Endaris.1452

does work as described there

Like...raptor or gliding? They just got served on a silver platter to everyone buying EoD without having previous expansion and there is absolutely no reason to not enable weaponmaster by default other than "lore" but they didn't give a kitten about lore in a thousand other places so I don't see why here.

SotO is probably the last expansion you want to buy among the existing ones. It does not add any elite specs or crucial new systems to the game and has less content than any previous expansion. Most importantly, an account with only SotO will not have access to any elite specializations. If you don't want to spend much right now, I would recommend only the HoT+PoF bundle as that is a TON of content and huge core systems like gliding, mounts and 2 elite specs per profession for a relatively low price. There is a character level boost for every expansion you can buy separately, so 1 for the HoT+PoF bundle, 1 for EoD, 1 for SotO. Honestly no idea, I was flying over the atlantic right after the release and will only try it this evening myself. For a new player however I would always recommend to first try out core content and only then look to dip into expansion content that is usually more difficult. Depending on how much you and your gf care about story mostly.

Granted, scrapper's elite mechanic was never strong enough to warrant having to give up F5 but it was special because no other class had this kind of power to end/save people in competitive to end people without extra commitment. And even in endgame PvE content, the extra revive power was just nice. Given anet's willingness to tap into F6 and up for mech, I think it would be nice if function gyro was moved to F6 and elite toolbelt was returned to scrapper because the function gyro is not nearly powerful enough as an espec mechanic to warrant its loss.

Maybe as some background for why this change was somewhat necessary. Login rewards were so good that the best long-term investment of real money into the game was to buy an alt, get login rewards and then get more gems with gold-to-gems than you could get with buying gems with your real money directly. Now where anet really messed up was a while ago when there was a basically unlimited give-away of GW2 Heroic edition keys at nvidia or something, letting people to get pretty much as many keys for alts eligible for login rewards as they were willing to create (fake) mail addresses for. That pretty much jumpstarted a lot of people to go for mass alt logins since there was no longer an "investment" necessary to start seeing returns and honestly, it was really starting to ruin the game's economy because of how extremely lucrative it was in comparison to actually playing the game.

With the exception of rev staff 5, anet has been nerfing various AoE CC skills that could hit enemies with big hitboxes multiple times. Holographic Shockwave, Tides of Time and Electric Wyvern all got nerfed previously so it doesn't seem super surprising, especially with what warhorn does for cata/weaver dps builds. It's a lot more topical and sensible than anet nerfing Napalm burning damage on EoD release.

There's some individuum who has a lower triple digit number of accounts that according to his own statement only needed 20-30s per account to finish dailies using the PvP method I mentioned. They made 100-300g per hour according to their own statement (depending on how favorable the spread of PvP dailies was). How does your suggestion stop these people?

For the majority of people, those ascended rewards are deadweight anyway, at some point you just don't need additional ascended anymore. At the end of the day, ascended gear is account bound and the amount of ascended gear you can get from the system seems to be timegated. So all in all it shouldn't be enough to completely throw off the economy like you say it would. After all there are still (gen2) legendaries that require a decent bunch of the very same set of materials. May they get a bit cheaper? Sure. But that price decrease will also reflect downwards to the base materials (e.g. Mithril) so whatever "scarcity margin" you can get for selling stuff based on timegated crafts will likely continue to exist for materials that are profitable to sell right now.

Honestly, I don't really mind login-rewards specifically getting nerfed. People logging in with dozens of accounts did negatively impact the economy and allowed people with alt-accounts to make tens of thousands of gold, even more so if they did go through the effort of pitting their army of alts against each other in a private PvP arena to quickly complete PvP dailies - easy when you have enough accounts to fill an entire arena. Abusing alts for login and daily rewards being the BEST income per time possible was a bad design and I think it's completely fine axing that. Doesn't mean that I'm particularly delighted about the way Wizard's Vault works right now and they definitely need to improve on the new system but the old one had its own set of problems.

Sustained damage? Burst damage? Are you on your own or do you have players with support builds enabling you? PvE, PvP or WvW? You won't get any reasonable answer if you don't make clear what you are interested in.

If you don't have access to those guild halls, the portal scroll to Bloodstone Fen does the job. Bloodstone Fen is considered Heart of Maguuma for dailies as well and has easy gathering areas for ore and wood. And I think although it doesn't make sense, Ember Bay also counts for Heart of Maguuma dailies and the island south of the circus usually has a ton of plants.

