Dr Meta.3158

Heart of Thorns was a 4.6/5. Narrative The story was good. It was a drastic change from the ending of dealing with Zhaitan. The intro knocked the commander off of their high horse and put into place a vietnam war style tragedy and setting. The chosen one stuff was cliche but I do like the lead up to it with the struggle with Caithe over a misunderstanding and the conflict between duty and destiny where destiny not only won, but won in an unexpected manner, and was both a character thematic for aurene and the story going forward with another payoff in living world season 4 albeit after a very cheap and dumb plot twist... but we'll get to that. The way the Modremoth antagonized the pact tied in with how he was defeated and that was beautiful. The deaths were impactful, the character development was good. It was overall a great story. 4/5 Locations The different maps of Heart of Thorns are all beautiful, filled with life, and there's always something interesting to look or get involved with. They all vary but stay within the theme of jungle. People get upset for getting lost in tangled depths... but that's the point, it's in the name.. its even a plot point in the story... The following design afterwards of living world season 3 wasn't as good but there was definite effort there along with memorable land marks like the chalice of tears. 5/5 Elite Specializations Elite specs were hit or miss. As far as theme goes, they all hit the mark but the execution was shaky in some cases with the worst offender being chronomancer which was the final nail in the coffin for sPvP and a major pain point for raiding compositions and this would only go downhill from here. However most classes were good, brought new options to some struggling core classes, and it brought an entire new fan favorite class and elite specialization along with sporting the most reasonable elite specs in the game. 4/5 Gameplay Heart of Thorns was challenging both in combat and navigation. Metas required so much coordination that entire guilds were built around running them and teaching other people how to command them. This difficulty brought the community together more than any I've seen since then. Ironically the community complained about the difficulty and as such brought upon the impending destruction of their own enjoyment of the game out of sheer ignorance. Getting the migraine achievement in a duo with a friend was the most fun I've ever had in PvE bar none. 5/5 Novelty Gliding was a great new addition and a mainstay in the game as a whole. The new legendary weapons were great along with the greatest designed legendary in the game, The Binding of Ipos. The usage of the bloodstone special action key also made its way past season 3 which was cool. 5/5 Path of Fire was a 2/5. Narrative The story was very generic. Balthazar was basically a saturday morning cartoon villian, Kralkatorrick was about as complex as the antagonist in Twister, and Joko was a missed opportunity for something greater. There was more character regression than progression, character development opportunies that went no where, new prominent characters that amounted to nothing, just meh. Living World season 4 was ok until the end thunderhead peaks and the beginning of dragon's fall. There was so much wrong that I just can't detail out as it will bloat this section so much. Its not included in the score since this is only about expansions and not living worlds, but yikes man. 2/5 Locations To be honest, since the theme was desert... I wasn't expecting much and I didn't get much. But just because I wasn't expecting much, doesn't mean I'm going to skew the rating. 1/5 Elite Specializations These elite specializations were mostly on point as far as theme and just disgusting in execution. These classes created gross balance issues far beyond what chronomancer did in its debut and wrecked balance in all three game modes for years and years to come. 2/5 Gameplay The major new thing was bounties which were OK until the extra boss effects made them more annoying to fight rather than more challenging. Other than that, nothing really new here. The difficulty dropped, there wasn't really anything that made people sweat like the bosses, pocket raptors or especially the smokescales which terrorized all three game modes. Its like getting on a merry go round. Its something to do but only if you have nothing better to do. 2/5 Novelty Mounts are huge in both a positive way and negative way. Mounts sped up the game a lot and allowed some new ways of traversal, sped up getting around things you've done already and added new fun stuff like beetle races that the community took and refined if you use taco/Blish/guild halls. Mounts also made it so the map quality definitely took a nosedive since their introduction. Because people can get around so fast no, there's a definite notable lack of detail and quality in map design now since less people notice from zipping around on beetles, griffons, skimmers, and skyscales. 3/5. End of Dragons was a 1.8/5. Narrative Before talking about End of Dragons. I have to talk about icebrood saga. It won't be included in the scoring but it laments the overall problem with not only end of dragons but Arenanet as a company as it is now. Icebrood saga started out amazing. Grothmar Valley was beautiful, the metas were fun and diverse, the easter eggs were great, the secrets were great, the details everywhere were great, the character development was good, the change from dragons to the internal conflict of the Charr trying to reband together was great, the design and thematic drawing from The Lion King was definitely present, the music was great, good lord I felt like this episode had to have been outsourced. The segway into Jormag luring in Bangar and turning into a psychological horror was phenomenal. It had me really invested into the story for the first time since Heart of Thorns and it was just getting better and better especially with that cliff hanger... then Drakkar came out and it fell off a cliff, drilled through the earth, launched into the stratosphere and plummeted into the sun leading to just a horrible narrative travesty. And that is what Arenanet is now both as a company and in their new design philosophy. Great initial promise followed by cataclysmic plummet into the shadowlands with not even an ounce of regard or remorse, just straight gaslighting until you're ready to quit then restarting the cycle again. I imagine this is what it feels like to get lovebomb'd into a narcissitic relationship. So with that out of the way, this is End of Dragons in a nutshell. Interesting premise followed by terrible payoff on repeat to the very end. Sprinkle in some cringe social commentary (as no one seems to learn from the other media that tried this and failed miserably) and you have your lackluster narrative. 2/5 Locations The locations are a mixed bag. Fly up into the air with your skyscale and it looks beautiful then land, dismount and walk around and its... pretty hollow. Its a definite reminder that substance is better than beauty as Nintendo is an example of having utilized this concept for a long time. Again, I think this is in part due to the introduction of mounts. Most people zip around and don't notice it because they're moving quickly from place to place. But... its not a desert with just nothing throughout lol. People years ago were speculating that one day we were going to Cantha and it is there that underwater combat would be revamped into something good and that would have the legendary waterbreather... 3/5. Elite Specializations The usual trend for arenanet was mostly hitting the theme and missing execution. Now its missing both. These elite specializations suck, they're lazy, a lot of them make no sense, they're filled with copy and paste, riddled with bugs, and most came in as garbage, boosted to problematic levels, and changed into a clunky mess. The introduction of mechanist under the claim to "help the disabled" only to make it functionally inept.. I said it before, its evil. That's really heinous. I mean jeez, its one thing that renegade can't use their specific legend under water but the entire mechanist class breaks under water. Who thought this was ok? Even the flesh golem was updated to have a shark form underwater. Just dastardly. Specter reminding people that having shroud means poor mobility and no active defenses and what happens when you combine the two before crucifying specter to leave pinned to the wall as a reminder to the community to becareful what they wish for. Bladesworn, I don't even know what they were thinking with this one. Staff was an obvious pick here and what they came up with instead is just dumb. I think from here, no more elite specs. Clean up the classes starting from the core nine. 1/5. Gameplay This is the definite turn your brain off expansion. There's no challenge at all and that's before the boon pylons everywhere. Its so boring, any failure just comes from there being no one to do the meta, especially in seijung province, because it sucks. 1/5. Novelty First off, lol fishing. I had to do it. Any game that uses fishing as a gimmick to draw in players is struggling. I remember when Lineage 2 did it too. They were also struggling. That's only two examples I've seen. But I'm just going to keep in mind that any time a game uses fishing in an advertisement/trailer as a motive to play the game to see if this is a universal sign of distress for the developers. Anyway, we have fishing and skiffs. I like the idea of multiple people in one mount but well water is not Guild Wars 2's strong point... well neither is Guilds nor Guild Wars... so whatever. The turtle is the only saving grace. 2/5. Overall, the game has been getting worse over time and the recent announcement of the road map change and how expansions are being done going forward indicates that we are in maintenance mode. Greatest speculations from recent hirings over the past year for a new arenanet game indicates to many of the development of Guild Wars 3 but I can imagine that announcing it this early would just cause a lot of the playerbase to not want to progress any further in this game. But it could be worse... it could be a bunch of mobile games... again.

