Almost a year has passed: What is your opinion on Path of Fire?

[Lionor]

It's still way too over tuned for normal players. Compared to HoT it's just as bad IMO.

I may not be in full ascended gear (only have two pieces) but I am in full exotics and have made sure to create a build that is a good balance of defense and offense and I still get one to three shot by mobs; often times even when dodging and rolling out of the way of certain mechanics too.

I find myself to be a pretty good player of most MMO's on the market and GW2 feels just way over the top. Either I can't get the way this game works combat wise or the mobs hit way too bloody hard.

I will say though the art team that worked on PoF and HoT are amazing. Some of the vistas that I discovered by happenstance are just breathtaking at times. The armor sets look great, and the animations for skills are amazing to look at. It just sucks that it's hard to enjoy that whenever you're constantly dead on the ground.

Took me only three days to put the game back down and uninstall. Makes me sad.

P.S. Also, the community around GW2 is great. Always helpful and nice people.

Hey matey, I'll assume that you come from a WoW-like MMO background and it does take some getting used to the new combat style in GW2. While the controls feel deceptively similar to WoW-like games, combat plays out quite differently.

For the most part mobs are not supposed to hit you, so any major attack will be "telegraphed" and you are meant to avoid it either by moving out of the way or using your "dodge" charges. Combat is GW2, at least in the open world, is not so much about maximizing your DPS but outlasting your enemies.

I had a similar experience, coming from WoW, when starting with GW2 and found myself dying quite frequently. Once you get to grips with how the game "is meant to be played" you'll find that its not too hard at all. It's just a change of pace.

Amazing game overall!

[Svifnymr]

I had a similar experience, coming from WoW, when starting with GW2 and found myself dying quite frequently. Once you get to grips with how the game "is meant to be played" you'll find that its not too hard at all. It's just a change of pace.

Years ago, my WoW Warlock would farm by running around in circles putting dot's on everything. I quickly figured out which dots you could cast while facing away from the enemy and which required you to actually look at them.

Definitely prepared me for the mesmer grind during launch!

Newer zones have stronger enemies for sure, but the bigger zones and mounts at least let you bypass some stuff in PoF. HoT, getting used to zones, you'd crawl through areas trying to find something, slogging through enemies and if you died, you'd be walking back across half the zone to regain lost ground long after everything had respawned.

Tarir's meta event was fun enough, Dragon Stand is the grandest design I think. Tangled Depths was never fun for me, and Verdant Brink is just a bunch of events that aren't very cohesive.

By contrast, the meta event in Vabbi just sucks. I did the Desolation chain with the wurms, it's cool enough but needs decent amount of players. I've never seen anyone even attempt the Mouth of Torment, though maybe it pops up in LFG sometimes?

I really do love the dwarf ruins in NW Desert Highlands though, very cool place.

[Edge-]

Man, that last HoT Zone is sure something. Finally got my wolf mount thingy but damn, the zone is bloody huge and they definitely ramped up mob density/difficulty especially in the southern parts...but mounts make it pretty easy to get away from some of the more dangerous packs of mobs.

I'm going to need to learn grouping etiquite and shit though. Finally remembered they added a proper LFG tool and saw some groups for open world content stuff over the weekend, will need to jump on those to fill out some missing experience for masteries. Unlocked the chapter 1 masteries but now I need to get the wolf mount masteries. Event time, ho!

[Svifnymr]

Masteries weren't so hard to get in PoF. I've got a good bit backlogged, so it should be easy enough to get Rollllllller Beeeeetle!


Sand Jackal is my favorite, but I knew it'd be my favorite long before the expac released. Griffon is very nice, great flying mount, but Jackal is just fun.

I do love using the bunny in action, and the Manta is boring.

I usually play an hour or two a day, but there's usually folks around to help in GW2. When you finish the story and want to get the griffon, it's much easier to get someone to use their port to the camp, then just Teleport To Friend to them.

[Edge-]

Griffon comes from an achieve, right? Seen folks reference it a few times regarding events in zone chat and kinda wanna unlock it once I finish up the last zone and start working on S4 of living story.

[Svifnymr]

Griffon comes from an achieve, right? Seen folks reference it a few times regarding events in zone chat and kinda wanna unlock it once I finish up the last zone and start working on S4 of living story.

There's a Dulfy walk-through that covers stuff.
Overview: Once you finish the main story, you'll find some random item (a strange claw or something) that leads you to some guy in Vabbi. Somehow that leads you to this camp in the SE corner. (MY friend ported me before I went to Vabbi guy, so I didn't crawl up a mountain blindly.)

