voltaicbore.8012

They can do hair with some hats/hoods. Since they started doing that with some of the EoD hats and the cat ear hood, I figured that was the new normal. Guess I was wrong. I was so wrong, in fact, that I didn't even check the preview to confirm hair or not. I just did some gold to gem conversion and got it, and regret it deeply. I understand not going back and adding hair to all the old baldness-inducing hats. But releasing a new hair-eating hat when they've already released hair-friendly ones? Bad call.

That's what I was getting at. As if the challenge of doing things on an MMO scale weren't enough, Anet raised their own bar in HoT and PoF by setting a standard for really offering new gameplay options and experiences with each expansion. Non-MMOs - especially those that rely on season passes, lootboxes, or outright gacha mechanics - don't actually have to do nearly as much as GW2 does to keep players hooked. And even many MMOs seem satisfied with much less ambitious additions than GW2 historically is. Here is where our opinions diverge. I really don't think the cuts and rushes were made in service to the "vision of the content as a whole." I'd bet a lot of money that it was more like "we can't do everything we planned before release day. How can we at least cobble together what we managed to finish into an acceptably cohesive product?"

While I don't necessarily agree with your perspective on the quality of the GW2 narrative, I do very much agree with the above sentiment. After a certain point, I accepted that the narrative direction is what it is in GW2. That doesn't mean I really like the execution of that direction, but to be perfectly honest, I no longer profess to have a better suggestion anymore. Back to your question about what stories I do enjoy, I was shocked by how much I enjoyed what I've seen (so far) of Genshin Impact's primary storyline. Without getting too specific and spoilery, I really like what they did with the typical goblin-esque common enemies. At first they're like bandits and goblins in any other RPG, common starter enemies that you remorselessly shred because you're an adventurer. Turns out, they have quite a backstory, which I haven't seen through to the end (I'm not sure the entire arc is released, but I'm fairly new to Genshin), and which further looks like it might intersect with your character's personal story down the line. I think it has to do with pacing and scale. Frankly, GW2 arguably does similar things - we found out the Sylvari were meant to be dragon minions, the dragons themselves weren't the born-bad-must-kill villains of the story, etc. These things, like the goblins-aren't-just-trash-mobs thing in Genshin, peel back the curtains a bit and give Tyria a sense of narrative depth. It's just that Genshin is a single player game (with optional co-op stuff), the player character isn't even given the illusion of choice in stories, and each stage of the story is fairly restricted to different geographic areas and characters. There are no pan-species military alliances, which themselves are built on transnational military/reasearch/espionage organizations, or events that force your friends from across the continent to always show up for the big final showdown. GW2's amibitious scale was matched, for 10 years, by the scale of the dragon storyline, which had the unenviable task of making everything The Next World Ending Cataclysm. Genshin's main story is just one person on a journey to find someone important to them, and they discover more about the world they are traveling through at a decent pace, like peeling back an onion. I think the best example of "cool idea, rushed and nigh meaningless ending" in GW2 was the Rata Novus arc. The idea is quite compelling, even for someone with little interest in the asura to begin with. A lost city that might have been experienced in dealing with both chak and mordrem threats - that's cool. But in terms of the main HoT story, you end that arc with "well at least we know dragons have weaknesses" - as if we, you know, hadn't already killed a dragon. Reminds me of a scene from the first Harold & Kumar movie: "bullets! My only weakness! How did you know?" If I'm remembering correctly, Braham voiced a similar level of disappointment with the "discovery." I think that arc could have been a lot cooler if we found out the Rata Novans came to a hard dead end just a bit closer to the finish line. Perhaps among other efforts one of their krewes figured out Mordy works through some mind connection with the jungle, and the krewe was trying (and failing) to make a device to tap into that. Note that I'm not taking issue with Trahearne dropping the magic solution on us at the end, that was plausible enough in its own right. I just think the "dragons do have [a completely unspecified] weakness" was an extraordinarily lazy place to end the Rata Novus arc. And I'm not calling Anet lazy per se, but I think that lazy choice was dictated by their need to ship an expac as ambitious as HoT and not enough time to refine everything.

Yeah I re-checked, I must not have pulled off all the traits on my thief (probably the dagger +power one) when I tried to check all those years ago. I was wrong about that. The coefficient picture is not quite as clear as "they're all very similar." Ranger GS autos 1 & 2 are markedly lower than the rest (I think warrior's first auto is the only other 0.8 in the list). All the other auto chains either apply boons or vuln somewhere in there, and rangers get a partial dodge refill (which, unlike the old evade at the end of the chain, only has defensive value). But on the other hand, while Vindi's auto 1 & 2 have a full 0.2 higher coefficient, there's no trait Vindi can use to buff GS attacks specifically (which ranger has, as well as warr and guard). This isn't a complaint about ranger GS - it's frankly one of the best weapons in the entire game. It's just that the number comparison of "very similar" doesn't cut it.

