JDub.1530

NA, Skrittburgh, Griffonfall I played most days of the beta Tues - Sun, around 9-10PM EST for about 2-4hrs each session. I did select a WvW guild, which was a small guild with no larger alliance. The matchups felt less balanced than normal. There seemed to be a lack of commanders during my play sessions, and many of the people who did tag up, seemed to do so only to fill that void. There were several occasions of having our map queued yet there didn't seem to be anyone actually around responding to things, perhaps due to a lack of commander to rally around. The Skrittsburgh matchup felt better. The could have been a factor of being longer. Or maybe participation numbers dropped of as the Beta progressed. Multiple players from both matchups expressed the opinion that our server was comprised of the "leftovers." Certainly the issue of people not being placed on the correct server was an issue, and could have driven people away, rather than dealing with or waiting on Support to fix things. But I didn't personally experience that issue, nor anyone else in my guild who participated.

No, it makes NON-torch weaker, because they don't gain any benefit from the trait.

But you also lose the AOE burning proc for other weapons. So now it's almost entirely a Torch trait

Am I misreading something? The changes to Radiant Fire are stated to enabled off hands other than Torch, but it seems like it's packing all the benefits into Torch instead.

You can filter any undesired game modes out of the list.

Don't even trust Blizzard? I didn't realize trust in Blizzard was a currency that still existed in 2023. But that's a different discussion. GW2 has been around for more than a decade. Where have they earned a lack of trust with respect to exploitive monetization? If anything, they've improved some of their monetizations. They eventually added mount selection licenses to counter the RNG of the original adoption licenses. They added Black Lion Statuettes to BL chests, so even if the RNG fails you, you earn currency that will let you select items you specifically want, which BL chest items will eventually rotate into. And even more recently they reworked the statuettes so that items don't rotate out, so older items will remain available, so you don't have to wait for the item you're looking for to make it back into rotation If anything, the new system is an overall benefit to players, as we'll be able to pick our rewards for basically doing existing dailies. And I see no reason to believe it's a prelude to some sort of cash grab. If they want people to pay money for special items, they can just put it in their already existing gem store--where people have shown they'll buy them.

This is nothing new to the game. Those Black Lion weapons we can purchase with Black Lion tickets cost 1 ticket when they release. If you don't buy them before the next set rotates in, the ticket price goes up. Every festival has a meta reward for doing the Annual achievements. If you don't complete the annuals by festival end, then you'll have to purchase it next year with festival currencies. Current dailies will reward you with 2g. If you skip a day that's 2g you miss out on forever. So fomo and limited time pricings are nothing new to GW2. And without specific rewards/pricings, we have no clue how easy or hard it will be to catch up on missed rewards. Bear in mind "seasonal" items aren't the only rewards available, and we don't know if the pricing structure will force you to go for seasonal items or general materials. Maybe if you skip getting some mystic coins or clovers you can still afford the unique items. We'll have to wait and see, but these changes don't seem so drastic as to panic that GW2 is suddenly like "those other games" with "exploitive battlepasses."

I haven't tried it, but I would think LB WB would be best for kiting. Hitting at range and using Virtues to maintain distance. Whether it's effective at that is an entirely different story. I'd imagine you only have a short window before you're forced into closer combat.

Agreed. I couldn't give it a full workout as I had no access to the Runes I needed, but it felt pretty good.

Just pulling what I read on the wiki.

I was expecting one of those follow up patches saying they fixed the Alac duration for GotL. Probably not terribly hard to accidentally type in a wrong number.

Agreed there. I honestly thought it was a mistake when I saw 3/4s of Alacrity (with zero boon duration). And honestly from my brief experiments, the whole CA kit is irrelevant, as spamming the 1-skill seemed to stack Alacrity better than any of the other skills. Which is why I feel removing Alac from the 1-skill and greatly increasing the duration for the rest might be a way of making it better while avoiding overstacking issues (with 1-skill spam).

Funny that you said it's more important to maintain Alac on yourself than your party in order to provide group Alac 😆 But this doesn't feel promising, because on top of being super sweaty and rigid, it has zero fault tolerance. You regretted demonstrating this build/rotation with the CC golems, but I think it was perfect, because it shows how fragile it is. Your rotation got interrupted, and you let things just completely fall off waiting for your CDs to come around again. That seems worse than just using a less sweaty build that has sub-100% uptime.

According to the wiki: What tactician wouldn't take advantage of all the tools at their disposal, i.e. firearms, infused with the power of their virtues.

I don't believe we're going to see the new weapons tomorrow. The Beta is just lifting the Elite Spec limitations of existing weapons. The new weapons aren't slated for the SOTO launch, so they're unlikely to be in this beta.