That last announcement of the updated road map screamed maintenence mode.

🤣

Most likely due to some hiring for a undisclosed game by arena over the past year or two. Means guild wars 2 is effectively in maintence mode as definitely shows by the change in direction from fully fleshed out expansions and game additions to smaller patches just to not have the game become completely stagnant.

Having to have 10% of the enemy team's score isn't good. I've been in plenty of matches against teams actually trying their best and still losing 0-500. Typing forfeit match or a teamwide /gg still leaves the issue of sitting around waiting for an actual match to come. There aren't enough good players consistently on and playing AT to have every match be exciting. The closest you'll get is mAT once a month, the occasional hardstuck tourney, or MOTA. There is a low rate of players becoming good due to a variety of factors such as sadistic/antisocial/psychopathic players driving them off the game mode or the game itself with no regulation from arenanet, an array of players with little patience and poor emotional regulation chastising new players for poor performance mainly due to lack of playerbase causing skewed matchmaking, no in game method of learning how to play pvp, newer generations of players having little patience and discipline for developing skill, and little interest from arenanet in cultivating the pvp population. There also used to be individuals or guilds that hosted tournaments and in-houses for prizes and such and those are essentially all gone now. I was even excited for the upcoming 1v1 ladder coming back but the guy that hosted that is leaving for Diablo 4 out of frustration for this game. Things tend to fall apart when you neglect them.

