Substance E.4852

There's a lot they could so with it as is that would feel fun in PvE but it's near useless in pvp unless they let us teleport it all over the place like a WoW Hunter spamming "Kill Command"

I mean, they're going to though It's pretty much a given, we have nothing else they can "trade off" unless they make our un-fused damage even worse or somehow nerf the sustain on a class that is built around personal sustain Anet's gonna kitten up the ranger spec but they're not going to go so far as to make us lose a dodge roll or something to slot it It'll probably be something like "the pet has extra abilities but you can only slot one" or something. Unless they overhaul the entire pet system at it's core, there's not a lot they can do with it . They can't give it extra damage/stats because pvp players will cry about losing to an AI

In theory, whatever gimmick they give us, plus new utilities, COULD offset the minimal impact of 2 offhand skills on our already "meh" kit similar to how Soulbeast's least interesting/impactful component is the dagger mainhand weapon. But, it's wise to not get one's hopes up too much with "it'd cool if we could have X" after Druid and Soulbeast. Both generally perform their specific niche well but neither lived up to speculation or theory crafting that assumed both would be great team support outside of pve. Druid is probably one of the worst pvp team healers and stance share was crippled from the start and even got nuked further to spite speed runners.

They stopped doing long, intricate, lore riddled quests for precursors very early in gen 2. At this point, they're just fancy weapons with fancy effects, no more technically demanding than the average BLC / gem store weapon. Just look at gear like the vermilion tail feather. All that needed to be a legendary was the secondary cosmetic effect. The only reason it still took them so long to create gen 2 after they stopped with the precursor quests was because they staggered their release to both prevent the material market from imploding like a neutron star and to give LW releases more impact and appeal

Backdrop: Legendary weapon 3.0 concept meeting "Okay guys, imagine this, Shimmering Aurora weapons but with auras/footfalls..." *uproarious applause through the meeting room*

6-7 months isn't enough time to go from "non-concrete idea that we can't even talk about" to key feature of an expansion Even if something wasn't yet in a state to show us, they would have said it was coming and let speculation and hype keep people enthused until they could properly show us the details "Feature X is going to be a part of the expansion but we're not quite ready to show you more" builds a LOT more hype and confidence than blind speculation fueled by copium does, especially in potential new players A new player isn't going to see this release and think "oh man, I bet there's a lot more they haven't said yet". They'll just assume this was the meat and potatoes because why wouldn't they? At best they would assume more elaboration on teased features was inbound, not totally new information.

Possibly but considering that they've pushed it back to Feb or even later means a lot of areas may not even be in a finished state yet, or at least finished programming-wise which usually takes a lot longer than asset work You can show areas with really crap FPS and slap a "Work In Progress" watermark on it and people will understand You can't really bandaid areas that aren't even done yet, though

They've been working on this for 2 years and killed IBS to get it done, but okay

It really doesn't even matter when you consider the hammer ranger will need yet another wacky mechanic that sidesteps the pet in order to be of any use in pvp/wvw outside of dueling and won't out perform SlB in pve damage without massive nerfs to Slb's dps Without major reworks to the pet system as whole, Bunny Thumper will just be Slb stance share 2.0 Sounds really nice on paper and should be something that people want on their team but performs really poorly and is outmatched by other classes when in the field Also keep in mind that the GW1 Thumper revolved around hammer knockdowns in order to actually put out the pressure that made it such a meme The more of those they give us, the less damage we do. The weapon might feel like the wrath of God in pve but will be far from a dps beast in pvp/wvw, forcing you to rely on GS for damage but without Slb modifiers that make it impactful right now

GW2 players are hopeless addicted to copium "Alliances out this year and we havne't forgotten about you!" is the WvW equivalent of PvE'ers having free legendary gear dangled in front of them because Anet needs people logging in for the next 6+ months while they hustle to finish EoD

8 years of: "Rangers are garbage and have no place in team comps but if I lose to one, it's empirical evidence that they need to be nerfed" Such is life in the Eternal Battlegrounds...

