Mungrul.9358

Regarding the tutorial pop-ups, it feels like a half-implemented system. In other games, you'll read the pop-up once and dismiss it, and the game will flag that particular pop-up as read. It feels like ANet haven't implemented that flag, so the game doesn't know you've already read the message before. Forgive me for saying, but a pretty rookie mistake given this has been standard practice in games for probably 20 years now.

Yes, because you are more qualified to speak on the meaning behind someone else' words than I am

Ah dammit, being a predominantly PvE player, I keep forgetting that particular boneheaded decision. Still can't believe they haven't walked that back.

Direct quote from the blog entry where they announced DX11 support: And are you honestly saying that effects like the ones I highlighted in my previous post aren't adding to the problem?

I always found it odd that Rush had no CC associated with it. I mean yeah, you don't want it usurping Bull's Charge. But adding a little CC would improve the skill, say half that of Bull's Charge. As for what type of CC, maybe stun?

As per my thread here, I'd like to be able to gift friends the Living World Episodes.

You'd have to invite them to your homestead first 😄

I've also noticed that since SotO metas, it's become increasingly hard to read the ground and avoid damage thanks to all the visual clutter unless you're playing fully zoomed out all the time. Knaebelag and Eparch in particular are absolutely atrocious for this, resulting in many deaths where I have no idea what killed me or how to avoid it in the future. Janthir's spears have made it even worse, particularly the Elementalist one, where skill 5, the "Etching" skill, completely obscures any damaging AoE effect indicators in the same area. But at the same time, I don't hold out much hope for a reduction in clutter. People have been asking for it since the original release of the game with no action being taken by ANet. Indeed, one of the reasons they promoted for moving to DX11 was that it would allow for even more graphical effects. Talk about tone-deaf.

Thanks for checking @Gop.4023 That's a shame 😞

Sorry, I'm at work at the moment, so can't log in and check. The wiki notes that the episodes can be bought for 200 gems each, but doesn't specify if they can be gifted or not. A friend recently started playing the game recently and has bought the package that includes HoT & PoF. But despite me informing him that each episode gives almost an expansion's worth of content (as well as a continuation of the story), I don't think it's sunk in. I'd love to buy him the episodes so he doesn't miss out. After all, as well as the story and maps, there's also a lot of really useful things to unlock through Living World, such as accessories purchasable with map currencies (with Blood Ruby ones in particular being a great alternative to Legendaries), and of course the Roller Beetle and Skyscale.

I did give it a shot while playing around with a Berserker condi build for Open World last night instead of Longbow, but ended up running back to Longbow with my tail between my legs. I find that a good, generalist Open World build benefits from having both melee and ranged options available, but Rifle simply can't fill that role at the moment. It's too slow to build Adrenaline, and it doesn't combo with any other weapon. Longbow isn't perfect, but it's the best ranged option Warriors have. As an aside, I also confirmed my suspicions that if Warrior wants to achieve decent damage, they have to go all-in on either power or condi, then really work to get those figures, all the while perfectly dodging all incoming sources of damage (or rely on the dubious abilities of other players in the Open World to keep them alive). They have to sacrifice survivability, and the inherent survivability they get from their baseline health and toughness isn't enough to cut it in the modern game. Cele gives great survivability, because it gives you health, toughness and concentration (and because of the stoopid Boon-based balancing hell we're in, Concentration is positively required these days), and it's not too shabby for damage, but it doesn't achieve anywhere near the same results as other professions using Cele (I'm looking at you Harbinger.) And hammer apears to get hit hard by power scaling, with damage done while wearing Cele being less than half the damage per hit as when wearing a mix of Berserker's and Assassin. Ugh, I love this profession, but it's such a mess at the moment.

One of my personal bugbears is the "special" skill and all of the disparate roles thrust upon it. I hate the fact that it needs to exist, and that it does so many different things based on the situation. It's a sign that someone couldn't think of a way of implementing a mechanic using existing tools, so just made it a special skill. As an example, before Janthir, there were numerous fights in the open world that relied on using the special skill to snare a running enemy. Yet Janthir arrives, and all of a sudden, there's no need to use the special skill anymore, because the War Claw gets a skill that does the same, meaning you no longer require an extra button to perform this task. I am thinking about the Lowland Shore Stag, Basilisk and Warg bosses in particular. Now in an ideal world, ANet would go back and look at previous similar fights, mostly Champion/Legendary Hydras, and simply add the same function to all mounts, removing that specific need for an extra key binding fo a "special" skill. This means that with creative thinking, they could probably do the same for every use of the "special" skill in the game, and remove control complexity therefore improving player experience. In fact, if you look at the UI for both the first game and this one, you can see that reducing control complexity was a core design philosophy. They're MMOs with as many complicated systems as any other MMO out there, but you didn't need to bind every single key on the keyboard to a different function. Simple controls allowing for complex gameplay. Elegant and beautiful design. Whoever was responsible for maintaining this discipline was obviously very skilled at game design and no longer has a strong voice in the company, if indeed they still work there at all. I have an engineering background, so subscribe to the following philosophy:

