Actually enjoying SotO a Lot

[Kumbaya.4689]

My only main issue is the unnecessary relic system with the terrible runes downgrade. Apart that, I'm enjoying quite a lot everything. Almost everything else is worse than IBS.

 

 

Edited May 22 by Kumbaya.4689
Update because expac is complete now.

[Curennos.9307]

I don't understand why they didn't release relics with everything available? I enjoy the concept of relics but it seems like a foot-shooting moment to take something away from players and their build options, then give back a lesser version. I assume they're going to be adding more, but that's..not a good way to do things. the 6 piece bonus was very important for some builds.

That said, I am very much enjoying the aesthetic and story. Weaponmaster also looks cool, though I haven't gotten to a character where I'd want to use it on, I'll definitely be experimenting with it later.

I think the new daily system is...a good start, but bad initial execution. Things immediately stand out as lackluster design choices - why do I need to pre-pick what kind of daillies I want. It costs no-one anything to just provide multiple options. Maybe I change my mind and want to do all PvE daillies or something, but it's already there until it refreshes with new choices. At this point I'll just set my daillies to PvE only all the time and do those, then go off and do whatever else I may be interested in that day.

[Darkk.3018]

I'm really enjoying the expansion so far. To me, the story is probably the best of the expansions to date. It feels quite fresh and I love the darker tone and characters. It might be hit or miss, but I also enjoy the skywatch archipelago map which has references to old rata novus and droknars forge. I wasn't sure how I would feel about the reused assets for enemies, but they don't feel too bad tbh. They seem like more effort went into them than the void enemies in eod. 

I like the idea of the wizards fault, but probably needs some more tuning which others have suggested already. I'm open minded about the relic system. I think if they improve the range of relics available, it will be a welcome change and open up a lot more options than the rune system did. The loss of the rune system doesn't affect me too much. I feel power creep means that even with relic effects seeming less powerful on the whole so far, it doesn't greatly change things. 

For me, fashion is my favourite element of guild wars 2. I can't wait for the legendary armour to come later. I will happily buy future expansions if they continue to introduce new leggy weps and armours. I'm a bit disappointed that the currently introduced set of armors are the same for each weight class. I hope they can make more unique ones in future. 

All in all, a good start to the new expac system. I'd rather the new cadence than the content drought of previous expacs and not knowing whether there would be an expac or not. At least there seems to be a very solid plan in place now. 

[Surelia.2651]

I have not progressed too far into the story yet, but I am so far pleasantly surprised. 

I am not sure what I was expecting exactly, so this may be why.  I deliberately stayed off reading much about the expansion, and found it refreshing to jump in without too many preconceived ideas this time.  The maps so far surprised me in a good way.  They obviously have some very recognizable terrain elements from other zones but I like how they weaved them together and the variance in landscape within the same zone is nice.   Hoping as the story advances it gets even better.  PS: Really liked seeing Zojja, and not just Taimi again.

[Eekasqueak.7850]

I binged through and finished the story in one sitting so I think it's safe to say I enjoyed that aspect at least.

[Sage.9458]

When people log in.

Using whatever little free time they have to play.  They open the game to find the rune's 6th skill doesn't work anymore.  Oh yeah! They added relics, so I'll find my relic.  The one that has my rune's 6th skill.  Only to not find it. Spend what time they have to choose a good relic.

Out of 40 relics 3 might be usable for a great build.  A lot have cd that render it useless.

Where as before you had summons, 10percent damage reduction, 10 percent hp, on crit, when struct, stealth and many other unique options.

From what I can tell, they took over 100 rune's skill 6 and replaced them with 40.  Out of these 40 you have on elite skill use (why, elite skills are already powerful), on heal skill (why, I'm just wanting to heal), on roll (why), and a few other things that do stuff, but have a ridiculous cd.

That is as far as I got on my first hour.  I found out my builds were busted.  I was supposed to be demon hunting or something.

The dailies seem oddly specific.  Forcing types of gameplay I don't really want to play.

[Tuna Bandit.3786]

It is not a secret that I had and have my reservations, so here are my thoughts:

- New map: Love it!. I just wish that we did not have the sheer amount of popups and "tips" ruining my experience. I am an avid Griffon flyer so first thing I did was get up high, get on Griffon and zoom the map to unfog it. Absolutely lovely design! (unfortunately, the constant "you found a ley line" and "you found an updraft" training warnings distracted from that. Please can you tone down those warnings? I do not want to have to rush the masteries just to get rid of that.

- New daily system seems ok, although some choices are questionable. Why are they different for everyone? Both my EU and NA account have the exact same settings, but different daily goals. The rewards you can buy are decent enough to forget the daily login chest. (please preview option on some chests to know what you are actually spending your AA on?) 

- Relics: The choices we get are decent. Although I think some are bugged. Most builds can be restored. Absolute positive: 3 choices per character, chests are account bound so can move parked character's chest to active characters. 

