Bridget Morrigan.1752

I bet it still comes before WvW Alliances.

I don't think it would be a bad idea as long as it stays minimal, like only displaying info for the current zone (i.e. CM 99 & 100 clears, each boss in a raid wing, etc). I hate clutter, so I'd be glad to get rid of KP in my inventory, but I don't want to replace it with clutter somewhere else. Pretty sure it'd have to start everyone at zero though...maybe that would be a good idea for if they finish the last part of the Icebrood Saga with a raid instead of a strike. Then it would partially even the playing field at the moment that players are most likely to try raiding if they're new. I don't think it would have any affect whatsoever on the game's toxicity. It'd just make the information people ask for be more accurate and relevant and less able to be faked. But they're already asking for this info. The toxicity is already there. It's not going anywhere, and I doubt this would make it worse.

what I realize I've been doing most of my CM's with friends lately but 500-750??? lulz

It doesn't really matter whether people like to play by clicking or like to play by key presses or which one is more efficient for whom, yadda yadda: as long as the option to play by clicking exists (and it needs to exist, for accommodation), then those who have to use it for whatever reason should not be further handicapped by having skill descriptions pop up over the field of play. A toggle would be great. So would putting a delay on it. So would making it not happen while in combat. Whatever works best for your spaghetti code.

I've often thought that all ANet would have to do to get casual players into raiding in larger numbers would be to eliminate the timer. I wouldn't even reduce rewards like they do in strikes: if you can survive that last boss stage on most bosses when the mechanics go all-out with the time dragging on forever because your dps is bad--heck, you deserve an equal prize. Surviving a marathon and not making mistakes that cost everything is challenging content too. People would still speed run and all the things they do to get more rewards faster, and there'd still be toxicity and all that jazz. But I think more people would try raiding and maybe like it, because it'd be a least possible to be successful in less experienced groups who don't like to do as much homework, and it might be easier to find people you know who'd be willing to give it a try.

I've been watching your posts over the past week, and I think there's one thing you need to understand about people that you're failing to really grasp: you can't change people's minds about this. What they want is what they want. You might want them to get into liking raiding, but unless and until it's a priority for them, the accessibility roadblocks, however small they may seem to you, are just annoying enough for them to make it not worth the bother. In other words, you can't persuade them to make it a priority to raid and to like it. The only thing that could possibly persuade them would have to come in the form of rewards or a re-packaging of forthcoming content from ANet, and then they'd have to try it, and THEN they'd have to like it. And in spite of your own personal feelings about raiding, them liking it after they get there is not a guarantee. A lot of people get into raiding just long enough to get their legendary armor or Coalescence or achievement points or whatever, and then they go off to greener pastures, because raiding feels more burdensome than fun. Myself, I don't like the "hurry up and wait," I don't like doing homework to play a game, I don't like carrying KPs, I don't like all 9 other people in nearly any group I've ever been in. I've apparently raided somewhat more than you have, and come out on the other side of it with a general response of "meh." I didn't hate it. I didn't love it. I'd probably do it more if it were in 5 man groups and I didn't have to wait around so much, or if I did, it'd be more likely that I'd be waiting for people I really like. But then it'd just be fractals. Point is, it's not a given that if people just raid enough, they'll learn to like it. In a way, you're not wrong to say, "As I've mentioned earlier, the only thing gating players from raiding is literally a mindset, and nothing else. That phrase sounds a little insulting because it implies that the roadblocks don't exist except in people's minds, and roadblocks/deterrents/inconveniences/commitments/whatever DO exist whether you find them significant or not...but sure: mind over matter, if people really just wanted to raid enough, I'm sure they would. They just don't want to that much, because those roadblocks are that significant to them, and the payoff is not. And you wanting them to want to isn't going to make them want to want to. (You also seem to believe that if more people raid and more raid content continues to be released, then the game will be healthier, make more money, and have greater longevity--and I don't think any of us knows whether any of that is true or not...I suspect it's less true than you think it is. We'll never really know, because no company will release those kinds of analytics. But it's only analytics that will tell the tale. Analytics should be used judiciously--companies of nearly any kind mess up when they think there isn't a diminishing return on certain activities just because their analytics haven't reported where that diminishing return is yet--but they're still a useful tool.)