>play with the guilds How? Post implementation, they are going to be in their own alliance matchups that you can't just pug join like you can now People are also going to stack guild alliances to the ceiling because numbers = victory in this mode which means you're going to have to show some actual competence to get an invite, not just be on a meta class It's a great system for people already steeped in the mode but will banish new players to EotM style, pug chaos swarm purgatory and we all know how well that worked out in the end

Charr using bows instead of whatever steam power AK47's they have nowadays doesn't make any sense either

They will if they can find a way to get people to pay $20 each time they want to manipulate matchups

I'm still waiting to see some kind of tangible explanation of how forming battles along guild alliance lines is supposed to allow un guilded newbie pugs to earn experience fighting organized guilds, much less demonstrate competence to potential guilds they want to join Sounds like we're just going to end up with a WvW version of "Entry level job, 5 years experience required" that will make new players just avoid ever trying much in the same way they avoid end game pve

Neat ideas but Anet at the present seems more interested in placing small scale "auras" on gemstore armor pieces so I'm not sure how likely these will be Even the eye infusion was pretty obviously their way of making amends for the abrupt end to IBS which is why we get one for relatively low effort but need to spend thousand of gold to get another

It was an easy way for them to shoehorn heal botting into their new raid system and has summarily been completely forgotten now that they have other heal specs to play with, on classes they actually care about Not to say completely give up hope but the likelihood of them sitting down and actually fixing the garbage fire that is Druid is nearly non-existant and will only drift further away when EoD introduces another one or more support specs into the mix which is pretty much a guarantee Druid might see action if it catches flak from some kind of frost spirit nerf and Anet is forced to deal with it being used in 0 game modes but that's about the only situation I can see this happening in

Getting rid of reflections wouldn't change that though Hammer Rev just spamming CoR into a zerg does more damage and their auto pierces by default Killing retaliation made it safer to drop a barrage on a zerg but we're still not going to be a top pick compared to other options and especially not when you need to go full Bm/Mk/Sb glass to pull off the kind of numbers that actually have an impact at best, we'd become incredibly good single target burners to the point that we'd probably just get our damage nerfed into the dirt to compensate when all the Necro and Ele players come on here to kitten about getting sniped in the center of the zerg ball

Just because something is verboten on paper doesn't magically translate into real action Even more so when Anet either doesn't know about the issue or appears to be ignoring it It took explicit demanding from the community just to get them to finally put a stop to people teleport farming Dragon's Stand for keys If everyone just went "Oh well, it's against the ToS so Anet will stop them" and left it at that, they'd still be there, bouncing around, getting effortless map completion BLC keys

You either have what we have now or people complaining that the item they wanted to buy got snatched up while they were trying to get past the confirmation window There's no winning idea here other than to reiterate that you pay attention to what you're clicking

Okay, cool In exchange, every other class gets a little npc that follows them around at ~300-2000 units and if it's killed, their class mechanic goes on cooldown for 15-45 seconds No more adrenaline gain, no more clones, no more initiative regeneration Fair is fair, after all

Anet can't afford to delay EoD to some nebulous "In 2022, honest" time frame after cutting of IBS at the knees to work on EoD, an expansion they announced over a year ago at this point. Normal players are going to see that and go "Oh, kitten, this isn't good" and a lot won't stick around to play reskinned "World boss rush" events and the same old holiday grind farms Many will come back when the pack does finally drop but the % goes down the further away they push it It's not even a matter of "oh they won't go to the other MMO's because I think they suck as a GW2 player" People will just go do something else with their time in general, especially now that Covid's effectively done with and people are itching to make up for lost time GW2's greatest strength and weakness is that it doesn't force you to turn it into a lifestyle That means it has unparalleled "pick up and play" potential but also doesn't compel you to stick around between content drops the way other MMO's do You can put down the game for 6 months, come back, and not miss out on a thing aside from maybe a BLC chest rotation, gem store skins, or some wacky TP fluctuations In terms of playable content, it will be like you never left

Either get rid of the pet entirely or reduce it to a visual aesthetic feature like the Hunter pet in WoW Anet is either incapable or refuses to design an AI companion that can be utilized in any meaningful tactical manner and the pvp playerbase absolutely refuses to allow their egos to be tarnished by "death by AI" The fact that our two Elite Specs either ignore the pet or make it literally disappear only demonstrates this even more Soulbeast only feels as good as it does because the pet is gone and Druid would play even worse had Anet decided to tie heal spam into the pet in any fashion This will all be once again demonstrated when our third spec either tries to tie functionality into the pet and fails to be good at anything or once again ignores it entirely or retools it into a completely different mechanic

Someone identified one of the last few things the pet does well and naturally immediately calls for it to be removed from the game Hilarious

These aren't 5 year olds or people spamming a forum These are grown adults who fully realize that even forcing you to wait for their troll portal to run out is already irritating you and will always get some measure of satisfaction from doing it just by watching people fall for the troll portals Inconveniencing you at all is already pleasing them