azureai.9764

Visit the Blood Legion Homelands (and/or Ash Legion Homelands). ALL CHARR LORE, to balance out my commander being written as a human or sylvari for the past several years.

I didn't play GW1 myself, but I do understand it was a GW1 thing. Still, a bad decision is a bad decision - regardless of whether it's a legacy thing - especially if it doesn't have to keep being made. Among the seemingly simple fixes are to include an auto-save system that every modern single-player game has had for a decade.

I just wrapped up the Balthazar confrontation - a very long slog full of annoying platforming, one-shot kill mechanics, and Anet's patented skill at explaining things (the Commander literally says "Aurene! Stay near me!" when you actually need to go to the OTHER side of the platform - which indication you CAN'T SEE WHEN YOU'RE NEAR AURENE). After all the tomfoolery, I did it. I beat Balthazar! And then I was promptly kicked out of the instance by a server side error. Instances have always been a terrible design decision for this game. ANet's refusal (for what I can only assume is technical reasons?) to preserve your progress if the instance burps was somewhat tolerable when the instances were relatively short. But in Path of Fire, the instances are all irritatingly long, and so the several poor design decisions involved in utilizing the instances have become much more grating. I've lost an hour - maybe more - of my time, because Guild Wars 2 doesn't have some kind of autosave system that nearly every other modern game have. Why? This screams that ArenaNet doesn't appreciate my time. I had a similar experience with the BeastMaster instance that required me to listen to unskippable dialogue again (and I love lore! I just didn't need to hear Joko's Beastmaster drone on again about something I already knew). If the instances really cannot have an autosave, if they really cannot have a skip dialogue feature - then they NEVER should have been made to be as long as they are in Path of Fire. That's a terrible design decision that has truly soured me on the game. If there's an explanation for this design decision - I'd love to hear it. Because I am truly baffled how ANYONE could have thought the Path of Fire instances were a good idea. tl;dr - Path of Fire uses too many instances. They're long. And when they (often) mess up, the player suffers through a massive waste of time. Terrible, terrible design choice.

Let's go to the charr homelands first. Much more interesting things there than a bunch of humans.

Centurion Tsume Rawroar

Thanks, Gaile. This problem affected me, too, and I definitely appreciate the quick fix.