Does EoD feel more like a Living Story or Expansion to you all?

[Ausar.9542]

I know I may be beating a non-existent horse here but I cant help but feel like EoD is a glorified Living Story with elite specs.

The map feels empty, and there feels like a lack of content to do compared to past expansions..

Some of the new features and mastery also feel Living Story level, like the jade bot for example.

 

iam in Kaineng city, and not a lot is going on. The map is big, but the content seem lacking. 

 

EoD comes with Strike Missions, but so did the last Living Story Ice Blood Saga. 

 

Dragon End seem to be the most interesting map, but its just a boss meta map. Living Story done this as well but in a better way. thats my opinion, of course. 

 

New kaineng city feels more like a new city hub, than a PvE map honestly. I wouldnt mind if that was made for its intention, but in its current state, its a boring pve map with little to nothing going on. 

 

because of all of this, I cant wait till the new Canthia Living Story maps open up. I am ready to move on from the current EoD zones into something more fresh and exciting. 

[kharmin.7683]

There are many threads on this type of topic already.  You might want to scan through here to read those opinions:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/forum/70-end-of-dragons-discussion-archived/

[Gorem.8104]

23 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

There are many threads on this type of topic already.  You might want to scan through here to read those opinions:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/forum/70-end-of-dragons-discussion-archived/

You realise you linked an archived part of the forums that no one can post in or....?  
Is this just like before where you both can't necro or make a new post about something.

As for myself, I see EoD as a Stain that won't wash out and feel the game had more people playing the day before it released. The world was so active, servers were over hitting the wvw caps, we were down to like 2 open servers, things were going great, Return to achievement had done a better job then any Living world or expansion ever had, there was so much hype! Then EoD dropped and its like the population in game halved as all Cantha zones were dead zones lacking in players and npc's and the story is the worst the game has ever seen that led to a controversial meta that caused tens of thousands of negative posts but was hardly changed because Anet proved how much they don't like their current playerbase as they want to make gw2 a raiders game till they were forced to move the turtle off but then still force you into a strike to obtain a main advertised feature of the expansion. 

Its still an expansion, its just a failed one. 

Edited August 26, 2022 by Gorem.8104

[kharmin.7683]

Yes, I realize that.  The point was asking for opinions when they've already been given doesn't really need a new thread.  What further discussion on the topic needs to be had?  /shrug

[Duglaive.5236]

Here's my somewhat odd take on your question:

I haven't been in an EoD zone in months; the only things of value - to me - from EoD are 4 elite specs and a jade bot that helps me get more mats. Oh, and adds some vitality.

And those things I can take to my favorite xpac zones of HoT. And every other zone from core Tyria, PoF, all LWS zones, etc. EoD could cease to exist - even those elite specs and jade bot benefits - and I'd be like "EoWhat?"

[Sunchaser.9854]

I mean to be honest. One of the major parts i got was trying to see a bit of both sides. To many players, a new mmorpg launch release with expansions is in the mmorpg market, usually dominated by power creeping all the past content (Mainstream potential 4-10x population by estimated numbers WoW/ff14), where only the latest expansions tend to matter.

In eod, i played it and while the story for being 2x as much as pof/hot wasn't like the worst by mmorpg standards. And certainly not something i felt bad about 30$ over, it did seem a bit lackluster to the 15$ hot/pof expansions which seemed to be better eras of Gw2.

And honestly if i was looking at a bang for buck metric, in terms of story delight, i'd probably put the fun of ls4 Joko + 5 living world zones + currencies for skyscale and ascended trinkets (even if slower than ls3:3), of the 10-12$ ls4 collection over a 30$ eod by story/skyscale and ascended unlocks alone. However, eod comes with expansions and a few easy money making.. zones, er. zone. 

I don't felt that burned out for 30$, i think it's brand new but. To be honest. All i do in Eod is pick up weekly items from arborstone, logout for a 25% xp bonus. And if i could get rested xp anywhere, i'd probably be in the pvp lobby due to like pc heat being a legit concern in the 100 F region im in.

(Pc fan get's hot and starts overheating if i left graphics on high unless i use my 16 gb pc to go on low. Cooling vents and everything. 0 heat problems in most mmorpgs and even AAA games. Gw2 causes tremendous heat and seems poorly optimized but still a good game.) 

 

That said, Eod feels like, it's only just released a few months ago. So adding more to it is certainly expected. I hope that it still adds 1-2 more expansion zones and maybe feels more full when 2-5 new living world zones could be added if the game's future remained as ambitious as Ls4 adding a new zone for each area.

