[This game begs for proper "hide others skins" option]

Joke’s on you because I already have my culling set to lowest so my cpu doesn’t combust and can’t see anyone anyway

[Turning into WoW...]

I think this is more an encounter design issue than an accessibility issue. The game has always used red/orange aoes. I haven’t played the fractal yet, but the meta indeed has too much going on and the near constant waves of demon juice crossing the room are a large part of the problem (on top of the redness of the room itself). That said, changing the encounter would be a better fix than changing indicator colors.

[Shortest story ever?]

I think the new format could work reasonably well but didn’t for Soto. They just need to adjust how they actually release things. For instance I don’t think they need to do a story release for every patch because that seems to have resulted in a very choppy and painfully drawn out delivery of an already weak story. Similarly I think splitting nayos map into three parts was probably detrimental. Instead one or two of the patches could be focused solely on features and other content updates.

[How are the Casual players doing with their Legendary PVE Armor?]

I think the difference in cost at least for the runes and sigils is that they used to be a lot cheaper before they were reworked a few years back to add them to the crafting system.

[Gyala Delve is a dead map [Merged]]

What I think would help some is if they reverted the changes to the rewards.

Back when GD released you could only open so many chests a day and got a lot more rares. Then a bunch of people whined about not being able to farm it ad nauseam. Anet shortsightedly listened to them and changed the rares to greens and put the map on repeat farm mode.

No one will farm GD on repeat because no one is playing there at all any more. If they put the rares back in and recapped the chests then there should be more incentive to go there once a day like with the Hot metas

[Obsidian Armor Skins?]

1. I see people here arguing that they have legendary armor for function and don’t care about the prestige. But that ignores the fact that prestige has always been a big factor for long term goals in all mmo’s. It doesn’t matter what you personally want the armor for. If anet hands out the skins for reduced price then it will undermine the prestige for those who do care about it. Also, saying you have raid armor for function and you don’t care about skins and then turning around and wanting free obsidian armor skins seems a bit contrary, no? There are plenty of other skins in the game that look good.

2. Saying there aren’t enough rewards in Soto apart from the armor is a good argument for adding more rewards, not offering current rewards for reduced price.

3. Is it even possible to divorce the wardrobe and skins from the legendary armory system that gives functionality (without making a duplicate set in the wardrobe)?

 

[Underwhelming. Not really bad, but also not good. [Merged]]

28 minutes ago, Dotveg.5108 said:

I sincerely hope the Kryptis storyline will not be over by the next major release. A magic hungry, gluttonous, seemingly all-powerful tyrant that consumes the very magic keeping his world alive should absolutely not be thwarted off within a single chapter — definitely not if he is supposed to be a long lasting threat to Tyria itself.

I hope not but I very much fear that it will be. The new expansions are designed to be smaller and self contained to avoid the devs getting bored with telling one sprawling story like the elder dragons.

I think a better format would be to conclude Soto with a status quo where Eparch is temporarily thwarted and Tyria is safe but he’s not gone. Then we can move on to another mini expac story and return to the kryptis and wizards later so the devs don’t get burned out on one thing but the expac stories don’t get cut painfully short. 
 

I also hope Peitha betrays us or something because her character is becoming very boring compared to her introduction.

[Underwhelming. Not really bad, but also not good. [Merged]]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Oh, i understand that. Still, cost-cutting at every corner does not result in improved quality. In fact, it does not even help with retaining previous quality. It just makes everything look cheap, and seem like devs no longer care.

I would also prefer they keep both versions. And I think the way to do that while still reducing costs is to reduce the amount of dialogue. The story has been dialogue heavy recently imo. They could drastically cut down the amount of voice lines in open world sections. And they could tighten up the dialogue overall to remove the useless parts that might add a tiny bit of flavor but don’t meaningfully advance the plot or lore (which is most of it).

I actually think that is where the writing in the game suffers the most currently is that it seems too much effort is spent writing dialogue that doesn’t matter to the game or story and could be cut with no effect other than reducing the runtime of the chapters. If you want to pad the story out some, the better way to do it is by adding combat or some other gameplay (since it is a game). It would reduce the costs of dialogue recording and allow the devs to record multiple lines.

(another option is to always refer to the pc by the title, wayfinder currently, and just tweak dialogue to avoid third person pronouns)

[Cant use Nevermore on my Warrior char.]

Could post this in the Professions forum but it’ll be moved there eventually.

Did you unlock staff for warrior yet? I think you need to complete an achievement as part of the new story or buy it from WvW vendor

[Useless drops]

Remember the glorious days of true bag management before unidentified gear spread from PoF?