Guild Wars 2

LS3 is a complete debacle, and it really does not bode well for the expansion. At this rate, PoF will repeat every mistake from HoT and then some — at least LS2 has focus, as others said, and its expansion still ignored a lot of important plot aspects and was rushed, shallow and in parts utterly nonsensical. LS3 has no focus because it had everything and the kitchen sink thrown at it, often with the apparent expectation that we should squeal with glee just because it’s GW1-related — completly disregarding the fact that many people probably never played that. And even if we did, our characters did not, so where’s their connection to all this, their role in it, their purpose except to go “ooh!” and “ahh!” at all the “awesome” NPCs and doodads?

It’s a shame, because the very first scene, Eir’s memorial, was actually very good IMO … but after that it just went downhill fast. It started the neverending Taimi-knows-and-does-everything-spam-because-she’s-the-best-ever spam, then callously made us dump the Pact at a time when it needs help rebuild after its terrible losses, which is not something my characters would ever do. And the very thing we were made to dump the Pact for i.e. our so-called “friends” can’t be bothered with us for some contrived reason or other, oh and we are also selfish and overbearing. Which is a funny accusation for the writers to make, considering how overbearing it is to be subjected to constant NPC drama-llamaing while having no arc of my own, and how selfish it is for the NPCs to receive all sorts of support, concern and interest while offering none in return (even in moments of extreme duress, like a sylvari PC going through HoT).

Add the way various other NPCs also enjoy talking down to us or yanking us around or generally acting overly familiar in completely unearned ways (Anise, Jenna, “Kerida”), and it makes me wonder if we’re back in some nightmare high school scenario where everyone is trying to out-sneer each other to look “k3wl”. It’s a very good way to sour me on characters very quickly, to the point that the only ones from this season whom I’d ever want to see again are Caithe and Rytlock, maybe Logan if he’s actually free of Jenna’s chains now (and that’s a big “if” because we haven’t seen it tested yet), and the Exalted/Aurene.

This has been a “why is this not a thing already” issue for a long time, and it would give the home instance a bit more much-needed purpose as well.

Yup. Complete and utter nonsense from start to finish, on every level for pretty much every kind of character. Also, the “tone” of it is all off. On one hand it’s supposed to be oh-so-grave and glorious and special and blah blah blah. On the other hand, there is the aforementioned sense of people not actually taking it seriously. Livia sneers at how much she wants to see you suffer, and everyone overacts like a bunch of kids at a high school play.

It’s one of several loose ends that really needed to be addressed but were never really picked up again either in HoT or afterwards. The “current event” does mention her very briefly and IMO is done well considering how short it is, but we — especially sylvari players — still never get to ask the burning question of why she didn’t warn anyone before the Pact fleet sailed to its death.

They are fantastic, and thumbs up for making them available in the baseline character creator as well, instead of just putting them in the makeover kits.

The personal story has its flaws, but so does everything that came after it, so it depends on what you like and what you loathe.

Personally, I prefer the PS for its themes and the actual focus on the protagonist. “This is my story” went out the window completely in the Living Story seasons, especially in LS3, in favor of making us spectators to, enablers of and punching bags for all sorts of NPCs wangsting or being oh-so-awesome at us. LS3 also suffers from being extremely bloated with characters and plot hooks that, by and large, are never actually explored in any depth. As much as I disliked much of LS2, at least it undeniably had focus. The only decent aspects of LS3 in my book are some snippets of background lore (kodan in Ep3, the efforts to heal Orr in Ep6).

My ranking would roughly go: PS > HoT as sylvari > HoT as non-sylvari > LS2 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> LS1/LS3

I don’t give a toss about raids or “meta” or any of that nonsense, but for fairness’ sake I want to ask: will certain non-vanilla stat combinations finally be made more accessible? It never made any sense that some characters need to grind a specific map ad nauseam (all the while hoping the meta will not fail, or that the map will fill up enough to begin with) and pay a chunk of money for a super-rare resouce, while others can just make their set with barely a dent in their time, material storage or gold reserves. Making support gear obscenely expensive does not encourage people to fill that role, a role that many players look down on as “lesser” to begin with.