You need ascended gear to play T4 fractals which are probably the best source of income in the game when done with an efficient group. Legendary armor is certainly something to look out for but you should keep the following thing in mind: Legendary armor usually has a precursor that is ascended. Building towards that first for a later upgrade perspective is definitely a good idea. Specifically, working on raid armor even gives you one free-to-use ascended set for the first collection and a precursor set for the second. If you already spend time in strikes, moving to HoT raids won't be all that difficult. There are some open world items you need though so maybe take a look at the relevant collection on the wiki already so you come prepared. Beyond that there is absolutely no issue with gearing your first 2-3 builds in ascended. You still need 1 Ball of Dark Energy for each piece of legendary gear and the only way to reliably acquire those is to salvage ascended weapons and armor. So even if you go legendary, you still have to craft something ascended to salvage for those balls. Absolutely nothing wrong with actually making gear that you can use for months until you have actually gotten to the point where legendary armor is a real option (aka you have all the other stuff you need and made your way through the related collections).

My bad, I misquoted something brought up in a conversation about Runecrafter's that related to the Silver-fed instead.

That makes way too much sense... 🥲

Reapers have great damage and are very self-sufficient for bringing it out but they have next to no defense stuff. Champ hits you with one attack and you're probably out of shroud which then guts your damage. There are plenty of other classes that can get 25 stacks of might and maintain a good number of vuln stacks on the enemy if they spec for it (mostly via might runes). Holo definitely can, about any kind of warrior can, renegade can, any kind of mesmer using staff should be able to. Probably some other specs too, these are just the ones I can think of immediately.

No, unless you start buying green unid gear on the TP in vast amounts. You need to salvage around a million green items to recoup the investment. I'm close to 200k lifetime salvages in ~6k gameplay hours without doing that and that's all rarities, not just green.

It's hard CC and hard CC is not allowed to deal any damage in competitive game modes, no matter the skill.

With rare gear you'd be missing a lot of boon duration, that's definitely not an option. As my previous poster mentioned, going celestial with your armor is definitely an option - you're only losing about 3-4% of your damage on paper if you can get your weapons and trinkets in ritualist's which is perfectly fine. Most people don't run infusions either which are around the same ballpark in impact so it should be negligible in real world scenarios. Also, as long as you purchased EoD on your account, all armor that is stat-selectable should have the stats of all expansions you own available. Notably that includes Bladed armor obtainable in Verdant Brink as rare drops or from the vendor on that map. But also Lunatic armor sets that come back/up with halloween. And exotic guild armor. The latter mostly has somewhat expensive recipes to unlock but once you have the recipe for a weight, it's pretty great for crafting if your guild has an guild hall in HoT. There are also some singular stat-selectable exotics you can use. Checkout the gearing recommendations here.

This is not how you fix elixir B. Engi can't have good throw elixirs because it would mean easily doubledipping for massive boons so their effect is always watered down to complement what you get from the selfish version already. If we get another elixir trait (and imo it should rather replace / modify HGH), elixir throw effects need to have special affects only affecting allies, kind of the reverse of what FmW and stancesharing do. When throwing elxir B you only get the stab but others get more boons on top. Kind of an "overdosing" diminishing return for drinking too much or however you wanna lore that. Throw Elixir C could additionally provide resolution and resistance to allies for a short duration. Throw Elixir U could give quickness to allies (like it used to), throw elixir R could additionally cleanse conditions (like it used to). Throw Elixir S could give aegis or stability. You get the drift. Elixirs in general are too niche and uninteresting and the ally effects compare very poorly with harbinger elixirs. They should be useful on their own and a worthwhile consideration for various situations rather than get powered entirely through a big chain of trait interactions.

The goal of research notes was to take crafting materials out of the game by making them only work on craftable items to balance the resource market and give relevance to materials not used as often in meta gear. All ascended backs come from mystic forge / collections / map currency, so yeah...bummer but makes sense. I think the best way is to just take the dive, buy crafting materials in bulk and then get yourself to a couple ten thousand research notes and never worry again.

If you have fun playing fractals or raids, convert any excess ascended stuff that drops to the crafted version in the mystic forge and salvage those into research notes.

