Secrets of the Obscure - Discussion Thread

[Edge-]

Protip: After you complete Chapter 17, DO NOT PROGRESS TO CHAPTER 18 and DO THE FULL INNER NAYOS META.

That meta is the narrative bridge between the events in Chapter 17 and 18 and the game makes no real effort to convey this to the player in any capacity. The meta explains why certain characters are present in Chapter 18 and provides context for the final fight.

Though at the same time it completely, totally undermines one of the scenes during Chapter 18 where the characters express shock over some news that really shouldn't be remotely surprising given what we just did during the 3rd part of the meta.

And minor spoiler gripe The power of friendship saves the day again! Isgarren coming in like Tuxedo Mask to do basically nothing but win the day! With our powers combined, we're stronger! I'm tired of this being the conclusion to narrative arcs. They've done this too many times.

[PACOX]

Wasn't aware that the fractal and meta basically use the same mechanic. My only complaint is that, in the fractal ar least, there nothing that hints at what the orbs do or how they work so you have to spend a lot of time trying to read tooltips on GW2 tiny, messy ass buff bar.

[Edge-]

Wasn't aware that the fractal and meta basically use the same mechanic. My only complaint is that, in the fractal ar least, there nothing that hints at what the orbs do or how they work so you have to spend a lot of time trying to read tooltips on GW2 tiny, messy ass buff bar.

Yep, game literally never actually introduces what these are to you and just throws them at you in the final meta fight/final story fight and apparently Fractal (which I've read is a damned mess).

I tried the meta last night and it's visually fantastic and overall great up until the last fight which is just such a fucking disaster if you don't have at least 10 competent players. A few minutes in and half the fuckin map is dead in the arena waiting for revives because nobody can be arsed to respawn, take the two ley-lines to one of the portal rooms and portal over.

A big problem is that a lot of them aren't even intuitive in their icons or anything.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/...rom_the_pools/

Thank goodness players have scienced it out, at least.

There's a sick fight just beneath the mess of that encounter.

Also, post-mortem confirmed for next week. I can't say I'm expecting too much brutal honesty, but I'm still far more hyped for that than I am to log in and fail the meta for a third time while grinding out that last pointless mastery.

[Edge-]

The new meta makes me actively fucking hate the playerbase so much. Still haven't completed it despite multiple attempts. Still just a comedic failbus of stupid and people refusing to run back/others wasting time reviving them. It's like the designers forgot that the average player struggles to keep from drooling on their keyboard.

Gosh, I want to play but every time I log in I'm frustrated because I go to do that stupid fucking meta and it's always a stupid fucking waste of time. That's all I have to do to finish this stupid update up to try to find something that's not awful.

[Raidoser]

The new meta makes me actively fucking hate the playerbase so much. Still haven't completed it despite multiple attempts. Still just a comedic failbus of stupid and people refusing to run back/others wasting time reviving them. It's like the designers forgot that the average player struggles to keep from drooling on their keyboard.

Gosh, I want to play but every time I log in I'm frustrated because I go to do that stupid fucking meta and it's always a stupid fucking waste of time. That's all I have to do to finish this stupid update up to try to find something that's not awful.

Read the same things in a lot of place, the only solution is to wait for the leeches to get bored in one or two weeks.
If you play Elden ring or FF14 you can use that time to prepare for the next DLC of elden ring or prepare your character to be a pictomancer/viper.

For video game when something frustrate you it's better to just stop and do something else, no video game is worth losing one sanity.

[PACOX]

The new meta makes me actively fucking hate the playerbase so much. Still haven't completed it despite multiple attempts. Still just a comedic failbus of stupid and people refusing to run back/others wasting time reviving them. It's like the designers forgot that the average player struggles to keep from drooling on their keyboard.

Gosh, I want to play but every time I log in I'm frustrated because I go to do that stupid fucking meta and it's always a stupid fucking waste of time. That's all I have to do to finish this stupid update up to try to find something that's not awful.

Did you get to see the Dragons End meta while it was fresh out of the over. It had Anet making some spicey comments against the community. This was after bugs were fixed. Anet isn't blamesless because it fostered the community but whenever a meta presents the slightest challenge you will see the crowd complain about it being too hard, leeching events until they are nerfed. Relevant to SOTO, Convergences were the same way due to them requiring to split and have half decent builds. I think its a mentality that exists across all MMOs, but in other MMos you can just outgear content.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Did you get to see the Dragons End meta while it was fresh out of the over. It had Anet making some spicey comments against the community. This was after bugs were fixed. Anet isn't blamesless because it fostered the community but whenever a meta presents the slightest challenge you will see the crowd complain about it being too hard, leeching events until they are nerfed. Relevant to SOTO, Convergences were the same way due to them requiring to split and have half decent builds. I think its a mentality that exists across all MMOs, but in other MMos you can just outgear content.