Your “Vivienne” looks absolutely splendid, too. Which face is that? I’d be tempted to borrow that look for my lone human.

Doam.8305:

This is funny people saying Anet sold out to be a bland MMO however that happened with raids and trinity.

Yup. GW2 also has PvP, gear-based progression, levels, character classes, crafting and instances (dungeons/fractals). What a cheap rip-off of every other MMO, eh? Let’s get rid of all that and be true purists.

I’ll never understand why people have such a hate-on for mounts — especially considering how annoying it is to move around the maps with characters who don’t have a passive movement speed bonus baked into an obligatory trait line. Plus, these mounts actually have different functionalities that look useful and fun, they’re not just 101 reskinned horses

Ohoni.6057:

In WP’s stream, Bog Otter talked about how there was once a Spider Mount being tested, and it was dropped because of aracnophobia concerns.

Wow. As an arachnophobe who is really sick of devs throwing spiders into everything for the stupidly cheap creep factor, I do appreciate that considerate gesture even though I think the GW2 spiders thankfully aren’t particularly bad. Still wouldn’t want to skitter around on one.

She’s really rocking that gorgeous new hair.

To be fair, those hairstyles were badly needed for humans, and I say that as someone who does not in any way care for the humans in this game either visually or lore-wise. It was BS that you could put an afro on fricking asura but not on human women. And the setting of PoF also needs those new hairs and faces so all the Elonan NPCs won’t look like white people in cheap blackface.

On the other hand, the human bias in this game is obvious and annoying, and continuing to give them special treatment is not going to help encourage players to diversify more. The sylvari didn’t get an exclusive slew of new options for HoT. And can you imagine Anet giving the charr a list of such beautiful, thematic and non-anime-silly options? They sure could use it.

brenda.9723:

I think charr players can be happy with the new legend of the revenant elite spec.

Oh yeah, Kalla is a great addition lore-wise, though Glint will be hard to give up. Makes me wish I had a charr revenant. The anti-magic warrior elite sounds right up the charr alley as well (and I do have a charr warrior), it would have made sense for them to have developed something like that by now too.

The LS3 story was awful and only got worse over time, which really does not bode well for PoF. You’d think that after the rushed, unfinished mess that was HoT and especially its nonsensical kitten pull ending, they would have switched gears and only picked up as many plot arcs and characters as they could cover well, but they did the complete opposite.

Add to that the constant crapping on the player character, the lack of reciprocative interest or support or concern from NPCs for our character instead of only ever the other way round, the lack of racial dialog options and acknowledgement of how different races may react to different situations, the lack of initiative or leadership or intelligence from the player character because being remote-controlled and (info-)dumped on via omnipresent asura deus-ex-magitech is easier to write … “this is my story” went completely out the window in favor of reducing the supposed protagonist to a bystander, cheerleader and punching bag for the NPCs and their drama. It’s making the story a complete chore to play through in my book.

Those googly eyes creep me out just like Aurene’s do, and I’m not even kidding. :p

Still, bouncing an overly cutesy bunnyroo butt-first into a bunch of Balthazar-zealots is a funny mental image and a special insult to rawr-rawr-war-and-murder edgelords, so colour me amused.

(If its combat-move isn’t a divebomb, I’ll be a sad shrubbery.)

Glorious and long overdue hair! The big afro (female #6 on Dulfy’s list) in particular just about knocked me out of my chair, it’s that awesome. My solitary human is Elonian, and although I pretty much never play her I’m still tempted to burn a hairstyle kit on her, now.

The faces … eh. I’ll never not be squicked out by how infantile many female faces are, especially in combination with all the lingerie “armors”.