I agree the troll portaling is a nuisance, but I think we have to just accept it as it is. As someone already mentioned, enforcing proximity limits on portals by chests could invalidate the very positive JP-portaling cottage industry this game has, and the chatbox/text cues could fall somewhere between easily missed/useless and spammy annoyance. There's already a fairly noticeable audio cue for the portal. It would be nice to get everything we want in the game, but some things just seem obviously not worth the effort for the studio. As long as that list of things doesn't get too long, I'll live with it.

At the risk of stating the obvious, have you tried the "quit this chapter" option for that one frozen story stage, or for the one immediately before it? I'm wondering if you do a soft reset of story that way, and then play through again, if it changes anything. Apologies if that's literally the first thing you tried, just throwing out ideas here.

This would be the only possible option to not turn off the vast majority of people who like this game's pve. Nope. I'm pretty sure most current players feel the same way. Not that any of this matters. In most games I've seen where there's an option to choose between pvp and non-pvp maps/servers, the pvp maps/servers quickly end up dead. There's enough pve tasks to get done, and people generally don't enjoy having their time wasted by griefing (or needing to constantly watch out for or defend against it) while doing said tasks. I'm not sure how hard it would be for Anet to implement this, but it's almost guaranteed to be a complete waste of time. Try one of the Korean games' pvp servers, or maybe something like Albion Online, because I'm pretty sure you'll never get anything close to this in Tyria.

I think this is really the issue, and speaks to mesmer issues in general. I recently had good fun in the mesmer forums being a toxic jerk about it, but I think the underlying idea is valid. Being able to polymorph an enemy is unique to mesmer, and I think mesmer should retain access to it. Doublecasting (via mimic or continuum split) is also unique to mesmer, and I think mes should definitely retain access to it. Taking those kinds of things away begins to gut the uniqueness of mesmer. Punishing high player action inputs (via confusion) and constant movement (via pre-rework torment) seem to fit right into the overall mesmer theme as well, which of course run counter to how everyone else is expected to play. These all sound (and indeed are) cool... until you try to fit them into competitive balance. The things that make mesmer so interesting also run against a lot of the dynamism and counterplay-focused nature of GW2 combat. Combine that with high burst potential from a skilled mesmer, and you're looking at a lot of dead moas. I don't envy Anet's job in attempting to balance this all out. Nerf these unique things too hard, and you end up making those skills useless and mesmer becomes a magic thief with less mobility. Leave them too strong, and it leads to uninteractive, less counterplayable stuff. Anet's answer over time seems to be along the lines of "make mes so lackluster in more normal aspects of combat, and let the unique aspects of mes try to carry it." But then you get stuff like taking away core, game-wide stuff like a second dodge away from mirages, and you start to get problems with the spec. It's a mess, that's the only thing we can say for sure.

Because school is such a good reflection of life, yes /s. I fully agree it's not unusual to see someone excel in a school setting at all subjects, but to have actual expertise in several fields - expertise that truly solves problems that non experts cannot hope to tackle without such expertise - is extremely rare and highly celebrated when it appears. Most 'smart' people spend their entire adult lives getting decent at just one thing. Even within the licensed professions (like doctors and lawyers) people further sub-specialize. That said, I actually agree with your perspective on Taimi's shrinking Taimi ex machina role in EoD, and Gorrik growing into the space she left behind. I would agree with this in particular. Yes, she did work on the device that we ultimately used to solve things, but there was a pretty clear indication that Joon was a big (maybe even indispensable) part of that effort. It wasn't just business as usual where Taimi is sitting in a lab alone hammering out the solution. A small nitpick I have with Gorrik's development is that I think Anet could have leaned into Gorrik's bug background to have him talk about emergent phenomena. I believe it would be more scientifically reasonable to have Gorrik continue to help us through that route, rather than just having the story make him better at more things outside of his original specialization. But I'll be the very first one to admit this is an incredibly minor thing, and I don't think it would benefit the overall direction of the story enough to matter.

