Adotiln Urthadar.1823

Anet, implement the most basic accessibility features in 2024? Doesn't sound feasible.

Yea, you can't accept daily/weekly/special rewards if it would take you over the cap.

As several Bonus Events are awarding Astral Acclaim, I was curious about what would happen if accepting the reward would take you over the cap of 1300. Turns out the AA disappears into the void and you get nothing.

The Weaver's Prowess nerf is baffling. cWeaver was already a relatively weak build and now it's even worse.

Spirited Arrival is a weird place to put more might as it competes with Windborne Notes. Seems like it would be simpler to just double the might on CA skills or something. Also disappointing to see no warrior changes, seeing that quickness berserker is clunky, low damage and has no utility. Plus the arc divider change killing off greatsword makes it super boring.

All of this from a PvE perspective only: Loving the pulsing alacrity on Tempest, will finally feel like a reliable support. Baffled by the buffs to power weaver - an already very strong spec. Should be something like ~1300 even before any benefits from the new weave self are considered which puts it in real danger of totally eclipsing the condi build and maybe even catalyst (why play classes with slow ramp-up if pWeaver is burstier and has similar long-term DPS). Power levels in general are absurdly high at the moment, we need nerfs not an endless series of buffs. The pWeaver buffs are especially confusing when Scrapper and Reaper (two of the weakest DPS classes) get relatively small buffs (if Reaper gets buffed at all). On the subject of Reaper - why on earth are the notes so vague? Other specs get precise coefficient values and Reaper gets "additional damage, stun, and condition duration, and grants you additional boons". 0.5s icd on Tomes is brilliant, really want to see this in a few other places (circular projectiles on Catalyst, Facet of Nature etc) Very happy to see further walking back of the irritating "disadvantage" concept by giving Daredevil its Steal back. Rifle deadeye buffs are nice, but this is another very strong build getting buffs where I just feel it would be healthier to nerf the alternatives instead. Great to see that Mark isn't removed when getting downed any more, can we maybe do the same for Catalyst energy? While I don't begrudge Bladesworn getting some QoL, it feels quite rough that it's the focus of the warrior changes - Berserker is almost certainly the worst eSpec in PvE right now and a miniscule increase in the damage of Arc Divider isn't going to do a kitten thing - in fact the sundering leap change might actually be a nerf! On a larger note - why do 99% of the balance changes only affect power builds rather than condi? There isn't a single condition damage change in this entire patch and I don't recall there being one in the last one either. We seem to be rapidly moving back towards a meta where condi is completely worthless.

That's just player research though, no? Clearly the specific research items aren't being salvaged from coats but I don't think that implies it's intended.

It's possible this is intended but it seems unlikely. Ascended armour pieces seem to salvage into ~450 research notes each, but chest pieces only ever yield 275. I would guess there is a base amount of notes you get plus a "roll" for more, and chest pieces aren't rolling for the additional notes.

Feels like DPS firebrand is going to be really boring to play now. Without being "locked" into tomes for a set period of time, you won't have any reason to use a weapon set other than Axe/Torch, and many of the F1 skills are going to be basically useless as it will all be about maximising damage/page so logically only one skill will be used (more only if you have excess pages).

I'd be interested in knowing where you stand on previous efforts that have ended up removing tools that could have been used for balance. An example would be making might and fury generation "automatic" in group content by having basically all classes provide some passively (though this hasn't been achieved yet). In my opinion this just gives you less things to balance around, and along with things like minimising attacks that benefit from large hitboxes, or making almost all boon-provision AoEs identical size (PBAoE 360 units), it feels like it leads to a homogenisation and denies classes from having a niche.

With the proposed changes coming on the 4th of October, Well of Bounty is losing the ability to provide regeneration. This is currently the only source of group regeneration that Specter has (single-target scepter skills don't count), and in combination with the shroud nerf, will severely reduce the potency of heal specter, which is already a pretty niche build.

