Guild Wars 2

I feel people are far too fixated on the perceived symmetry of this.

As it is lore characters have very loose professions and the rules that govern us the player does not apply to them. The idea that there must be one single character representing every profession in the story and no more than one is kinda bizarre . It would put a real limit on the narrative for no discernible reason or benefit. Logan and Braham have guardian animations and abilities but from a lore stand point Braham is a norn who follows the teachings of wolf whilst logan is the commander of the seraphs i imagine both would have different styles of fighting and thinking .

For me it would just be bad story telling if they where gonna kill off a character just because we can’t have two guardians or whatever.

They guy who made that video is so salty and won’t be happy until every condi build is removed from the game.

It takes around 1hr to fully unlock your elite would hardly call it a grind and if you wanna play with it before that you can by entering the pvp lobby.

When HoT first came outand i was new to the jungle it felt dangerous now days it feels about as dangerous as feeding cows in Queensdale. My most recent character i took into the jungle at level 73 or something by the time i was 76 i had enough HP to be able to unlock my elite as soon as i hit level 80. Events give a ton of exp as do adventures it was a great way to finish of the last 10 or so levels and fairly easy .

SlayerSixx.5763:

You need to buy something to remain relevant. That is literally the definition of P2W. The elites are clearly better than the core classes and are locked behind a pay wall, therefore it is pay to win. Why are you still trying to argue?

The game is buy to play if you wan’t the full game you gotta buy it ,if you don’t want to fine but you cant cry when you have less options than the person who payed for the full game.

Daggos Skelito.2910:

Serious.6940:

Another issue is that increasing the power of players means mobs need increased power too, just to stay even. Central Tyria mobs were not much of a challenge before HoT but now don’t even reach cannon fodder levels. anet really needs to think before giving players even more power we don’t need.

Worse it creates balance issues between players who have HoT and those that do not.

Im really starting to feel HOT players have an advantage in WvW/EoTM. Sorry but getting insta downed alot since HOT gives me the “Pay to Win” feeling. Never rage quit before HOT and been doing alot of that lately. I’ll give it some more time before exploring other options. HOT just isnt for me.

An expansion is not “pay to win” its your decision if you buy it or not however and expansion like the name suggests is gonna expand on the base game. Which in the case of pretty much every MMO ever meant and increase in level cap. HoT had no level cap increase but introduced new specs even if it was possible that they where all in perfect balance with the exisiting pre HoT builds you are still gimping yourself by having less options.

The reality of expansions in MMOs is if you do not have the existing expansion/s you don’t have the full game and as such will be at a disadvantage. Gw2 is pretty unique in that you can still be competitive without the expansion but again you will always be limited as you do not have access to all the content. If you cant deal with that then MMOs are not for you further more if you can’t afford $30 or whatever for the expansion playing video games should not be a priority for you.

People are so overly dramatic saying stuff like anet hates “insert profession name” or specific dev doesn’t care about my profession! This is just hysterics that doesn’t hold up under any sort of logic and is of zero use when i comes to bettering aspects of our profession that need work.

Imo what worked pre patch still works now ,obviously the issue is we have two legends who still need a lot of work. It doesn’t surprise me that they haven’t touched on them yet as something like Ventari really needs a serious work over .

I have no issue if you dislike the expansion but to say there is no sense of exploration in HoT is such a fallacy i have spent probably around 50+hrs in a map like TD so far and still finding tons of new things the intricacy’s of that map far over shadow anything in base Tyria so much that its not funny . The fact that you can get lost going through the new maps the first few times is testament to the design that they made a living breathing jungle to traverse through, it can feel confusing claustrophobic and dangerous as a jungle should be!

The HoT maps make many of the old Tyria maps seem one dimensional basically flat with a mountain here and there, a cave or two and town etc and every hour or so a boss may spawn just staples of every MMO/ RPG fantasy area. Not too mention generic quests hidden in hearts.

As a necro main i have always found minion builds pretty lame and fairly niche.

As a ranger you get much more of a range of different looks and types of pets not to mention you get to name your pets. With ranger as well no matter what build your character is you will still have a pet out. I would try both to see which you like more but for me the only real pet class is ranger.

I don’t see it as much of a difference from the base game just slightly more challenging than the base maps which is refreshing. I think mastery is a good replacement for increased level cap which comes with most MMO expansions their are very few "must have " masteries and the ones that are can be found at the lower mastery levels most often. I can’t understand why you feel the need to max out mastery i am at level 73 or something in mastery and that is just from doing what i always do participate in events , explore maps etc and without ever deliberately trying to level mastery.

