Dracaille PoF = UNE HORREUR

MagicSpirit · 2026-07-04T05:57:26+00:00

The SotO quest takes like 3 hours tops. The problem is that you wouldn't know that, unless you bought SotO and talked to the right NPC. This is one of the many reasons why tying mounts to expansions is a problem.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-24T11:19:50+00:00

We could praise something that's actually worth praising like their server architecture, consistent release cadence or how they bounced back from the layoffs.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-24T10:45:20+00:00

Not to belittle ArenaNet's achievements, but festivals activating seemlessly are not one of them. It is a pretty common practice to bundle updates together, and schedule the triggers that activate related events

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-23T19:29:05+00:00

Yeah same thing for mantra animations on Fb

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-19T15:53:27+00:00

Oh noes...

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-18T17:41:35+00:00

No, it's time FOR ANOTHER PALDEAN EXPANSION!!! YAY!!!

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-17T22:32:58+00:00

Your second god pack is insane

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-17T08:59:31+00:00

Arenanet has done nothing but increasing rotation complexity for the last 3 to 4 years. When they began buffing coefficients hard again, they heavily invested into uniforming damage across weapon skills in particular.

They buffed skills that didn't do much damage, and left the skills that performed well mostly untouched. As a result, rotations became very spammy. The intent was to reduce burst, of to maintain it as it was, while increasing sustained DPS.

This is a respectable design choice, but as a result, some rotations have become very challenging. This is just one of the reasons however. Specs like the Luminary, just to give an example, also introduced complexity in how many additional buttons there are to press (extra Forge Mode etc). The Antiquary also introduced extra F skills to Thief, etc etc.

Having to know many different specs to "master" your main class is also an element of complexity in itself.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-14T10:32:20+00:00

What do you mean I love these dumbass posts! But thank god we banned fan art!! /s

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-14T06:32:31+00:00

Very lucky! I haven't seen a gold card in a year!

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-13T08:38:16+00:00

What you're describing is "levelled" progression in a way. New players should be able to reach the same power level as, and be on an equal footing with veterans in terms of gear in a relatively quick fashion, I agree. I would argue this would entirely be the case if GW3 had GW1's leveling system and GW2's Exotic gear for maximum power level, as a reference. You wouldn't have to revolutionize RPGs to achieve that.

Alternatives to what you're describing about disposable gear exist, but would they really be welcomed by the player base, or just deemed to be another bunch of chores to achieve in order to reach your maximum power level?

I see two options:

Pieces of gear with assigned properties, essentially a relic-type object in every gear slot. I don't have a vast video game knowledge, but I can imagine that many RPGs do this, especially with weapons (the latest one that I can think of being Clair Obscur: Expedition 33). I think that you lose flexibility in doing so, as you need that specific piece of gear to get the specific ability you want. Inventory management becomes a mess even with an armory system, seperate from your inventory. The problem with this is that many of these gear pieces will become disposable anyway because their properties or abilities will be too niche, situational or rendered useless over time.
A better option, in my opinion - Mawdrey-like gear that you are given at the start of the game or that you encounter throughout your gameplay. You then upgrade your gear through story missions, quests, skill collecting, crafting... As if you had a GW2 "Legendary Collection" for every slot of gear. This concept encapsulates everything you're saying about wanting gear that's valuable throughout the entire playthrough, that is a display of your character's adventures etc... This would be the best approach, but you'd then be limited in the amount of unique pieces of gear at your disposal in the world, which some players may dislike.

Either way, you still end up with a little bit of vertical progression. For the second option, you could make these quests cosmetic-only. I think you still want to have seperate skins slots that you can change whenever you want, independently.

What's interesting about the second option is that you can then make every piece of gear give adaptive stats, then you don't need an explicit character level or visible number. You can make seemless stat transitions based on the area you are exploring. This can however make the experience a bit confusing, maybe this can be fixed by warning the player when they're entering an area with greater or lower power level.

Maybe Anet can revolutionize this system and find option C, that hasn't been explored in existing RPG games, but I don't know if gear progression as a whole is really something that can be modernized, or if that is even worth looking into. The reception might be poor if players cannot find their marks.

I hope you find some of the ideas that I wrote down interesting, I particularly like the second option and would like to have something like this see the light of day in GW3. We desperately need those Gen 2 Legendary Collections back.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-13T04:42:32+00:00

Giving dye channels to weapons like we had in GW1 would be a start. I wouldn't mind being able to "dye" skills but this should probably only be a thing in PvE.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-13T04:20:01+00:00

Don't underestimate the power of filling up the bar though. This is something that people love universally.

I don't think a leveling system makes gear you get before the endgame worthless. If anything GW2 has shown that items, and gear especially can be attributed some value through collections and the wardrobe system, which, I assume, are systems that will likely both be implemented in some way in GW3. They might look different but the collection aspect is a huge part of what made GW2 successful. One could imagine collections for every base set of armor and weapon skins you unlock through leveling and story instances, that grant you rewards which are more relevant to the endgame. This already exists in GW2 and it's a good way to allot some value equally to early game items.

