Infusion.7149

I just upgraded all characters' +15 swim speed infusions to the accountbound one for +5 agony resistance purposes, with sometimes multiple account swim speed infusions on some of them that I do fractals on. I do not think I will invest any further , at best +20 swim speed account upgrade in the future since that is a couple hundred gold currently and will drop over time. +15 is roughly 10 gold and is the basis for the account infusions, +20 swim speed account upgrade is roughly 350 gold now which could be reasonable if you have many characters, +25 account upgrade is a ludicrous 9K+ gold...

It is possible they will end up as cheap as agony infusions in the new expansion if almost all the content is in the water.

Two sunken chests in Sirens Reef when there are 3 in Aquatic is laughable, it should drop +10 swim infusions in greater quantity if it is only two chesrs. T4 Sirens should have 4 or 5 sunken chests IMO. The amount of time an average group spends on a fractal compared to just looting a chest in openworld is not comparable. I do not have anything really to say about the other sunken chests since they have been around for so long, awarding 2 keys for the first opening this week is not anything amazing.

Plot-twist: You are not the main character. 😆 In all seriousness though, I do not think anyone plays GW2 to just look at their character. Maybe the environment given the presence of the vistas and whatnot.

As primarily a WvW player I spent some time thinking about this dev post. I think the contributions of the dev team to a casual WvW player's experience should not be undersold here, though for any form of organized play there leaves a lot to be changed (mostly with respect to boon removal). Hiding ally visual effects was a good change that was identified for PvE but also has a profound impact in WvW similar to prior culling revisions. So here is what is missing from the post by Arenanet with respect to WvW: * WvW (weekly) vendor Dugan added June 2023 (pre SotO) Game updates/2023-06-06 - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W) * August 2023 Wizards Vault introduction removed the veteran creature slayer daily from the game which is one of the best things to happen since so many people were eating up queue space afking to wait for the warg or other veterans * Wizards Vault also added yak escort as requested numerous times in the WvW subforum * Addition of 32 slot provision pack to outfitter * Ability to change grandmaster mark boxes to grandmaster mark shards as of April 2024 * the presence of the keep stat reduction to make fights more even "fair" as of April 2024 Here are unintended downsides: * The split of relics bonuses from runes punishes people without legendary runes before the update quite severely. Fortunately I had a legendary rune bound for the aquabreather but other people may need multiple relics for WvW templates now that rune of the monk is not the primary option for any firebrand or support spec * Relic of the flock in general has been changed to apply barrier for the excess heal: this is disproportionately strong on firebrand due to the charge of the mantra heal (mantra of solace) * November 2023/ February 2024 weapon proficiency update does not seem fully balanced for WvW to this day , most notably since power weapons were not quite available for scourges * Minstrel boon-balling is effective due to the resurgence of scourge transfusion (especially with mercy relic), Illusion of Life, and the rallying of downstates in a slow / low spike damage environment brought about since 2020 competitive damage split : I would also seriously discuss this topic with the WvW community of whether rallying off enemy deaths should even exist * Skills that do 5 things should always be less effective than skills that only do damage or healing, I remember in the past CMC or another balance dev stated there is a "power budget" so to speak , please attempt to stick to this ideal. A prime example of this is the new version of Serpent Siphon. ---> some of the most iconic WvW skills in the game do only one thing: "Stand your Ground" , Veil , Coalescence of Ruin (before it was gutted), temporal curtain (mesmer pull), Meteor Shower, Purge Gyro, Winds of Disenchantment, Stealth Gyro, etc. If the goal is for WvW to be more accessible for newer players and to have clear tells of what a skill does, it is in Arenanet's best interest to stick to the balance ideal of one primary function even if this seems to have gone out the window in PvE. ---> Note this concern is not well addressed in the June 25th preview which mostly focused on PvE/PvP , in fact it might make it worse since every tempest overload is providing group protection without using any trait selection ---> Minstrel blobs fighting each other is about as interesting as people beating each other with twigs while wearing full body armor. Most old time players will reminiscence of a time mobility and damage actually felt impactful (especially pre firebrand) and water fields meant something as opposed to standing still taking every form of damage. * Defense credit is still quite hit or miss as reported numerous times since the introduction of WvW tiered scaling rewards * Mechanically speaking, rebuilding on structures at 50% was a horrible change overall (April 2024). There already have been numerous threads on this topic * Rewards-wise, putting the jumping puzzle on the weekly WvW list for the Wizard vault is just as bad as veteran creature daily

Or the dev team can follow the revenant route: only remove a particular boon such as stability Brutality - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W) This would not overly complicate smallscale and do quite a bit for larger scale combat.

