voltaicbore.8012

The desperation you speak of seems much more to apply to GW2 than to BDO. BDO's most recent "expansion" is similar to what they've always been able to put out, and you're still completely missing out on the other two dream horses even if they give you one of them for free. GW2 on the other hand, once it gives you a skyscale, it's yours. There's really no other acquisitive hook left, no "two more skyscales to farm." And while BDO is just doing what it's always done (overpriced shop, baiting weebs, lame but consistent content), GW2 very much gives the impression of shrinking in ambition. Which is a complete shame. In my opinion, as a consumer experience, GW2 not only utterly destroys BDO, but most other competitors in the genre. It pains me to see games more willing to nickel-and-dime players enjoy more stability.

I used to think this as well, during the IBS era. I was one of the many people complaining that IBS could never truly be "expansion like" content without elite specs. However, EoD changed my mind about that. I remain fairly unimpressed with every single EoD elite. The builds that excel feel quite boring and uninspired to me, and the rest are just... even more boring. I don't think I'll miss elite specs, if EoD is any indication of how they'd be moving forward.

It just magically stopped happening to me a few nights ago. Made no changes of any sort, aside from playing GW2 a lot less during the disconnect-y days.

And I'm guessing this is optimistic beyond reason. Then again, I would have said the same thing about visiting the Wizard's Tower, so maybe the new content structure/schedule leaves more room for revisiting things that weren't done quite right the first time. I still haven't reached Cantha in my playthrough of GW1, but this is what I'm afraid of most when it comes to current Anet getting their hands on longstanding Core Tyria "mysteries." One of the most compelling things about Garenhoff was the low key sense of... "something is off" about the town. I'm getting the sinking feeling that none of that will matter to Anet, and it'll just be "oh the good guys always lived up there, but now they need your help Brave Adventurer! That's why for the first time ever they're letting people in. What's that you say about the town that kind of cultishly worships me, and these elemental slave-creatures? Nah, doesn't matter. Stop asking questions, we'll never answer them anyways."

I, too, believe the best years of the GW2 are behind us, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy what we have now, and look forward to what is to come. I've just accepted it's not going to captivate me as much as the core content did. Also, I'm certain my opinion of core Tyria was greatly enhanced by me experiencing it as a brand new player, fresh off the experience of being disillusioned with my previous MMO. There are certain things GW2 just does so well. Few other games (if any at all) do all aspects of movement as well as GW2 does. I try out other games on a pretty regular basis, but the movement in those games invariably feels inferior in some regard to GW2. Also I haven't seen another game that merges tab-target and action combat quite as successfully as GW2 does. Finally, I still believe that GW2 is hands down the best dollar-for-dollar MMO experience available. Again, Anet's track record isn't perfect (coughcoughbuildtemplates), but I think they largely got it right in terms of not nickel-and-diming players. These sorts of things are what I can still continue to appreciate about the game, even if I'm not thrilled about the most recent direction the art and writing seem to have taken. So yes, we might be on a downhill path, but that doesn't mean we're tumbling headlong into a death pit.

This is precisely what I am planning on doing. I'm getting in my easy dailies now while I still can, but during the beta testing I saw a ton of weapon mixing nonsense in unranked. I'm sure it was fun to play, but there's just no way Anet is balancing it all. This is perhaps the most insulting thing of all. There are a handful of exceptions (ranger hammer allowed you to select which abilities you wanted perma unleashed, since no ranger outside of untamed has access to the unleash mechanic), but that really only worked because untamed traits didn't uniquely buff the hammer anyways. This new content pacing and the upcoming xpac seems like an exercise in "hey let's just do a bunch of stuff complainers have been asking about."

Necro'ing this thread because the error code I'm posting about is identical. Getting a LOT of 7:11:3:202:101 disconnects as of the past two days. Doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing, dungeons, fractals, open world, spvp, etc. As per usual I made sure I had all the recommended ports open, and I'm not having any connectivity issues with any other game/application on this computer. Anyone else having the same issue?