I'm older too (pushing 40). Not old old, but certainly not one of the kids anymore. The fame I referred to regarding other members of the GW2 voice cast is not at all based on the new internet fame you describe. Jennifer Hale (Queen Jenna, female sylvari character, and others) is one of the biggest names in the English/NA voice acting scene. Nolan North (human male player character, etc.) is a similarly big name in the industry, as is Troy Baker (Logan Thackeray). Steve Blum was long famous for being the voice of Spike Spiegel from the English dub of Cowboy Bebop, and he plays Rytlock, Phlunt, one of the dredge leaders from Thunderhead Peaks, and a ton of other NPCs. Matt Mercer is only slightly less established than the names I just mentioned, of Critical Role fame (Mercer does the male norn player character, the new Canach, and others). Prior to CritRole blowing up, he's probably best known for voicing all incarnations of Chrom from the Fire Emblem series of games, which is an enormous franchise. Fred Tatasciore does Snargle, Kralkatorrik, Deimos, Mad King Thorn and others, and he's another highly established voice actor. Tara Strong (the voice of Scarlet) is another huge name from the industry. Kari Wahlgren is another longtime voice actor in a lot of other media and games as well. The list goes on, so I'll end it here. And yes, Felicia Day has a lot of credits to her name, but as a voice actor she's nowhere near these other names. For all the things that Anet skimps out on, voice casting is not one of them. Frankly it's extremely impressive to have so many huge names attached to a project that seems to suffer from so little broader attention.

One of my proudest moments was to down someone in fierce moa combat. I mean, my teammates did most of the work, but my dodging and pecking finished the job.

Eh. Felicia Day does have a career in her own right, but it is nothing in comparison to some of the bigger names on the VA cast list for GW2. To call her too famous for GW2 is utterly laughable. I think I've just gotten used to her being gone, her absence doesn't bother me anymore. On the other hand, I'd be perfectly fine with a reasonable re-casting of her role, and there's already a very good in-game excuse for such a change. The real answer is that it's probably not worth the trouble for Anet. Not saying that everyone needs to be happy with the status quo, but that's probably just how it is.

Yes. This is exactly what I meant by mesmer being "wrong" and suffering for it - it's uniqueness forces Anet to counterbalance it in terrible ways, resulting in said weak heals, and forcing power mesmer players to stack up huge bursts to get anything done (as opposed to the "solid reliable damage skills" that would bring it in line with more normal gameplay). The net result of mesmer's uniqueness is that it constantly vacillates between untouchable and dead, because Anet attempts to balance the unique things it does with heavy nerfs to the non-unique things it does. Here's a piece of logic for you... it is possible to (1) be the designer of something, and (2) design that something in a flawed way... at the same time! Gasp! Who would have known? Moreover, one need not be an expert in the design of a product to discern that a product has some design flaws! I can already hear the "sniffle sniffle well if you think this game is so flawed, why do you play it?" Short answer: sunk cost. I log in for dailies and some casual stuff, and I stick around because there's the chance that future content releases might offer me some more fun at a justifiable cost. None of that logically means I can't say the game is flawed if I think it is. More seriously, I sincerely believe that the unique essences of ele and mesmer in particular were, from day one, on a collision course with balanced sPvP. I will continue to enjoy your frustration at having only one dodge (at least until Anet gives it back to you, whenever that might be). Initially I considered including a more extensive discussion on how ranger, ele, and thief also suffer for being "wrong," but eh. And yes, in case anyone isn't aware, ranger is quite limited in what it can do well in WvW. Beyond just WvW, ranger as a whole suffers from pets simply not doing what the class design assumes they will do. I have no interest in salvaging my reputation in here though. I made it quite clear that I derive a petty enjoyment from the suffering of the mesmer class; the fact that I personally play a class with very well-documented drawbacks doesn't take away from that pettiness. I embrace the confused emojis, just as deeply as I embrace the frustration of one dodge mirages.

Not really. Even the soulbeast elite specialization accounts for rangers having a pet, but at least in the case of soulbeast the pet literally disappears into your character (in addition to providing your character extra stats and abilities). But as far as pet-less rangering, soulbeast is the closest possible thing.

My bad for not making it clearer - I specifically chose to say mirage "works" in sidenoding sPvP, not that it's a killing machine. It "works" in sPvP on occasion as a sidenoder because sidenoding isn't just about kills, it's about forcing bad decisions from the enemy team. Mirage, even with one dodge, can still do that. As I noted, this is vastly different from WvW roaming, which doesn't allow for the same force-bad-decisions power that sPvP does. Your class is wrong though. In the same way ranger, ele, and thief are also wrong - their core class designs involve elements that are at odds with GW2's fundamental priority on interactively counterplayable combat. Again, as I said previously, it's not our fault things are like this. It's just what happens when a non-pvp game makes interesting non-pvp playstyles, then tries to smash them all together into competitive modes. And even more insultingly, warrior (which is an extremely straightforward class that specifically lacks all the fancy weirdness of the 'wrong' classes) has long suffered in all game modes. The most unique thing about mesmer in competitive seems to be how much mes mains like to pretend like they're the only ones touching the bottom of the barrel. Your entitled salt pleases me.

