Raap.9065

In my opinion, the quality of the content is just extremely low. I always keep up with GW2 updates, but these last two just take me back to how Icebrood Saga got butchered, how the White Mantle potential got wasted, how Joko was killed off - all of these things (and more) had one element in common: ArenaNet repeatedly gives its developers far too limited deadlines and stories end up getting wrapped up not because it makes sense from a narrative point of view, but because management requires the wheels to keep turning. But to receive Gyala Delve and the story around it after a year of content drought and then be told "next content is a mini expansion you got to pay for", well to be honest, after 10+ years of GW2 ups and downs, I think this is the closest I've gotten to a jump-off point. "But the content is free, stop complaining" - to this I say, no, this is a poor statement to commonly throw in the defense of ArenaNet here. ArenaNet has a cash shop in the game which generates sufficient revenue to allow for continued development. There is no justification for such a poor level of care for the game, it is pure miss-management. (I wager this post will probably get deleted, but still, I felt like writing my thoughts and concerns about the direction of a game I did mostly enjoy playing for a decade.)

Good catch. They seemed to react swiftly to the, what, 2 people who may have partiality botted this mechanic (they mostly get killed anyhow), but if you go to an open world map you can bot in the same spot for months and months without even the slightest concern of a kick or ban. I think some priorities got twisted.

Odd choice to nerf a map that was honestly being ran as a "daily dragonstorm" sort of deal. Sure, the map is pretty boring, and on release the rewards didn't work which left people with a lasting poor impression, but it started to settle into a place in the "daily gameplay loop", it was a map you ran once from start to finish whenever it suited you. Now it is another map that demands your constant attention all day long, much like Drizzlewood or Dragonfall, but those two maps are at least somewhat fun with a lot more happening inside of them.

You cannot simulate the volatile mech AI wandering off into a crowd of 50 people and 9000 particle effects in the practice dummy room. On paper the nerfs are fine. Basically not a nerf if you execute things in a perfectly safe environment. What breaks the mechanist with the new 'stay in range' mechanic is that the mech AI will do whatever the fudge it wants and the game doesn't provide enough control tools to properly manage it. This means if you lose your mech in the action, all you got is a single signet skill that teleports you and the mech, but nothing stops the mech from wandering off away from you directly after you use this skill.

Another weapon would not solve the broken mech AI and faulty design decisions.

So here is the issue; This isn't a balance change. I'd wager most players are generally fine with balance changes in either direction. Mechs needed a nerf? Sure, I'd say most would be fine with a nerf. But this patch wasn't a balance change. It was a double mechanical change; Rifle handling was significantly altered to reduce weapon responsiveness, all to achieve... what exactly? If lower damage was the intended outcome, then reducing the damage would have been a fair balance adjustment. Instead, they opted to mechanically change the weapon and cause significant jank in the process. The rifle feels terrible now, when it instead could have kept the 3 round burst but with lower damage values. The 360 range mech change was a mechanical adjustment with the consequence of the mech being unusable in large crowd game modes as PvE and WvW. The mech AI is extremely volatile, it can leave that 360 range by simply pressing any movement key. So say you're doing a group battle, you walk forward -> the mech does what it always does and decides to move forward by going twice the distance you traveled -> now your mech is lost in a crowd of particle effects and name tags, and a bunch of identically looking mechs. What was the point of this change? If the intended outcome was a damage reduction, a flat reduction would have been fine... But this is just a mess. So this is why my earlier comment also pointed out that GW2's balance team makes decisions from within the bubble of a specific game mode. They make changes that can work out alright in some modes but completely break specs in other modes, which goes well beyond of "a simple balance patch". Players invest a lot of time, energy, and even real world cash into characters. A few balance tweaks won't deter most players, but a wrecking ball would.

A messy set of changes made by developers working on specs in a bubble of a single game mode. Plenty of feedback was given ahead of this update. All of it ignored.