The guild hall has been one of the things i spend most of my time in so far my small guild usually max 5 people on have loved it so i don’t buy the idea that it is killing small guilds.

Nothing is ever perfect though and i have a few issues with the expansion stuff like making ascended gear even more costly to craft , making new and useful stats like viper way more costly to craft than base stat choices. Adventures where hit and miss also some are fine but getting gold in certain adventures can be pretty bs.

All and all HoT has been a good experience and a progression from the base game and i am looking forward to what comes next.

P.S Tangled Depths is the best map in game! if you can’t appreciate the scope and detail that went into creating something as crazy as this beast i don’t know what to tell you.

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is to understand the basic strategies employed , things like where you should be on the map at certain times , what roll you should be filling and the special features some maps have.

Being able to win in a 1v1 is great and all but i have lost way more matches due to people being in the wrong place or just doing stupid kitten / poor decision making.

I was hoping for some Jalis and Ventari changes but oh well i will still enjoy playing the profession. If some fair weather revenants can’t handle a few changes and drop the profession nothing of value was lost.

In my experience the people currently playing thieves in ranked pvp are usually the hardcores the ones who have spent their time mastering the art of playing thief. Underestimate them and you will find yourself kittened up pretty fast . Meanwhile there are a ton of people running around on so called “meta” builds who suck badly i know which player i would like having on my team more.

Lightward staff is sick it would fit my Revenant perfectly for a melee staff that price though………. Why can’t it only cost 50ish gold like the hammer!

I would imagine i would maybe get off the boon corrupt on auto maybe 5 times in a match…….

Sitting around auto attacking with scepter is a quick way to get yourself destroyed i will be relying on my current boon corrupt like usual and i doubt i will even notice the effect of the corrupt on scepter auto with the amount of boon production going around.

Boon corrupt on 3rd auto attack ok how many times do you think you would actually land that in one match? I currently run with nearly as much boon corrupt as i can and even then i find a lot of the time boon production is way higher than my ability to remove or corrupt. I really don’t care if this change goes through or not i cant see it being anything more than a drop in the ocean and won’t effect any of my matches in anyway.

Balance is constantly changing after the patch we should be fine ,in the future we could be OP or we might find ourselves at the bottom . This is the way MMOs work if you want to be playing the flavor of the month profession wait till the patch drops and see which class floats to the top maybe thief? necro?.

Personally i play the professions i enjoy and stick with them through the good and the bad i cant understand how you would get any satisfaction jumping from “meta” proff to “meta” proff.

Great sword is so overdone i would be pretty disappointed if that was our next weapon.

Ranged throwing dagger would be cool , short bow and rifle are massively underused and could make for a really interesting specialization.

The way legends are it really opens the options for some really crazy kitten so far we have demon , dragon and even a centaur christ figure hopefully the next ones will be unexpected and not some generic humanoid warrior or whatever with Great sword.

Good idea and i commend you for putting in the effort to write all this up.

However a lot of the difficulty ratings i disagree with massively like fallen masks 8/10 for silver? gold is insane but unless you are really unlucky i never found it particularly challenging to get silver , meanwhile sanctum scramble silver 5/10! the hours that i have put into that adventure yet cannot get better than bronze says otherwise.

Really rating them on difficulty is incredibly subjective and your doing it from the perspective of someone who likes adventures and is seemingly quite competent at them.

HoT open world is moderate difficulty when you first enter the new zones then becomes trivial the more time you spend there. If you find it difficult i dunno what to tell you? there is always Queensdale those cows ain’t gonna entertain themselves.

This is how it should be

Initially you step into the jungle and find it a confusing and deadly place you spend some time exploring , participating in events soon enough you begin to find your feet and use your exp to purchase some mastery levels which makes life even easier.

Soon enough you are swinging through the trees like Tarzan taking down Mordrem with ease. This is progression done well you learn sometimes harshly through trial and error and the more time you spend in the zones the more exp you get to level your masteries.

It takes me 40mins from hitting 80 to unlock my elite spec fully and i’m sure others do it much faster not to mention everything has been nerfed to hell already and even stuff like chak gerent succeeds more often than not these days.

tldr HoT open world content is trivial.

The problem is you only have to give up a single trait line to take your elite .Given that this will give you access to a new weapon and skills there are very few instances when this is not worthwhile. Even on my ranger i play as a damage dealer which has the druid specialization ( arguably one of the few specializations that properly fits the different play style they where going for) it is still beneficial for me to take druid as my damage is the same and i gain more group support.

Pre HoT anet was stating that elite specs should just be a alternate play style not an all round better choice ,i was fairly skeptical as the opportunity cost in taking and elite instead of base class seemed really really low not to mention balancing all these new elites was gonna make early HoT a clusterkitten regardless.