This was also my precise reaction. Its overuse seems quite cheap thus far, but I agree that seeing this same phenomenon play out with Blish/Gorrik might be an interesting take on it.

To me it sounds like mesmer mains want their second mirage dodge back primarily in WvW. Few people seem to mention how mirage can still work in sPvP, and the one person who did early in the thread seems to have been shouted down. I've said it openly elsewhere, I'm a mesmer hater. My hate is based on the fact that its competitiveness in... the competitive modes seems to depend greatly on the availability of access to blocks, invulns, massive power spikes from stealth requiring macro-like performance from the mesmer, or alternately dependence on confu/torment when taking rapid action and moving a lot (this is relevant only to pre-rework torment) are things players are supposed to do. A 'counter' class sounds cool on paper, until you realize it has to lean very hard into punishing behaviors that other classes must take to be effective. Thus by default, the devs would have to really nerf mesmer's ability to make these huge punishments, which is precisely what they do, and never give anything back. Look at cata in sPvP to see what happens when a class that can freely punish others doesn't get the nerf hammer properly. And this is NOT in any way the fault of mesmer players. It's just that the class has been bounced around and has so many underlying problems, y'all have no choice other than to rely on these counter-to-how-everyone-else-plays-GW2 things. I think all these 'counter' properties are what keep mirage (barely) afloat in sPvP. Because sPvP is purely conquest mode, the short bursts of invuln, blink movement, detarget, and stealth are enough to reset because the conflict is fundamentally centered on nodes. Also if you're not pressured enough to run away, there are just enough offensive tools to get the job done in a 1v1. Note that these are all side-noder behaviors I'm describing, which are often 1v1s. I can see even in sPvP that mirages aren't a huge threat in teamfights for the most part, because those situations aren't about forcing tough decisions on the opponent like side node 1v1s are. As such, I can totally see WvW mirages feeling left behind. And no, I don't think WvW roaming is anything close to sPvP sidenoding. sPvP inherently offers a ton of opportunity to disengage within a short time and distance, where a lot of the open terrain in WvW roaming isn't quite as forgiving in my experience. I just don't see a stable, healthy long term future for mirage in competitive though, given that it shares the general mesmer class design of being the counter/counterintuitive class. I'm sure there's a studio or a game that could handle a 'counter' class like mesmer, but I'm not sure Anet and GW2 are it.

It's been years, but I'm fairly certain that I ran a test where I put a level 80 thief and 80 ranger into their core specs, made sure to remove all traits and utilities that buff stats directly (so no signets), and put them in identical sets of ascended zerker gear (sw/dagger + shortbow, no runes or sigils to be precise). I think my ranger had 210 less power at the end of it all. I could be wrong though. If I find time today, I'll run it again (should be easier with the legendary armory).

EDIT: I was completely wrong. I probably forgot to unequip the thief trait that boosts power if you're holding a dagger. Read below if you want to know how dumb I was. Ranger loses stats just for having pets, in case you weren't aware. The justification is that since the pet is there doing some work, the rangers themselves are weaker in exchange. It's not a small amount of stats, by the way - you baseline lose 200 power, and I'm not sure how much else in other stats (I think condi might also get a shave, as I have trouble reaching the same levels of condition damage stat as I do on other classes). The pets, with their garbage AI, pathing, and animations, fail to make up for the penalties. The majority of pets cannot land a single hit on a golem moving in a circle. If you get wrecked by a ranger pet, your movement skills are even worse than that golem moving in a set path at the same speed. The notability of these stat penalties was made most apparent with the release of soulbeast, where rangers could lose the AI portion of their pets and reclaim those lost stats. Longbow rangers started absolutely murdering people, which led to Sic Em nerfs, the eventual gutting of One Wolf Pack, and a few other things.