But.. As is. It's not a bad deal for 30$, but pof and hot are great steals at 15$ sales and arguably most of the collection would be spent in pof/hot zones if it wasn't the +25% xp in and doing soo won once a week month to charge up favor 4 Stones. And occasionally doing blacklight meta in hopes of a +30% griff energy chip only to be disappointed each day when it doesn't drop for 40 days in a row. 

Edited August 26, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[yoni.7015]

I like EoD, the maps are beautiful, many of the new elite specs are fun and the strike missions are way better than the IBS ones. The new legendaries are easy and fast to get and the variants are a good thing. The meta events are better than the PoF meta events and I think the DE meta is the best meta in the game, of course the prep time could be shorter and the rewards could be better but the end fight is great. So for me it definitely feels like an expansion. 

Edited August 26, 2022 by yoni.7015

[Sunchaser.9854]

4 minutes ago, Duglaive.5236 said:

Here's my somewhat odd take on your question:

I haven't been in an EoD zone in months; the only things of value - to me - from EoD are 4 elite specs and a jade bot that helps me get more mats. Oh, and adds some vitality.

And those things I can take to my favorite xpac zones of HoT. And every other zone from core Tyria, PoF, all LWS zones, etc. EoD could cease to exist - even those elite specs and jade bot benefits - and I'd be like "EoWhat?"

yeah yeah yeah. For 30$ i don't really feel scammed and it still had a 1 day long story. It wasn't bad and it was a okay deal for 30$ and the moneymaking zones are actually boring but great. But the other 2 expansions, if one was on a tactical spending cash based tier list.

Pof/Hot on sale (15$ or 50$ collection), > 10$-12$ Ls4 1-6 (Great story, just as much story,  Zombie man was actually a great villain for the few chapters he was in. Purple Dragon boy has a great meta and skyscale is a pain but comes with the collection and a 4-40 day grind.) >= 2$ ls 3:3 if you want access to easy ascended 200 berry ring/backpack/trinkets for each character + 500 berry aquabreather (loot 50 berries a alt a day in 5 mins), >= 30$ EoD (Buy for specs/moneymaking, really. ) 

EoD isn't bad, it's just that pof/hot were better objectively to me in story, fun mounts unlocks, gamechanging gameplay alterations (mounts pretty much covered all of it.).

And while 30$ doesn't break the bank and i think it's still something work unlocking, it's probably a mostly moneymaking/spec unlocking expansion vs gliding/mounts/story expac for me. 

 

The benefits of pof/hot change your game and how you move (+100-300% speed mounts, flight, epic story, avoiding death from fall damage with gliding, potential lean boosters for combat escapes with mastery, fun travel, gorgeous zones, flight). EoD just makes you 25-30g a week and has fishing and +25% rested xp and +1k-2.35k hp with jade bot cores. and maybe +20-30% mount regen energy). It has unlocks. They're handy to have and worth buying but i'd always put 30$ eod after 15$ Pof/Hot for me. But 50$ collection ain't bad. 

[yoni.7015]

30 minutes ago, Gorem.8104 said:

 a controversial meta that caused tens of thousands of negative posts but was hardly changed 

These “tens of thousands of negative posts” came from some few people that flooded these forums with their complaints and were met with tens of thousands of positive posts. And the meta was nerfed significantly. 

[Bunny.9834]

Personally this is my favorite Expac and definitely doesnt feel like a LW Season. 

 

[Sobx.1758]

Feels like an expansion to me.

[Killthehealersffs.8940]

28 minutes ago, yoni.7015 said:

I like EoD, the maps are beautiful, many of the new elite specs are fun and the strike missions are way better than the IBS ones. The new legendaries are easy and fast to get and the variants are a good thing. The meta events are better than the PoF meta events and I think the DE meta is the best meta in the game, of course the prep time could be shorter and the rewards could be better but the end fight is great. So for me it definitely feels like an expansion. 

Coomon ,the  circle of  "you have 99% of the other content , why we cant have one" and then procced to ask for more rewards , should stop .

