Substance E.4852

GW2 died on January 28, 2013 and we've all been playing an elaborate undead MK Ultra government psyop since then

Precursors were always a small chunk of the total cost (300-500g vs 2500g) People just focused on it because you couldn't farm it directly like the rest of the materials and it had the largest sticker shock price when the gift of fortune was always more expensive as a whole

Aside from veil pushes, it wouldn't change much Druid more or less completely ignores the pet and that's a good thing Nudging Anet to give us more team support in exchange for less personal sustain and pet pressure means the Druid gets better at what it;s meant to do without risking nerfs from OP solo builds like we've dealt with for the last several years since PoF

Nothing ground breaking but at least we didn't become objectively worse which is a monumental achievement for the balance team Untamed is still DOA in WvW though No amount of AoE spam on hammer is going to change this The pet will still die instantly in anything more than 10 v 10 and melee hammer aoe will always be worse than ranged Rev hammer aoe GS/A-A soulbeast is still gonna out perform it, even more so now that we can swap fused pets They either need to retool the spec completely or just abandon their goals of making it our "WvW spec" and focus on improving the viability of druid. Even just getting a single slot in a guild group to babysit the commander is still better than being told to bring another class

900 range shortbow is a fossil from the bygone days when short bow zerk builds were our highest dps and literally were just us auto attacking Getting 1500 per hit, 100% crit chance autos off was considered "really good" Anet couldn't think of a better way to make the weapon better beyond it's auto attack so they just nerfed the attack speed and the range so people would stop using it altogether (until condi builds became a thing) and stopped making the game look like a clown fiesta (back before they stopped caring about such things)

HoT hit the hardest because it added so many mechanical features to the game PoF and, by a greater margin EoD, feel much weaker in comparison because they lean so hard on "skins and overworld fluff are now content" which gets old fast and has no impact unless you're on the maps Remove everything it added to the core game and HoT would feel just as bland even if people still enjoyed the unlimited, 0 effort loot from auric basin It also came out back when it still felt like the game was going places and could only ever get bigger and better while current year GW2 is coasting on pure inertia at this point on a flat plane

Okay and? Soulbeast offers nothing but damage now Druid is a healbot and untamed will probably end up as a "good for pvp and spamming alacrity in pve with middling damage slot" Are ranger players just not supposed to ever roll dps again? They aren't going to buff up vanilla and untamed to "meta" benchmarks, especially not after giving us perma alac on untamed with hammer stun spam

I feel like you're giving the GW2 general player base too much credit Many people can't even time dodgerolls Anet assuming that "press 3 skills when the break bar breaks" seems pretty on point when it comes to "high skill play" for this game at this point They should have just focused on the "keep your skills on cooldown at all times for best performance" aspect of untamed instead of ruining soulbeast's identity

I don't think it ever beat out dagger for total BIS performance (maybe right at PoF launch when dagger was trash) but it was comparable Getting the same damage but with no drop off when kiting and having more aoe is gonna make it totally obsolete It's pretty much the only reason that split blade did great damage in pvp but not in pve. I can't even name another skill that worked like that. After this update, I doubt anyone will ever use it in pve other than for roleplay like dagger offhand

This is ultimately why slap dash fixes like "just make spirits give alacrity" were never going to work the way people hoped Years of "healbrand is best support" combined with the utterly brain dead ease of use and generally foolproof execution of the kit means people will just default to FB when pugging People want what they know and what they know to work Boon spam druid is too new to have general confidence and if it can't flawlessly perform when even a trained monkey is playing it, people will just rather have the FB when it comes to blasting through content as fast as possible with the lowest chance of some rando mucking things up It doesn't matter how much better on paper something is if you can't count on the lowest common denominator to play it reliably

The fact that they think increasing the damage on sword 2 and 3 will matter at all demonstrates that people who don't even use the class are still at the steering wheel Gonna be pretty funny if people crunch the numbers and everyone ends up using axe main in melee range now that split blade isn't completely worthless on a power build and sword drops off the serious PvE radar entirely

I expected them to ruin spirits but not pretty much everything else that made Ranger worth slotting in a party Bravo, Anet...

It's being handled by the guy who's taking 9 years to figure out why pets don't get any benefit from quickness

haha, no

The problem with "elite skills" is there's simply not enough of them to make it feel like there's always one to take that's good in every mode A lot that feel "ya, pretty good" would probably be immediately demoted to "never gonna use this" status were we given the chance to slot a 4th utility skill instead