Nash.2681

Pretty much what most people already said. Over the years I developed a habbit of waiting for rare unidentified yellows to pile up to ~50-100, open them, throw the weapons in the mystic toilet and salvage all armor and trinkets with a mystic salvage kit. That way I never went low on Ectos and still sit on several stacks of them.

I agree, I was just referring to the part of OPs surprise of having to wait another 6 months for the piece of cake he was looking for. Personally I was amongst the "more suspicious players" and it saddens me that apparently I was right about it. Given the disappointment of quite a lot people that got SotO blue eyed and are now disappointed, I wonder if they really stick to this concept or revert it again in fear that for the next mini "expansion" more people will vote with their wallet.

Thanks to all sharing the information about legendary gear. As someone who always bought the expansions except for SotO, I thought this would be the regular behaviour of legendary gear. Apparently it's not. So... can we get a word about this @Rubi Bayer.8493 ?

Well, I frankly like the idea. It wouldn't hurt anyone and I'd indeed consider it a minor QoL improvement.

Bit late to the party, but for the most part I'm with the OP. The only thing I have to disagree is the SotO rant, since it was clearly communicated that the so called content will be delivered in pieces over time, so everyone being surprised about that made a fault themselves. However, the initial post made me think about why I mostly share the same feelings. And to me, there's many reasons that individually wouldn't be too bad, but over time they cumulate and now I'm here thinking about the lot that imo went wrong and let to this burnt out feeling (to keep it short I'll stick to PvE only). Company direction. Every now and then there seems to be a new vision of what the game should be like, just to be abandoned after a bit of try and error. I feel like they never had a clear idea of what they want GW2 to be and how to keep players engaged. Or may be they just hadn't the courage to stick to a path, knowing it would drag some players away, who knows. But as the saying says "you simply can't please everyone". Repeating old errors. Balance is a big issue across all game modes and GW1 showed, that adding more and more options makes it exponentially harder to get the game somewhat balanced. Yet they kept adding more E-Specs and now Weapon Masteries, making every approach to balance the game a plain nightmare. The neglection of instanced party/squad content. While having an open world to explore and just relax is nice, it's imo nothing to sustain a game in the long run. Running around anonymously, whacking a big baddy for laughable loot every now and then amongst dozens of other players, where it doesn't matter wether one activates auto-attack and watches youtube or actually engages in the content is just disappointing. While it's nice as an option and for variety, it's hard for me to believe that this kind of gameplay really keeps players interested in playing over an extended period of time and actually deal with the game and it's possibilities and stay connected. To achieve that, a MMO should focus on instanced party content to promote finding like-minded people and overcome challenges together. Remember how good it felt to finally beat a hard mode dungeon in GW1 EotN for the first time? Or some tougher missions or elite areas? And after that I always felt it was worth coming back, be it to challenge myself, for the loot or just to help friends or even strangers. Simply because one got the feeling of "hey, we achieved something together!". But GW2 abandoned dungeons, fractals are at a stale with the few newer additions being... let's say... not so well received. Raids are abandoned and strikes feel like a cheap fast-food substitute. Literally every type of content that holds some replayability value got abandoned or got added in an unattractive way. And on top, that kind of content mostly got trivialised by massive powercreep. Shown ignorance towards the community. There was a time when there were community coordinators, even for multiple languages, that kept in touch with us players and sent a feeling of "we see you, we hear you". But for years, all we get is a couple of announcments and every kind of criticism just stays uncommented. The whole legendary relic fiasko? Zero, just announcments, sometimes even contradicting the ones before and that's it. No response to the massive amount of feedback. Also this thread, lots of dedicated long time veterans share their feelings and their concerns- zero response. Quality decline. Mostly visible with EoD which I guess left many of us disappointed, especially those that loved GW1 Cantha. I won't even drop a word about the disgrace called Gyala Delve. And SotO.... I'm sorry, but to me it's almost a scam. Making active players pay for follow up living story content is a no go for me. May be a minor reason and it might sound strange, but to me, the lowering of AP that came with EoD was a huge let down. Only getting 1-3 AP for achievements doesn't feel very motivational to me, knowing we got +5 or even +10 for similar stuff in the past. While I know I'll never be even close to the top of the ladder, seeing the account AP increasing slowly but steady also held some motivation to play. Sometimes I just browsed the hero panel to see what I could do to just add some AP. To me this is gone entirely. I'll end here, even though I'm sure I could bring up even more points, but it's already quite some wall of text. Why I wrote all above you might ask? Why didn't I leave long ago already if everything is so terrible? There's not "the" answer to it. One aspect certainly is, that it's hard to leave a belvoed franchise after roughly 20 years, since there's also a lot of good memories and the hope for better times to come. Another is, that besides all its (unfortunatly steadily increasing) flaws, GW2 also does a lot of things right. Many of the QoL improvements added over time turned out to be blue prints for other studios. I found myself more than once trying out some other game thinking "oh nice, but GW2 had this feature already 2 years ago, good copy pasta" or "well, nice game, but too much QoL features are missing to keep me interested". Also worth to mention is the server architecture with almost no down times, not even for patches. And the possibility to return to instances even after disconnects is a straight upgrade to what we had in GW1 and early GW2.