I can’t really see any obvious solutions that could be easily implemented .

I just hope some of the ridiculous elite specializations get scaled way back .

Hearing stuff like “make more unique” in regards to shouts is also interesting and is a better way to make changes to the profession than just increasing or decreasing metrics.

My battered corpse lying at the bottom of a cliff after forgetting you can’t glide in core Tyria lays as a testament to the demand and need for gliding .

After getting downed by a bear in Queensdale and other players walking past instead of reviving him he vowed to get his revenge and git gud.

I was using a look like this awhile ago but i decided i really didn’t like the reaper hood and switched it with the Bladed cowl ,ended up looking more sith lord than Nazgul but it was pretty cool.

I don’t buy the idea that they made elite specs OP just to sell more copies of HoT its kinda ridiculous if you believe that.

It happens a lot in MMOs when a new class or spec comes out the developers can look at what works and what hasn’t in the past and the new proff / spec comes out and makes the old ones look dated in mechanics and feel.

The problem is 10 new elite specializations and an entire new class is gonna kitten balance so hard . Furthermore you only have to give up a single trait line to use your elite specialization which gives you access to a ton of new skills i can’t see many circumstances when you will not wan’t to slot your elite even if they buffed old trait lines you give up way to much to not use your elite.

They hid the video as damage control as it was proved beyond a doubt that they cheated

Lmao more like suck at cheating.

Pretty effective way to completely destroy your reputation especially lying and pleading innocence after you where caught out.

Justice has been served.

I am enjoying HoT a ton i like that i have to pay some attention on the new maps otherwise i will die.

My only issue with HoT is i believe i could have easily been delivered via living world updates over a period of time rather than having to wait months and months with nothing new then getting it all at once .

Another benefit of frequent and smaller updates is that anet can focus on one thing at a time which will mean less bugs .

I could never understand all the people that where clamoring for an expansion we were on a good thing…….

At one with nature

Gliding is mounts done right in my opinion.

Obnoxious sparkly horses / dragons etc that offer no unique gameplay other than a movement speed increase and a way to show off your kitten are something gw2 can do without.

In my opinion the mastery points / collection items etc should be available on your first completion of the adventure no matter how well you do in the adventure.

Completion should be easy whilst higher scores can give you some daily rewards .

Really though who cares? i am having fun and there are always tons of people to play with anything else is irrelevant .

The worst is when you hit space ,wait a second glider doesn’t appear so you hit space again just as glider pops then disappears again.

Yea i agree with you and while i enjoy the new maps some variety in how they work would have been appreciated . For dragon stand i really like the idea of the huge meta and it fits in with the theme of that zone but some of the others could have functioned differently without losing much.

Going forward i hope some new maps are more unpredictable and spontaneous.

It is full on weekdays no worries i just ran it today and i am on an obscure timezone compared to most people.

The thing you gotta understand is that these metas run on a timer think of it like teq you wouldn’t show up onto a map 6mins after its started and expect to be in a good map. The same thing applies to most of the HoT maps you can’t zone into VB mid way through night and expect to be put into a map that is organized and pushing t4 .

For VB start of day and around 10 or so mins before night is the best time to start looking in LFG or taxing people into your own map. Sure it would be cool if you could just zone straight into any random map and have and organized successful group but due to the way these maps work you have to put in a bit of prep before hand to make sure you get a successful map.

It happens so often when i am in random map harvesting flax or whatever not interested in doing events someone will zone in with 10 mins left on night and start complaining that they always get fail maps . I really really gotta stress that it is all about timing . Check lfg see what stage the maps are at take a taxi at the appropriate time or start organizing your map well before the meta starts and you will save yourself a lot of troubles.

Worth trying wow if you want gear progression ,been around for a long time but with all the changes over the years its basically wow 2 by now and still easily the best of that type of MMO.

As gw2 has no monthly fee its easy to play in combination with other MMOs so its worth trying what else is out there often i find it makes me realize what a good thing we have with gw2 .

Grinding is relative what you may find tedious and repetitive someone else may enjoy doing and whilst to you it feels like a grind to them its not.

Personally if i don’t find something fun i’m not gonna bother with it ,in this game especially you can pretty much do whatever you wan’t without worrying about a gear treadmill or whatever carrot to constantly chase.

They should get rid of bronze , silver , gold altogether.

For those that care about adventures (lol) there is leader boards for everyone else merely complete the adventure once at your own pace gaining the mastery point and the collection item and enjoy never having to do this kitten again.

