Guild Wars 2

If it were not for that “victory at any cost”, you would be forced to"bargain from a position of weakness" for that precious treaty of yours with the humans. In the words of your great hero Pyre Fierceshot, this makes you a fool.

If we Charr were simply tools, then why pray tell were those gods discarded and vanished once their usefulness had been expended? And why should any heed be given to the words coming from those of the lesser Legions, when in one breath they will claim “victory at any cost”, and in the next dam [sic] those that produce world changing results in our favour? Jealousy is unbefitting of a Charr.

Our gods gave us boons and allowed for the destruction of our enemies; no matter how much you twist those words you cannot deny that success. Your new gods, the mice, can do nothing of the sort.

(hehe I agree, clearly every lore discussion in the Charr subforum should be IC)

EDIT word censor please stop ruining my fun

Bloonis.9528:

…

A lot of “teamwork” in GW2 is basically people playing side by side, as opposed to playing together. Most dungeons are soloable, and there is not actually that much interaction between players. Largely, it is just everyone doing their own thing and they happen to be physically close to each other. The strategy for soloing or undermanning content is no different than for doing the content with a full party, because all that more people bring is more damage numbers.

EDIT: Added quote to make the string of posts more clear.

Agroman.7190:

Mages of all sorts are rather uncommon in Charr society

This is not true. GW and GW2 are full of mages everywhere. Pyre’s warband in GW1 was largely mages. Every class besides Warrior and Engineer are magic users in GW2 (if you count Signets and Alchemy, then Warrior and Engineer would also be magic users to an extent). Every second Iron Legion NPC you see uses Guardian magic, and half the Ash Legion NPCs use Necromancer magic.

In fact I see a lot more nameless Charr NPC’s using magic than I see nameless non-Charr NPC’s using magic. It would probably be more realistic to say that “Mages of all sorts are rather uncommon in Krytan society”, as the magic users there seem to all be in the ruling elite (the few consist of the Queen and leader of the Shining Blade, the leader of the Seraph is the only Guardian I’ve seen in the Seraph, etc).

Draknar.5748:

Oh, I was referring to the example OP gave. Brain Fart isn’t offensive. Not in the slightest.

“Offensive” is subjective, and ever changing.

Something else for you to think about here in this example.

A Charr can become a gladium simply by being the lone survivor of his warband, as others will think him a coward who fled, leaving his warband to die, even if this is not the case. Gladium are treated like kitten, and very well could be thrown in prison and forced labour such as this, simply because “they probably deserve it”. No one is going to stand up for these gladium, because who would stand up for cowards other than those that would want people to defend their own cowardice?

Some of those Charr prisoners could have been guilty of nothing but hopelessly watching the rest of their warband, their friends/family slaughtered before them, then the justice system simply assumes that they were somehow the cause of these deaths. Now this extreme PTSD subject is beaten in a forced labour camp for the rest of their shortened lives.

Moral of the story: Don’t be a spineless gladium.

pandas.9450:

I don’t see your issue with dungeon sellers

It is clearly just the usual reasons for hating dungeon sellers and other undermanned dungeon parties. It is jealousy, pure and simple jealousy. People having fun in a way that you do not find fun, or that you are barred from partaking in due to skill level or some such?.. time to whine, complain and try to demonize them for not having the sort of fun that you approve of. That is all it ever is with this type.

Berk.8561:

And it’s sad seeing the map tell me it wants to kick me within 5 minutes of the event ending because everyone has left

At least that gets those zergs out of the map. I’ve grown bored of the afk-inside-of-zerg world bosses long ago, and really missed those smaller scale world bosses. Last week I actually got to do a Shatterer fight with a total of four players though, since most people left to head towards zerg central when prompted. That was the most fun I’ve had in a world boss fight in a long time. Funny enough, that 4man Shatterer fight was faster than the zerggy afk-snoozefest that those Shatterer fights usually are (since everyone there was a decent player, well geared, and actually paying attention rather than the hoards of leeches that usually exist in world boss fights).