Now can the other races get an equal amount of new features too, please? :p

I don’t see how this could be charr-biased when the trailer is full of human history and human characters. Whether or not it will be satisfying for human PCs is another question — HoT was sylvari-focused but left a lot of unanswered issues for them at the same time, and the game’s general track-record of acknowledging different races is not good in general.

The mounts are the only thing that I’m interested in. Giving everyone regardless of class and weapon/skill/trait choice a speed boost is way overdue, and the unique movement mechanics sound fun. They also look good — okay, the googly bunny-kangaroo not so much, but the raptor is wicked and I’m glad it’ll be the first/default mount.

Cyninja.2954:

Maybe the lack (mostly due to time constraints) of story or lore related obvious ingame depictions of how the monrachy is beneficial (or detrimental) as well as the same for the ministry would have made this a tad clearer.

Definitely. And it should be shades-of-grey for both sides, not Jenna = good, minsters = bad unless they’re her sycophants.

Regarding the RL aspect: the rise of fascism and national (and racial) supremacism is one reason why this squicks me out so much. Being tortured and magically enslaved to ensure utter loyalty to a fanatical secret police devoted to a potentially hostile foreign power is a really awful story beat, especially if it goes down the typical GW road of “this is being done TO your character, but you will never get a chance to choose how you feel about it or explorer what it does to you because we long since abandoned any notion of this being your story”.

Also understandable since Trahearne and people not wanting to play the ever lackey in the story.

See, I liked Trahearne (granted, playing primarily sylvari helped) and had absolutely no problem with “only” being his second in command. The PS has its flaws and ham-fisted eyeroll moments to be sure, but it didn’t make me question whether I was wanted, needed or appreciated or what the point in me being there was.

Most of what that came afterwards on the other hand is essentially an NPC fawn-fest and our supposed protagonist basically has no place in it except as everyone’s punching bag and errand-runner. Our “friends” drama-llama all over us at every turn but never show any actual friendly interest in or support for us (which is especially glaring when playing HoT as a sylvari), and that’s before they decide we are the worst and most selfish leader ever. The return of voice acting for the player character is a big improvement over LS1&2, yes, but the focus of the writing just keeps moving further and further away from us.

I guess the writers wanted to tone down the entire: you are the greatest, you are the best, you are essentially king kong banging his chest

Actually, the PS made me feel like I was part of a team, not some incomparable god — I love the Pact and the idea behind it, and am really annoyed at how the writers casually kicked it to be garbage bin in favor of the abovementioned NPC drama-llamaing.

(Braham is going through his mourning phase, something everyone who has lost a close loved one understands especially if it was a parent)

Braham is one of the biggest of the many problems with LS3. Throughout HoT, he gets nothing but respect and support for his worry and grief, even when it makes him act like a jerk towards others. At most, he gets asked not to blindly charge into danger. You can even bring him to the final battle, and it would never have occured to my canon story character to deny him that. None of that is acknowledged.

Neither can you do anything to counter his BS about “try losing your mother”. Humans can be orphaned gutter rats. Charr lose their warband. Sylvari have to watch many of their siblings fall to the corruption of the same dragon that’s also screaming in their own head, mercy-kill their oldest brother, and the sole mother of their entire people is in a coma she may never recover from. Did Braham or any of the other NPCs ever ask about that? Nope. Our history, our emotions, our culture, our past choices don’t exist and don’t matter. That badly needs to change.

Yeah, this episode was the worst, even worse than casually abandoning the Pact in Ep1, and especially for charr. None of it made any sense, the NPCs were complete tossers from start to finish (business as usual by now, sadly), my character had no place in the narrative whatsoever and was just supposed to be an adoring and obedient spectator to said NPCs’ awesomeness (business as usual again) — and to put the cherry on the BS sundae I’m now essentially the Shining Blade’s and Jenna’s slave. Wonderful.

Also, as someone who never played GW1, this season didn’t give me any reason whatsoever to care about any of the people, places or doodads that I’m supposed to be ever so impressed by. All they did was to thoroughly tick me off.

