I started with only WvW and PvP dailies. Got annoyed by “Defend X Y-times” and unchecked WvW since. I never even bothered with PvE, since PvP is so easy to complete. It’s basically 1-2 matchws for dailies (mostly one) and about 10 per week.
Pvp is: Play about 1.5k ranked games for the whole set, that's it. About 250h conquest, nothing else contributes to that goal.
In addition: We don't even know the full requirements for the open world armor yet. Maybe you need to do all the achievements as well. Maybe you have to finish the meta of the upcoming map 300 times. We simply don't know.
The point is: you don't have to do any of it to get legendary armor and you don't have farm rifts for it either. Choose your preferred way or mix them of you want to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything of it. If you don't enjoy any of it: build 8 sets of ascended armor for every character you play and you get a similar result.
But what is the advertised core feature exactly? Open world legendaries, story, wizards vault, achievements? IMO there is no single core feature, it's a collection of things you CAN do.
I finished the story, played the strikes and did some rifts in the process. I still haven't used a single essence and honestly don't know for what I should use them.
I'm satisfied with the time I got out of the addon and am looking forward to coming back to single bits of the addon any time in the future.
Needing to do exactly one type of content is what is necessary for every type of legendary armor. If you don't like the rift farming, you can also get the armor through the classic ways: raids, wvw, pvp. Except for raids the time invest for those is also pretty high. Raids are ridiculously fast and easy IMO.
Tbh I don't feel this "pressure" to do rifts at all. I do them when I stumble upon them, but have never farmed them repeatedly. What gives you the feeling " I need to do rifts"?
What's usually working on all the maps is "Teleport to a Friend", as long as you bought the addon/living world necessary.
Chose Lord Caudecus Rapier and got a 3g dye from the drop Glints something, I feel ripped off.
I'm in no way as proficient in mount races as some players, but the hot maps, especially verdant brink, feels really good with the griffon now.
With experience you can probably do it. But there is no formula for it. My guess would be around 8k, but you can get unlucky with mechanics or get good/bad support, so it's not that reliable.
If you want to see how you perform, I recommend the golem in the aerodrome. As a boon dps I usually run a more utility orientated build in that fractal to boost my groups dps.
Yes I just did the easy thing and used the standard golen setup for benchmarks.
I don't think you can just convert the dps to any actual encounter. It strongly depends on the fight and how long you can stick to the target. It just shows how much damage is possible without doing anything for your rotation. However you can see that you can probably reach about 30% of the benchmarks just by auto attacking (on some builds). Once again, there is no shame in using an easy or low intensity build to fulfill your role. Gw2 is very easy in most aspects and elitie level skill isn't required for basically anything.
Yeah that's a good goal to get to. But that's also hard to achieve, without making skills feel weak, because you basically have to make auto attacks very strong.
We can totally agree though on the teaching of mechanics. Gw2 has a lot of mechanics per encounter, that seriously reduce your dps output if you don't know how they work. We rarely have classic "punching bag" bosses like other older mmos. Anet did a good job with the two new strikes though. They are very easy to understand, so easy that you can beat them on the first try.
You are talking about a problem that is independent from the dps output of the classes: players aren't told how core mechanics work. This has been addressed in the recent updates with the adventure guide and the beginning of EoD. You have to seperate this from the damage balance though, because a dead dps doesn't do any damage, regardless of potential.
On the dps side of things there are also two main aspects: baseline and maximum potential (floor and ceiling). You are talking about low performing players, that are on the floor side of things. But neglected the ceiling part. If you raise the ceiling (like soto did) you trivialize a huge part of the content for most players. Especially in raids there are mostly mixed groups of players, with low performing and high performing players. If you have just two players doing 80% of the benchmark dps, the group skips entire parts of the fight ruining the encounter as it was intended. This also affects the low performing players, that are in the group as well.