As for a lot of the suggestions about how to improve GW2 enemies to make them more fun. Really, it can all be summed up by “look at how GW1 did it”, the good ideas proposed here in this thread are simply elaborating on that statement.

fireflyry.7023:

GW is a game and franchise that prioritises casual players. It was indeed designed specifically, by and large, for that type of player. Always has been. End of.

Casual (time commitment) =/= low skill

Palawa Joko may very well be fighting against Kalkatorrik and his minions, not to save or protect anyone else, but simply to keep Kalkatorrik out of Joko’s own domain. Just because Joko is evil, doesn’t mean that he’s going to join up with other evil powers… even though Palawa Joko would have been a much more fitting member of any “EVIL JUSTICE LEAGUE” or “EVIL AVENGERS” (such as the incredibly improbable alliances Scarlet was forging).

Elder Dragons don’t like each other, Kalkatorrik might just think that Joko is basically Zhaitan encroaching on Kalkatorrik’s hunting grounds for all his minions can perceive.

While these two big foes are fighting it out, that could leave us much time to establish ourselves in the area in order to deal with one or the other (or both threats).

The main question here is not “can this work into the GW2 narrative”, but “is Anet ever going to add this sort of substantial amount of content rather than purely just biweekly cashshop updates until the end of the game’s life”.

One of the reasons why Asc Armour/Weapons did not receive as much of a backlash as it could have (it still did, but it could have been worse), is because everyone knew that they only had to make the armour once (for PvE purposes). If most aspects of this game weren’t simply “wear zerk and max damage on everything”, then the costs of fitting armour for multiple purposes would have been far higher.

I’ve never changed my opinion in that Asc gear is needless and horrible for the game, but any change to make gear quality less of an issue is probably a good change. If you want to add new qualities of gear, just as with many things, look back at how GW1 did it (Minor/Major/Superior runes have a tradeoff to balance them: Minor gives +1stat, Major gives +2stat -35HP, Superior gives +3stat -75HP. This means that the highest quality is not strictly superior thus invalidating everything else).

Lady Elvea.2847:

Gogo green and orange!

At first I was wondering why these colours were not used, then someone mentioned Colour Blindness.

GW2 “end game” is about fashion, playing around and giving yourself different looks. The old PvP lockers allowed for a lot of playing around with armour skins that you have unlocked, as well as getting better previews than the preview window. Unfortunately that functionality no longer exists.

A potentially neat idea would be to basically bring that functionality back for a sort of “Guild Hall fashion room” upgrade so to speak, where people are free to change their looks without eating up their transmutation charges. Perhaps even give upgrades to allow for “free” hair style kit usage within this designated area as well. You would actually have to spend the charges/hair style kit to keep the look outside this designated area.

This would allow for a lot more use of skins that may otherwise not see as much use due to the trans charge restrictions, bringing back the functionality of the pre-wardrobe PvP lockers for testing out unlocked armour looks.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/LW-is-story-over-gameplay-this-is-bad

For all the accusations of “archaic tab targeting”, it’s not really. It’s more of a mix.

In actual “old tab targeting” games, you cannot attack if you do not target the enemy. Someone jumps you? You must tab through all targets in range, the random enemies all around you and maybe even offscreen, make sure you don’t tab past the guy that jumped you or you’ll have to tab through this entire group again before you can even do anything to respond. Pray that your attacker does not have a target drop ability or you’ll have to go through this process all over again. With the GW2 controls in this scenario, many of your skills you can use to attack without even having a target (especially melee skills, blocks, etc), even ranged abilities may hit your target as dumbfired projectile attacks may be “bodyblocked” by your intended target, even if he’s not targeted.

I believe that there is a lot of space for improvement in GW2 combat (and GW2 in general), but I really do not see why tab targeting is such a focus. GW1 had nothing but tab targeting and the combat is far, far more interesting just because the skills and character building is incredibly interesting and in depth (nearly unanimous opinion).

I had assumed that that karka was just some random asset, as others have mentioned, like a rock or some such.