Loved it, the only thing that would make it even better is having more beautiful environments to admire while and after jumping. Otherwise it’s pretty much everything I’d want from a jumping puzzle — the checkpoints that work for instead of against you are a particularly welcome feature. All in all this is the anti-Chalice: fun, fair and relaxing.

As much as I’m sick of the story and writing itself, there are some good points:

• The jumping puzzle is great, easily one of my favourites.
• The additions to the material storage, especially from a cook and scribe POV! Big kudos to Lindsey.
• The portal tome. Anything that frees up inventory/bank space is most welcome.
• … so the Gleam of Sentience goes on the list too, of course.
• I liked returning to Orr and seeing both the fact that our actions in the Personal Story had a positive impact and that there is still much more to be done.
• Letting the sylvari team up with the royal ghosts to (try to) heal the land and free the “Unchained” is by far the best thing, story-wise, that has come out of the season IMO. It makes perfect sense and I wish I could get involved with that instead of any of the main story beats from LS3.

Add another “me too” here. Aside from the expanded material storage, the new JP is easily the best thing about this episode and the season as a whole. It’s chill, you pretty much always know where to go aside from two or three leap-of-faith glides around a corner (which are easy to land and don’t require you to hit a particular pixel at a particular angle), and it has checkpoints that are actually helpful! A+ and cheers to the person or people who made it.

I think one aspect of some people’s dislike for Jenna that hasn’t been touched yet is that the “tyranny = good, any hint of democracy = bad” story is sketchy no matter how many in-world justifications the writers decide to throw at it. These people and events aren’t real, they were written that way by choice, and it’s simply not a theme that works for everyone.

That’s my take on it, at least. In combination with Jenna’s attitude towards the player character and my persistent wondering of “Okay, what the bleep is my character’s purpose in this story? Is it just being condescended to and yanked around by yet another 2-k3wl-4-u NPC?” (*) in the mess that was LS3, my attitude towards her is definitely soured … and it was not that good to begin with, given her involvement in the failed attack on Kralkatorrik.

(*) There’s a long string of them this season, and yet the player character is the one constantly getting crapped on for being mean to people and a bad leader. Go figure.

Thank you so much for organizing it, and cheers to everyone who attended (EU here). It was good to get together in such a friendly, positive atmosphere.

Yeah, Trahearne going all “I’m mad now, charge!!” without planning or preparation was … weird. Even considering the immense worry for the Pale Tree and maybe the subtle influence from Mordremoth to encourage recklessness, it felt quite OOC for him. He of all people would have known how vital information is, considering how long he struggled with his Wyld Hunt.

You helpful mesmers are awesome and a beautiful antidote to the sometimes horrendous parts of the playerbase <3

@Anakita Snakecharm: Well said.

I’d also add my usual criticism about the almost exclusive focus on NPC drama over “this is my story”, and about the scarcity of racial dialog options — anything to make me feel like my character actually has a place in this.

I suppose it is connected to the “all over the place” feel of the story. If you’re cramming half a dozen plot threads into as many episodes in which the actual bits of storytelling are heavily padded with combat, there’s going to be very little room for “superfluous” things like roleplaying options for the supposed protagonist.

As a primarily sylvari player, it is definitely highly frustrating to see so many unfinished important hooks and plots, be it the anti-sylvari sentiment or a serious heart-to-heart with a slowly recovering Pale Tree about letting us and the whole Pact run right into Mordremoth’s jaws without warning. (No, mom, the whole song and dance with the memory seeds back in LS2 does not count because it didn’t reveal the big secret until it was way too late to save our fleet.)

At the same time, though, the last time my charr ever got to feel like charr was in the first chapter of the vanilla Personal Story, so I’d kind of understand that it may be time to focus on something else by now.