Started to work through the survey, but stopped at this question, as none of the answers represented my own experience with Homesteads: Basics: Are you familiar with the Home Instances? I have gained access to the homestead, and regularly park my characters there for the rested buff. I use it to gather from my home instance nodes and garden plots on a daily basis, and I have applied glyphs (Volatile Magic) to the gathering boxes. I have maxed out the associated mastery track. It's a useful crossroads for porting characters between Core Tyria, SotO and JW. I occasionally use it for some light fishing. But beyond that, because there are costs associated with the creativity tools, I have no desire to interact with them. Anything that takes resources away from my pursuit of Legendary armour is not worth investing in, and pouring resources into creating things in the Homestead won't benefit my game in any way via extra boosts or convenience, so the whole idea is dead in the water to me. I see it primarily as pandering to a loud minority, that mostly Streamers will benefit from, and beyond that is a rather cynical new attempt to further monetise the game. But I'm also a grumpy old man.

I find this with any Warrior build worth using to be honest; Elementalist often gets referred to as the "Piano" profession, but I find effective Warrior play to be almost as... busy. Everything worth doing requires a combo and/or weapon swap. And having played some other professions recently, the amount of effort required to achieve similar, or in most cases, better results is significantly lower. My Harb, I just pop everything I need to get to 25 stacks, then enter shroud and auto-attack, and everything just melts. Willbender, just keep spamming the virtues (that have ridiculously low cooldowns for movement skills), and make sure everything is on fire all the time by the occasional applaication of two skills, and then again, just fall back on auto-attack. But the thing is, even though these perform better for less effort, they're nowhere near as fun to play as Warrior.

Talking of, Eviscerate needs to cleave in a cone in front of the player and Backbreaker needs to hit all targets in a small circular AoE at point of impact.

I've been toying with them more often recently too, especially as a Warrior where I have to sacrifice a trait to get the same effect.

I got past seeing titles as meritorious a LONG time ago now, and if I use them at all on my characters, it's usually for flavour, like "A Ferocious Hunger" on my Necro, Trog Stratosphlegm, "Killer Queen" on my Warrior, Prince Voltan, or "Omnomnivore" on my Asura Mechanist, Omnom Becky with her mech Omno Barry.

In the shadow of SotO and its introduction of Open World Legendary Armour that takes a huge amount of time to grind SotO-only content for, I think there's a need to add some of the components to craft Legendary Armour to meta events on older maps. While you're working on these sets, there's very little incentive to play previous content, which can lead to burnout through repetition, especially when it comes to Inner Nayros, which gives two per day (one flexible!), compared to the other metas' one, pretty much necessitating you spend more time there than anywhere else. If you could play ANY meta event, yet still feel you were progressing your Legendary Armour, this would be a massive improvement, while also serving to keep previous maps populated. I'm talking about Calcified Gasps / Clots of Congealed Screams, Pinches of Stardust / Pouches of Stardust and Static Charges / Cases of Captured Lightning in particular. Rift essences are thankfully available in content outside of SotO, and I don't think there's an improvement needed there. While it might not make sense to give those rewards specifically, something that could be traded in for one of them via Gharr Leadclaw or similar would make sense. If the fear is that people could accelerate the journey through having more opportunites per day than four, I suppose you could limit the total possible per day to four. But this would seem pretty mean-spirited, especially as there are ways to get more than four a day through exchange mechanisms anyway.

Sorry, I hate saying that coding anything is easy, and don't mean to imply it is, but this one seems like low-hanging fruit to me: Warclaw has no fall damage. Give this feature to the bunny too.

If you want PoF Hard Mode, play as Warrior. The amount of Blind spam means at least half of your attacks won't hit. !FUN! Edit: Oh, and at the time of release, before all of the power-creep and mounts, core Tyria wasn't Baby Mode. It wasn't stupidly difficult, no, but it certainly wasn't easy, especially the Orrian areas. People who say it's easy obviously weren't playing at release.

The tips of the Weaver's Sword and Warpblade on a female Norn (tallest height) clip into the floor when sheathed: Weaver's Sword Warpblade

Just to let you know, I'm getting this. My Grandmaster Armour / Weapon Smith can only see two items in the Discovery tab, ecto and Destroyer Lodestones. Other characters se more, but not all ingredients. I'm trying to Discover the sigil of impact, but despite having them in storage, Discover won't see the Onyx Lodestones. Is it possible your database is reaching some kind of limit and is therefore not capable of displaying everything a character has?

Any possibility of getting an Uttakkt mini?

It doesn't make sense to me why ANet would make player housing, then not let the player move key compnents themselves. Why do they have to be in a fixed location in the first place? The same could be said of the gathering chests and nodes.

I love the extra animations when using this Legendary spear on land! I'm curious to know if it was difficult to adapt it, or if it was relatively straightforward. Any insight from ANet would be fantastic!