This reminds me of all those “phantom candy corn nodes” that sometimes appeared, then disappeared up to a month after the Halloween events. Just stuff left in the game that glitches into viability sometimes.

This screenshot is probably eight months old or so. Since then I’ve finished all the Asc crafting I have the patience to do, a great deal of Dragonite Ore has also built up. Many more useless Asc rings from Fractals as well.

A display aquarium in one of the hubs of Lion’s Arch would do nicely for those fishy players wanting to AFK with their legendaries on display like all the cool kids.

As excited about Halloween this year as I am, I am deathly afraid of things being removed and simplified in the name of trying to make content “less confusing for new players”.

If I’m running around the Labyrinth, and I hear “VROOM VROOM” then see the a chain saw wielding skeleton hitting players with a chain saw skinned pillow, then I don’t even know. If however that skeleton can still cleave a path right through countless inattentive players, and instill fear like he did last year then a little bit of faith will be restored.

The year1 Clocktower was more fun and sociable than the year2 version (as was the year1 Wintersday jumping puzzle vs year2). Hopefully they’d go back to that, but I’m not expecting it. It would be nice to see all the events from previous Halloweens, including Reaper’s Rumble (which was mysteriously absent from year2, perhaps in an attempt to concentrate players into a smaller pool of activities). And some new stuff of course.

Adding some non-gemstore stuff goes without saying. But I’m not getting my hopes up on that account.

Behellagh.1468:

LS1 sort of failed this test because if you missed it, oh well. LS2 sort of fixed that aspect.

Yes one can pay gems to unlock a LS2 episode they missed, however the pricing is all off. I’m pretty sure no one would honestly say that shuffling through some dialog boxes and the playing some slow unchallenged content is worth the listed price.

Ten ectos from one ring is not unreasonable. Fractals gives low enough rewards as it is. Asc weapon/armour boxes give the player a 50-100g item, 10e is still nothing in comparison to that even if it is tradable. If Anet cannot be afriad of people farming Fractals for ectos, as even if there was a guaranteed 1e per run (if 1 Asc Ring = 10e, then 1 Pristine Frac Relic = 1e) and a chance at a 10e ring, then that still pales in comparison to the rewards that would have been acquired from simply running profitable dungeons.

Yes, doing this would create a windfall of Ecto, since many Fractal runners have been saving multiple bank tabs, alt’s inventories full of Asc rings. However Anet has demonstrated that introducing massive [temporary] shocks to the economy is something that they are willing to do (see Asc armour crafting, especially Silk). Allowing us to salvage one Asc ring for 10e will create this market shock in the short term, some will profit, some will say it is unfair, but in the end after the market goes back to an equilibrium state we will all be better for it.

On the concern for “people unfairly profiting” off this sort of market shock, this is actually one of the least bad scenarios of people profiting off of market shocks. Information on new high demand resources gets leaked all the time and insider trading runs rampent as people giving the opportunity of previewing patches abuse that position. In this case the only people who would really profit, are:
1) Long time Fractal runners, who have been getting very low reward levels all this time reguardless
2) TP barons who will buy cheap ecto and sell it later when the prices go back to equilibrium

The second point there is not even a bad thing, as they are helping to stabilize prices by controlling the supply windfall, and most importantly they are not doing so with insider information, as they must act after the patch that introduces such a change.

Old thread, but hey why not?

Former Molten Alliance Charr Necro.

In yet another a thread about how horrible the clipping and stretching is on Charr armour, you should not be posting images hiding the clipping/stretching, and saying that there is no problem, or posting clipping/stretching and saying you don’t mind. Complacency like that is doing the opposite of helping.

Yes there are some armours that don’t clip/stretch that much, or are more bearable. But that’s only because we have so few options in the first place, and those few options are generally just “it clips/stretches less”. It’s still horrible, and there is no reason to defend Anet’s apathy on the topic even though this thread has been done 9000 times before.

Palador.2170:

and it’s suspected that he might destroy it for good now that he has it.

