toolbelt skills underwater with the F5 becoming the Depth Charge skill if that's how you're going to do it. Don't get me wrong though, when you have your mech active, the spec is quite fun. The problem is that it's not very fun to play when you don't have your mech. A somewhat minor change I would like is for Barrier Signet to be ground targeted rather than be placed wherever the mech happens to be, as you can't really tell the mech to go to a specific spot, and even if you were we would likely see pathfinding issues like we did with the old Gyros. (Also, it wouldn't hurt if we could recolor our mech to match our style!)

At the end of the Shing Jea stream today, Nick said that all players will have the opportunity to unlock the Springer and Raptor, regardless of if they own PoF. I think this is a great opportunity to add in a new skin for each of the two mounts, as it would make it so that both players who already have those mounts and players getting them for the first time will have something to gain from doing that content. Basically, players who unlock the raptor/springer in EoD would get a different default skin than players who unlock it in PoF. If those players decide to do the PoF story, they unlock the PoF default skin. Furthermore, I think it also would make sense from a world-building standpoint that Canthan raptors and springers would look different from their Elonian counterparts, since they originate from different geographical regions. It stood out to me during the stream that the taxi service was using raptors that — to my knowledge — had been established as being native to Elona; it's the explanation for why there aren't any in the core Tyria regions. I know there is the raptor skin that you get with the deluxe version of expac, but its description on the pre-purchase page describes it as an aquatic raptor that enjoys the beach, so it could make sense why it isn't the main species of raptor that Canthans would use on a day-to-day basis. I seriously hope ArenaNet doesn't let such an opportunity go to waste. Fans have been asking for unlockable mount skins for the longest time, and this is such a great opportunity to add some!