Blade Syphon.4325

And...you don't see why that might be a problem in Anet's eyes? As the article itself said - they want players to actually engage with new content when it releases, rather than do it once, then never do it again, effectively creating problems that already exist with the game's less popular pieces of content for new players, or players that may like the content that others don't. Anet also isn't asking you to jump through hoops - they're asking you to simply play the content, and if the future expansion relics are anything to go by, then they'll all be acquirable through collections, zone-wide achievements, Reward Boxes, and if you really want to grind, crafting. You still maintain the QoL aspect of the Legendary Relic - that it's account wide and you can swap the relic's affix at the push of a button, all you need to do is simply add a new relic to the library of existing relics you have by just doing whatever piece of content the relic you're after requires of you. That's not a big ask, especially if you only play a few characters, and don't need every new relic for each build. There is literally nothing preventing you from just laser focusing on one or two relics that look interesting and synergize with your build, and ignoring the rest. I feel like a lot of you are making a mountain out of a molehill, especially considering most of the requirements for the SotO relics were incredibly easy to do in a short amount of time.

Title more or less says it all. Camped out at the Waypoint for just shy of an hour, and never had the event start, which brickwalls both the Protector of Rata Novus and Primal Maguuma achievement, as well as the Zojja's Journal achievement chain.

...Have we really reached the point where we have people complaining that a rough $10 per LS season is too much of a barrier of entry for new players to afford? As others have already pointed out, having to pay a grand total of $125 for literally every piece of content in Guild Wars 2 is not at all a bad deal, at all, and nothing says you have to purchase it immediately. A new player just getting into the game has the entire Core Campaign and Season 1 free to them, and there's no reason why they should feel obligated to pay for anything expansion or LS wise until after they've completed that large chunk of content, save for possibly dropping $30 for the HoT and PoF bundle for the sake of having a Raptor mount from the get go. Beyond that? We're talking the price of two cups of Coffee from a Starbucks for a Living Story Season, and half the asking price of a regular AAA title release for End of Dragons and Secrets of the Obscure. Bonus points - Once you've purchased the content, it's yours forever, with out any worry of having to pay a Sub fee on top of it. That...that isn't expensive, and that's not a barrier to entry to anyone who has any form of income. And frankly, if you have time to play an MMO, you probably have time to throw away some disposable income in the process. So no, I do not agree that anything needs to be done to make the LS content or expansions more accessible, other than possibly making the bundles more obvious and easy to locate in the in-game gem store.

I took my wife through her first SAB last night, with the warning that World 2 was a significant jump up in difficulty compared to World 1. It had been a few years since I did World 2 myself, but I did recall the difficulty spike that I warned her about. What I had forgotten, though, was the overall tedium of Zone 2 and 3. Zone 1 is fine - it's a bit longer than World 1's zones, but not too much so, and has a nice little break up mid way with the raft before moving onto the final two little segments. It feels like a good, natural progression from World 1's zones. Then we got to Zone 2 and 3, and I was quickly reminded why I hated doing these the first time, and never did them after. They're long, tedius, and just not fun to play through. Worst yet, the exploration of the zones is lackluster compared to the ones in World 1, given that the zone are much more linear than the original World's 3 Zones. The Smile paths do help a *little* in this regard (like being able to completely skip the stupid trap pagodas in Zone 2), but it doesn't help the other problems they have - mostly how awful the combat is in SAB and how it's the focus of Zone 2, and how both Zones vastly over stay their welcome., which is a shame because aesthetically they're really cool, and the bosses in Zone 3 are a lot of fun, but honestly by the time you get to the Yeti and Storm Wizard/Dragon, you're just kind of at the point of exhaustion where you're just throwing yourself at the boss until it dies. The only real saving grace is that there's no reason to do World 2 a second time after you've completed it on your first play through, but that's not really a saving grace so much as just a desire to not want to return to them out of the tedium. It's not even a case of World 2 being too difficult - my wife used ten continue coins to get fifty lives, and went through maybe ten or fifteen of them to get through the entirety of World 2. Her biggest complaint, and mine as well, is just that Zone 2 and 3 are too long, plain and simple.

That's not entirely accurate. The entry price for WoW is simply the $15 monthly fee after your first month for access to everything in the game except for the most current expansion. Given that a brand new player to WoW might not want to immediatly jump into Shadowlands, that's actually an extremely reasonable price of entry. The Base Edition of Shadowlands is also only $40, ten dollars more than the PoF bundle, and ten dollars cheaper than the complete GW2 collection. So really the pricing is more or less identical - the only difference between the two games is that you pay monthly for WoW (and let's be honest, $15 a month shouldn't be a barrier of entry for anyone anymore actually interested in playing the game). Pointless nit-picking comparisons aside - I do think Anet should do an all in one bundle that features the three expansions, as well as the LS Seasons, or at the very least a bundle of all the LS Seasons together, rather than charging individually for each Season package. The price of entry to gain access to all of GW2's content is close to $100 when bought in bulk, which is a bit of a steep cost, all things considered.

HoT: Yay, Meta's on every map! PoF: Wait, you literally can't fail story missions anymore? EoD: Finally, we've achieved balance.