Once you get the item and start it, it unlocks some collections which send you over the entire zone to find nests and do events and wander in circles and stuff. Then you fight a guy. Some of it might be time-gated too, I forget.

The griffon glides basically, with the spacebar being a wing upbeat to delay the dropping. Later you can plunge, then come back up faster and stuff, it's hard to describe. (Or maybe it's just my current headache status.)

[Edge-]

Interesting, I may have started that actually. I know I have a handful of items that want me to track down NPC's/stuff out in the world that I haven't really bothered to look into too much.

And Dulfy is great, good to know she's got a walkthrough for that one. Though I probably should have known given that she puts up walkthroughs for everything : )

[Deleted]

It's still way too over tuned for normal players. Compared to HoT it's just as bad IMO.

I may not be in full ascended gear (only have two pieces) but I am in full exotics and have made sure to create a build that is a good balance of defense and offense and I still get one to three shot by mobs; often times even when dodging and rolling out of the way of certain mechanics too.

I find myself to be a pretty good player of most MMO's on the market and GW2 feels just way over the top. Either I can't get the way this game works combat wise or the mobs hit way too bloody hard.

I will say though the art team that worked on PoF and HoT are amazing. Some of the vistas that I discovered by happenstance are just breathtaking at times. The armor sets look great, and the animations for skills are amazing to look at. It just sucks that it's hard to enjoy that whenever you're constantly dead on the ground.

Took me only three days to put the game back down and uninstall. Makes me sad.

P.S. Also, the community around GW2 is great. Always helpful and nice people.

Sounds like you're playing a Guardian in full zerker

[Deleted]

Well i felt pretty good, but then this latest episode came out...
and it feels like a complete shit-show.
- voice files missing in conversations
- loading screens, while on an SSD and fully updated game taking 2 minutes
- i've "failed" the infiltration mission twice now; they made sure to place the places you got to bomb at the border of the quest-zone. Once you exit (and this can also mean getting blasted past the border) it you get "teleported out of the scenario" to the current zone and get to waste money on porting back to the other side of the PoF map to restart the damn thing.

[kendro1200]

PoF started out fine, but it's been pretty lackluster. The expansion itself launched with a great story, but it did not launch with good replayable content, and most of what has been added through living world has not been correcting that issue either.

I feel like Arenanet did a kneejerk in the wrong way with PoF design in comparison to HoT design. They spent a lot more time on making the story content, and a lot less on everything else. The maps feel fairly hollow, and there isn't a lot of incentive to play in them. I now also dislike the seperating of the mastery experience system between the different chunks of pve content, as I'd rather level up my LW S4 masteries in HoT maps where there is some actual gameplay and people around.

Anet could fix this in one of their living world episodes, if they would just didn't create a new map and just filled out the ones we already have. Honestly putting some good metas in the current PoF release maps would be just as useful as building a whole new map, except they'd save time on building and populating a map and would just have to start populating it with the new event chains.

edit: Also, this last LW episode was really subpar, similar to the kinds of tidbits we got in LW S1, wait for 3-4 months, get little 30 minute chunk of something that was extremely buggy, and then everything would go dark.

[Svifnymr]

The odd thing with the "PoF has no replay endgame" stuff is that there are a few events there, but folks just don't do them. The Forgotten stuff in Vabbi is obnoxious, sure, but it does exist. Grabbing some wurms and assaulting places in Desolation, or the Gate thing, rarely done. I've actually never blown up the gates or seen one attempting it.

This latest zone is okay, the last one before this with the Charr was a nicer zone. I don't really like repeating the same meta-event over and over, but the 2 specimen thing and the djinn thing were both nice events.

I think the main problem is rewards, the Vabbi thing is obnoxious already, but do this whole thing in order to get a couple rare pieces? Utterly pointless.

[PACOX]

PoF is messing the metas that made Hot last longer, that's it.

The current episode was good...if not to short. From a technical/design point it's amazing. Anet has some new bad end stuff and it's good. All the story instances have been fun and creative. The problem is the story is a bit shallow. Ep 2 set up something big and it sort of just fizzled out and played way too fast. We do know because they've spent a lot more time with back end stuff and design but the story was trash. Even if they needed to rush Joko out of the picture, basically GW2s Lich King, they should have left it as a stale mate instead of not doing him justice. We went to way and killed him in the same hour...

The fractal is beautiful and challenging enough. Beetle, amazing. Instances, fun. Story...C-

[Svifnymr]

Daily events was Brisban, so after I did it, I cranked up the roller beetle and toured the roads. Very nice zone for bouncing off things!