Training groups exist--that's how I learned to CM--but you're right in that they're rare enough to be almost invisible if you're not on at the right times. I think those times might be later in the evening, a few hours after reset. I do them on Saturdays sometimes, and you'll usually see it advertised not as training but "chill but know fights" because I am not always in the mood to explain every mechanic, and I keep having to replace my headset. (Not this Saturday, though, because I'm getting close to Fractal Goddess and am just anxious to get it done.) I agree that joining a fractal guild is probably your best place to start. CM's is one of those places where you can meet people that you can cultivate relationships with over time and end up with people that you enjoy playing with who can pull their own weight. So consider it a social exercise as much or more than a generating killproof exercise.

But mirage is horrible in that fight and scourge only good in a very bad team. stack 2-3cfb and the boss dies before you can blink.Cfb is one of the highest benchmark onesand optimal there. that thing is just op in most normal t4s. You missed the point--I'm not arguing that the highest benchmarked classes won't still be the fastest, highest benchmarked classes. Any fight is easy if you stack the "highest benchmark" there. Any fight is also easy if you stack the best players there. That's not unique to this fight or any other. What I am saying is that this fight by its nature allows for a unique variety of play to solve its challenges. Scourges can come in and rescue bad teams, reapers can cleave down the adds, mirages can evade the attacks, and so on. It's not just a "stand and bludgeon down a single boss that phases three times and clears condi each time" kind of fight. The pressure from the adds, small playing space, heavy use of conditions, and complications from instabs make it the kind of fight that invites creative ways to be successful, and it's a refreshing change of pace for that. That's the point.

I like having fractals like this in the game because it helps balance the need and usefulness of certain classes when they aren't necessarily the "ideal" (read: highest benchmarked) dps classes, like reapers and scourges and mirages. It is a bit long (one stage too many) but I'm all for end fights that add in variety compared to other fractals, like this one does.

I wouldn't mind a system replacing the one we have largely because I hate having this junk clutter my inventory, but it'd need a few things: the ability to "ping" your wallet item (otherwise some other KP will just replace the ones currently used, or you'll still just have to keep the items unconsumed), new recipes involving LI/LD (probably something ANet won't spend the time/resources on), the ability to deposit your KP's from raids into a guild without having to visit the guild (which we have currently but I'd be concerned we'd lose if consuming the KP meant that it would first go to your wallet), and an added ability to cash out from the wallet though a vendor (I have a lot of money stored up in ESS right now). Plus some other things I'm sure I haven't thought of. All these make me a "nah" for now. I'm in favor of a full overhaul of KP to ones that have no purchasing power in the wallet and are also pingable (guild decorations always have some value to someone, so it'd have to be something else). Like literally just keeping a tally of every time you complete a raid encounter or 99 and 100 CM, regardless of whether it's the 2nd or 10th kill in the same week or day or whatever, and adding up over time. Getting some reward from subsequent completions even if it's not monetary would encourage more people to participate in training raids and help broaden the community, as well as help people improve faster (I for one learn better if I complete content with shorter breaks than a week between each attempt), and grant people the ability to increase their KP #'s both with more focus and more accuracy, all while recognizing that KP of some sort is just a functional reality.

Has there been official word that there will indeed be two more trinkets to finish evolving the effect of the previous three?

I'd like to have scribing stations set up in all the places the other crafting stations are. They could have a pop-up on interaction for which guild you'd like to craft for.

Regardless of whether one argues that the PvP version should be made less daunting or the WvW version should be made more daunting, you're absolutely 100% right that the two versions are waaaaaay out of alignment with each other. It took me two days to get the (T2) WvW version, and if I wanted to have ground it out in one day, I could have. That's just not possible for PvP. The key is: it doesn't matter whether I'm good or bad at either mode (I'm about the same about both)--it matters that one mode should not be significantly more difficult/time consuming than the other for the same player. Another way of looking at it would be this: for them to be more aligned, you should need 120 tower+ captures in WvW to correspond to 120 rated (not ranked) PvP match wins (recognizing that making them ranked, season-play PvP wins adds a layer of time-gating that doesn't exist in WvW). 20 tournament wins would be more equal to 20 keep captures. I'm not advocating for an upping of the WvW requirements to be this, simply because I've already completed the thing and it would be unfair of me to say, "Haha, I did it easily, but everyone else should have to work harder." I'm also not terribly motivated to do the PvP trinket just because I don't like the red in it. So I don't really have a horse in the race for how to solve these issues. But I can say it's really unfairly designed for PvP players, and there should have been some in-house discussion of how to make them more equivalent before rolling them out. Therefore my suggestion would be to simply halve the requirements for the PvP version. Yes, that sucks for people who have already completed it, but that's always the case when they change such things (for example, the Skyscale collections). (I haven't made a cost comparison of other required items like Shards of Glory or Memories of Battle or whatever, so that isn't playing into this--this is purely about the time investment involved in the actual playing of and succeeding at the two game modes.)