Duke Nukem.6783:

anet your releasing WAY TOO MANY black lion skins in too short of a time, nobody can keep up, nobody even wants to keep up anymore as evidenced by how prices on black lion skins have plummeted in the past year, i know it used to be your bread and butter but you over saturated the market with too many.

THE SOLUTION 1: release them less often 2: stop releasing full sets, you already stopped releasing underwater weps (even though i like spears) so maybe its time to do that with other sets….., it looks “fine” for magic but that butterfly set is not something im going to use as a hammer…..so why make the melee weps at all?

you could save time and money by producing only specialized half sets of weapons that would serve a more niche audience with each set

“i think we can all agree that the black lion glittering set should NOT have had melee weps”

Ah no we can’t

I can’t believe you are seriously asking for incomplete sets and having them released slower as well , truly bizarre .

If there is an issue it is the rate at which we can get BL keys or tickets/ scraps either increase the rate or allow sets to stay at 1 ticket price for much longer .

Was running DS frequently, initially i seemed to get quite a few leystone pieces off the event itself and pod runs after . Haven’t had any drop in ages and seem to get pure crap from pods guess its a case of diminishing returns.

I gotta strongly disagree with the statement of “punishing old players , rewarding new ones” but that’s neither here nor there and irrelevant to the question you asked.

Overall my experience in HoT is a positive one , its certainly not a perfect experience however.

Positives
new maps are amazing i know TD fuels alot of rage but i think its awesome a map like this was made in an MMO
Gliding is mounts / flying done right the only problem is now you will wanna glide in the old world as well which can lead to fatal consequences……..
The music is just wow
Elite specializations are great but in many cases possibly too powerful
Mastery is the best leveling system for when your not having levels
The story was fun up until the last mission which drags on and is filled with bugs

Negatives
Adventures , at best they where something i did once then forget about however they gate alot of things such as collections and mastery points considering many of them have quite harsh difficulty curves it can be really really frustrating experience .

Whilst elite specs are fun some are way to powerful my understanding was they would be an alternate way to play your profession the reality is in most cases they are an outright upgrade and i feel like i have less ways to play my characters than before.

Kinda of a continuation but balance especially in spvp is in a pretty poor spot currently

Overall don’t regret my purchase at all and am having fun in game but as someone who never understood the hype for expansions i believe they could have easily added this stuff bit by bit through the living world updates and we wouldn’t have had that massive content drought.

Purchased the sword which is amazing and the greatsword which is ok .

Torn between the longbow and hammer for my last ticket

The maps are as they should be initially you stroll into the jungle with zero masteries everything is confusing and dangerous . After you spend some time in the maps doing events etc you learn the lay of the land , learn some masteries and soon enough you are flying through the trees like friking tarzan.

TD is the best maps in this respect once you understand it you find tons of short cuts and easy ways round and it is actually the quickest of the new maps to navigate without using waypoints. This is true progression and one of the things the new exp did best.

Highly unfashionable but i really like using greatsword as my alt weapon with usually scepter and focus . “nothing can save you” + greatsword will deal with diamond skin then i can drop the condi bomb with well of corruption etc . I really take alot of satisfaction out of fighting tempests they tend to panic as they are not used to losing health quickly once you get them sub 90% its gg they drop in seconds .

I

My dislike of gating things behind adventures is pretty well documented and the thing is some of the adventures i didn’t mind playing . If you removed the mastery points and collections from adventures then i could just do the adventures that i didn’t mind when i was in the mood for something like that and my views on adventures would be much much more positive.

However when i am forced to do something like sanctum scramble it just sours me on the hole thing . Its not like there is any parity between the collections either i got Yggdrasil easily as the adventure that was required isn’t complete bullkitten . In comparison i watch every video on youtube of sanctum scramble never minding that i can’t do half the things in these videos as my latency from a non American /EU country makes it hard enough to even complete bronze.

My opinion is if they insist on keeping an adventure part of the collections make it so you only have to discover the certain adventure when it is unlocked to get that part of the collection. For example sanctum scramble you would have to complete the AB meta event to get access to the adventure then click on it when its unlocked boom done. This way between all the collections there wouldn’t be any ridiculous jumps in difficulty.

Did the adventure to get my druid staff got silver first time easy will probably never bother with it again.

Now comes my herald shield the one specialization weapon i was super excited to get …..and the “adventure” this is gated behind is the least fun thing i have ever done in game . Not only is the adventure locked 90% of the time when i can actually try it i spent hours and have not even managed a bronze run.

Seriously kitten this i deleted my herald in a rage quit.

And now i am starting to run low in mastery points……

Don’t like druid at all but i had to take some shots with Azimuth as a think it fits the specialization perfectly

Premades trash talking after beating solo’s

classy