Either way leaves something to be desired, though. I really hope we get some development/closure with Mama Tree before long at least (the brief chat after the Caladbolg event was welcome, but too brief). But I also really hope that the writers will add more racial dialog where appropriate in future story chapters. Like the much-criticized lack of a special human reaction to Big B.

There’s like a billion Itty Bitty Miss T*tty “armors” and outfits, so I for one am glad this one actually, for once, almost looks the same on both genders. The spurs are weird though.

The new wyvern twins are even worse with the bouncing because they wreck more and more of the “arena” where you fight them if their bar isn’t broken. Good luck even reaching them in melee after a few failures. I fought them five or six times, never saw them broken once, and honestly got tired of chain-dying in melee trying for the break when it feels like I’m barely even scratching the bar anyway. Swapping my hammer for the longbow and ignoring the bar for the rest of the fight kept me alive, but didn’t really feel satisfying or doing it like it was designed to be done.

I like this as well, as long as it isn’t too GW1-focused (speaking as someone who hasn’t played that and doesn’t care about the humans in this setting). As RoseofGilead said, WoW introduced something like this in Cataclysm, but that was when I quit so I don’t know/remember too much about it other than that it was fun to just go and dig and find little bits of lore.

Also, they could give us collections/trophies from it and let us display them in the home instance if we choose, to give that forgotten place a purpose other than holding some gathering nodes. I liked the recent addtion of Ridhais and that golem from the new map to the home instance. More additions are always welcome, be it more NPCs or our own memorabilia or maybe a collection of Jotun pottery.

For me, the vanilla JPs were a mixed bag. Some are really fun and, as has been mentioned, some do a really nice job of showing off the scenery — Morgan’s Spiral or Hidden Garden, for example, which also both had the added bonus of giving me sweaty hands and a bit of enjoyable vertigo-thrill due to the height. That’s the kind of JP I’d like to see more of.

The ones I hate are the close-quarter ones that slam the camera in your face all the time and give me honest-to-goodness motion sickness in two minutes flat, and don’t get me started on how much worse it is for people who (like me) prefer taller characters. That’s bad design, period. (And also applies to all those “hide collectibles in tiny random nooks” achievements, which are similarly stomach-churning.)

But the newer “die and lose 2+ hours of agonizingly slow progress if you can’t make this blind jump or land 3 pixels too far to the left” JPs are even worse. I did Not So Secret once, it took most of an evening and left me so utterly beyond kittened off (also motion sick, of course) that there was no room for even the smallest tingle of “accomplishment” afterwards. Same with the Ember Bay JP. Haven’t even tried the new one yet for fear that it is just more of the same.

Long story short: there’s a limit beyond which “challenging” loses all sense of being “rewarding” and just turns into a painful chore that I end up hating myself for sticking with. Especially if it involves actual physical discomfort.

IMO the last actually enjoyable JP they implemented was Skipping Stones, which was decently challenging but fair, didn’t punish taller characters or was motion-sickness-bait.

I mainly play sylvari, yes. It does make a difference, and they could have handled that better — but I still think that even outside the initial racial storyline, they did a much better job at establishing Trahearne as a partner and friend who actually liked us and needed us than they did with any of the “biconics”. Just as they did a much better job at establishing the PC’s place in the Personal Story. The writing and story-flow were more clunky then at times, but (that one hilariously bad “ZOMG Trahearne is suddenly a combat and leadership god!” mission in Timberline aside) at least they never gave me that “Okay, is there any reason why my character is even here? You could replace me with a lampshade and nobody could tell the difference,” feeling of LS1 and, slightly less so, LS2. In LS3, scratch “lampshade” and replace it with “NPC punching bag”.

The only time I recall any of the “biconics” ever showing actual friend-like behavior towards the PC was Canach’s support for a sibling during HoT. At the same time, some of the others are flat-out hostile, which doesn’t help my overall impression of them versus my impression of Trahearne, either.

