To add from what everyone is saying, the only real new system that you missed is strikes. Basically a 10 people single boss battle, like raids but without the filler and pre-events. Very puggable, especially what people call the easy 3 (shiverpeaks pass, voice/claw of the fallen, fraenir of jormag)

If you want to avoid story spoilers, be sure to follow the story until the end of the norn map of IBS before joining them.

EoD added a new mount, skiffs (boat), plus some new systems that you won’t find outside of those maps anyway, so don’t worry too much about it. But of course you need it to use the elite specs

The last expansion instead gave us new weapons without the traitline and unlocked elite specs’ weapons to be used regardless of the spec. To unlock all of that you need to play the expansion until a certain point tho. If you don’t have the skyscale in the expansion there is also a new way to get it that should be a bit faster

In general, there wasn’t any big shake to things, it’s mostly more of the same and some new side things. The only real difference is a bit of powecreep and that now every class can cover any role.

So take your time, play everything in order and all the new things will appear step by step

Liked the story better than EoD, even if it was dumb to see the commander keeping his “secret” without a second thought after jormag and onis

And they still overuse >!deaths of new characters!< way too much, it doesn’t have any weight when done like that

Anyway the story was different, no dragons, overall with a good pacing too. Also finally some new lore, and no magitech

So I still enjoyed it more than anything since PoF and S4 times

Also I’m interested in seeing the rest of it, especially if we end up “crossing over”, that place looked great

The maps are nice (nothing too great but enjoyable), rifts last the right amount of time to avoid becoming too boring immediately, the masteries fill up quick enough too

The vault system left me with a positive impression, it’s clearly something new to patch up (more dailies to choose between, mix between the games modes) but it shows potential. And they added gemstore items and gold to it, this can’t be appreciated enough

Relics were frankly a disaster. Almost all of them are boring, no more summons, interesting effects were removed, especially for condi builds there is basically no choice. For many builds not equipping a relic or equipping a bad one makes realistically no difference compared to equipping a “good” one

The idea to separate the bonus from the runes was good, but there was no reason to change the effects, especially not like that. They need a complete relics overhaul ASAP

The armor sets were nice but lacking variety. Also it has to be seen how annoying the legendary armor grind will be

I haven’t tried the strikes yet, so I can’t really say much.

All in all, I am satisfied. There are some things to fix but it looks like a step in the right direction

Well, both HoT and PoF final fights weren’t turned in a strike so it doesn’t really mean much.

Also where did they say they the strikes will be part of the story of the first 2 maps?

Of course it can’t spoil anything from the third map, but it could also be a rift enemy, for example. Or a meta boss like the boneskinner

Especially for the first map, we could have no big boss at all during the story

It’s ok to be bored with the game after a long time, just take a break, play something else and then come back if and when you feel like it.

But the gear grind part is very confusing, except for fractals you could still be meta with exotic berserker gear from 2012 in some builds. The game could improve in many areas but gear grind doesn’t seem one of them.

Yeah, you need to spend some gold for BiS but usually even that doesn’t require any kind of group activity or grind. At most some ls currency farm if you don’t have any spares

Outside of legendary (which is purely looks and convenience) I don’t see any big farm or grind required

Yeah, the powercreep is a totally legitimate concern since HoT Mounting in combat feels a bit cheap to me too, can be useful when going around gathering or stuff like that but maybe it’s a little bit too convenient

Yeah probably it could, and I’m sure we’d all love it since we’re all here What I meant is that outside of ethic reasons, anet would default to reddit instead since the community is using that.

To have them here we would need to have the majority of the community to switch to lemmy first

That’s good, but people are proposing it as a defense against an eventual EEE, that’s what I don’t get

That would be nice, but we need to move way more people here for that

Can somebody explain me exactly how defederating them would give us a different outcome?

I’m genuinely curious.

Meta couldn’t give less fucks about 100k users on lemmy, they are targeting people that isn’t and will never use nor understand what the fediverse is.

You keep them out, good. They don’t care, they just want to fill their own bucket with stuff that is outside anyway

Twitter people going to threads is completely independent from anything in the fediverse. Those people won’t even notice any difference if they are federated or not.

They are in for the brand and the fomo, not the content

Right, even if I got it reset randomly a couple of time. Other than that works perfectly

I think people are seriously overreacting. From what I see all changes seems to be done with a positive intention (not saying that the balance will be better or worse, but their intention is to make it better)

They have been struggling to find a good and sustainable content delivery system since the start of the game, this is just the latest idea. And there is no aggressive monetization in it, it’s still the cheapest model between all the main mmos. Expansion/content ratio got a bit more expensive compared to before, true, but it’s hardly aggressive or expensive. To be honest we had it way too cheap until now compared to the average market prices, it’s understandable. And until now they always offered super cheap bundles for old expansion after a bit, if someone prefers to wait a bit and save money.

And I’m having a hard time to see how more weapons on all elite specs + new core weapons can be negative in any kind of way (outside of balance concerns, but I haven’t seen anyone worry about that) The new combat changes don’t even require the new expansion from what I got…

And the new reward system is just daily/weekly/monthly achievements but hopefully done better.

If anything they are showing interest in making the game better and more stable

I haven’t had a chance to test almost at all sadly, but I think the biggest gain would be for revenant condi builds. Having shortbow on all specs is really a big improvement since the only core condi set was mace/axe

I’ve also heard people liking scepter daredevil but I haven’t tried it yet