Those Mech changes will be incredibly frustrating due to the Mech AI movement being extremely volatile. Not to mention, it will be a major pain to find 'your Mech' in the crowded particle effect soup called GW2's combat system, among the other Mechs. At the very least, introduce a system where you can change the colour of your Mech so that you can identify which one is yours. Though, honestly, I think a flat damage nerf is preferable.

One thing that concerns me is this mechanical differentiation between game modes. It is one thing to have separate damage and duration values between game modes, but when you make abilities mechanically different by adding/removing functionality or changing cooldowns, then for players it starts to become difficult to keep track of what-does-what-where. A lot, if not all of the non-damage changes, could easily be ported to WvW. Arguably a lot of the damage as well, since it mostly impacts specs that see limited play in WvW.

I too would rather see them stop either now, or after the next batch of elite specs. Balance is one issue, but another issue less acknowledged is that with so many different specs, it is starting to become difficult in PvP/WvW to remember which class has access to what specs and thus what your opponent is going to bring to the fight. It would make more sense to instead expand the available skill selections of classes with extra options, as often there are very few meaningful choices in skills for builds.

With Anet leaning more heavily into instanced content, they really need to start thinking of adding a group finder for the 'easy/normal' modes. Having recently completed Kaining Overlook as both my first (and likely last) strike mission, I have to say that I didn't see anything super complicated. The mechanics are often self-explanatory or can be explained with a few brief words in chat. All you really need is a setup of 8 DPS and 2 healers, which is the type of thing an automated group finder system should easily be able to handle. Without such a system, I'm not likely to ever set another foot into a strike mission - and especially never a raid. Not that I found the content too difficult, but because having to deal with the GW2 community gate-keeping the content via insane group join requirements.

I managed to do it on my first try. While the fight itself is fun, everything regarding getting into it is exactly why this is my first and last strike mission. It takes too long to find a group, you have to spend a lot of time spamming refresh for a group that doesn't ask you to link completely crazy things (often things unrelated to strikes, like a raid item), or doesn't demand you play very specific 'strike meta' specs. On top of that, you also need to decrypt a ton of 'lingo' completely alien to any player that never did this sort of content before. Effectively the GW2 community is doing some very serious gate-keeping here... and ultimately I do not understand why. The strike mission wasn't particularly difficult, the mechanics can be explained with a few words in chat, and the only really mandatory thing here is having 2 healers and 8 DPS - a baseline minimum that an auto-group finder could solve, bypassing all this nonsense gate-keeping.

With the latest changes, you can accomplish the meta by landing on the good map where enough players know the mechanics, it just takes some persistence. (A bigger issue with the meta is... zero replay-ability. Once you've done it once and got your egg, the remaining loot is so awful that it isn't worth repeating - thus fewer and fewer experienced players will put up with it.) The real bottleneck, I find, is the strike mission you need to complete on the last step of the collections. At least large-scale meta events fall within the general comfort zone of most GW2 players, but difficult instanced content you need to find/create manual groups for, is well beyond the comfort zone of most players, especially given the often elitist behavior that comes with this type of content.

They should be challenging, but not frustrating due to RNG mechanics. The kind of challenges the meta gets right: Movement, damage evasion, break bars, target swapping, group splitting, and requiring to free other players - all of these are totally fine mechanics. What is not fun is the RNG deciding you need to excessively deal with specific tasks that delay the fight enough that you fail to meet the timer requirement. Players can learn challenges over time, this we've seen from other "difficult" world bosses in the past... but players shouldn't be expected to have to deal with the mood of the AI on a given day, at least not to the extent as it is right now.

We're in the same position. Currently facing the choice between giving up on it or try to hire people for sizable chunks of gold. Leaning towards giving up though since it is just too much of a hassle to spam map chat. Edit: Ended up spamming map chat and group finder for a while, offered 15g per person and eventually did it with 9 people in total. Could have done it with less in hindsight, but I opted for 'overkill' to make sure I didn't have to make a new group. 😄