I mean, banners are currently unkillable now, so I figured leaving them on the same system (they just time out on their own) regardless of repositioning would do the trick. I don't think we'd need to dispense entirely with the powerful active effects like stab/aegis/cc, but just offer shorter durations and fewer stacks on reposition. Yeah I didn't imagine quickness pulsing from banners, and I did imagine using the reposition to recast quickness. One way to address this issue would be to cave into the very same spam-off-CD problem you mention, and tweak the numbers such that you reach the 105% uptime (or whatever number might feel more appropriate) with spam-off-CD behavior. This has the unfortunate effect of forcing the warrior to recast the banner even if a reposition isn't needed, just for uptime. This would also pigeonhole the warrior into running all 3 utility slots on banners, which again feels undesirable. Another way would be to have quickness largely remain as it is now (heavily front-loaded on the initial placement), and limit the max duration of quickness that any one banner can push out with repositions. If possible, I think this would allow a structure where spamming itself is not required to keep uptime, but will allow you to reapply it to your team when they move away from the initial placement. Since the game does keep track of who actually provides boon uptime on a target, I think this might work. Balance would of course be an issue that would need to be addressed with numbers tweaks. A third way would perhaps involve ICDs to cap off max quickness uptime, but I think that would devolve into a meta where every warrior would have to simply recast at the optimum time, making it functionally identical to a spam off CD situation.

I think your build could avoid a lot of potentially hazardous complications and extra reworks if Anet simply made banners move like ranger spirits. In exchange for not being targetable and killable like ranger spirits, banners would lose all direct power damage and damaging conditions on cast. However, both the initial banner placement and subsequent movement could remain player-targeted, rather than the ranger spirits' "just get vacuumed up to where the ranger is now" system. Banners can be further distinguished from spirits by retaining their blast finisher on both the initial cast and reposition. While the new warhorn and elite banner synergy seems fun, I think that comes at a cost of too much rework. As such, I'd be very interested in your thoughts on my version of simply ranger-izing banners.

This is really my biggest complaint with the direction indicated by stuff like the cat jade bot and this newest outfit. It looks and feels exactly like the out-of-place bullkitten pandering nonsense that you see in much lesser and unworthy titles. Which makes you wonder... does Anet somehow see GW2's art style as something on the level of those awful, cheap, horrendously designed p2w titles? I'm certain that if you asked any individual member of the studio (or the studio itself as a cohesive business organization), the answer would be "of course not! GW2 is super speshul." But with what they visually allow into the game feels increasingly like they've given up on actually maintaining their own style.

A lot of folks in here have already said most of the important points, but I'd like to throw in my two coppers here. I think the old dungeon trash mob design, with some tweaks, might be pretty close to what OP is looking for. It feels like back when they were making dungeons, Anet's trash mob design was to make a lot of them individually fairly weak, but put them together in good mixed teams (or have them work together dangerously with environmental hazards). The OW does feature some "mixed teams" of a sort, but they're usually too small in number, can be easily divided and conquered, and just generally die too fast to provide any real combat challenge. The important thing to note is that even the better mixed teams inside dungeons do not exhibit either the move-out-of-aoe or counter-react-to-player-reactions behaviors. These two things (along with the other suggested difficulty boosts) would significantly add to the challenge of dungeon trash. As dungeons are right now, the good old "tap mobs, hide behind line of sight, and murder them rapidly in a nice tight group" gameplay works just about everywhere in them. Even with the huge advantage of LoS tactics and without the added challenges, I've seen people of all levels and "played this game for X years" absolutely struggle to make kills in dungeons. I can only imagine that adding several such challenges and mixed teams to the OW would do little outside of alienate an enormous proportion of the player base. One might argue that such casual players might not be the whales that keep this game running financially, but that's for Anet to know internally. Outside of that, I think it's just a bad look for a game to suddenly alienate a lot of its players, regardless of how it impacts the bottom line in the short term.

I guess I'm completely neutral on the clothing itself. I personally have no desire to add it to my wardrobe, but I appreciate that it's kind of another version of the "explorer" theme that we got with jungle scout and (a properly dyed) angler's vest. I certainly don't see the clothes on this new set as immersion breaking, at least without the cat anatomy features.

I'm a little divided on this issue. On the one hand, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I've been using "standard enemy model" in spvp for years, and it's been pretty great. Less visual distraction, and I get to focus more on gameplay. If they could just extend that option to pve, and allow it to cover all other players, that would be nice. On the other hand, I (very rarely) run into a pve player that has a look I really like, and I stop to ask them about dyes/skins. Disabling other players' outfits/skins/effects/everything would prevent this. Overall, I'd prefer the ability to turn off everything other players have on. I'm absolutely appalled by just how many people love senseless eye-stabbing flashiness more than I do. I'm also not a huge fan of the anime-cat-person trope everywhere else. I'm also disappointed Anet is dipping into it, because it just seems so out of place in this game, especially with Charr being a thing.