After Clearing Ir >Marrionet > EoD meta , you should hit a little the break from doing that again (also we should askHardstuck to stop doing the events in EU +USA , to see the real results . 50people x5times perday x2 (eu+usa) x30days x5 months=75.000 succeful tries . If we calculate that "secret guilds" that inv people outside the map toinv non-casual x2 times per day =another 30.000succeful tries)

EoD meta its the second most profitable : https://fast.farming-community.eu/open-world/farmtrain

An can  skip the pre events for the damage buffs and join in the main event for faster gold/h

Edited August 26, 2022 by Killthehealersffs.8940

[Sunchaser.9854]

Yeah Eod is good for 1-2 zones with gold, and for gold farming gold and 25-30g a week is easy gold. There's not as many zones, and tbh mounts were so complete there's really not a lot of design space left for new mounts to fill other than merchant mounts. (Which might compete with leisure zone tps / pvp zone banks/ infinite salvage kits), etc. (Not that i care just like... infinite repair canisters still exist just to keep value with a patched out mechanic, etc. ) 

 

I don't think that's bad, for 30$ eod isn't a bad zone just like. Pof has like 5-7 ginormous full and lush zones, I remember crystal deserts with Ogre camps, branded, a temple of the past with kings and underground dungeons. A desolate waysland filled with castles and academies and VILLAGES dedicated to joko as well as teh free city of ammoon. Every map, meta or not has stuff to do on it, bounties, champions, champion trains, hidden easter eggs with entire zones such as the griffon quest temple and hidden temples to climb. Even the random pyramid feels huge.

Eod by comparison. I think the meta unlocks are like uh.. 2-4 zones with 1-2 you use regularly. One has a fish spawn in it. the other is dragonfall you farm for decent gold and easily vendorable like 2-3g worth of jade if you want. The last zone is good. Just New khaheng is a city without npcs past the blackout meta and even the jade behemoth doesn't drop it's +30% mount chip often. It's not unknown to see 50 people trying for 40-55+ days in a row and not see it, give up. and just do favors for it. The drop rates are atrocious. But it's not a bad expansion. For 30$ it's not bad, just the others are better priorities/value for the money if one had to pick, but it's not that bad spending 50$-100$ to own all 3. I'd certainly put EOD over ls2 by far though. 

[Ashen.2907]

It feels like an expansion to me, just not a very good one.

[EMPI.4013]

It feels like a mix of both to me, but closer to an expac than a lws. Personally I think I liked pof more.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Expansion.

[Raknar.4735]

It's an okay expansion. Story was better than HoT, but PoF & HoT just generally had better additions in my opinion.

A lot of the EoD content relies on the player being interested in the Aurene legendaries. If you don't really care about them, you're better off farming some LW maps.
And while DE is mechanically more intense than other maps, it just feels like a worse & less appealing version of DS to me.
(The lower map population caps also makes it feel less "massive")

[Luclinraider.2317]

Absolutely the weakest of the expansions.

 

After all the reveals I made a post about how little there seemed to be in the expansion and ended up fan boi'd over it.

 

Yet, here we are, a few months later with a full expansion of pretty much empty zones aside from the dragon fight event.

[Hashberry.4510]

Especs are pretty worth while, and a geometrical? Increase in workload. Except, sure 36 specs and counting are not a thing that can work as a balanced choice in this mmo. So getting this far is pretty good, loads of fun to try it all out. This is what makes it more than a living story dlc.

 

So EOD has a lot of holes and deserves some flak, well maybe a lot of flak. Rather crappy as well considering the choice to trash IBS.

[Sunchaser.9854]

I mean adding extra specs like Eod's is always a nice feature. If devs do work, it can be doable to balance at least the dps benchmark with number changes so all are within 10% of eachother.

I mean other games can do a thing where each spec can be viable and brought to a raid pretty easily. The difference between a top tier and a bottom tier in Wow can literally just be usually just 2-10% dps difference, like say,

Top class A brings 40k dps, B brings 39,998 DPS, C brings 39,900 dps, D brings 39,850 dps, etc. All the way down until F is just some class doing 36k dps. But every class would bring like a +5% group buff like +10% more intellect, +5% more crit for having a leader of the pack feral druid or hunter pet. Hunters could even bring a couple class buffs by pet instead to flex as 1 or 2 of any missing class. Demon hunters would have like 5% more magic damage done to targets they attacked, etc.

Sure, there were top tiers, and definitely lots of gripes but snowcrows only lists the builds that are good for benching. There's some specs that have pretty much no one playing that it's anyone guess if they're like 15k or 34k off meta or just a boonless 32k dps class that while giving no boons or advantages over one that did 28k dps and Alak or 37k dps and ranged, was playable.

In gw2, there's some randomly assembled specs out there that have 40 people in a soo won group doing 0.2k dps and 0.5k dps and you can only hope they're healers or using open world greens with eod as their first expansion, since it literally would take 56x 0.5k dps players to do the dps of one mechanist's autoattack benchmark.

And you're gonna have days with 40 of those people in a soo won meta ready to report you if you say anything about a rotation.