Last time I checked there was legendary gear available for all classes. But I agree, always taking out infusions, put them in the bank, taking them out with a different character, equip them, repeat would be a nuisance. But as others already said- by the time you can start careing about multiclassing in fractals on levels where AR actually matters, people usually have aquired more than enough infusions and gear to put them on, so no infusion swapping required. I'm not completely opposed to an account wide AR system from the beginning, but at the current state I fail to see how such a thing could make it's way in the game in a well thought-out way using a reasonable amount of dev ressources. I mean, they decided to change how runes work and caused a complete mess, I don't see any good coming from them touching AR...

If I understood the new system correctly, it's already in the game. It's called "legendary gear" which allows you to swap your AR around as you see fit and comes with even more QoL services.

While I strongly disagree with all the underlying "elitists" nonsense build on unfounded prejudices, I second the few objective and correct statements. You don't have to run a meta build to be successfull, performing 5-10% below them but with a build you feel confident with and get a long well, is totally fine and no one will ever attack you for that (unless you apply for a top hardcore raiding guild aiming for record runs...). But I'd like to add- meta (and LI) builds are there for a reason. And while I admire OP's dedication, it's highly unlikely at this point to reinvent the wheel. The info is all out there and it's nothing wrong in using it. And by "using it" I don't mean blindly copy&pasting, but using it as a starting point, understand why certain traits, skills and gear choices are made and then adjust it to ones own preferences. Also it's often totally fine to stick with something you figured out to work well, even though some updates change things in the meantime. For example- I still refuse to buy SotO, so I don't have access to some relics and weapon choices. But I still play my Reaper the "old" way with a staff in the 2nd weapon slot and guess what- works perfectly fine and I still do better than most other Reapers I meet. And why? The build fits to my playstyle, I practiced it and I know how to adjust it for certain situations. Or if there's a need for an aDPS, I still dust of my Condi-Alac-Tempest running a ~1 year old build with mainhand scepter instead of dagger. And you can guess it- absolutely no issues with the squads or the content since I know the build, what it does and how it works and just do what I'm supposed to do.

I support this idea. If for whatever reason the commander needs to afk for a few minutes the whole squad building process is put on hold. This would be a straight improvement.

100% agree, give it a green vfx or better- give it a vfx that makes it clearly visible as friendly AND doesn't prevent players from seeing the dangerous stuff beneath.

As mentioned already, legendary is just a QoL upgrade to ascended. However, I don't see aquiring asc. gear grindy nowadays, especially if one does instanced content, which you seem to be interested in since you look up builds at hardstuck. Do some fractals, strikes and raids and soon you'll drowning in bank tabs full of asc. gear.

Signs that forum moderators don't play the game: putting this topic into instanced content sub while it affects the whole game (like OW PvE and WvW aswell) 😆 On topic: I wouldn't mind having more marker options to chose from.

Me too. Exploration can be fun, especially when one is fresh to the game. But to me it has little to no replayability, you do it once and are done. If that would be my main interest, I'd probably quit the game years ago already, only to come back for a few days when there's something new. But to each their own.

Attack you? Come on, some people are really sensitive nowadays... Anyway, the legendary armory's only three advantages are its flexibility, the certainity to always have the best possible gear option ready and the free skin change. Yes, what you describe about ascended drops is absolutely true, but that's something people know before they get their legendary gear. And I assume the certainity of having always up to date gear with full freedom of choice outweight that for most. And that's why it absolutely baffles me that some people are cool with this changes. Yes, they may seem minor for now and just be tiny steps. But those are steps in a direction that's absoltuly contrary to their philosophy so far.

And you know that it will stay like this in future expansions because...? I mean, if unlocking the relics will be so trivial that a single story play through will be sufficient, that we'll unlock them "on the fly"- why make this change at all?