VaileCearo.3819

I guess I don't play Chrono, I play a double staff condi mirage and to me it feels insanely strong and survivable. I can even solo group content, champions, and difficult hero challenges without any issues whatsoever. The issues you've described with Chrono I've kind of always felt like existed, it's why I have never and never will play Chrono. If I can't solo everything from open world to T1 fractals then I just won't play that build.

Perhaps I was misunderstanding what you were meaning to say. I know in my case though that there were no other tasks on the map that I was wanting or needing to do. I was literally on the map just to complete the achievement and that was all. So for me it felt like I was stuck waiting for the chain to restart without anything else for me to do that I had any desire or intention of doing. When I set a goal for myself I become very singular minded in my efforts to achieve that goal and all other content becomes invisible or annoying to me until that goal is completed.

The diamond specifically drops from the Zohaquan meta events per the wiki and does not drop from anything else. If you're someone who's literally just trying to get that item in order to complete the collection then it's a real pain.

The issue is that the RNG here is time gated. For every time you don't get the diamond to drop you then need to wait however long it takes for the event to restart and it just feels like such a huge waste of time. I enjoy RNG when the content can be instantly repeated over and over again without the game telling me I have to wait but when the game forces me to wait 30 minutes before I can make another attempt then that's just bad game design. I love Guild Wars and Anet but that part of the design, that time gate that prevents me from using my time as efficiently as possible is just absolutely terrible. I work a full time job, I've got a dog to take care of, I feel like my time is being completely disrespected with this kind of design because if I don't get the item then I have to wait to try again only to just have a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a chance of getting the stupid item then before I know it I've wasted my entire goddamn day and still haven't gotten the stupid diamond to drop. It's ridiculously stupid.

I haven't had any issues and I exclusively play mirage. I'm kind of one of those 'use the same build for all content' kinds of players.

This bug is also occurring in the season 2 episode 8 mission: Arcana Obscura however it is completely game breaking in this one as you are not able to read any of the text needed nor are you able to see where you're going.

So a few days ago I started noticing 2 different things with the DX11 beta, one is a bug, and the other seems to be a change in the game's lighting I think but I'm not sure... The bug I'm experiencing has only happened twice so far, once during a Fractal mission and the other just now during the final story mission for War Eternal in Dragonfall. What this bug does is it causes most of if not all of the model assets in the game including character, weapon, foliage, environment props, and more to completely de-render and become invisible; after that the UI starts bugging out and de-rendering too and you can't even quit the game normally to reload because all menus become invisible. Screenshots of bug: https://imgur.com/a/Cn1ERnm As for the possible lighting change, I still can't place my finger on it but something about the game as a whole just... looks different. It looks better even. I want to say it's the way lighting and shadows are affecting in game models and character models but I'm just not positive what it is. I swear I'm seeing more dynamic shadows on my character model than I use to see though but I haven't seen anyone else talk about anything like this so I also kind of feel like I'm just going crazy or something. I swear that something, SOMETHING, is looking much better than it used to but as I keep saying I can't for 100% certainty say what exactly it is that seems to be looking better.

Not much has been said but it has been insinuated that the reasoning for updating the engine to DirectX 11 from 9 was not only to increase stability but also graphical fidelity supposedly so I was wondering if any of the devs working on this are able to let us know what this could mean? Will we be seeing an update to the way the game handles lighting, in particular the way lighting affects character models and etc? Will we as players be eventually granted more control over the graphics options of the game such as with the post processing effects like bloom and character highlighting? Will some of the more fuzzy or pixelated textures get updated to higher resolution textures? Will the motion blur slider be fixed? What kind of visual improvements will we as players be able to look forward to after the dx11 update leaves beta and is fully stable?

I mean, there was a want for a ranged based spec for mesmer to bring it back in line with feeling like a mage and Virtuoso does do that but otherwise yeah, I completely agree. I like having illusions on mesmer personally but this spec doesn't seem to properly compensate their removal. I think the idea for this spec is to feel like a mesmer/thief cross class deal but I don't think it's properly delivering on that even.

So I'm trying the power variant of the spec now after trying several different things to try and make the condi variant feel good, spoiler alert, nothing I tried made condi virtuoso feel good. Condi Virtuoso is just straight up terrible, it's unusable. I'm one of those players who does all content solo and so I tend to judge a build by its ability to solo every single story element, group event, champion, and challenge without ever getting downed and as far as I can tell, that's just not possible with the condi Virtuoso. You'd have better results soloing everything with a core mesmer using absolutely no utilities it's so bad at it. So what about the power variant? Well, it's a lot better than condi, I'll give it that. In fact I think power Virtuoso might actually be able to solo the entire story anyway but it doesn't excel at it. My double staff condi mirage kills things far faster than even the power virtuoso is able to and it kills mobs even faster thanks to my ability to spread condi's around multiple targets with ease. You would think that with all of the AoE available in the Virtuoso's kit that killing mobs wouldn't be an issue but apparently it is. I was doing a lot of my testing on the all veteran mobs that you can find in Drizzlewood where it's like 4-6 veterans all grouped together. For my mirage these mobs melt like ice cream in a hot tub and I'm able to take virtually no damage from them, for the virtuoso however, these mobs are an absolute struggle. The power version can actually kill these mobs without dying... usually, the condi version though just flops around like a wet noodle until it inevitably gets stuck on the bottom of a Dominion Charr's boot and repeatedly walked all over. Even still though, the power virtuoso still takes forever to take out the entire mob and regularly comes really close to getting downed due to the lack of self-peel to keep enemies off you while fighting from range, illusions to help manage agro, and the mobility needed to maintain distance from enemies. This combination of factors in my opinion either needs to be compensated somehow or they need to be mitigated or resolved. As the Virtuoso is right now, I can't see myself ever playing it at all. It's just not particularly good at anything whatsoever and it feels like it's lacking an identity even. Anyway, that's my final bit of input for this spec. I still think it's a cool concept but it fails to be anything more than that in my opinion. I hope it receives a lot more love, development, and even change before EoD releases because I want so badly to love this spec, I want to want to main it. I want to be a Virtuoso main so badly but it's currently not even close to being good enough to make me actually care that it exists when I can just play my mirage and have a whole lot more fun and success.

