How to Megapost, by Retro.
Step 1.
Have an "unplug" day where you intentionally relax away from the PC, because it's Wednesday and they'd never just dump info randomly on a Wednesday
Step 2.
End up missing random Wednesday info dump.
Step 3.
Congratulations, you're now ready to make a Megapost!
I'm putting all my faith into one handed sword going to Ele and it being amazing.
I wish I had your faith, I considered dropping money for full Tempest skins (right now all I have is Staff) but I don't play my Ele enough to justify the cost. I'm sure I'll regret it later when the Tempest spec is some insane wind-themed Blade Dancer evasion tank awesomeness.
Well, that'll free up close to a whole bank tab for me. More importantly, the tab has room for expansion (which always seemed like an obvious oversight with the old wallet, but my guess is that they knew HoT was coming and they'd just be changing it again later). All the doodads and rupees and smurf ears we'll collect later can fit nicely inside.
Nothing I don't love about all of this, except that I might swap out my Engineer's gear for full Sinister (I tend to not use pistols though, so... maybe not... probably too early to tell).
Three years and finally conditions are what they should have been at launch. I guess it was a technical limitation . . .
It was;
DS: There’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. In a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Is anything being done to address that to make them less redundant?
Colin: Currently no. Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow, the more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. And so we could say, you can have infinite stacks. Number one: that becomes really unbalanced. But number two: it’s actually extremely expensive for us, on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of back-end server issues that can help make game designer decisions regardless of what you want to do with it. (
source)
They've obviously figured
something out, but I would guess it took a lot of work that very few people in the community have the ability to appreciate or even comprehend. I'm sure there's already a few comments on Reddit about them "flipping a switch" or some moronic variation of it, though.
Honestly they will give fuck all about the dungeons. They already don't care and don't design the game for that crowd anymore.
Can't say I blame them, after the lukewarm reception Aetherpath received. People said they wanted a big, challenging dungeon with unique rewards... and nobody runs it because it "takes too long", "it's too hard" and "isn't rewarding enough." They have reams of data on what players are doing, they know where the bear shits in the woods and it's clearly not in the dungeon-y part.
No offense to dungeon runners (I love a good dungeon myself) but... they're not going to add tons of dungeons that nobody runs no matter how much people demand it. Listening to a part of the community that is not representative of the whole is a path that leads to ruin (just ask whoever's left at Carbine Studios).
I'm holding out hope for 10-man instanced content, whatever form that takes, either as personal story achievement style stuff that requires additional people, 10-man fractals, or whatever. Maybe instead of 'personal story' stuff there are 'guild story' instances - that unlock shit for your guild hall.
If they implement anything like this, I think it would likely be guild-based. Guilds are kind of ridiculously under-utilized as an organizing element for a game called Guild Wars (and yes, I know where the name comes from, ya' bums). Apart from buffs and missions (which are wonderful, and I hope we get lots more of them) there aren't many non-social benefits to being in a guild. It'd be great if guilds served as the trigger mechanic to the instanced content people keep asking for, especially since guilds are already exclusionary by nature.
Like Ash says, GW2 is all about open-world cooperation, and I don't think anything is going to change that. Nor would I
want it to change, because I think having players segregate themselves from each other in a genre built around social interaction has always been a mistake. Stuff like Tequatl and the Triple Wurm are cool
because you've got a ton of people who have to work together (and sometimes that means a lot of failure before everyone figures out how). Those are things no other genre can do and the push to instance everything is one more step towards MMOs becoming more like single player open world games, losing the one thing that makes them unique.
But like Toasty mentions, there's also a frustration factor with things like ferrying, people refusing to cooperate or flat-out griefing. There's assholes everywhere and while I agree that games should be an escape from them, the social nature of the genre means eventually, you're going to bump into more than a few. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to minimize or negate their impact by design; GW2 is leaps and bounds the best at it of all the MMOs I've played but there's still room for improvement (seriously, for those who never played an MMO before GW2, you have no idea how negative the mere presence of another player could be, never mind the purposely disruptive ones).
I don't think instancing stuff like Taco or the Wurms is the answer; guilds being able to trigger them already seems like it's enough control, though I think being able to change which megaserver you're on should be much easier. Guilds triggering a boss should be able to select an option that starts a new copy of the map, but I think having them completely instanced would be a step too far. We all have stories of being newbs and being taken under the wing of an experienced player (and those who don't probably don't play MMOs anymore) and likewise we all have moments where we're the ones passing knowledge on ourselves. It's a great feeling and one you can't get easily if everyone is in their own little private bubble, excluding everyone they don't already know. But guilds already behave that way, and I think the ability to organize into groups is just as important to the health of an MMO as having lots of things open, so nothing is ever going to change that exclusionary nature. The important thing is that people already know and expect guilds to behave that way, so exclusionary content being tied to guilds just makes sense to me.
On that note, all guild-based content should also be built so the
entire guild can be involved, but also shouldn't
have to be. As a guild leader in both GW2 and other MMOs, having to decide which 10/20 people get to go on a raid was one of the worst things about the job and I hated every second of it. It leads to all sorts of guild politics, cliques, backstabbing and grief. If GW2 implemented limited stuff like that, I would be very surprised, very disappointed and very likely to step down (I can hear the cheers already) though I wouldn't wish that role on anyone. It's a very shitty feeling to be responsible for the enjoyment (and lack thereof) of your crazy videogame pseudo-extended family.
But the point is, everyone can create or join a guild, and groups like TTS and such have already shown that players will organize guilds with the express purpose of gaining access to content. Having instanced content that isn't guild based just seems like it's ignoring the obvious, that organizing that content is going to fall to guilds anyways. Unless it's some kind of Looking-for-Raid thing which is.. horrible (seriously, go ask anyone who played WoW post-Cata about the trainwrecks LFR has caused and how many people actually get a chance to see the 'real' version of a raid vs. the unsatisfying, watered down version).
I mean you might see some "challenging content" as that datamined instance stuff but no idea if and when that stuff is coming.
If I had to make an educated guess, they would probably add something like that in some kind of... large, update-like thing, like a big upgrade that changes the game significantly, or "expands" it, so to speak. This "expansion" could then be sold separately from the game to both increase revenue and generate excitement among existing, lapsed and even potential players.
So these changes DoT and Stack changes will not bring anything to healing, regeneration and protection, but maintain the condi cleansing support-meta?
I would say based on how the Ventari stance reveal went, we'll probably see some changes to support soon as well. Expansions are a chance to change up everything, even things most people think are set in stone. Players are more forgiving of big, earth-shattering mechanic changes if they're getting lots of awesome stuff with it. Most MMO developers never take advantage of it (the most I've seen is Blizzard doing stuff like stat-squishing or changing their Talent system), but I think it's pretty obvious at this point ANet does things differently so.. I'm hopeful.
Yeah I know the trait revamp is coming soon but my point was how the current system can go against one of the core tenants of the game. And I feel like buying traits was just a thing they did for impatient players. I believe their intention with that system was to get people to unlock traits by exploring and unlocking them without just spending money and skill points.
I honestly feel like the current system for traits was a bandaid. By most accounts, they've been working on Heart of Thorns since or shortly after the game launched, so I would imagine they've known for a while there are big changes coming. The previous system didn't gel with their New Player Experience (which I guess they figured either couldn't wait for the expansion or needed to be in place before it released) so... we got stuck with the current one. It really does smack of a temporary fix, "Just assign traits to a bunch of disconnected events or let people buy them from a vendor."