Yeah you're off the mark here. There's A LOT in SoTO that people have been asking for (elite specialization weapons now usable across the entire class, open world legendary armor, WIZARD'S TOWER, etc) in the same category as "skyscale access." Also, as @Danikat.8537 pointed out, you already have to buy into the expansions to get skyscale as it is now, and if anything, unlocking skyscale with just SoTO is actually cheaper. If anything, I think Anet is touting the skyscale as just a higher-profile "hey guys we're giving you something a lot of you complained about" move. Far be it from me to defend a lot of what's been going on with Anet, but the one thing Anet has been almost 100% consistent on is giving the consumer a good deal. Dollar for dollar I consider GW2 the single best value in current gaming. The one notable exception is the way they handled build/gear templates.

Hopefully someone with code literacy can look at the report and figure out more technical data. All I can contribute is that on my win11 machine I got... maybe around 6 months ago?... I haven't experienced a single crash. I was actually prepared not to be able to run GW2 at all; this machine was something of an emergency buy, so I got it retail (a laptop without discrete gfx). It was a pleasant surprise to be able to run it at max settings, keep a stable 60fps in group content, and the fan actually turns off from time to time.

It seems I finally set my expectations low enough - I don't see anything that really pushes me to preorder, but I don't feel a huge sting of disappointment either. I have to admit that much of my non-hype stems from my general disappointment with EoD and Anet's failure to address a lot of what doesn't work well from that expansion. I'm trying to keep an open mind about SotO, and visiting the Wizard's Tower is a good start (I just hope they don't mess it up). Heh in a game not getting too many Ws, at least there's the satisfaction of being right.

I think this makes the most sense. As @Valfar.3761 laid out very clearly, the process to make use of this trait is horrible. I'll take a shave on the damage numbers for ambushes in exchange for being able to use the new trait sensibly. As for the sword changes... I'm actually pleasantly surprised. As a power weapon in a power soulbeast sword/axe build, it's nice having big chunky 5-digit numbers coming out of these moves, which are animated fast enough to use in melee, or more properly as gap closers. I'd really only consider sword 3 as a true gap closer, given the range and evade on it. On my tanky condi roamer builds that use a couple traps, having consistent leaps and extra immobs has been very nice. I haven't run druid yet, and I'm honestly not looking forward to it.

I think this is the logical solution. I, however, am safe either way, because I procrastinated on making the runes thus far. At worst, I will not have experienced a "we're taking away a cool thing your grinded items used to do, you can grind a whole new thing to get it back".

Though perhaps costly, I consider the "very biased" option as the best way forward. Essentially the 'invisible hand' concept. I guess the only hazard is the competitive modes inching back towards the oneshot meta we had before the Feb 2020 omeganerf rebalancing, as balance would become something of an arms race between each class getting a lot of love. Then again, a lot of folks prefer the way things were before Feb 2020, so maybe it isn't even a "hazard" for them. As much as I despise certain classes (you'd know from my behavior in the mes forum lol) on a fundamental design level, this arms race approach to class balance would at least blunt the hatred by providing more tools to win fights. My rangers are salty that they'll probably never get a rifle (at least in the near future), but I'm nonetheless interested to see how Anet pulls of rifle for mesmer.

Honestly I would have been much more excited for all that than fishing. I would 100% would accept these as xpac selling points. Thing is, I'm not sure anyone who isn't already invested into GW2 would see it the same way.

I fully agree that Anet doesn't put out the instanced content worthy of such a shift. The only thing dumber than making this shift, would be if they were making it on accident.

Sadly I think trinity 2.0 is actually their goal. I'm not sure if they consider stuff like HT CM a success, but they certainly showed us they want to up the endgame challenge instead of sticking to the game's rather casual OW identity. Without trinity 1.0, the only way to have players succeed in encounters is for everyone to become some homogenous self-sustaining dps, or to implement trinity 2.0. It's pretty clear (at lest in my opinion) that they're going down the trinity 2.0 route.

There certainly has been a lot of turnover. It may very well be that by 2018 everyone who wrote/cared about the human gods was gone. If you're really curious you might be able to piece together the staff turnover picture via bios on the wiki.

No no no they might just push us out the window, give in to their fears, and plunge the galaxy into darkness all because they were too weak to fulfill their destiny of achieving balance. It will take decades of oppression before they come around and throw their alac/quick god down a really deep pit to restore balance.