So technically the virtuoso's trial period expired a while ago now but due to a bug in the launching of today's beta event for other elite specs I was able to play around with it again for about an hour before I was forced to re-update my client. I just wanted to say that the trait lines though seem a little bit underwhelming despite the fact that they work. I feel like they don't do a lot to really push the theme of the spec which I think is kind of a missed opportunity. I prefer playing condi mesmer builds no matter what spec I'm using and the virtuoso seems to handle itself okay with that but not as well as I think it should. We've got bleed from the blade skills through the trait lines but since it is daggers we're using here I just can't help but feel that poison should also be an available condition for them and I really hope that's something that gets considered before the live release of EoD. Additionally, while I appreciate the thematics of the Virtuoso being maintained in it's heal skill I just can't imagine why anyone would want to take that heal skill over something like Ether Feast since that one heals you per active clone and Virtuoso is able to have 5 active blades (which count as clones) as compared to all other mesmer specs being capped at a maximum of 3 clones which means it is capable of providing a very significant heal compared to other heal skills. Over all, I'm happy to finally have a ranged elite spec for the Mesmer since I've always preferred playing it like a mage or a caster and generally since release have avoided playing mesmer in melee range as much as I possibly could. Even now I play a double staff mirage because to me that's more enjoyable than axe or sword, I like kiting enemies and killing them from afar rather than being up close and personal with them. That said though I feel like the Virtuoso is just missing that flavor that it's name and insinuated presentation otherwise seems to be advertising. I think it needs more mobility, at least just a little, and that it's traits could do more to push the theme instead of letting the skills carry it's theme all by themselves. EDIT: I forgot to add that I also hope the fine folks at ArenaNet might be able to still go back and add dagger as an offhand option as well for the Virtuoso. I know that's kind of not the precedent set for adding one handed weapons to classes with elite specs however with everything else getting 2 handed weapons and major mechanic re-structures I still stand by the Virtuoso feeling a bit underwhelming. On top of that, the core thematic of the Virtuoso being a dagger wielding mesmer just feels like it needs dagger/dagger to be an option. Not having dagger/dagger as a gearing option for something like the Virtuoso just feels very wrong to me. The hotfix for today's beta event didn't delete the Virtuoso I made earlier this morning though so I'm going to continue to play around with it and come up with more feedback I can then come back and provide. That said, I really hope ArenaNet sees and considers some of the feedback this spec has received. I know there's a lot of negativity here on this thread about it but there is a lot of valid feedback here all the same and I'd really hate to see End of Dragons launch with Virtuoso remaining what it is now, a missed opportunity.

Yeah, I wasn't talking about the forums though, I was talking about an email I typed up and sent to one of the dev teams a couple years ago that was written from the perspective of a made up Canthan character. While I'm sure your point still stands I just thought it would be cool to know, y'know?

That makes sense. I don't know if I could even call what I sent a suggestion though, I sent the email back in 2018 in the form of an 'in game letter' written by someone from Cantha. I knew it was a dumb idea even when I did it but it was a strange compulsion I couldn't resist doing. lol While I still completely doubt it had anything to do with anything the fanboy in me still think it would be cool if it did, y'know. I suppose maybe if I'm lucky and it did somehow inspire or influence I could find a reference somewhere in the game to it once we get to play but I won't hold my breath. I'm just happy to get to see my favorite continent done up with the GW2 graphics engine and level design. x3

So, 2 years ago I was compelled to send an email to one of your teams pretending to be a Canthan resistance leader named Kimiko Musagi who was fatally wounded and requesting help from the Ascalonian heroes who defeated Elder Dragons to come help with a dual threat that was ravaging the land of Cantha. While I completely doubt it, I still want to know, did this affect the new expansion in any way? I never saw a reply back to that email and I never expected to but now that the new teaser dropped today and also that gif you guys accidentally titled as 'Shing Jea' which is where Kimiko told whoever read her letter (the email I typed out) to meet representatives of her guild the fanboy in me wants to know for absolutely certain instead of just assuming this email had nothing to do with anything. I'm pretty sure I already know the answer but if my assumption is wrong it would be really awesome to know. Thank you in advance and also sorry if I should have posted this somewhere else.