I can speak specifically to the fractal experience: first of all, healbrands aren't a hard carry in T4 fractals with the team face-tanking. That was always a mistaken impression you had, probably because healbrands are super effective and can create an experience which is MUCH more forgiving than many other healer builds, leading people to exaggerate when they talk about them. Someone earlier in the thread mentioned that the game is action-based, so even the best healbrand is not going to give you the sense of "You got my back, bro? Hell yeah!" or "Just call me 'Immortality' because that's what you get when I am healing you" that you are looking for. It doesn't mean the players are bad. It just means the game is designed to require a lot livelier of stepping around the dance floor. With regard to your specific T3 experience, my question would be this: which instabilities were running in the fractal, and did your team have an alacrity revenant support build also running? Healbrand and alacrigade are meant to be run together in fractals--you can live without the alacrigade but it makes the HB's job exponentially harder, especially because of the lack of alacrity to keep the healbrand's skills off cooldown. Additionally, if you had certain instabilities, that particular fractal can be especially difficult: with "Frailty" on, for example, you'll be running one of the most delicate builds in the game (you kind of already are), and "We Bleed Fire" can eat up a dragonhunter's low health pool real quick. In that way, although dragonhunter makes sense "on paper," it is going to require more practice to get really good at. You wondered if you were doing something wrong, and maybe? But probably everyone in your group is. T3's are just that way: everyone's a learner. It's a weird no-man's land because once people can join T4's, they do, ne'er to be seen in T3 lfg again. This means that T4's are substantially easier even with an added instability and greater difficulty built in, because less experienced players are spread out more thinly among a huge field of players that are very experienced. This leaves only people in T3 who have very limited experience, and experience _does _matter in fractals. And I think what's probably the important thing to consider about support builds in GW2 is that they're not just healing. HB/alacrigade is designed to offer together 25 stacks of might, constant quickness and alacrity, stability, aegis, and a whole host of other things that make you more effective as dps. Heal scourge and heal tempest might offer more immortality, as you call it, in many places, but they're not brought along because they're not doing as much of those other things, at least in fractals. If you're planning on moving into T4's, you're going to see that every successful group has a dedicated healer, the vast majority of successful groups will be running the meta version of quickness/alacrity/healing/stability on two charaters (which will probably move to some other classes someday), and you're going to have multiple experiences of failure and frustration along the way. I wouldn't get too discouraged by all this or assume that the builds are at fault: it's supposed to be hard content, and finding it hard for a while is pretty much the norm. You'll start figuring it out. Whether or not building a support character is worth your while is really a personal decision. You can certainly dps your way through T4's into infinity (I mostly do), but I've also got a healbrand and don't regret it, and I intend on making an alacrigade when the shared legendary gear thing happens. You'll find T4's will fund a rather crazy amount of ascended gear and will get to the point that's there's no reason not to have one of everything if you want it. Learning to play those support characters also might help you understand what you need to do on your dps to take full advantage of the support as well, plus provide insight into others' play (I always notice how people face-tank till their health is a disaster and people are downed, and then suddenly remember that they know how to dodge!). You'll also never be lacking a group if you have a support character. Good luck in your endeavors!

