Guild Wars 2

As a supplementary post to OP’s, the fractal team has virtually unlimited lore to build on new levels if they wanted to; I see no reason as to why we stay gated at 100 scales, with only 25 being really original (the agony resistance could stop getting higher at 100 and it would be no loss of challenge).

Furthermore, for some reason we even get to revisit content from Living World instead of exploring things like Turai Ossa or the golden years of the Margonites ruling the Crystal Sea. C’mon Anet, you got a gold mine right there! Nothing wrong with things like Thaumanova, but it just doesn’t live up to the Fractals potential, IMHO; they were announced as “anything is possible” yet we are getting literally “the most obviously possible”.

I don’t think they should open up these skins for general use, they’re not even that flashy to start with, gemstore and in game available stuff more than compensate for not having the heritage stuff, besides, as OP has probaby noticed by now, it’ll just stir up the veterans who are quietly playing their way through every release (and stir up even more the vocal ones).

A very good idea on the other hand, would be to somehow rebuild the hall of monuments once the Pact gets up there to fight Jormag (if ever, of course), allowing new stuff to be acquired there, both lore and festival related (more christmas stuff other than divinity’s reach?). Of course, the heritage items should still be right there along with the ghost merchants for those who want to acquire it through GW1, but it should remain gated only by GW1, I think.

Guild Wars 2 is, unfortunately, not very optimized for parallel use of processors (threading /hyperthreading), so both i5 and i7 processors will have similar (dare I risk to say, the same) performance. You’re basically limited to the clock of a single processor, to put it in maybe overly simple terms.

I don’t have windows 10 so nothing to say about that, but about the video: I use a laptop to play myself, and get through pretty fine (nearly to no drops) with a Geforce 740M, so I think you’ll be more than fine with the one that Asus you mentioned has. Keep in mind though some meta events with up to hundreds of people might experience minor backdrops if you play on high settings. But if you’re not worried about looking the prettiest at all times, just turn shaders to low, my low-end card gets steady 30FPS at all times without the extra shading.

The army that fought Mordremoth is implied to not be large but to be very specialized; right at the Verdant Brink map your task is to help the many factions of the Pact regain their strength, not by numbers but by tactical advantages (setting up defense camps and what not).

The Pact did take a very large hit from fighting two dragons. To the point that at Dragon’s Stand we have basically the best soldiers only assaulting the jungle, and of course with the help from both Exalted and the frog tribes, groups that are presumably knowledgeable enough about Maguuma that they can yield the environment against Mordremoth itself, even though he has become part of that environment.

So I think it’s safe to assume the Pact numbers are at an all time low by the time we get to the second dragon (they have many soldiers stationed at the Silverwastes and at Orr who can’t be counted on too), but the ones who did reach the dragon are pretty much elite mercenaries who can more or less compensate for being outnumbered. The event itself even helps conveying this idea: each floating island during the last fight on Dragon’s Stand has a single “captain” elite NPC of sorts and no more than around ~150 people (3 full squads) are able to take down the dragon’s body, which is by no means a massive army if you take into account Mordremoth’s area of influence and number of mordrem he popped out.

The Deep Sea Dragon is supposed to be mysterious and I believe it’s very intentional that no one has information on him.

When you think about it, all the stuff about Largos and Quaggans running from tentacled horrors, not to mention Karkas and Krait surfacing (both Karkas and Krait are VERY powerful, the latter being a literal army akin to real life ancient Persia/Egypt), point to a kind of Eldritch abomination trope surrounding the oceans. A quick swimming around the shore towards the bottom on Malchor’s Leap will demonstrate what I mean: the oceans are dark and you simply do not know what kind of horrors to expect coming from there, and that’s how the Dragon is supposed to be conveyed – as something unseen, unspoken and unfathomable.