That would be more than enough reason to start another civil war. The best strategy for Smodur’s ends is to just hold the relic aside indefinitely.

So the Foefire was the Flame Legion’s doing as well mmm? Pray tell what else?

Those false gods were tools that allowed for the liberate Ascalon, the sinking of Orr, and the destruction of Kryta’s Mursaat allies. Without the Flame Legion’s leadership to direct the obliteration of these outside threats, the humans would never be in the position of weakness to seek a truce and sign your precious treaty in the first place.

There is nothing to brag about in the last two hundred years, because all that has been done in that time has been consolidating the Flame Legion’s victory, while spreading propaganda against that legion.

No wonder you’re spitting so often, I’d be hacking up as well if I were licking mice that much.

Yeesh look at this Flame hate. How about an opinion from a Flame Legion Guardian: Kerbrus Blazecaller.

"

If it were not for the Flame Legion, Iron would not have Ascalon in the first place. Many of those great heroes from the liberation of Ascalon? They were all Flame. The acclaimed “hero and liberator” Bonfaaz Burntfur?… he’s from the same warband as the dreaded “villain and enslaver” Hierophant Burntsoul. If the Charr need no faith in gods, then do not simply replace that with faith in propaganda of wars’ victors. All too often the successes of the Flame Legion are claimed by Ash, Blood and Iron; every failure is attributed to the Flame Legion as the great scapegoat (whether deserved or not). This sort of behaviour is more befitting for cowardly mice trading words in their courts.

The current civil war amongst the High Legions is simply to keep all of our forces experienced; just as the Charr have always had infighting for as long as any records go back. The only difference between now and the rest of our entire history, is that the Charr have always united against outsiders: the Forgotten, the Ascalonians, the Orrians, the Krytans and their Mursaat allies… but now we are allying with outsiders against out own kin.

You will all burn for your treachery against the might of the Charr.

"

Anet’s strategy for gemshop armour and costumes is quantity over quality. This is because they are purely there as gem shop revenue. Costumes being as incredibly limiting as they are (therefore being horrible in a game where the end game is supposed to be dress up) are also ever more so common. There is no reason valid enough in Anet’s opinion to do anything more once they get their gemshop sales of new armours.

It’s as simple as that. Nearly all of the new weapon and armour skins since launch have simply been gemshop items, and thus are treated like gemshop items… not like game content.

And yes, Anet has created a catch 22 for themselves with Charr armour. Another funny thing here, is that due to the very small pool of suitable pieces of Charr armour, fixing a single piece of Charr armour will increase the pool of available armour pieces for Charr by a significantly larger proportion than working on armour for any other race.

Electro.4173:

And if they’re already making the armor models new anyway, it shouldn’t be that difficult to do. Unless we’re still getting half-finished armor models from launch that they’re just now getting around to finishing up and putting into the game, but this far in I doubt that.

I would hazard to guess it is much easier to make some slight modifications to existing armour pieces, than make new ones completely from scratch. However the gemshop problem I raised means that this will not happen, as only the new flashy particle effects matter for gemshop sales, not fixing previously released items baring a great deal of outrage (human T3 reskin with particle effects sold as gemshop armour was changed, while the other reskins remained).

Charr have mastered the GW2 PvE strategy of “stacking” over two hundred years before it became the dominant strategy for clearing dungeons. Clearly they have been ahead of the pack the whole time.

Unless Anet has some secret in the works, like a surprise expansion, then no. There has been hardly anything added to the game in two years, and any official word from Anet is basically disregarded nowadays due to people rightfully considering them pathological liars.

Enjoy your gemshop skins and gambling.

Being able to select your stats for levelling drops is nice, but honestly they could have simplified that by just making zerker have a much higher drop rate. New players aren’t going to know what stats to pick, and giving them so many non-zerker options literally is confusing them. It is nice for vet players who know which stat distributions are useful and which are not though.

The one thing I am pleased about for the patch is the ability to block emotes from players you have blocked. This allows me to block very obnoxious, public pseudo ERPers from my chat window, greatly improving any RP experience.