Ele changes look good, nice to see staff getting some attention, even if I'm sad that the fire auto is retaining its clunky animation. While holo and scrapper are thankful for the buff, I don't understand how you can justify another buff to power mechanist - it's already having a devastating effect on group diversity and now it's going to be even worse. Additionally, I don't understand the condi mech nerfs at all. They should end up putting cMech really close to pMech in terms of damage so why would you ever play it? Very happy to see that Blast Gyro is no longer able to sabotage people who've neatly grouped up enemies! It's good that Mirage is finally getting nerfed, though I wonder if the axe build has been hit too hard. pVindicator buffs feel like they're in the wrong place? It's already barely a DPS increase to use swords in addition to greatsword and now it might even be a DPS loss. Sad to see higher skill-ceiling play get no reward. Similarly, it seems that the pDeadeye buffs help out dagger more than they do rifle? So we might end up in a situation where the much more complex rifle build is barely better to the very simple dagger builds so again... why bother? While I think there's more good than bad in this patch, I don't understand why some classes get sweeping buffs whereas others get the tiniest increases (seriously, why on earth are you scared of letting reaper be viable?). I would have also liked to see some more actual condi buffs. Adding 10% to the power damage of warrior's sword seems incredibly pointless.

With a new expansion comes lots of new players, and the return of old ones. While End of Dragons is undoubtedly great, conversations with friends and family have brought to mind the ways that Guild Wars 2 is still failing to accommodate players with various disabilities. Below are a few examples that have been in the game basically since launch. While this was par for the course when GW2 was released, it feels like it's falling behind when it is getting major releases in 2022 and is still full of issues. Motion Sickness I don't know how widespread this is, but I've got the impression that more people are having issues with motion sickness in this expansion than previous ones. With the game taking control of your camera much more often, it feels like this is causing issues for some people. Similarly, my partner finds the way the login screen shifts as you move the mouse to be actively nausea-inducing, to the extent that they have found themself trying to select characters as soon as they can before the background can load in. A real shame considering how gorgeous it is! Visual Processing This is something that has got worse over time. The PoF era in particular was in love with filling the screen with glowing or flashing visual effects. It's often stated that visual clutter is a problem in this game, but even aside from that a lot of the effects being used make it difficult for some players - I know a few experienced raiders who find wing 7 in particular difficult to look at in times with its heavy use of brandstorm effects, and in particular the way that the floor tiles appear and disappear between phases at Adina. Some of the new skill animations don't seem properly affected by skill LoD, and there are a multitude of existing effects that cannot be consistently toned down, even with LoD and postprocessing options. And partly related - I've also heard people say they find tracking the fishing bar quite difficult, sometimes even inducing motion sickness, which definitely ruins the relaxing gameplay typically associated with fishing. Colour-blindness Frankly, the game is appalling for colour-blind people. I think every single person I know with colour-blindness has had some issue with seeing parts of the game, so it's definitely widespread. I've had some raid encounters where success and failure basically comes down to "Let's hope the colour-blind player doesn't get this mechanic" Audio While audio cues are great, there are times when an audio cue is the ONLY good cue that is provided. Additionally, there are no proper subtitles in the game, and not all dialogue appears in the chat box, forcing you to read a small stylised box floating over someone's head that may even be in motion. In EoD there are a few cutscenes where there is dialogue, but no subtitles. UI Not a lot of detail needed, simply that having an almost totally-uncustomisable UI prevents players from making adjustments that they may need to play the game properly. Sustain This one is perhaps less obvious, but the recent (much-needed) nerf to battle scars seems to have brought with it a game-wide reduction in sustain traits (and Tormenting Runes). To the best of my knowledge, none of these traits (except battle scars) was used or causing problems in high-level PvE, PvP or WvW, and many of them were on classes that were otherwise pretty weak. I can see the argument that these traits were too powerful, but they were also an incredible tool for players who have slower reactions or limited mobility, who otherwise may not be able to avoid a lot of the damage the game throws at you. This change will have made the game significantly harder for such players, just because some other players were able to solo content too easily? I bring this up in part because I know there are people at Arenanet who care about accessibility, and it is a disappointment that such a wonderful game is continuing to fail to accommodate large groups of people.