[Lazuli]

It's alright, much of the same but elite specs can keep me busy at least with having every char to 80. I mostly still pvp and that's cancerous as always. With every MMO following GW2 footsteps massive ability pruning and passive design I may as well keep playing the one with least time gating and most account bound stuff. It's funny how similar everything in the genre is now. I've been playing more GW1 since they did the graphic update and seems more alive recently.

[frogger237]

Beetle was easy as hell to get but takes much longer for the last two collections. Luckily I had just logged in minutes before the world bosses so the only problem I had was with the alpha beetle which won't spawn if the map has the 4 mordem? quest bug out and not have the 4th appear couldn't figure out how to switch instances to a non bugged version so just logged and waited til the next day.

[LilSaihah]

My loose opinion so far is that it's somewhat underwhelming compared to Heart of Thorns.

The reward structure is busted and there's very few reasons to do stuff in PoF's main maps and too much reason to farm Istan.
Bounty rewards feel eh. What should be a good reason to go out with friends is not really that interesting. Even with the legendary bounties, many seem like they are ignored.
PoF's story was decent - good, even - but the living story has kind of fallen off a cliff with LS4-3.
Living story release pace feels really quite bad. In LS3 if a map was underwhelming you could be quite confident you'd see a new one in 2 months. Now, it's almost certainly 3-4 months.
Living story story is somewhat underwhelming as well. The capstone of LS3 was the battle with Balthazar at the end of episode 5; it was a long, long way down the line, and absolutely the end of the story, with One Path Ends feeling very much like a 'bonus level'. Joko, on the other hand, is dead in episode 3 with no other story threads really developed. It feels like the story wants to move in the direction of "well, there's Kralkatorrik, I guess?", while LS3 had Jormag, Primordus, Balthazar/Lazarus and Caudecus competing for screentime, and not being sure which line would be advanced next - with the rapid pace of releases - was a fantastic thing.

Most of all it doesn't feel to me like there's a reason to go and do core PoF, or even a lot of LS4. Funerary armor and weapons are a good first step to a collection that binds the content together, but what I think it needs is a legendary. LS4's Corsair pieces paint the intriguing idea of a return of Carapace/Luminescent armor tiering, and an Aurora-esque collection that says "do absolutely everything" would do the trick as well. Truth be told, I think both PoF and LS4 could really use an Aurora collection each.

[Svifnymr]

On the one hand, rewards for a lot of the new stuff are lacking. I've got a ton of the tokens for the Cliffs, but there's really nothing I WANT. PoF had these really long events that were very involved and sometimes quite arbitrary to the mechanics. "You lose because you didn't have 5 teams of organized players that did enough CC to break the bar", meh. Then you get the event and you get 10 silver worth of gear? You could literally spend the time farming random mobs and get more loot than some of the events.

Same with bounties, random powers that are just irritating at times, and rewards are a couple pieces of nothing coupled with a widget to make army you don't want.


On the other hand, loot itself is meaningless. You can fill up backpacks with pieces of gear, shred them all for mats or sell them off, and none of it has any meaning.

[leviathonlx]

It's pretty and I didn't mind the story but they didn't add much to keep me playing the game outside a week or 2 here and there.

[Deleted]

What is your overall opinion of Path of Fire?
Great value for 30 euros, I think the maps weren't too hard and such, gave me solid 50ish hours of content after I finished them all, most bounties, full masteries. The elite specs and Mounts were the main allure though as they last forever. Mounts were amazing enough said. Elite specs were.... Fun..... Just fighting some of them isn't very fun (deadeye, mirage, spellbreaker) because their passive defenses basically make them unkillable 1v1.

Compared to Heart of Thorns, do you think that this expansion is better?
Heart of Thorns was better, elite specs were more balanced and fun to fight against. Also the maps were more challenging. Mapwide metaevents made the first few weeks of the expansion amazing as people tried to understand it. But heart of thorns cost 50 euros, Path of Fire just 30 euros, so Heart of Thorns obviously had more effort put in it.

What do you think about the current storyline/living story?
I dont like living story in general as the maps bound to them are usually dull and unchallenging. I just do it.

Do you like the new elite specs?
Yes, they're fun to play, just not as fun to fight against as HoT ones.

If you could give this xpac a numerical score, what would it be?
8/10, they did great job with it, just kind of made PvP and WvW less enjoyable with it.

are you still playing GW2?
Yes obviously, still best game on the market regarding player vs player content.

[Drakain]

I still love tangled depths to death and, while POF was great, that hasn’t changed. There’s probably something wrong with me.