Why did you never get past level 40? The levelling process is now a lot more tedious, so if that was the reason why you quit, then it has only gotten worse.

Not going to happen. Anet nowadays is too prideful to admit that they can be wrong. Doing this will give them the metrics to show that the number of people using this “Beginner” option that they apparently worked so hard at, would be negligible. This would easily display a great mismanagement of resources and direction, thus threatening the job security of the people who came up with this (and the people you are asking to give us this option).

You might as well ask a lazy, crooked businessman to voluntarily participate in an audit. Not only that but spend his time and resources to make it easier for these auditors to see what he’s been doing. You are asking people unfit for their job to make a case against themselves. It is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

If people never made it to level 80 because they found the levelling process too long and tedious, how is increasing the level of tedium going to help?

The problem was not that the levelling was too fun.

Anet simply doesn’t care about RPers, for whatever reason this may be. I’d just attribute it to the incompetence they seem to be displaying in many other updates they’ve given.

Everything pales in comparison to the Megaserver update. There are many, many problems that it caused that I will not go into now, other than simply summing up that it killed a great deal of open world random RP.

I too was annoyed about this most recent change, but upon hearing that we could now block players custom emotes… well I figured that it was a small price to pay for being able to simply block just a couple problem players, thus removing the lion’s share of public pseudo ERP from the chat window.

Most players are becoming accustomed with disappointment, and starting to almost expect bizarre changes like this, so it is not as hard to ignore the bad and focus on the good I suppose.

My understanding is that this and the Fractal spoon are the first Exotic quality junk items.

Unfortunately they aren’t sold when you use the “sell junk” vendor option. Make sure when you are manually vending these junk items that you don’t accidentally vendor an actual Exotic item, since now orange isn’t necessarily a DO-NOT-VENDOR quality item in your inventory.

For all of Anet’s concern about “confusing players”, the dumbing down the game does not address that concern, but things like this actually do add confusion. I’d expect that many people might accidentally sell some exotic non-literal-junk item and regret it later.

GW1 is a good game. The only real problem with it is that it was basically abandoned by the devs in it’s prime. However it is solid enough that it doesn’t even need updates to compete with GW2, it even has many basic features that everyone has been asking to have copied into GW2 since release.

Although it would be nice to get a bit more stuff, or to see an actual sequel to GW1, but that’s just as likely as seeing a meaningful content update in GW2.

Roybe.5896:

They realize that there is more money the closer they develop to the center of the normal distribution curve of any given market

You are ignoring the fact that there is more than one video game in the market, and that there are alternatives to video games. Video games do not have an inelastic demand curve.

Kamui.4038:

I can’t tell if you’re being facetious or not.

I don’t blame you. Everyone’s faith in Anet has plummeted so far, and they make such bizarre decisions, that this very well might have been the reasoning they came to after a night of LSD assisted brainstorming.

This nerf was to bring the aesthetic power level of humans down to be more in line with other races. Previous to this, the other races were at a large disadvantage, as they were largely the same except clipping/stretching/mega shoulders/oddly fitting skirts/etc. This resulted in an unfairly low aesthetic power level of non humans.

This nerf to human idle animation is simply part of Anet’s vision for game balance.

Even before Anet’s version of the SWG NGE, patch I was discouraging my friends from coming back to the game, due to Anet making the levelling system more tedious (and adding nothing to the game for the non-Farmville player). This patch just blew the trait rework patch out of the water with turning the levelling experience into a painful and tedious experience (and insulting the player’s intelligence at every opportunity). I was embarrassed to tell people I played a game with as horribly dull a levelling process before this patch, but now it is just on another level entirely.

You may disagree with Arenanet, and think that they are insulting everyone’s intelligence now, but the fact is that you are just too stupid to see Arenanet’s visionary greatness! You’re children’s children’s children will marvel in amazement at the fact that Arenanet was such a trailblazer, creating the height of art and entertainment (see attached image).