Humans. Now I’m not the “Ew, only boring banal stupid ugly losers play humans!” kind of player that exists in some fandoms, but I do go for non-humans morm often than not. There’s just nothing appealing to the humans in this setting — or at least as far as I’ve seen in GW2. Yes, I agree that norn are a disappointment because they don’t really feel (or look, for the women) unique and different as they should, but at least the potential is there with the shapeshifting and the spirituality.

Solo. Well, I do like to do some group content both in the open world and in instances, but there are just too kitten many people who get a kick out of being horrible to others, be it in PUGs or in organized groups.

It would definitely have to retain the principle that people do not have to compete for resources nodes because everyone can gather them individually. That is one thing I really do love about GW2.

WoW did the “fishing nodes disappear after x catches” thing, and that kinda worked for me because it made sense. Again, though, it should not be global for all players.

The actual process of fishing could probably be a bit more involving than just “cast lure, wait for the bob, click”. Stardew Valley has a little minigame in which you need to counter the fish’s efforts to escape, and each fish has its own distinctive pattern. That’s kind of fun, but it would absolutely not work if made into a “catch 100,000 fish to level up” or “the fish you need has a 0.1 droprate” grind.

Fishing can be fun, but this being a genre in which “gameplay” and “content” are often equated with “grind”, I’d be worried that a fun pastime would turn into a horrible chore. And I say that as an ex-WoW player whose main always had Fishing (and Cooking) maxed — there were times when I genuinely enjoyed it and would in fact just cast a lure and watch the scenery for a while, and times when I bleedin’ cursed it because it took an age and a half to get anywhere with it.

If they do introduce fishing, I’d hope that they’d keep it more “fluff-and-fun” and not too painful to level, but I doubt they’d introduce it unless it was in some way relevant … and that would almost certainly mean a grind.

Stncold.1897:

Apparently Anet didn’t learn from Blizzard’s mistakes because Taimi right now is the exact reason people started to hate Thrall when he was previously a beloved character.

Don’t remind me. Writers’ pet NPCs dominating the story at the expense of everything and everyone else, and even if other characters somehow get thrown a bone once in a very blue moon under a perfect celestial alignment, it’s just turned into another writer’s pet showcase instead — this is one of the main reasons why I quit WoW during Cataclysm after having been fed up with their writers for a while already. Though at least GW2 doesn’t treat its female characters as horribly as WoW did (mind you, that is low bar to clear if there ever was one), and also doesn’t have the forced PvP aspect screwing up all attempts at storytelling.

It is also the reason why I probably won’t buy another Bioware game despite having played their games since BG1. Way too much fawning over favoured NPCs even if they want to destroy the world.

There’ll always be characters who are more important to a story than others, of course, but when you actively sideline or kill or off crap all over other characters, or ignore their strengths just so your favourite can look like the only smart, competent person in the world, you’ve cannonballed off the deep end into bad storytelling and shouldn’t be surprised by the splash it might cause.

I wish we had at least had word from her in every episode, or one of the visions she can send. One encounter isn’t enough to establish a meaningful connection, if that is what our bond with her is supposed to be. So, yes, she’d better be back and get a bit more attention than just a quick visit.

It’s not just that people think a nebulous “someone else” will do it, or that tactics are unnecessary. It’s also a combination of the Vinetooth and some similar bosses 1) being bouncy little gits, 2) having some pretty nasty AoE/CC themselves, and 3) the bar only being up for a very short time. If you’re melee and you have to spend half that time running towards the boss because it just charged or jumped clear across the area, and/or you need to avoid its AoE, you sometimes barely manage to hit it once or twice. That’s not going to amount to much.

Then people get reckless trying get more breakbar damage in, but die in the AoE as a result. Or, alternatively, most of the group decides that breaking the bar isn’t going to happen anyway, give up after the second or even first failed break attempt, and probably avoid the fight altogether in the future.