So perhaps they never even bother to actually show us the Dragon, as it is more useful that it remains a mystery, simply there to be a wonder and a constant, yet distant, menace. Or perhaps it dies for reasons outside of our actions (fighting another dragon? the White Mantle drains its power for their purpose?) and we never really go to the Unending Ocean (neither it comes to us) to deal with it. I think it was Stephen King that said things are scarier if their true shape remains unknown, and the Deep Sea Dragon is definitely supposed to be the “scarier” of them all.

The new reward system and layout is good enough, it rewards more or less fairly and require more or less just enough effort to be fun to do. The fractals themselves, however, have become pretty stale. When fractals were announced we were told there was literally infinite potential as to what we could find inside, we could literally have 100 different fractals instead of rehashing Living World stuff (they are already planning to rehash even more…), and still have infinite amount of lore left to explore. So they implemented a great idea very poorly IMHO.

Nevertheless, what little fractals we have are fun to play through, but if they’re not going to release levels regularly they might as well add more “surprising” elements to keep us up and running without it becoming a chore.

Honestly I found envoy armor to be VERY underwhelming, specially the light one (seriously what’s up with the hip cape? we’re not all Victorian mages here). If anything I’ll raid for the sake of it, but not in a hurry to get that armor at all.

The only saving grace, aside from changing stats (which is not that much of a bonus assuming I already have sets I need to begin with, since I’m raiding), is if using other skins do not remove the walking effects or whatever other special effects they add to the armor.

Honestly I’d buy a very specialized salvage kit which never yielded runes and sigils from stuff (of course the standard kit would be there to salvage rares and exotics). I’d rather lose all the 10’s and 20’s of copper than spend a half hour every other hour piling up this stuff and selling it /mystic forging it.

Thank you all for the input. I will definitely look out for a raiding guild to join and learn! I guess listening is enough, I have no plans to lead up anyway; see ya’ll there!

Topic title says it all, but let me put it into context:

I’m a mute guy. Not the shy kind too, really mute, I can barely mumble (it’s not tragic or anything, I had a minor tumor and fortunately lost only the voice). Now, that doesn’t concern my playing of games at all, and I play a lot: I’ve done most things around GW2 short of the legendary journeys and raiding, playing for years alongside other games. With that said, fractals got stale so I’d like to start practicing and running raids.

I’ve got the gear and I’ve got the patience, only problem is, most groups I see around require voice chat like TS. While that would be no problem on my side (my ears work even better than they used to), I’m not sure if it would harm performance to the point where it’d be annoying for the team if I couldn’t point out things fast (e.g look guys a green circle!). Either way I have good humor about this – not gonna scream at people for not wanting me around, but if raiders overall do not find it unbearable, I am definitely going to silently sneak into the raiding game ^^

Reporting back to this thread, I actually reproduced a bug twice involving minions: when I summon jagged horrors through Lich Form skill 4, I never go out of combat sometimes, until I die (doesn’t matter if minions die before that either, but pretty sure their summoning triggered it). I will report it properly, of course, just letting y’all know.

The whole concept of minions is that they are walking piles of flesh animated solely for the sake of brutally murdering and bringing the souls of your enemies into their company among the dead, MWHAHAHAHAH…sorry, got carried over.

Anyway, minions are not like regular pets, in the sense that they are literally mindless automata born only to kill whatever has a red name over its head (which, lorewise, can probably be explained away by the Necromancer instinctively sensing danger, i.e, not actually controlling minions directly).

I recall somewhere it was mentioned the devs might consider [very arbitrarily] that while ranger pets are ok to protect and even kill stuff while the ranger afks, minions and otherwise “uncontrollable” pets are not ok. Since I can’t even begin to think of how to justify this segregation, I gotta agree with you that their posture is not clear at all.

As mentioned above, it is heavily implied by the whole context and the whole Mordremoth story arc, that all the vines you see around the world are its “body”.

Now, instead of thinking of it as a single, large tree rooting its way into the world, one might imagine Mordy as a “clonal colony”, basically meaning that he just genetically spreads himself identically everywhere, starting from a central point (wherever he first awoke). Vines and “mouths”, and everything else really, that he grows around can wither and die (we do that many times over with the Vinewrath), and they can even be thought of as “individuals” in the sense of a single think working out some metabolism, and it would not come into conflict that killing out any single part of the clonal colony will not end the spreading of it elsewhere.