This goes back to HoT's release. During the prior two years, overworld content was so easy that Anet had conditioned players to expect that they can mindlessly breeze through overworld content by just wearing berserker gear. When HoT released, people were suddenly dying which went against what they had been conditioned, and even when people did dodge they sometimes died to unavoidable autoattack damage which simply cannot be survived by wearing berserker gear. You were incentivized to play in parties to burn down mobs before they could kill anyone or have people like the new Druid healing spec, again something that seemed unnatural because up until that point people were conditioned that they could solo normal overworld mobs. Before players could acclimate to this new standard, Anet gave in and nerfed HoT into the ground. A similar thing happened with Dragon's End, but DE also has several design issues. 60 player limit with several of those players being people fishing or lighting lantern for achievements and thus not contributing to the event, the number of invulnerability phases on the boss is RNG dependent so groups that were doing good could still get screwed and lose due to factors outside of their control. And lastly, the final fight was DPS check but there is a humongous gap in player DPS. It isn't a matter of actually pushing your buttons; the buildcraft in GW2 is obtuse and there are a lot of trap traits and abilities that seemingly do a lot of damage but don't and you have to consult mathematicians on class discords to understand what is going on and how to extract high DPS from your character. The game never educates the player on this.

[Edge-]

Did you get to see the Dragons End meta while it was fresh out of the over. It had Anet making some spicey comments against the community. This was after bugs were fixed. Anet isn't blamesless because it fostered the community but whenever a meta presents the slightest challenge you will see the crowd complain about it being too hard, leeching events until they are nerfed. Relevant to SOTO, Convergences were the same way due to them requiring to split and have half decent builds. I think its a mentality that exists across all MMOs, but in other MMos you can just outgear content.

I've still only finished that a handful of times because of people failing to CC and shit.

I finally did finish the meta, stopped going my support/dps build and just went my power willbender build because fuck it at least I can make sure shit dies quickly. It seemed to work. Completed it. Somehow still underwhelmed with the conclusion. Oh well, at least now I have the last stupid mastery (gosh I hate these kinds of masteries) so if I clear it again maybe I can get something cool. Neato.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/s...k-and-forward/

Retrospective blog post is up.

TLDR: They learned some things, next expansion announcement next week.

Real though, it's about as predictable as you can imagine and doesn't really include much of note. I'm confused on the story though, it's a smaller local story (expansion has been outed via trademark filings, it's apparently Janthir, which tracks with the Eye of Janthir that folks have spotted around in the final story missions, but also the Astral Ward are involved? How can it be a local threat yet it's a bigger threat to reality than the elder dragons, which couldn't even move the Astral Ward to take action?

Like, you can't have it both ways, Anet. You either get your super secret extradimensional force to deal with the uber super duper big baddies above elder dragons, or we're beating up bandits. It's not both. I'm already annoyed.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

A little over a year and a half ago, we announced that we we’d be transitioning from the long-standing Living World model to smaller, more frequent (annual) expansion releases. This was a significant shift, but the new direction was born out of an examination of the pain points experienced by our players and our developers. The reasons we laid out for this change, and what we hoped to achieve by it, were simple but deeply important:

Deliver content updates in a more consistent and timely manner.

2016 through 2019: GW2 is releasing at least one new full map every 2 to 3 months, from the start of Living World season 3 and then the release of Path of Fire up through the end of season 4.

Current GW2: releases three maps over one year.

That's not a "more consistent and timely manner", that is half the output.

[Bladesyphon]

I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I enjoyed SotO enough for what it was. It certainly had it's problems, to be sure, but overall I had a good time with it.

I'm also super happy the final boss of Inner Nayos was somewhat challenging. I was getting so tired of SotO's previous map meta bosses being little more than "Show up and press one, and you get a bouncy treasure chest" encounters. I'm not saying every world boss should be Soo-Wan pre-nerf levels of challenge, but I feel like Eparch is the perfect balance of where world boss difficulty should really be - difficult enough that you're likely to wipe a few times in the first week until you learn the mechanics, but otherwise a puggable fight so long as people actually respect and do the mechanics.

[PACOX]

Land spears is all I needed to see.


