In my mind, Massively is the only mmo news site.
Yep, this is basically what I'm down to now. TenTonHammer is pretty much the "Hype" MMO site; they'll run a dozen articles about the smallest detail on an upcoming MMO, but once it's out they forget it exists. MMORPG seems to be fixated on the communities rather than the games, so instead of covering news and announcements, they cover the
reaction to news and announcements instead. Lots of fluff too, and their comments are the worst.
Hopefully future content exploits people learning memorization over how to adapt to the situation. Or at least foster an environment where people can learn to adapt a build to their own abilities as a player.
They've been making progress in anti-zerg mechanics, so I wouldn't be shocked if future content comes down hard on the stacking / zerker meta. The last Living Story fight is kind of brutal if you're ignorant of stability and condition removal, and there's so much hitting you that I can't imagine zerkers lasting very long if they don't have the skill to back it up.
For all the complaints that GW2 fights are chaos (and chaos is good, since order is
boring), there needs to be less "This is a regular enemy who just has more health and hits harder" and more "Holy shit, what is going on!?" More Scarlet Hologram fights, less HotW Butcher (who has the underpinnings of an interesting mechanic but it's suffocated by the small space and the fight not punishing you enough for ignoring the totems).
They definitely need dodge training in the tutorial.
I'm a big proponent of 'teach by doing'; when a player needs to learn jump, put them in a situation where the only way forward is to jump, rather than making them wait and telling them "
Hey! Listen! You can't get past here without jumping! Wait, You do know how to jump, don't you? How could you forget? It was your favorite thing in the world! Did you forget that you press X to jump too?! What a horrible thing to forget, I can't imagine forgetting how to jump! So, did you understand all of that? I can repeat it! Are you sure? Okay, then press X to jump now, or should I tell you about jumping again?"
Basically, something in the tutorial stage needs to be impassible without dodging. That's too important of a mechanic to be able to ignore.
I really really hope it's changes to the way traits work because it's a real pain having them all locked away when wanting to experiment with builds.
Early game improvements would definitely be a good thing too. There isn't all that much in the way of a helping hand at the start, which is partly to avoid putting restrictions on how people play I suppose but at the same time, there could definitely be better ways to introduce new players.
I've gone over my distaste with the trait system
several times before, so I won't regurgitate it here, but I'd be happy if they just spread the levels in which you earn trait points a little more evenly.