My WTF-“award” for this year so far goes to the new General Almorra Soulkeeper. She sounds like a befuddled granny instead of a veteran charr warrior and officer. Granted, this may be due to her writing, but geez did I side-eye her in Ep1 every time she opened her mouth. Speaking as an old Vigil player, that’s not my General kitten it. :p

Canach on the other hand is brilliant. It always sounds as if the VA is enjoying himself and given the right instructions and/or freedom to nail the character. Whether he’s mid-combat or being a snarky little cactus, there’s something about his very precise enunciation that I just love. His is a very distinct voice, but not over the top.

For the player characters, I like the sylvari voices for both genders but am less impressed with the norn and charr. The female charr PC lacks … something. It’s not bad per se, just not deep and resonant enough for me. There’s nothing there that you’d really associate with a huge and massive bipedal feline fighting machine who could snarl in annoyance like Rytlock sometimes does, or bellow orders across the cacophony of a battlefield. The female norn PC on the other hand just sounds bored much of the time and could do with some zest for life and making her legend.

SnowHawk.3615:

No anime hairstyles
More practical hair and manes for Charr!!! NO MORE GOOFYNESS

Can’t believe I forgot these two, so let me add me add my “hell yes” here.

@PopeUrban: Exactly. If such a cataclysm happened, I’d dance for joy (especially if it also took out mesmers because they annoy me almost as much). There need to be limitations both in the name of challenges to overcome and in the name of not uselessly sidelining 99.99999999% of the setting.

I want the story to go back to focusing on us bringing together different cultures and organizations with all their unique strengths and resources. I want my character to delve into mysteries and explore ways to solve problems from multiple angles. Where’s the shamanism, the Dream-visions, the unmatched discipline and mechanical expertise of the Legions, the vast knowledge of the Priory, and so on? Hell, for me the most interesting aspects of LS3 so far was the kodan lore from Ep3 followed by the new druid tidbits, and both are mere background mechanics and optional chatter.

This has been pointed out and wished for from the beginning, and the fact that they’re still ignoring it is really not good.

Ashantara.8731:

Females in general (regardless of the race you pick) get treated a lot different than male characters in the game:

Yeah. For female characters, the focus on everything from gear to faces is overwhelmingly on being cutesy-wutesy and sexy-hexy, and apparently (but probably unsurprisingly) natural black hair doesn’t fit the bill.

Grimwolf.7163:

No one’s saying he shouldn’t be upset. The problem is he’s taking it out on everyone else and kittenting on everyone completely unprovoked.

Exactly. He’s being a puerile emo brat throwing a “Nobody as EVER suffered like I do!” tantrum — and the writing lets him get away with it, while also paying zero attention to the stresses and losses our own character has gone through. Each of these three factors alone would be annoying, and combined they only get exponentially worse.

Plus, it’s not like Eir did anything wrong or even unusual by norn cultural standards, which made Braham’s hostility towards her weird from the start, and me not particularly inclined to be sympathetic towards him.

I like Trahearne, and I want quieter, introverted characters, but he did always come across as a bit flat and “not really there”, because he sounds much the same in a relaxed chat among Momma Tree’s branches as he does out there among a million Risen. You don’t have to be a screaming extrovert to express a bit more urgency in the latter situation. :p

I like Trahearne, and I want quieter, introverted characters, but he did always come across as a bit flat and “not really there”, because he sounds much the same in a relaxed chat among Momma Tree’s branches as he does out there among a million Risen. You don’t have to be a screaming extrovert to express a bit more urgency in the latter situation. :p

I’d like an older norn shaman companion/friend/mentor, because I’m kinda tired of the brutish brawler/young hothead stereotype and would like to explore the spirituality of their people more instead. That would also give us another source of insight into the world instead of just the “asura magitech this, asura magitech that” spiel that we’re being beaten over the head with this season. (That, as I said before, is something the PS did much better, and even in LS2 we went to multiple sources.)

Calling the story a “sidequest” pretty much hits the nail on the head in terms of summing up a lot of my annoyances with it, yes. Especially the whole Rata Novus sidetracking.