- Story: enjoying it so far, although some pieces are a bit weird. Getting outside in first instance and someone starting to talk to me about what skyscales are, while I sit on my very own, raised from an egg one, that is a massive error on Writer's side. Also that I then am confronted with dozens of popups about how a skyscale works, while wearing the "Ruler of the Skies" title is laughable. You could not put in a check on mastery line? I felt treated like a newbie with my 455 mastery level. "Commander, I see you are farmilliar with Skyscales already..." would be cool.

- Some bugs in story I found, but reported them through the proper channels. 

All in all, considering my reservations, I am enjoying myself.

Now excuse me, me and my griffon have a date with some challenging small corridors and tunnels. 

[Sahfur.5612]

#The positive I will say:

I am sure the story is good. I like their story telling and world building, typically.

Decoupling weapons from specs is good. Unfortunate that it is locked behind the expansion, but buy to play is a pretty reasonable model.

The idea for relics would have been good...

 

#The negative, for now, but it doesn't have to stay that way:

...if done with more respect for peoples characters, playstyles and builds and reimbursing them with an equivalent of their 6th bonus in the empty slot upon login. They could have simply detected 6 superior runes in a build and yeeted a relic into the empty slot upon release of the expansion. I disagree with how they did it, but decoupling the bonuses from the stats is in itself a good idea. Hopefully they will fix it so we don't have to remember "that time they tried to sell what we had back to us" going forward.

As a WvW player that looks into build theory and knows how many of the systems work under the hood in actuality, I unfortunately think the vast majority of their other changes were not so great. I would love to be more excited and enthusiastic, so hopefully they do more to encourage that enthusiasm and correct the relic/rune change to be more respectful of the way some people played their game.

Edited August 23, 2023 by Sahfur.5612

[idpersona.3810]

  

16 hours ago, idpersona.3810 said:

I'm about an hour from getting home and getting to log in to play. From following forums and Twitch all day, I expect that I will enjoy the story and map exploration and events. I will not enjoy the Wizard's Vault and runes and relics.
So it will be a mixed bag.

Oh...and after today I will likely skip logging in on my family member's accounts to keep them active since there will be little point. So I picked up an extra few minutes of free time.

So having played for a couple of hours last night, it was about what I expected.
I've map completed the first map and I'm about halfway through the story as far as I can tell. I love the map design so far. Whoever worked on that did a great job.

Story is fun so far. I am confused about why there are Skyscales all over the new maps. Maybe I missed something that explains that lore-wise. I agree with @Tuna Bandit.3786 that being instructed about skyscales while sitting on the one I raised and have had for years was really weird. They could have easily done better on that end.

The bad: Rune/relic changes suck. Several of my first few characters I tried to update didn't have a relic that fit easily into how I was playing them before so I just gave up. Collected all the relic boxes and put them in a shared inventory slot for sometime later. I will probably have a legendary relic before I go back and gear out all of my characters with those rune boxes. And I still have to go back through and see if their rune sets are still viable as well. I wasn't really looking forward to redoing so many characters and build and it's as bad as I thought. For now, I just tossed the thief relic on my warrior main since it looked like it would be good enough to do the story with. 

The new Wizard's Vault is bad. Not horrible. Just bad. I'm glad I had a heads up from being on the forums yesterday to have some idea what to expect. I probably would have chosen PvE and WvW otherwise. But knowing the selection of tasks would be so limited I just chose PvE. I have different tasks than my wife or kid, since their accounts don;t have SotO. It's just a really stupid implementation imo. I see the potential the new system could have. But this sucks. Rewards are fine-ish. I am annoyed the login reward are complete crap compared to what they used to be. 5AA is almost worthless so there's no point in logging in anymore if I don't actually have a block of time to sit down and play. And even then, I will likely prioritize whatever project I'm working  on unless the daily tasks are all easy enough to finish quickly. The nerf to the gold reward we used to get for dailies also sucks. I didn't notice if I got spirit shards or not for completing the dailies yesterday.

 

So yea....SotO itself is fun. I'm having a lot of fun with it. But that's in spite of the other system changes they decided to implement.

Edit: Oh yea....and playing on warrior for the story, so so far Weapon Mastery is pretty worthless. Might make a difference when I get back to WvW on my engineer down the road. Speaking of, this expansion sucks for WvW players. The dailies/weeklies there are particularly bad/annoying from what I've seen. And my Sanctuary Runes suck now. So there's that to look forward to. I don;t know yet if there's any relic worth taking for my previous build or if I just need to start from scratch because they made changes no one asked for. And the WvW potion change is pure garbage. Which again, no one seemed to ask for or want.

Edited August 23, 2023 by idpersona.3810

[Dark.1823]

14 hours ago, Defias.1892 said:

Also I'm kinda tired of reading all these complaints about the new Daily system. The NEW system is 10 TIMES BETTER. With Astral Acclaim, you can buy:

• Skins
• Ascended Gear
• Storage/Template Expansion

And there's a weekly cap, and even though you only get 1g instead of 2g, you now get a weekly chest

You are a minority.

