Guild Wars 2

Astralporing.1957:

TL/DR: yes, the farming speed is better than originally expected, but the nonfarming, casual gameplay speed is beyond horrible.

Yeah. Everyone was all worried about the time-gating on the recipes, but that’s honestly the easiest part about ascended weapons. (Though gathering up soft wood logs is a bit annoying)

The real time-gate is the darn materials to make the crystal. I was considering making a few ascended weapons. Two for my main, one or two for an alt, but I don’t know if I’ll really want to keep up that farming for that long.

Sword/Pistol?

You do realize that’s the weapon set with about the least amount of stealth, right? In fact, none of their weapon abilities can be used to get stealth on their own. (Now Dagger/Pistol. That’s a different story.)

Anyway, even as a thief, I admit that in 1v1 situations, thieves can have just a bit too much stealth going on. I’ve fought a dagger/pistol thief who couldn’t really kill me, but every time I tried to get him, he’d vanish into stealth and recover.

That said, outside of 1v1s, Thieves are pretty awful. No 1200 range weapons. Limited survivability when faced against a zerg. Condition removal requires either stealth, spamming a skill, or making sure a utility is slotted.

It’s kind of funny that we had this balance pass on traits and skills, and all it really did was make these “ganker” perma-stealth style thieves even more important. Thieves don’t really have many other options.

Tribulation mode isn’t “hard” so much as costly. You spend a lot of lives, have to learn where the tricks and traps are, and that may require some challenging jumps. Beyond that, I don’t think I’d say there’s a lot of technical skill required. At least not on the pinpoint precision levels of IWBTG, but that sort of thing would be impossible in GW2. I think the mode is still plenty hard from what I’ve seen of it.