We even have a real life example of a clonal colony linked together by an intricate network of roots, ever spreading as the individual treetrunks flourish and perish accross the years, this colony is called Pando: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_%28tree%29, and it is a worthwhile debate if it should be considered “a single tree”.

The only difference from this to Mordy, is that Mordy does have a central unit (inside the Dream of Dreams) from which he can seemingly spread himself as a clonal colony. This way of putting it not only erases the question of his size (the size is simply the size of the root network’s reach), but also solves the matter of his shape (alas, he does not grow uniformly like a regular living being would, instead appearing to be many, i.e all the Vines and Octovines and basically everything he spawns directly from his root network.

As for the Rata Novus data, it could be that his mouth has so much more concentration of ley energy than the rest of the colony, that this is the only actually measurable signal.

You have to think bigger than it being a mere dialogue between two people. Anet wants it so that, when someone comes here, they are not greeted with free (and largely random) amounts of hate and needless rage (cue the chan imageboards…just go there if you want some censure-free online life), neither that they lurk around and conclude that we are all just raging at each other all day long and nothing on topic or civilized is going on.

If you have to put up artificial communication barriers in order for people to “properly” communicate, so be it. Having a whole set of words automatically turning into kitten causes the whole set to be less used (since it now has only one element anyway for all intents and purposes). Note how we still use kitten kitten kitten all the time here, but it’s certainly not the main focus of whatever we are trying to say. With no filter, I believe most people (myself included) would resort to cursing for the sake of cursing much more than actually argumenting anything, or trying to convey our disagreements in more elaborate ways.

All that said, I am all for freedom of speech. I’d rather have people calling me racist and xenophobe slurs all day long online than not being able to call anyone anything, or to come up with “dangerous” ideas. But since this is just a game I have no intention of holding up a dialogue which actually requires such freedom of speech anyways, so I just go with the flow. Besides, freedom of speech is arguably not even everyone’s preference, as they would be gravely offended by reading this and that about them, regardless of its truth value. So if you are a game company, and you want to reach out to all kinds of people, you definitely want to establish “rules of language” that are compatible with having just enough freedom to cause much more “friendly” rather than “agressive” disputes. As for every other case (like bugs in the filter), the preview option is there just for that.

While this should stay a fantasy game no matter what the technology becomes because it’s kitten magic (think FFXII with large airships and teleporting crystals and people still think Victorian architecture is da bomb), it actually makes sense lorewise that there should be more sci-fi crap hanging around, if only because the Fractals of the Mists can actually lead to fractals far in the future (which we have seen none of unless Swampland is a very bleak future), and someone should already have brought alien stuff back with them from there.

Balance is a huge problem since sPvP started (so like, since release?) but MMR certainly isn’t. I get paired with idiots all the time at 60% winrate, but it’s not because they can’t play, they just don’t want to. I can only assume that at ~40% you’re getting more idiots, that’s all.

They are probably not that bad players, however (remember if they are in diamond they got through their own MMR hell, so hell is others, huh?), and you’re all just trolling each other in chat instead of actually adapting your playstyles. A short example, I am usually the only one to switch to/from support when we don’t have enough of it/have too much of it on the team, while most people simply claim “lol I’ll play thief even tho we have 3 necros and a mesmer, gl guys”. And this single, simple act took me solo queueing from ~40% to ~60% winrate.

You might be surprised to realize that many real life animals do carry “man made loot” around, be it inside their digestive systems (naturally hurting and eventually killing them), or stuck on their bodies because they were swimming around some area with lots of trash.