In all honestly, mesmer doesn't need a buff. Mesmer is very, very strong. Most players don't and never will reach the skill level required to demonstrate how truly monstrous mesmer can be in a fight and as such will never understand its potential. Mesmer's problem is lack of mobility which by description is an intended weakness to the class but it makes it unviable for conquest. Conquest requires a lot of map mobility and ability to handle focus fire to be effective so any class that is slow and/or doesn't have scaling defenses is going to naturally struggle in conquest regardless of how strong it is in a vacuum. Its one of those things where theme coming before function hurts the game. Function should come first and theme should fit around it. Buffing portal back to pre nerfed ranges would immediately bring mesmer back into competitive viability and you'd would see the forums flooded with people asking for nerfs once the good mesmer players show up.

I agree. Since scrapper was and still is intended to be a bruiser. Having their elite skill being a mobile stealth field is incredibly weird. I'd imagine it being more along the lines of bulwark gyro.

Honestly those little bugs with the charges give warrior some charm. I'm not advocating for bugs but I do particularly like those and would rather them just be how the skills work. I'd just prefer a little more distinction between bull's charge and rush than there is now since bull's charge is an evade. They could work like death's charge where in that case greatsword and bull's charge would be a useless weapon/utility on warrior. Greatsword is what keeps warrior viable in the competitive levels of pvp whereas hammer only takes you so far. The only thing I don't like about warrior is full counter, how much of a crutch it is, and how much warrior has to be kept down in other regards because of full counter. Same with continuum split for mesmer. Spellbreaker isn't the strongest build as far as actual combat goes but it works better in conquest than any other option.

Most people in pvp are generally quiet. There are a few people here and there with maladaptive personalities reaching criminal levels but not too many. The main problem is, those people go out their way to torment others for their own amusement and they can do so without consequence. They tend to cause players to leave pvp or the game in general and are technically costing arenanet revenue. They sent one employee a month ago to sit around for 3 days and people behaved better during just that time period and that was pretty much it for the past few years.

The best part was leading people into the water and 1 shotting them and launching into the stratosphere out of the water with both Harbinger and bladesworn. Good times.

Specter was a tech demo to show why necromancer doesn't have good mobility, blocks, evades, invulnerabilities, and stealth. After the tech demo was finished they had to stuff specter in the trash compactor along with scourge and firebrand. Horrid design mistakes to never see the light of day again.

Not everyone can be a company executive. Most people have to run the cash register. There's limited room at the top and plenty of space at the bottom. That's just the way things are. If you want to climb up, you have to be competent and not everyone has that capability, drive, motivation, discipline, and mental fortitude. This is why these forums exist. Come here and vent your frustrations. You'll never improve and your situation won't change but at least you'll feel a little better. No balance patch will ever fix incompetence.

Thats why I put... ...as a disclaimer.

I've done nothing but support you.

Interesting. Going to need to have full precision with no power or ferocity. Maybe get a reaper with nomads armor, death magic with 30 carapace, shroud, infusing terror, light/frost aura, Rite of the Great dwarf, protection, Rise!, all attributes damage reduction food, rune of the scrapper, and bulwark gyro.

It would be cool if, given that shatters ever get reworked to be all defensive/control utilities, domination had an adept trait that allowed phantasms to daze for 1/2 second when they hit their first attack to replace Rending Shatter with.

My favorite profession to pvp with is mesmer. But since portal got axed I gradually stopped using it outside of pve.

I'm too socially awkward to stack.

Fireweaver is lowkey the strongest duelist build in the game right now. But only a "god" plays it correctly right now.

That's not true. When I played the power harb meme, I did 15k voracious arcs. Even then it wasn't good enough for competitive play. Then I discovered a much stronger build (death magic/curses) and played that in the hardstuck tourney and even that wasn't quite up to the task of dealing with specter. However, that lead to the inevitable destruction of the death magic traitline. It will not be missed. You guys need to step your game up. You're complaining about chill and paltry 7k hits; there's way more disgusting stuff you can do with necromancers.

Scrapper was supposed to be a support bruiser, right?

I agree. Reapers are out of control in ranked pvp as well. Theres like 2-3 of them per team in every game. In ATs its even worse. One game, my team got wrecked by a 5 reaper team in finals. We couldn't even leave spawn. They need to get nerfed before we have the full 5v5 reaper mAT finals.

Stand still and let me hit you.

I think part of the reason why they won't touch phantasms is because of power shatter builds. That initial phantasm rework led to that digusting chronophantasma build back years ago. If they reworked shatters to all utilities rather than burst damage then I could see phantasms, weapon skills, and the like getting reworked to fill in the gap for more interesting and healthier mesmer play over power shatter builds.

The maximum damage you can get with true shot is much lower than what you can get with gun flame.