Maybe if you knew a bit more about the video game industry, you would know about Star Wars Galaxy, and how successful their NGE patch was where they told their existing playerbase to kitten off in favour of trying to attract a new playerbase! Everyone knows how successful SWG was because of that.

How dare you disagree with Arenenat! Enjoy your forum ban :^)

All hail Arenanet.

I am very excited about the changes to dungeon party leaders.

It was always so confusing, whenever I and a guildie joined a pug party at the last boss, then when we were kicking out the other party members so that we could let more guildies in for a free dungeon path, or simply sell there spots… we’d get booted out of the dungeon! Now we don’t have to worry about kicking the dungeon party leader causing the dungeon instance to be ended.

Thank you Arenanet, this change has made our dungeon “runs” much less confusing!

Sublimatio.6981:

so it’s kinda hard to judge if I’m doing something smart or something wrong

And that is exactly why the idea of policing player behaviour over influencing player behaviour through incentives is not only stalling the process of fixing things, potentially spending more time/effort in the long run, but also giving a very bad impression to players.

Sure, some consumers with a frightening degree of corporate devotion might call you stupid for not seeing what is “obvious” (those opinions are worthless and should be disregarded), but it really is an issue. If it is confusing to people who actually have read these dungeon policing threats, just imagine how confusing it is to the vast majority of players who don’t even know about a single post in a random thread on the official forum.

Sublimatio.6981:

So what if I spawn 3 phantasmal duelists to attack risen priest of melandru and hide behind a wall? a) priest can’t move so he is in his spawn point b) he doesn’t even try to attack me or my clones, he just does nothing. and i do nothing, except my duelists killing it safely.
now i dont understand – is it a design flaw and not my fault, or am i exploiting?

I think it mainly depends on how zealous and liberal the particular Anet dungeon policeman is who sees you. I know of someone who received a ban after literally AFK 2-manning, face-tanking some boss kills in full Cleric gear. The ban message was extremely vague, and he had done nothing else out of the ordinary that he suspected could warrant a ban.

That’s one of the bad things about opting for the “policing” policy. Not every policeman is competent, and some will be power tripping or trying to further some sort of personal crusade at the expense of professionalism.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I dunno, “Triple Trouble”, the evolved wurm. Rather than resounding silence on whether it was good or not.

To be fair, most people ignore those sorts of events because they are not implemented well. They require a large and coordinated group of players to accomplish, and then this group must fight against the Megaserver system. The best way to get the massive amounts of players required for this sort of event is for it to be a flavour of the month farm event (which will lack the coordination requirement), otherwise you are largely disadvantaged.

If this content was designed for smaller groups, say 5 to even 20 players, and instanced like a dungeon (and maybe rewards that aren’t simply a reskin with ugly particle effects added behind massive RNG), then this sort of content would be much more appreciated and accessible.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

As for Dungeons, what I’d like to see are more . . . like a single goal in the dungeon but multiple pathways. You can brute force through encounters, or you can get to levers which bypass some of the mass group encounters in favor of fighting one or two Elites, or you can use jumping to get around to some other route with different challenges.

This is a really fun idea, and used to exist to a small degree in this game. However Anet has shown that this is the opposite of what they want (removing the very minor JP skip in SE P3 by simply adding a big ugly wall blocking off the JP, and many other examples).

But I digress.

Lindbur.2537:

Whatever suits you, then. Give people an inch and they cry for a yard.

As I said: a bad solution is worse than no solution at all.

It took two years for that inch to be given, and it was even going in the wrong direction. And it was apparently not important enough to even deserve it’s own thread.

Chris Cleary.8017:

[dungeon police]

This is a horrible use of time and effort on Anet’s part. Scrap the dungeon police idea, and instead allocate those resources to programmers so that these issues can simply be addressed in a more permanent way.

A 315 word document in the middle of a random thread on the forums, briefly outlying the do’s and don’t’s of how to not get banned for playing the game is completely unreasonable for the vast majority of players to even know about in the first place. If these threats are actually enforced, it is only going to hurt Anet, GW2, and the few people that get banned for it, while solving nothing.