Pretty much all the good options are locked behind SOTO. The pricing on some of the stuff makes no sense either. Example; 1gold bag = 30 acclaim while 1mysticcoin = 9 acclaim. We also get significantly less reward for significantly more work put in. No choice anymore when it comes to dailies, you have to do what you get. You can't do dailies with friends anymore because they're random for each account. I've pretty much lost all incentive to play anymore. Before, you would do your dailies, get 2gold+3spirit shards PLUS whatever you would get from just logging in.

Daily Login rewards before. Source: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Log-in_Rewards

Quote

A full cycle will yield the following total rewards:

• 20 Mystic Coins
• 35 https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/5/56/Laurel.png/20px-Laurel.png (or 55 if the 20 https://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/thumb/5/56/Laurel.png/20px-Laurel.png reward is selected from the Chest of Loyalty)
• 2000 Luck
• 10 Tomes of Knowledge (or 16 if the 6 Tomes of Knowledge reward is selected from the Chest of Loyalty)
• 4 Gem Store items
• 3 Transmutation charges
• Several crafting materials
• 1 Account Bound piece of Equipment of Exotic Rarity
• 1 Celebration Booster
• 1 Chest of Loyalty
• 2% permanent increase to account gold find

This was just from logging in. For the record, the gold find increase alone is priced at 1000 acclaim right now. It's absolutely absurd. The only good thing that came out of this is the option of getting Ascended chests now. I'm not going to talk about the skins because they are locked behind SOTO which is a scumbag move by ANet. Even T6 material bags are locked behind SOTO.

[idpersona.3810]

41 minutes ago, Dark.1823 said:

For the record, the gold find increase alone is priced at 1000 acclaim right now. It's absolutely absurd.

Worse. From what I understand it's 1000 AA for +1% gold find. We used to get +2% every month.

[GeraldBC.4927]

I'm very positively surprised with the story. A miraculous leap up from what they've made before. Whoever was involved in designing that deserves a raise, preferably at the expense of the people responsible for EoD. 

I want to make an extensive feedback post/thread sometime but I want to wait with that for until I've played the rest of the expansion some more. 

 

My only criticism towards the narrative design is that the heart of the obscure is casually handed to the player, yet treated like it's this rare or unique artifact that makes the commander special for wielding it, when every other player chara- I mean rift hunter in the overworld seems to have one of their own. 

Edited August 23, 2023 by GeraldBC.4927

[Dark.1823]

1 minute ago, idpersona.3810 said:

Worse. From what I understand it's 1000 AA for +1% gold find. We used to get +2% every month.

Even worse is that if you wanted lets say 1% gold find which realistically I don't think anyone will ever get, lets be honest. Maybe I'll use a better example; say you want an Ascended Weapon chest that costs 600 Acclaim. Daily you can make 65 Acclaim and if you do your weeklies, that's an additional 690 Acclaim.

If you only did your dailies, it would take you 10 days to get the chest. If you just did your weekly, you would get it in 1 week. So you are either going 10-days without reward in exchange for the chest or 7 days if you do the weekly. If you no-life it and do both, you're gonna end up with more Acclaim to actually spend on other things, however it is still going to take you at minimum 7 days to get the chest. In the old system, we didn't have Ascended gear options, however most of the rewards that are now available in exchange for Acclaim were free and required no work. If you're a casual player and you don't have time to grind out your daily and weekly tasks, this was a good way to make some passive income. I honestly think ANet alienated it's casual playerbase here with these changes.

[Defias.1892]

On 8/23/2023 at 9:54 AM, Dark.1823 said:

Even worse is that if you wanted lets say 1% gold find which realistically I don't think anyone will ever get, lets be honest. Maybe I'll use a better example; say you want an Ascended Weapon chest that costs 600 Acclaim. Daily you can make 65 Acclaim and if you do your weeklies, that's an additional 690 Acclaim.

If you only did your dailies, it would take you 10 days to get the chest. If you just did your weekly, you would get it in 1 week. So you are either going 10-days without reward in exchange for the chest or 7 days if you do the weekly. If you no-life it and do both, you're gonna end up with more Acclaim to actually spend on other things, however it is still going to take you at minimum 7 days to get the chest. In the old system, we didn't have Ascended gear options, however most of the rewards that are now available in exchange for Acclaim were free and required no work. If you're a casual player and you don't have time to grind out your daily and weekly tasks, this was a good way to make some passive income. I honestly think ANet alienated it's casual playerbase here with these changes.

I think that was the main thing that Anet was trying to avoid. If you login just to collect rewards, either on your main or alt accounts, you are not really contributing to player activity. The new daily system encourages players to go out to do events rather than just login and inflate player counts. I am a casual player and I kinda like this change because it rewards you for actually playing the game rather than rewarding you for logging into your 10+ alt accounts for some daily login income. 

I will say that the only thing I dislike about the new system is that you don't have the ability to re-roll or swap out one daily/weekly for another. Some players have encountered bugged dailies which took several hours to do because they had to organize a group to make sure that the minidungeon wasn't being over-filled. Also I got a strike mission weekly so at some point so I'd have to take some time to organize one, which shouldn't be a big deal because Shiverpeaks Pass was kinda easy, but we will probably fail a few times because it's gonna be a pug.