Now, surely we wouldn’t expect to kill turtles IRL and carve whole pistols out of their stomachs, but the creatures in Tyria are profoundly different from their IRL inspirations, to the point a veteran wolf might actually be able to swallow an armor whole! (or at least digest it into some disgusting indistinguishable, but salvageable, garment)

This is certainly not immersion breaking: you might think that while carrying lots of bags around while dodging and jumping and gliding, some stuff is gonna fall off on the ground. The logical jump from there to animals eating that random stuff we occasionaly lose (specially very wild ones like trolls and savage rabid bunnies) is not a big one, if you can suspend your disbelief just enough to allow fantasy animals to be able to eat some gold coins.

The longer fractals (like Cliffside and Snowblind), when they were released, actually lived up to that feeling of exploration and getting inside the world of Tyria that dungeons had – up to a certain point of course – it wasn’t storytelling properly said, but it was indirect exposition, much like the Souls series, and it was great at it.

But, due to a combination of boredom over replaying it over and over again, and also ( specially so) due to no incentive at all to do them, but rather to actually just triple swamp all day long and forget the “journey” fractals, they became what they are today. This is sad because GW lore in general (including 1 and 2) is so rich that they could have turned fractals into a literal maze stockfull of different scenarios and “mini dungeons” with little to no effort [in creating cutscenes and the like], since they could just lay out the scenario, insert enemies with meaningful dialogues and let the story tell itself. Somehow, I still have hope they catch up and make Fractals live up to its initial proposal.

As someone mentioned above, the Mursaat are very interesting villains compared to the rest Anet came up with, precisely because they are not bread’n’butter “evil” in an absolute sense. They have no qualms about killing other species, including humans, charr, etc. However they definitely would not do so out of pure entertainment. Their ultimate go is survival both of their selves and of their magic. They did not yield their magic like the other elder races during the last dragon awakening, and would probably rather die than do so, while at the same time, not wanting to die at all of course.

And there’s Lazarus the Dire, a particularly proud-of-himself Mursaat who swore “revenge upon countless generation” after his literally the horcrux plot from Harry Potter plan was foiled by GW1’s playable character.

I hope they are finally tying up the knot on Saul’s storyline all the way back to the bonus pack in GW1. Either way Mursaat are awesome “It was me plotting all along!” kind of villains (so is Abbadon, but it is much easier to go along with Mursaat since they are a whole group and Abby is kinda deader than dead).

And now I need that stupid Ascended Gear to actually go through this myself.

People who gamble the TP or Teq as their main source of activity (or real life lottery for that matter) really need to rethink their focus as players (or citizens :P);

There is a concept in probability theory relevant for things which are either very likely to happen or very unlikely to, which is dangerously called “Almost Surely” (dangerously because it has a precise definition not necessarily identical to the usual English language term). Basically, it means the following: if something will almost surely occur, it will then happen with a very high probability (say, you are 99.999999% likely to get wet naked under rain), and should you have infinite time to measure infinitely many outcomes of that something, then it will happen, at least once, no matter what (you may [kind of] miraculously not get wet for some time naked under rain, but oh boy will you get wet after hours, let alone infinitely many).

Now I know this looks obvious but bear with me here and consider the opposite: say you have a probability of 0.00625 of getting that sexy precursor you want. I took that number from the 1/160 someone mentioned above and did not verify, doesn’t matter anyway, what matters to me, is that it’s very low. Now, this is not only low, like 1% low, it’s really low, in fact, a pessimist would tell you it might as well be considered zero. This event, as the above definition would induce us to think, will still happen, at least once, given infinite time and rare equipment, but question the practicality of this: surely, in average, you would have spent much more gold than the whole price of a legendary just to gamble for it! For more information, these two wikipedia articles (yup, wikipedia articles) will enlighten you on trying unprobable things for too much time/money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

That’s not to say you shouldn’t do Teq, or throw stuff on Zommoros, when you feel like it. Who knows? But please do not count on it as your prime source for anything, because it will almost surely work

There’s so much backstory and general lore they have buildup from GW1 to use on fractals they could literally release monthly fractals until the game goes down and they would never run out of original stuff, so yeah, just bring in anything.

