Generalissimo.8602

I'd say the characters get a little bit better overall - in the base game, the only people I actually liked were the Order mentors, whereas there are a few recurring characters that I think are OK in the later parts - but the story line ranges from similar in quality to the base game (generally serviceable but mostly uninspired) to downright terrible and there's much more of a focus on the plot than general world-building. Basically, if you need a good story to motivate you to keep playing the game, I would not recommend GW2 or any of its expansions.

The change should make banners a lot less clunky for open-world, at least, as you can now use them without fear that you've wasted the cooldown when you move on. I'm not really sure why you'd want to use them in open-world, though, as they're still static attribute bonuses with no play to them, which just seems hopelessly boring to me.

I really don't see it, myself. Both the raptor and jackal's skeletons and animations are pretty far off from a horse so getting something that looked good would probably require quite a lot more work than any of the previous skins.

Thanks, everyone.

Is there any Amalgamated Gemstone recipe that's more cost-effective than simply selling the ingredients and buying a Gemstone on the Trading Post?

It depends on your own emotional reaction to the losing streak. If you find yourself getting annoyed and angry, that's the point to stop; you'll play more sloppily, which will make you likely to continue losing, you'll be more inclined to simply blame your teammates and not examine your own play, which will inhibit your improvement, and, well, if you're not enjoying playing the game, then there's no real point in doing it. If you can remain calm and treat each game individually, however, then I think the best way to improve is to keep playing and learn to look at trends in terms of dozens or hundreds of games, not just the last five or ten that you played.

Sanctum Sprint, by a huge margin.

A single button to list an item on the Trading Post for 1 copper less than it's current lowest price would get a lot of use out of me.

Yes, filtering out players increases wait times. However, this is voluntary. Instead, the current system forces players to play with those much less experienced than them. I'd argue that this frustrating experience disproportionately pushes out the best players, who have the biggest impact on player base (e.g. through teaching, streaming, tournaments). Even if it's voluntary, adding another queue would still negatively affect everybody else as it would reduce the pool of players for the normal queue, which would lead to either longer wait times, even more mismatched teams or (probably) both. If the nature of the problem is that there aren't enough players for the matchmaking system to do it's job properly, any extra sub-divisions of the player-base is going to make that problem worse.

With an already small player-base, adding ways to split it further just seems like a fundamentally bad idea.