Now let's talk about the baseline (floor) of dps. Yes there is a big difference between baseline dps and the ceiling you can achieve, maybe they could tweak this a bit for some classes. But in my experience bad baseline dps often comes from bad preparation or bad support. Before last patch I tried to benchmark the power soulbeast standard build on the golem, with only doing sword auto atracks. I did get 17k dps out of it. That's more than enough to beat almost all content. You literally don't have to press any buttons, just do the mechanics.
Heal and boon dps is another thing. It's a shift of focus, your dps isn't that important anymore, now it is keeping the team alive and providing utility. This is traditionally harder than pure dps, because you need to adapt to the encounter you are facing and know the kit you are using. But there are easy variants too, that can provide the core boons without breaking a sweat.
All in all it's not "git gud", but just "git okay". Invest 15min for preparation once to setup your class and you are good to beat any non cm in the game. If you want to get into raids, strikes and fractals invest another 10mins to watch a mechanics video or go into a training raid before joining experienced groups.
I think you mistake where the drastic change really happened: on Soto release. Scourge went fully over the top. It's always important how much dps a build can regularly do, because it trivializes certain encounters and let's you skip mechanics entirely.
This ofc also affects more casual players too. But if the non cm game is too hard you are definitely doing something completely wrong. You either have very wrong equipment, traits or play the build wrong. But the good thing is, there is a very easy solution.
There are "low intensity builds" for every class that you can play with about 3 buttons. Combine this with cheap lvl 80 exotic gear from the trading post (about 25g for a full set of items) and you are easily in the top 10 damage dealers in any open world meta. This is even enough to beat pretty much all the raids and all fractals.
Big health bars is not what makes encounters hard, mechanics are. The health pool of Silent Surf CM is so big, that it’s not worth it to do, especially with the tone of bugs forcing you to start over every second try. The fractal isn’t hard because of this, but just annoying. IMO fractals should all have a similar time to complete.
The reduction of all over dps is necessary nevertheless, because the current output makes you skip entire mechanics of older encounters, not only for the few hardcore players, but for everyone reaching 80% of their benchmark. This can be done by low intensity that probably everyone can do.
There are times where maps are not that full, because not many players are playing, which is perfectly normal. Your server has nothing to do with it, because GW2 uses mega servers, where all players from a region are basically on the same map instances. Your server is only relevant for wvw right now.
The game dynamically adds instances of a map, when more players join a map, to keep them at a better performance level. When players leave, instances close again. This is best visible when metas happen
You can have bad luck and get put in the “last” instance with the few remaining players, but that shouldn’t happen that often. If you see are on a meta with few players check the lfg for maps with commanders, they are usually full of players.
The commanders/mentors you see are probably players temporarily activating their tag for a single rift/event and are not doing a longer rift hunt squad.
Sounds better to me. I don’t mind if they give you harder open world content. Legendary bounties are laughable easy in trains nowadays anyway.
Okay that seems plausible, just wish the pre-event was shorter then.
Out of curiosity, have you unlocked the astral ward masteries? My guess would be that you need the rifts to get the non legendary armor unlocked by the madtery.
I haven’t really looked on the rewars yet. I have done quite some Tier 1 Rifts. My main proposal is to reduce the health/amount of the trash mobs in the first phase and triple the hp of the “boss” monster. I don’t know how others feel about this, but clearing trash never feels great, fighting boss like monsters is great. Right now the trash clearing part is very long and the “boss” barely survives the breakbar burst at best.
Yes it is a nerf to the login abuse, but it is still bullshit that you can get a fortune just by logging in X accounts every day. Ofc it’s very convenient for the people doing it and it feeds the market with mystic coins, but its basically a money cheat.
A better concept IMO is to remove monetary rewards from purely logging in general and add other ways to earn the coins, where you actually have to play the game.
Hyped about the ranger and thief spears, rev seems like a good WvW weapon too and could be a good power ranged option.
The others I didn’t really look at, I saw the teasers and red the blogposts, but they didn’t hook me. Which could also because the classes er not that interesting for me.