I have a compulsion for plot reveals, alas, my life will not be complete if they bankrupt and stop releasing new lore before all the Dragons are revealed.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lore/Am-I-missing-something-or-HoT-Spoilers/6005738

That link was a great reading! It actually hit me with many other stories I’ve seen other than HoT. It felt really weird because core game set up a great story arc: we had the Pact building itself and developing powerful magic/technology to take down a previously thought invincible foe. Then Mordy came and boom, we can just go into Dream and rip his metaphorical fat belly apart.

I guess that law explains a bit better (concerning me, personally) why the story felt rushed: I suppose I could go with the PC being a psychological Juggernaut, as long as I could “participate” in knowing a bit more about how PC turned the Dream itself against a dragon.

As for the order of events, I do believe better placement of story should take place here (though, I don’t know how they could have done this); Many of the relation between meta events and story events mentioned here I simply did not notice, and not out of lack of attention. Actually, my first playthrough I have not moved into a new map for story before fully completing all events inside the previous meta (e.g I’ve done all pylons in AB before moving to TD for story), and that actually hindered me from seeing these details (by the time I completed a map, the story’s already lost in translation, so to speak).

I so agree with this. Furthermore, I firmly believe the next Raid map should have a Quaggan boss (much more fearsome than any Sloth).

Since no one commented on this yet, nice job, I appreciate the effort to compile these fun details!

I did not realize the points about being a Sylvari player and the details about Snaff’s accomplishment, thanks for pointing it out.

However, it still sounds rather strange that individuals can overcome (even if as a group) the will of a “force of nature” kind of character; it’s like if I wanted to deny gravity simply by focusing on doing so, and should be independent of PC being psychologically absolute. Actually, it should even be independent of whether his body is being challenged somewhere else: one would think a dragon’s presence would be kind of uniform inside his domain.

Anyway, I guess it is a writer’s choice to make a “godly” character that is actually lovecraftian (then he would be arguably unbeatable and it would make no sense) or a “false idol” kind that does have a weakness. Even though I like the first option more from a lore point of view, I suppose the second is what goes better with a game like GW2.

GW2 as it stands, literally “Lives and dies by its community”, so the short answer is: we will get to see the whole world and beyond if the playerbase is steady (and growing, for we’ll have a pretty kitten large map to fill out with group metas), but won’t even get to see all the dragons if population dies out instead.

What was done in GW1 was that, after population started to diminish, they made it so we could take allied NPCs around with us to do all of the content by ourselves if we wished to. The way GW2 works, I don’t see it happening. could Dragon’s Stand be done with a single person and NPCs? And, more importantly, would it even feel like the same content? GW1 certainly did feel the same with NPCs or players, minus the fun dialogues and versality of builds.

I have just finished the HoT story, and have two questions (or more like, “what the hell just happened” moments):

- First, where the kitten is the epilogue?! There was no dialogue with the folks, no running from collapsing tree, no nothing. It just kicked me back into DS so I could farm my eyes off getting masteries. That was…rushed, to say the least;

- Speaking of rushing, the story as a whole did not really convince me the PC could actually culminate into killing an Elder Dragon from inside out by messing with its mind. One thing is fighting with the Pact’s army and defeating Zhaitan through raw firepower (and magic) but this was something else entirely. Even though we went through a lot during the personal story, It’s a long stretch from everything else the PC has done so far, to (apparently with not that much effort) accomplishing what Snaff has only barely done before with Kralk. I really believe I have missed something here – even with help from DE 2.0, the PC started the last fight, and his/her will didn’t even start to bent in front of mordy’s mind. So my question I guess is: when was the transition of the PC from a great warrior to a literal force of nature bending creature?

Interestingly enough, anything can be kept afloat in the air through diamagnetic levitation (a google search for this term or its “advocate”, a certain A.Geim will lead to videos of floating frogs). Problem is, most experimental setups for it require superconductivity, which is hard to maintain at high temperature, and naturally it is much harder to keep things flying around as they get heavier.
For all we know, the Asura can keep some pretty bulky stuff floating around, and if you are into hard sci-fi, you might justify it by going with “well, these guys are masters of superconductivity! In fact, even these harmless boxes are built with awesome floating metamaterials!”.