As far as the retrospective goes, it's words. By that I mean it's very safe. They obviously play the game, they are very aware of feedback, there's not much to say in the way of what will be different except they are aware. I think they could have stolen some free points by listing some of the legacy and backend stuff they worked in during the course of Soto's lifetime, "on top of an expansion we did xyz". About what I expect from an old game with an awkward studio. Can't help but to like Anet and it's quirks.

[Edge-]

Can't help but to like Anet and it's quirks.

I like the game but Anet frustrates the hell outta me on the regular.

One of the biggest hopes I have for the next expansion: Please do not design zones that your game engine cannot handle. I'm tired of Amnytas and now the final area of Inner Nayos turning the game into slideshows when you look towards the center of Amnytas or last part of Inner Nayos. They know the performance limitations of their game yet they design these zone that simply cannot run above like 30-40fps because they're working with ancient rendering tech and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to even shipping DX11.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Land spears is all I needed to see.

Looks like a staff transmogged as a spear.

[PACOX]

I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I enjoyed SotO enough for what it was. It certainly had it's problems, to be sure, but overall I had a good time with it.

I'm also super happy the final boss of Inner Nayos was somewhat challenging. I was getting so tired of SotO's previous map meta bosses being little more than "Show up and press one, and you get a bouncy treasure chest" encounters. I'm not saying every world boss should be Soo-Wan pre-nerf levels of challenge, but I feel like Eparch is the perfect balance of where world boss difficulty should really be - difficult enough that you're likely to wipe a few times in the first week until you learn the mechanics, but otherwise a puggable fight so long as people actually respect and do the mechanics.

Soto's first map is one of favorite maps in the game. Very creative in concept and gameplay. Fun to just fly on. The 2nd map and Wizard Tower are great but run horribly. Sadly they aren't optimized. I can't stand Nayos, it's just too bland and bleak, the vision doesn't translate well. The landscape would work as just like the final stage in a singleplayer game where you do one quick last mission on the big bads home world. Hey, and maybe it does play like that for people who play through Soto in one chunk, it just odd the way it was released.

But yeah, I also enjoyed Soto's fights except normal Dagda in the first strike for Soto. Her CM feels like what her normal mode should have been minus her massive HO pool.

- - - Updated - - -

Looks like a staff transmogged as a spear.

We do have blades staffs in the game so I see your point. But also you can tell they are either allowing staves underwater (land weapons underwater) or spears on land (underwater weapons on land) by the way the weapon doesn't transition when the characters exits the water. The latter is a way to add more weapon skills to the game without much effort. Anets hints are never subtle, they added a standalone spear skin to the game recently after pretty much ignoring underwater skins for years.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

you can tell they are either allowing staves underwater (land weapons underwater) or spears on land (underwater weapons on land) by the way the weapon doesn't transition when the characters exits the water.

Don't we have gliders and backpacks/cloaks that look the same? Could be an underwater spear sharing the same model and sheathed pose as a land staff.

Spears on land would be cool, though.

[PACOX]

Don't we have gliders and backpacks/cloaks that look the same? Could be an underwater spear sharing the same model and sheathed pose as a land staff.

Spears on land would be cool, though.

I had some time to do some digging. They use a female norn in the video. The weapon held the same way they hold spears underwater, one-handed, tip end facing foward. Staves are held upright with one hand as a caster weapon or two-handed angled backwards for melee.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I had some time to do some digging. They use a female norn in the video. The weapon held the same way they hold spears underwater, one-handed, tip end facing foward. Staves are held upright with one hand as a caster weapon or two-handed angled backwards for melee.

Interesting find. Sounds like they're really coming then. Weird to hold a spear behind you rather than pointing out in front, though.

[Edge-]

Interesting find. Sounds like they're really coming then. Weird to hold a spear behind you rather than pointing out in front, though.

This is the era of making sure costs are kept in check, which means extremely liberal re-use of existing assets and animations. I'm not opposed to it entirely (though please, fewer random wyvern bosses and shit), but agreed that it does look weird.

I'm just happy it sounds like we're finally getting a proper "new weapon" for what I believe is the first time in this games existence.

[PACOX]

People are speculating that Anet is going to announce a new raid since the last one was released 5 years ago almost to the day next week. Its actually not uncommon to see Anet employees in various community discords and streams but they've been more active. The community is going to hype itself up beyond measure and reddit is going to farm disappointed regardless of whats announced, should be good though.

[Edge-]

Next expansion announcement tomorrow, will make a new thread for it.

But FYI on top of all the other info that points to the next expansion being Janthir Wilds, someone on the web team oops'd with the scheduling and you can currently see the next expansion on your account page. Can't buy it and there isn't a page for it yet, but it's there with logo and it sure seems to confirm one thing, spears are comin.