I dislike exploiters just as much as the next guy that wants good, challenging and fun gameplay, but a bad solution is worse than no solution at all.

If a low quality story is used as a vehicle to deliver gameplay, oftentimes (especially in the MMO genre) that is accepted. Conversely if a high quality story takes a substantial amount of emphasis away from gameplay, that can also be accepted, but this is obviously geared for an entirely different target audience.

The issue here is that the LS production-line model is not conducive to either of these examples, as time needed for both refining story and gameplay simply is not permitted, it isn’t even a “one or the other” sort of deal. Much of the wealth of updates we get are full of bugs and inconsistencies with lore, both of which can easily be remedied by simply giving the devs more time than a strict schedule permits. A focus on one aspect of the game over others is a viable strategy when working with insufficient time. The problem though is, there are many players who would prefer quality over quantity when it comes to these updates.

Also a lot of the limited dev time seems to be going into the (largely temporary or otherwise hidden away and unrewarding) LS when we would love that content to be, for example, added into dungeons. It’s not like Anet has wholey abandoned gameplay: the Marionette, the LA bosses, the Dragon at the end of the most recent LS episode, those would have been great if those sorts of things were added into new dungeons. Two of those examples no longer exist (nor were they scaled for non-zerg content, therefore you won’t be able to field the numbers needed outside of the flavour of the month zerg content), and the third example is behind a bunch of dialog boxes, as well as lengthy and unchallaging (to an enormous degree) story instances… here the aforementioned issues with focusing on LS are extremely apparent.

tl;dr: Limited dev time is not being allocated properly to create a a quality of story and/or gameplay that many of the players deem satisfactory.

Unfortunately you can’t solo content with friends, and there are no increased rewards for doing dungeons undermanned unless you risk all your dungeon rewards by trying to sell the path.

Its even worse for the daily Fractals chest. That ring that has a vendor price of not even 5 silver could have been an Ascended Weapon/Armour chest who’s worth would be closer to 50-100g (not even factoring in the price of levelling up that craft in the first place), or a literally priceless Fractal skin.

Five silver is nothing really but an insult. Although Fractal runners are more than used to having their intelligence insulted (most of the time “buffed rewards” have later been determined to be nerfed rewards, and tedious Fractals which generally have gotten “fixed” generally have seen nothing more than increased tediousness).

Not exactly sure about the Plains of Ashford, but I do know that the Black Citadel is horribly optimized, and there are all kinds of hidden assets that need to be rendered. There are even gears and pistons blasting flames and smoke out of them in some spots, that you can only see if you break out of the map, as well as all kinds of other junk that is rendered, but never visible (if you don’t break out of the map).

Basically Anet needs someone to go into the BC map with a delete button, and clear out a lot of complicated junk that isn’t even visible (as it is hidden underneath the ground). Perhaps Ashford is similar in spots.

A lot of PvE enemies’ attacks aren’t designed with interrupts in mind. Back during that ~3 day period when Mesmers could actually interrupt through defiant (Power Block before it was nerfed into PvE uselessness), I (and many others I would assume) did a lot of testing and playing around with it.

There are actually several attacks that bosses use, that don’t actually channel the attack (making the attack interruptable), but simply have a forced animation follow through after the attack (even if the attack’s effect pulses, suggesting that it is channelled). A good example of this is the AC P1 final boss: his scream appears as if it is channelled, it deals damage and conditions with pulses, and there is a “screaming” animation while this is happening. However if you interrupt this scream, all that will happen is that you will shake him out of his self imposed stun (which is what the scream animation basically is), while the scream’s effect still pulses damage and conditions.

Additionally the other day when there was an daily interrupt achievement, I ran into some enemies in open world (Jotun) which had skills that behaved similarly, where they would appear to channel a skill for a second or so, but attempting to interrupt did absolutely nothing because this again, was basically a fake-channel, or self imposed disable while their skill just acted normally.

tl;dr: This game’s PvE isn’t designed for anything but DPS. Control = LoS. Support = Might. Damage = stacked up melee cleaves.