Needless to say, most of the magic here is very hard to give proper context to – but I also enjoy thinking it’s just some pretty amazing natural effects the Tyrians discard as “magic” because they cant rationalize it.

Actually I hope Anet doesn’t try to explore all that space at all. Given how badly they have handled HoT and how their vertical exploration didn’t feel as “right” as what they made in Vanilla, they should just focus on making the best they can with the map size they already have (which is quite large, mind you). At most they could reveal Elona or a portion of it since it’s “tied” to Tyria as Eurasia is in our world.

As for a [lorewise] reason why we couldn’t explore other continents, it would be really pleasing if at least the two dragons we know the least about (Primordus and DSD) were actual “forces of nature” and we can’t even face them like the others. Thinking of it, they are the ones whose corruption take shape through a “primary” source (water and…rocks, I guess?) rather than a “secondary” one (Zhaitan, Kralk, Jormag and even Mordy all need some kind of living being or at least something which used to live in order to spread corruption, unless I’m missing something). Also, it would make more sense if such fundamental level of corruption was so powerful that we couldn’t even grasp it (coughLovecraftcough), and the oceans could be permanently out of question to us. Even if I’m missing something and every dragon is around the same “level”, I really wish at least one dragon would live up to the hype that the lore gave us.

Heck, they could even make it so Primordus and DSD are fighting for some particularly cozy layline at the sea floor and are literally tearing the world apart everywhere around Tyria for it. Anything goes as long as we don’t get a giant map filled with literally nothing stock full of repetitive events.

If either the wisp run for swamp went back to being almost impossible like the old days, or the Mossman became a mad Eldritch horror worthy of lovecraftian nightmares that took half an hour to kill (which is more or less what the other fractals take in average), then people would be forced to do other fractals as well. Or simply stop doing fractals…oh well

And here I was thinking I had a crappy PC and it was all my fault not seeing stuff (even though no fps drops happen at all). Sometimes I can’t see my own traps triggering, so I have to hope people are taking damage, and other times I have no idea where the damage I’M taking is coming from. This is seriously out of hand, and it also happens with wells sometimes, as well as necro cloud.

Achievements in GW1 actually played the role of main objectives to strive for during the game. For example, the PvP achievements gave unique emotes to players after they reached a certain amount of progress, which they could use anywhere and people would think (hey look that guy must be playing pvp for years!). The PvE achievements of certain areas increased/decreased the damage of enemies on said area, allowing for faster/more viable running. Not to mention if you saw it written “God Walking Amongst Mere Mortals” as their title you knew they worked hard for it and didn’t just afk-auto attack a legendary mob to have “The Tormentor” under their name.

I guess the point I’m trying to get across is that Anet actually knows how to pull achievements. Heck I played most of GW1 solely to get achievements, and it’s not like they would mean a posterior reward, I was playing for the achievements in themselves! I can’t bother doing that in GW2; I only go for achievements because of the shinies, and I have no idea how they got this wrong, among other things.

I have explicitly switched from a condi necro to a chrono because of diamond skins dropping my tiers. It’s no use trying to outrotate someone as necro, if they’re good they WILL chase after your point and get you. It’s also no use claiming “Teamplay will counter it”. In a 3v3 fight in which I am a condi reaper and the other team has a diamond skin ele, it’s as if my team has one less member and they have one more (I’m basically turning it into 2v4 simply by being me).

Bunker Chrono on the other hand can spend the whole 10 minutes of a match tanking anything on point, and while I can’t kill anything fast, people eventually pile up on small mistakes and die to my slowly grinding conditions. I hate it but I have no choice unless I want to lose 70% of all matches.

There are so many examples of successful eSports around: mainly MOBAs, for MMOs should NOT be primarily about eSports. Anyway, it’s surprising how badly they are pulling this off. What kind of people are they striving to entice? FPS players? LoL players (like they will ever play anything else with how much money they already get)? I don’t understand, and I believe even the professionals they are trying to “entice” do not understand either.