So the recent reset change made it very annoying to test in the special forces training area as swapping any traits or weapons would clear your buffs from the console. To fix this, the console now re-applies the boons/buffs that you set up on an interval. However, if any boons are applied it will strip any other boon currently on you at the same time. For players that want to test self-generation of boons such as quickness or might for their group, it is common to apply alacrity to yourself as this boon will usually be assumed in an organised setting. Of course, this now means that every few seconds you will lose the boons you apply yourself, making it impossible to actually test unless you bring a friend along to apply alacrity for you! If every version of this reset change breaks something and needs some weird hacked-together solution, maybe it wasn't such a good idea in the first place?

For years now, balance patch notes have been known for their occasional slip-ups and strange statements (who can forget the infamous “purity of purpose”?) But there seems to be an increased occurrence of these patch notes not merely being misleading, but completely incorrect. Since the long balance patch drought was broken in May, there have been a number of instances where the notes claim significant changes have taken place, but that simply haven’t. The second note of the most recent profession changes update claims that combo fields will now prioritise your own fields. This would be a massive improvement to the usability of a number of classes and combos therein, and one that I was incredibly pleased to see. This… didn’t actually happen. Based on everything I’ve heard and experienced, combo fields work exactly the same as they did before in all cases. This strikes me as concerning because it means that a change managed to make it into both the preview notes, then the final notes, while not actually being in the patch at all. It’s possible that the update worked in the test environment, but not in the live game for some reason, and will be fixed in a later update. However, this has happened before. If we look at the May 11th balance patch, the notes say that boons were changed to have a maximum duration, while stack limits were removed. Again, this didn’t happen – or rather, the maximum duration was applied, but stack limits were left in place. This change effectively screwed boon application on two fronts, making some skills that apply frequent, short-duration boons like Time Warp much weaker. This has never been acknowledged, and over three months later, it looks like the devs have just forgotten about it and moved on. It is astonishing to me that such a thing can happen – presumably if the change made it into the patch notes, the balance team believed it was a good idea and that they could implement it. The fact that it never actually got released, and no statement was ever made about it suggests a serious breakdown in communication. If the balance team were not including it in the release, why did they allow it to appear in two sets of patch notes? If it was bugged, why hasn’t it been fixed after three months with no acknowledgement? If they changed their mind, why didn’t they inform the players? While these inconsistencies may not matter to a large part of the playerbase, they do matter to the most dedicated players. To give another example, the most recent patch also fundamentally changed the firebrand skill Ashes of the Just. The change effectively killed firebrand as a DPS build outside of organised groups and wasn’t mentioned in the notes. The closest thing we have was a note in the June 8th patch that it “now properly attributes its damage to the source for each stack of the effect.” At the time, this was another patch note that simply didn’t happen but now what are firebrand players supposed to think? Is this the intended effect that wasn’t included in June, or is it just a bug that will be fixed soon? People may want to regear, change groups comps etc. because of this change, but we have no way of knowing whether it’s here to stay because the patch notes cannot be considered a reliable source of information! Patch notes are one of the most convenient, simplest ways of communicating what has changed in game, but I know people who no longer bother reading them because they don’t trust them to be correct. I would urge the people responsible to take a look at these issues, or at least let us know when mistakes have been made. I recognise that it’s not practical to respond to every bug in every patch, nor to guarantee that the notes include every single change (e.g. firebrand axe and thief pistol autos have reduced cast times, plaguelands has a combo field indicator when it isn’t a combo field), but for these “headline” changes I don’t believe it is unreasonable to expect some degree of consistency.