I cannot see aquatic combat being a good thing unless every AoE boon source is updated to be 3 dimensional (i.e add the vertical component) ... aquatic is one of the worst fractals to try to output boons in.

Did you write a wall of text to say that Arenanet keeps nerfing boon removal and damage? If so then you are pretty much spot on. They are putting group protection on every tempest overload in the patch preview... so obviously they have not learned yet. The real reason why stacking supports is a thing is due to the 2020 PvE damage split (protection and regen were not changed even if heals were) which was probably the worst thing for WvW since the numbers were not tuned... a good example is CoR (Coalescence of Ruin) which used to be 1.5 coefficient which is 0.91 now. With the scrapper meta people were rolling around with superspeed and stealth as well. Your assessment of spellbreaker is missing the fact that the 2020 patch removed all damage from CCs. Celestial stats gaining concentration without a reduction in total stats in recent memory (2021) is also a part of the problem. If the goal was to make PvE DPS supports better then toughness could have been removed completely on it especially since some raids are toughness aggro. If you recall 2012-2013 era people were blasting water fields to heal plus downed control (and random rallying) was not much of a problem due to damage output and low amounts of protection rolling around. Well of corruption was the largest piece of boon removal (along with null field but people rarely used mesmers in bulk). The way rallying works makes it so that multiple supports "wins" due to attrition and ressing over any less organized group.

https://gw2mists.com/alliances maybe

It probably would have a title but no AP , since most of WVW/PVP does not give AP. The high AP people usually are PVE players that dabble in competitive modes.

I meant putting things like legendary WvW backpiece, ring, and armor (which still does not have a collection). Pillager's pack with 32 slots was added but while Convergences have a drop chance for supreme rune of holding , WvW still does not have a source for those. Ironically Arenanet did decide to add the WvW feasts to the WvW lockbox and Dugan. Thesis of strength and such are still not readily available and while Mist-Infused Maintenance Oil is less pricey compared to Bountiful Maintenance Oil it still is not cheap. I am not alone in suggesting that in the past so I am glad they either figured to add it on their own or acknowledged years of WvW forum feedback. Likewise, the addition of memories of battle to the lords when flipped at T2/T3 was a years old idea that was made on the WvW forum. I was not a fan of the addition of skirmish tickets to it but it is what it is. We also do not have a real reward for the Ultimate Dominator title nor God of WvW. Neither of those are attractive to mainly PvE players. We also do not have any form of collection or reward for a full set of Mistforged weapons, Mist Lord weapons, or Obsidian weapons. There are ways to make rewards that are usable in PVE offputting to PvE-only players. A good example would be adding a weekly 15 Emblems of the Avenger + 10 Gift of Battle + 2 Emblem of Conqueror + 7 mystic clovers = 1 Gift of Exploration , since someone that hates WvW would not take that deal over open world PvE. Another instance would be mystic clovers at the weekly vendor which is hardly a good offer even for primarily WvW players. All in all, making WvW less of a gold sink for active players could be a priority rather than making it a gold per hour farm. edit: Almost forgot...memory gobbler is still garbage.

Farming PvE is always going to be more effective than WvW. There is no incentive for Arenanet to make it profitable. Instead they ought to focus on making rewards unique to WvW that are actually useful for WvW players. For example, supreme rune of holding on the weekly vendor now that there is a 32 slot pillagers pack would be a start.

@disForm.2837 If I did not have the help of some mesmers I would probably have never completed the JPs

I do not understand the rationale behind the gating of the vendor for junk conversions (Prismaticite crystal , Congealed Putrescence, or other that are not even SotO *) but I sort of understand the reasoning for opening arcane chests time. The reason is some people are abusing the map or just running no-key chests. This makes it inefficient to do so. Not getting fully rewarded for the meta is a problem IMO. * Gharr Leadclaw can exchange currency, materials, and more! He can be found west of Empyrean Plaza next to a thornsprout bloom.

You can buy legendary weapons off the TP so it is unlikely to change. What is a problem (for me at least) is how Gift of Exploration is required to make use of the Wizard Vault legendary kits. In that regard there could be something done about that if Arenanet deems it an actual issue.