I do see the appeal of a "beginner queue" that ensures that accounts of similar experience and rating get matched with each other, but frankly that would probably only delay the "quit" moments instead of preventing some of them from happening. I mean, there's a whole slew of top-ranked players making brand new alt accounts just about every season, for match manipulation purposes. The game would have no way of differentiating between such smurfing accounts and legitimate real accounts, so I'm certain that pool of matches would get poisoned one way or another. The only thing in your post I can fully, unreservedly agree with is The saddest part is, there is work on sPvP on fairly regular basis, but it rarely seems to move in the right direction and is consistently too small in scope to really make some of the more broadly needed changes. Unfortunately, I really don't see a shift away from this "never enough attention paid to pvp" scenario, as the game's overall health seems to be quite independent of the state of sPvP.

There actually is a rating for your unranked play as well. See the wiki page for the sPvP algorithm. This is pretty much the explanation. The matchmaker simply doesn't have enough population to work with, so the built-in compromise ends up putting players of vastly different ratings together rather than have no match at all.

This is what is most disappointing - doubling down on those two boons is basically treating the symptom instead of the disease. "Man, I feel terrible without all these painkillers. Welp, let's just keep taking more painkillers, forever! No need to figure out what is actually causing the pain." I believe the inclusion of quickness and alacrity in the game at all was a mistake. They are certainly very cool, but they are so fundamentally gameplay-changing that they were always destined to become the monsters they are today. In a way, I think the whole Fervent Force arc untamed is a miniaturized picture of the quick/alac story. Something so useful came to entirely dominate a PvE spec, so they had to get rid of it. Quick/alac are doing the same thing, just to the entirety instanced high-end PvE and over a longer time frame.

Agreed. The long windup on sword 3... even if using an about face keybind, the sword 3> about face > sword 2 movement combo covered less distance than just pressing W for the same amount of time. So to get out of spawn I'd just W + sword 2 + whatever merged leap I had. That long windup also made sword 3 a pretty weak reactive move for me - it'd only really work if I knew something was coming, and it was the distance created that made the incoming move fail. To do that I'd have to hit it early and sacrifice the sword 2 reset more often than not. I still don't see MH sword ever replacing GS in power builds though, not at this rate.

I get the on-paper appeal of what @Pooktress.2805 is suggesting. GW2 has a very on-the-rails feeling to a lot of it, and including these self-contained, randomly generated quests with randomly assigned rewards adds an element of "oh I haven't seen this before!" excitement... ...at first. Having done map completes many, many times over, I doubt a random assortment of interactions or kill quests would really retain any form of excitement for players like me. As for rewards, I can already do a ton of these things in the game and never see an infusion drop, so the scroll adds no novel experience in that regard lol. This is a big part of the problem. There's a relatively narrow range of activities that would work, and I think you'd see repeats quite early. So yeah, add me to the list of people not very impressed with the idea.

I liked it as well, I firmly believe games can do well by stepping outside of the "we only express story progression through combat" box. My only gripe with the date was that it wasn't enough to prop up such a short and thin release. The date itself was fine, I thought.

It appears to be somewhat fashionable to skyscale-bash, at least for some folks. While I believe it's not helpful to worship the skyscale as a must-have, it certainly does have a compelling use case (sheer convenience). To pretend, as many seem to do, that the skyscale is utter useless garbage is pretty laughable. I think you'll be quite lonely in the turtle camp though. I personally find them fun in small bursts, but I never really find myself reaching for it unless there's siege targets to stomp. I suspect a lot of others feel the same, given how few turtles I see in the field. As for the change, I'm a totally indifferent to the outcome. I pugged KO for the turtle collection relatively early, so there were a lot of fellow 455/+30k ap folks in there who were also first timers. In many respects, that's the ideal group for me - people who can generally be assumed to have a decent grasp of the game, but also people who aren't really dedicated instanced-endgamers. I think we got it on the first try; if not, we certainly got it on the second. Given the overall smoothness of the process for me, I was fine with folks like the OP doing a lot to usher new players into KO/strikes, since it would almost certainly turn out to be a positive experience. On the other hand, even decent-at-combat vets like myself just did KO to check that box, and never really went back. I really don't consider most of the strikes to be compelling enough fights, where the fun of the fight itself keeps bringing me back. I'm guessing a lot of new folks are the same way, so perhaps Anet judged it to be a failed experiment and backpedaled.