Over in other games, i think the gap between a bad player was 20k dps for a bad dps to 40k potential. In gw2, that's about a seasoned raider vs a snowcrows robot in a hectic, invulnerability one shot game.

It's like having some half between heroic and mythic difficulty tier with 0 explaination as the only default difficulty of a game where most players only want to do open world content with 0.2k-1k dps checks.

People go greatly below even 4k dps / 10% bench and it's beyond me why gw2 has such wide gaps in people's performance for a game that wants to cater to a very casual, open world audience with 0.5 sec gcds on a 100-250+ ms ping megaserver honestly. Half of your gcd is eaten up by only having one 'real' server, Na or EU to connect to while all the servers are just merged together illusions. It does hide the pop problem well and it never feels empty playing gw2. But dang. Some of the non mechanist eod builds just seem kinda useless/redundant. When every class is a dps that does less dps than a easier to play afk dps that provides boons,

How many advantages does a 25-32k vindicator who can't dodge, alac, or quick provide over a mechanist who can always just press 4 lit buttons for 28k-35k dps and provide alac or heal or might or barrier if they want and has 2 dodges for one shot spamming content? 

Edited August 27, 2022 by Sunchaser.9854

[Ultramex.1506]

Expansion, people say its features  are weaker than previous expacs but i prefer they exist together for different gameplay than trying to one up each other

I'm hoping future LWS will expand the skiff mastery, maybe let us install a cannon or glide on ley line energy

[Labjax.2465]

I think it's definitely like an expansion, but it also feels like a rushed, unfinished expansion to me and as such, has left me not wanting to engage with it much at all. The reasons in my case are unfortunately numerous (and I've stated them in some detail before), but I think I pinpointed the most important as being the visual experience, with the neon green being offputting and not up to what I see as being GW2's usual standards. It's possible I would be willing to give it more of a chance, if not for that. On paper, there are elements of it that are actually more of a match for me than some of the zones I play more. For example, I like the intrigue of humanoid factions who are acting of their own free will, as opposed to always dealing with monsters. But I never find myself wanting to spend much time there, sadly.

[Gorem.8104]

16 minutes ago, Ultramex.1506 said:

Expansion, people say its features  are weaker than previous expacs but i prefer they exist together for different gameplay than trying to one up each other

I'm hoping future LWS will expand the skiff mastery, maybe let us install a cannon or glide on ley line energy

Well, the main issue with the "Features" it added is that they are all a combination of weak or alt-unfriendly. Unlock a mount, or unlock a mount mastery? All of your alts get that feature, unlock gliding/masteries? All of your alts get that feature, unlock Jade bots? none of your alts get that feature. Skiffs? Worse then the mount we already have, especially if you don't want to fish (that other games usually get free, we paid for fishing). Essentially, its the weakest by far for account rewards. No ley line converter for constant rewards either. The Aborstone mastery track didn't even need to exist. 

They should have made Jade Bots be account based and have its own collection storage that you can swap to on the fly inside its own menu without needing to visit a bench, if not for the bench we have in guild halls, it would be an extremely annoying "feature". Zip lines didn't need to exist, and only make the city worse for existing as you can tell its designed the way it is to give zip lines a reason to exist, where flying mounts are just better in every single way. I'd redesign the jade bot entirely. 
I do agree with most posters here though, it is an expansion, its just a bad one. 

[Sunchaser.9854]

Pof: Here is a tribe of undead living under a city, a warring faction led by Joko of resurrected egyptian zombies enslaved against their will with zombie driven cities to fight against the branded, the flaming minions of balthazarr, a waring tribe, all these ranches for the skimmers, and everyone else.

 

EoD: Here is a empty city with only 1 meta. The only time you even see 10 people inside of it is a story instance where after completion they despawn and never appear again, leaving you in a empty city. But sometimes during the blacklight meta you at least have mechs to fight and one giant mega mini boss. Outside of 2 npcs in the meta though, Do people even exist... or spawn.. or walk in New Khaheng  though?

 

Dragon's end has good gold and decent mini events. It's not bad, just i can barely recall anything happening in echovalds wilds other than it's empty and a annoying boss on ziplines that one shots all non mechanists with the insta incap if you're not behind a barrier the mechanists can easily shoot from is a bit annoying.

Then the other area, pretty, but i think there's literally just a leviathan spawn there and nothing to do there? 

[Vayne.8563]

It felt like an expansion. The big difference between expansions and living world episodes are the inclusion of elite specs, which EoD had. It also had a very nice guild hall.   Therefore it feels like an expansion to me.

I also liked the story better than any of the other stories except perhaps Season 4.