Winners, losers, and speculation! TL/DR in bold.
Fractals – They created incentive to do low level fractals while removing any incentive to do higher level fractals (after the achievement).
Mechanics – New mistlocks are less challenging and more of an annoyance to be honest. I won’t hit every single one, but I want to make a point. They made boon strip and condi clear more valuable which is good, but in general it just feels like a half-hearted attempt to throw a wrench into the zerker stack meta. Let’s all run condi builds and attack from range—is this what anyone wanted? Is this good for this game type? Cutting boss damage in half and doubling boss HP is the most boring thing anyone could have done to FoTM. Now the only skill required is the skill to stay awake.
Mastery - having maxed mastery does give you more options, but it could be much better. There is no journey, no flavor, just a grind and some point allocation. Why doesn’t FoTM give viable FoTM-mastery exp? It just feels like completely unrelated grind-gate and the final rewards lack flavor. Merchants? Okay. The singularities are more interesting, but they could and should do so much more with this. There’s no depth here. Okay, go grind out some exp and let us know when you can run high level FoTM with us again—just hope we’re not done with the achievements because then we have no more reason to run them again.
Rewards - Initially I made good money TPing everything before the market realized that encryptions are crap and +1s drop like rain in a storm. I understand the value of gold sinks for inflation, but should my PvE grind be my gold sink? With the cost breakdown, you lose money or barely break even salvaging those 1000s of rings you saved for 2-3 years. I hope they increase demand on those stabilzers 100×. Ascended chests are a myth.
Golden skins – They removed the BEST part about the skins—the particle effect. They look so terrible. Gold isn’t even a popular color scheme if you take a look around. Much better options would be to keep the skin (and old particle effect) and add a color swap option or add new similar skins with the old color and old particle effects. IE a large 2-handed scimitar or katana GS to compare to our current “frosty bacon strip GS”. IE a rapier sword, a melee staff, a hammer that looks like a hammer.. etc.. These new skins don’t even have to launch all at once, but it looks lazy just slapping gold on old skins and adding dust while removing the effect. I’m almost relieved that I hate the new skins so I don’t have any more grind after I make the legend. New skins won’t even match the legendary backpiece… It’s the skins that kept people doing FoTM for years—they’re a HUGE deal. On that same note, selling old skins for 20 pristine is probably the nail in the coffin to kill any demand or prestige they once had.
Ad Infinitum – By the gods, it looks glorious. I must have it in my life. Even the lesser pieces look great. This is the first legendary I’ve cared about since you can sport the skin on all characters and you can’t outright buy it. Everyone wants to remark on how easy those collections are, but they forget that a precursor is only 1/4 of a legendary recipe and we could be in store for quite a hell of a time ahead of us. Although, the more horrible the final grind, the less people that will have it. There is more to earning an achievement or prestige item than time gates.
HOW TO FIX: Rethink mistlocks. Put something worth having in the encryptions like mini Molten Berserker or Molten Jet Pack or… anything.. maybe even ascended boxes. Rethink toughness scaling, boss HP, and boss damage. Make sure the legendary journey proves that the player wearing it earned that thing. Rethink the mastery track. Have higher level FoTM or higher level mastery unlock even more of those Daily Recommended levels so a FoTM100 guy with maxed mastery has 4-5 of those per day. Time gates are a lazy way to stretch out boring or insufficient content and no one is fooled.
Fractals summary – I think there’s a lot more to come. Mechanics are poor. Rewards are poor. The legendary looks amazing.
Dungeons – The nerf was unnecessary, but it had less of an impact than we expected. Dungeons are still run on LFG, but much less. I just don’t see the point of invalidating old content that people put hundreds of hours into. To funnel us into the new content? Maybe push more HoT purchases? People will buy HoT because HoT is great and not because non-HoT content gets gutted. If you want to control the economy and inflation, give me something worth buying with all that gold and I won’t have so much of it.
Raids – With what they have done with the final battle on Dragon Stand, I am so confident that they have the POTENTIAL to make raids a grand slam. Honestly, after BWE3 raiding, I was interested, but not very excited other than it just being new content. After doing the final battle of DS—that was the best PvE I’ve ever done—I hope Raids can follow suit.
Tell me what you think!
(edited by Gav.1425)