Engi is just really flexible because it has access to 62 different utility skills alone via it's core utility skills. Drawback is you can only select them in sets of 2 but you have 6 of them. Core rev on the other hand has 12 and it can only select them in sets of 3. Greatly reduced flexibility. It mostly gets worse if you add healing skills into the equation although Rev elites are arguably 10 times better than whatever non-espec elites engi has. Rev is definitely fun to play but I would also say it's comparatively dull after a while. You're always going to play with the exact same weapon+legend combinations. Switching out a legend has huge implications and cannot be done without repercussions for most builds as switching into Ventari or Mallyx for a power build to get access to something specific (be it boonrip, projectile hate or an AoE pull) costs you way too much. Switching out weapons is more or less the same as most weapons are very strongly typed as power, condi or support. Personally I'm more or less the definition of a player that has no real main with 1340h on engi, 1290h on mesmer, 930h on ele, 770h on ranger, 740h on thief, 640h on guard, 300h on rev and about 150h on warr and necro each. So I think my main point with your confusion is how you can stand to play such excessive amounts on only 1 class in the first place (unless it's PvP, can kinda relate there). Exploring different playstyles is fun and rolling over to a class/espec you're not as familiar with is a bit like discovering the game anew. At the start I didn't get how to play Herald at all which is why my Rev doesn't have too many hours but now I certainly enjoy it just like I enjoy engineer (except mechanist, kitten that). Likewise, engineer was a rather late discovery for me but it has overtaken all my other classes in playtime since and I even picked it as the class for my "vintage" character that I play story on in order and with only the expansion tools that I'd have normally (so without mounts before PoF etc). Imo, somewhat similar to mesmer, Engi is more of a toolbox class. It doesn't have the upfront destruction that Power Revs have but if you enjoy that, playing (PBM) grenade kit holo is imo a decent substitute as forge and grenade barrage can similarly deal out punishment. But you can be very nuanced in how many active defenses you slot on an offensive build, you can somewhat reasonably play hybrid stats thanks to kits. Engineer is much more about the "play the game the way you want", compared to the very specialized Rev utilities, traitlines and weapons. There is a lot more buildcrafting possible. The issue is that with powercreep and increasing experience, playing less efficient builds that don't immediately delete trash mobs out of existence feel less satisfying. Because we know how it's done and it makes us ignore most aspects beyond the full berserker/viper/trailblazer setups. My vintage character for instance is running a weird hybrid composed of marshal, grieving, sinister, berserker and viper, core, flame legion runes, tool kit, flamethrower and mortar kit. It's not as effective as a full berserker/viper/trailblazer would be in relation to my gameplay experience but I recently started LS1 on the character and it actually makes me feel more engaged with the enemies because I can't just blast trash to smithereens but instead have to play around my active defenses (lots of blind and explosive entrance with the barrier mainly). And hey, I was able to solo one of the CoF dungeons with it too. Finally I think one of the main issues is that engi weapons are just bad and don't give you any flexibility. Which will change with SotO so whatever.

Yes, it's just GNU/Linux and you can easily setup GW2 to launch via Lutris or Steam.

You don't need it, but it's a nice to have item. It mostly depends on where you stand economically with your characters. Getting your first 2-3 characters outfitted in full ascended is pretty long-winded and I wouldn't recommend anyone to dump gold on a commander tag in that phase. If you're in a situation where you would consider crafting legendaries without having 77 clovers sitting in your material storage, the commander tag is definitely worth a thought. It has a similar cost or rather even lower cost than 1 legendary armor piece or 1 legendary rune or 1 legendary sigil. It is a convenience item just the same, even if you may not use it terribly often. Just having the option is great and people already gave you some examples for usage. Other examples that I haven't seen mentioned would be marking traps during guild races or doing scavenger hunts with friends such as lost coins in silverwastes.

No, it's not. I recommend you to watch this video on how loot tables work in this game and how magic find interacts with them: tl;dr: Magic find does not affect whether you loot a container/weapon/trophy/etc, it only affects how good the container/weapon/trophy/etc will be. Magic find is considered not that influential by most people due to how it is stuck between the roll for whether you get an item at all and the roll for what item exactly you get from the rarity category but personally I definitely "felt" myself dropping significantly more exotics from random enemies compared to when my magic find was low (basically from "virtually never" to "rarely").