I think some racial skills wouldn't be that big of a deal to include, regardless of type. Cultural armor, a new city, and dancing are all a must for me also. I suspect people would expect armors to work with any new race, especially legendary armors. I don't really see any way around having to make all the armors and outfits work if you are to add a race. They're kind of like an upright charr, so maybe that'd take less tweaking than it first appears, though I haven't much faith in there being easy-to-code aspects of the game at this point. While I'm no fan of leveling, it doesn't sit right with me to have a character that would start at level 80 automatically, and it would be both a bit weird and a bit cumbersome to have to do levels 1-80 WITHOUT having a personal story to help carry you through. So I think the 1-80 grind might be a must, and that sort of requires a starter zone or a few. Tengu would need _some _kind of backstory that would somehow merge with the ongoing living story in a way that makes sense--this is a must. The most obvious way to fit it in would be by using the Scrying Pool and actually writing the story differently for Tengu and non-Tengu characters for enough time to get them into the same place, which would imply a divergent outcome of the personal story/living world that would allow the Tengu character to step into the role of the previous Commander/Champion, who would have to die in the Tengu version of the story and not in the other race's version of the story. IDK if they SHOULD do it, let alone if they WILL do it, but HOW they could do it would require the writers to do pretty much what they're already doing. Someone playing a character from one of the original races would proceed as normal, they continue to save the world, etc. They'd probably need to lose their status as "The Commander" and instead make a full shift to "Champion." (Shouldn't be difficult with the Jormag business going on, and the lack of trust everyone is demonstrating.) For the Tengu character, they'd get a personal story from 1-80 that meets up with the Commander's story nearish the end--only in the Tengu version, the Commander fails and dies and through some maneuvering of storytelling and use of Aurene as an elder dragon, the Tengu character then gets to take the Commander's place as the new Champion. Previous story from, say, the Battle of Claw Island onward, could then be unlocked for the Tengu character through the Scrying Pool, allowing them relive the (non-race specific) Commander's life as they take their place. From there the story could continue same same for everybody. Like I said, this isn't a vote for this as a good idea (or a bad one), just an observation of how they might make it work, speaking generally, so that anyone starting at Tengu at any point could get the full game. Realistically, the player who buys the game at the next expansion and rolls a Tengu character first is the player that the devs have to please, not you or I. It'd be a lot of work.

I like the elite specs just because I like to change up what I play every two to three years or so, and then it's hard to go back. For PvP/WvW, I still see a lot of core classes, though, and in high-end PvE like fractals builds like core warrior bannerslave come and go depending on the recent meta (it's not the meta now though). I'd say core specs are niche, but not entirely out of fashion.

IDK if it's working as intended, but seems redundant to have a hidden achievement that requires all 4 CMs if the visible achievement also requires all 4 CMs.

Also same, 3 of the things dropped on my max-level charr that I had taken over to a low-level map just because I was working on map completion anyway, and I destroyed them before learning about the beginner experience collection. I didn't even think it would be an issue since the character wasn't under level 10 when I got the drops in the first place, like the description says.

Build: 102030Error Code: 42:0:9001:4479 same same, with above info

I agree, and it seems like it would be simplicity itself to replace the map with the new instance version and pop the same npcs and pets around the room with some slightly updated dialogue, and maybe a tiny affectionate exchange with Aurene.

Knowledge is knowing that prestige cosmetics from the gem store undermine prestige cosmetics from gameplay. Wisdom is outfitting your character in whatever way makes you happy and recognizing that there's no such thing as prestige cosmetics because everyone else thinks you look like garbage anyway.

After literally years of listening to whining about Kormir "stealing" the PC's glory in GW1, I very much doubt ANet is going to entirely reconfigure their story strategy to one that sidelines the PC. Another damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't proposal. #shrug I for one am hoping the Jormag thing becomes more and more about the ice dragon coveting Aurene's Champion. It'd be nice to move the story from being about Aurene to being about the Commander even more centrally, especially with the Kormir thing in mind, and the comments Joko made about who is the real enemy and so forth. They've set it up nicely to make it feel like the player really is the main character in the epic. We'll see if they follow through.

"some of us actually read" -- so much sass Some of us were actually around when there wasn't anything specific yet to read about it.

It'd be nice if they had a series of restoration quests, like they did with the Sun's Refuge, that would be available to anybody with one appearance, but if you have a linked account with GW1, would import your skins and trophies from that account instead. Which is what we had all been hoping for from the HoM in the first place.

Also same...tried letting the client download that 1% that it seems to not want to download, but it never finished. Didn't wait more than five minutes tho. On 4th try. FWIW, the game says there's 1 file left to download and it just never downloads. Eventually the message about downloading goes away, but it never says it got downloaded.