So even before this bunking meta came up I have been playing a boonstripping based necro (and now a reaper but still focusing on taking down boons). For this reason, Revenants actually did not bother me so much, because their uptime relies heavily on holding up all the boons while not having too many conditions, which is exactly what I strive for (most builds either stack might and/or regen with protection in some way, removing boons constantly works surprisingly well).

But the mesmer is another story. It doesn’t matter how fast I can keep their protection down (and I do it very fast mind you) they bring it back almost instantly, and stacking. It’s like I didn’t press any button at all on my keyboard. Crazy stuff, and that’s not even to mention all the invulnerability they can pull up (3s each 30s if I recall? that’s flat out immortality for a reasonably skilled player). Of course, my build gets stompkittened by those elementalists immune to conditions, but I expect it to happen, and they can’t damage me either anyway, what I do not expect is all my attacks against mesmers to simply mean nothing, even if they actually “land right on target”.

So, I have not read the entire thread, but let me compare the situation OP has posed to my experience with the original Guild Wars game:

Back in GW1, by the time I joined in, it was already a “mature” game (EoTN had just launched). At this time, there were a myriad of elite areas to choose from (Underworld, Fissure of Woe, Domain of Anguish, not to mention the hard mode content widely available after completing the main story).

There was nothing casual about these elite areas. If you went to the Domain of Anguish outpost, and used the equivalent lfg tool available at the time, all you would see is “lfg r10+ SS/Rt/Tank/WoH monk only NO NOOBS”, referencing VERY tight requirements: we are talking about a game that had literally thousands of different skill combinations, and players eventually converged to using a single one in order to rush the content. When I first completed the “main game” and looked at these elite areas, it was very frustrating, to say the least, having to limit myself so much.

Eventually though, I joined a guild and met a couple of buddies whom I played most of the “hard” content with. Thing is, neither of us tried to replicate the run of the mill builds around, we simply fleshed out something at the spot and went on to experiment. Obviously we couldn’t run at the same speed others did; the previous elite area I used as an example took about 2 hours with a good team and the recommended build, for us it was a day’s work unless we completed one sub-area by one across days. The point is, we could actually do it, as long as we were sensible enough to build something which worked, but there was more than one thing that worked. We got to a point where our own custom build with NPC party members was actually doing fairly well and we could run every single elite area in manageable time, as long as we wouldn’t become greedy with luring too many mobs, etc.

I see no way of anything even close to this happening with the new raid content. The reason is very simple: the elite areas in GW1 were elite in the sense that, if you did not learn the game mechanic (which at the time was choosing a set of 8 skills out of hundreds, for eight party members), you would fail at all cases. But if you did learn, you would succeed at varying degrees of success (taking 4 hours to run the elite content is much worse than taking 2 hours, but you still won and deserve the rewards/to experience the lore).

The GW2 elite content so far, which I will only include raids (the high level fractals are perfectly doable with any setup as long as you have AR), is elite in another sense: you either maximize DPS, or you will likely fail at all cases. There is no “learning the game mechanic” as people try to claim (learning to dodge red circles and to save a single utility slot for boon removal? I learned that in Wayfarer Foothills, no one should feel special about this), and the DPS race requirement can only be fulfilled by a single set of classes/builds.

This is alienating not only to players who are too casual to attempt doing the hard content (which I think is no argument too, I played with my dad back in the day and we managed the hard content eventually so he could experience the lore by himself, with him playing for 1, 2 hours a day at most), but also alienates players who can go down the “hardcore” road but can’t be bothered to do it by looking at some metabuild wiki. Anet has done this right before, so I have no idea how did they manage to insert a DPS race into the game and call it elite content (Mallyx and Dhuum are ashamed of you). Yes I can play the raids, yes I can spit the thousands of damage you want me to, yes I can git gud, but I’m not having fun with it and will complain until you give me the juicy challenging stuff you used to give before.