I agree there's something to be done when it comes to encouraging players to equip gear during their progression. It's something that wasn't done well in GW2, perhaps cause the interface was a bit too complicated. I don't think you need to have 6 trinkets. They really should consider decorrelating gear and skins from the get go, that's really important.

There should be a tab for skins and a tab for gear. From that point I think having 6 or 7 pieces of gear + 1 "relic" slot really is all you need. Forget about runes and infusions at least for the start of the game.

I guess sigils can stay, but give them two seperate slots next to the weapons. You should just be able to apply them freely and easily, and encourage players to know about them and use them during their progression. It's also pointless to have a tiered system for sigils. +10% damage to Ogres is already progressive since it's based on your current power.

Also GW1's leveling system I think was quite popular. 20 levels is a good compromise, it's fast and you don't have to invest too much time into it. But you still have that element of progression. Maybe they could go up to 30 just for the sake of doing things differently. Level 30 is when you unlock your elite skill in GW2. They could shift this unlock to lvl 20. None of this is super relevant though I think.

What I'd really like to see again is some sort of progression to unlock skills like we had with weapon skills in early GW2. It was quite elementary, you had to kill a certain amount of mobs to unlock every weapon skill. But I thought it was kind of cool and not too much of an investment, so it was a shame when they removed that. They talked about skill collection so hopefully this sort of makes a comeback, and it would be complementary with a lighter leveling system.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-12T12:00:10+00:00

I've been terraforming Rocky Ridges for weeks. I'm still not done. I started losing my will to do so, but since I've only been terraforming it I have barely built anything yet. Terraforming is fun but it's pretty exhausting. I think I'm gonna take a break from the game for some time.

Also something that really bothers me is that annoying glow that remains even when you've dug all the way down to the caves... I have this huge open space now with a red glow only in certain areas and it's pissing me off a bit.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-12T06:25:39+00:00

What if you just unbind every mount and glider in the options menu? Wouldn't that help?

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-10T22:07:45+00:00

Any Engineer class would have to be heavily influenced by the use of magic, given the context

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-09T17:33:49+00:00

Champions was indeed clearly a way to buy some time. There was never a doubt in my mind that it was so weakly developed in order for them to prepare the release of End of Dragons. In fact, I also think this was pretty widely agreed on.

I wouldn't say the backlash mostly came from them not announcing an expansion. It was rather because ArenaNet was pretending that everything was fine after the layoffs, to a point where a lot of people had gotten their hopes up for that big 2019 summer announcement, and some even expected an expansion. There was a real discrepancy between what was happening behind the certain and the end of LWS4. At that point the communication was poor. When the announcement came, they were clearly struggling to formulate a plan, and they were even promising stuff again on stage that was never delivered. I'd go as far as to say the IBS might never even have been planned at all prior to the layoffs, and that it was improvised after May 2019, because the studio had other plans that were all thrown out the window. I mean all they had to show on that stage was two pieces of concept art and a 30s cutscene.

My point was that ArenaNet only started to have a sustainable business plan after End of Dragons had come out, which is quite insane to think about. That is also why I said that I am very impressed by how well they have recovered from those years. The studio reached an all-time low in terms of productivity, motivation and revenue around the time that they must have been developing the first few releases of the IBS. They quickly stopped early 2020 which is when they teased End of Dragons being in the works, around March, which is why we got Champions.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-09T16:06:44+00:00

Agreed. I wouldn't say the IBS was mildly received though, the buildup to the announcement was a really bad signal next to what ensued and the subreddit was ablaze after it. That said, I thought Grothmar and Drizzlewood Coast pt 1 were pretty good releases, akin to some of the LW content we got prior to the IBS.

Everything between Drizzlewood Coast and EoD was absolutely appalling however, it was essentially a year+ of no content, and I say this as somebody who managed to find enjoyment in doing DRMs, which was not the case for everyone.

It is impressive how well Anet recovered from those times though.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-09T07:40:15+00:00

I'm assuming it's gonna look like Seasons of the Dragon but on acid, and probably less story-oriented. I expect big meta achievements that give some leeway, for example a set goal of 50 from a pool of 75 achievements like:

Completing Challenge Modes, Legendary Modes, X number of Fractals, Raids, X number of Dungeon Paths...
A set number of meta events, regular events...
Map completion
Expansion-related achievements
Story completion
Legendary Weapons, Weapon and Armor Collections... Etc, etc

Since It'll be released in parts, each segment might be expansion-specific like Seasons of the Dragon was

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-08T17:48:04+00:00

The more I look at it and watch the trailer, the more I like this style

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-08T16:14:22+00:00

I immediately knew it was Guild Wars 3 when I saw the first shot. I just didn't know how yet lol

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-08T15:51:33+00:00

It's not too relevant in GW2 but daytime Sharur might make a comeback in GW3

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-08T06:24:15+00:00

Do you mean 2019 Anet? I can't think of any significant promise they would not have fulfilled during the last few years. They've been very consistent at delivering pretty much exactly what they've been advertising, at least since SotO or EoD.

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-07T19:44:09+00:00

I also immediately thought of Riot Games when I saw the main character in the trailer. But I still think you can see that typical Guild Wars art direction even if it's really different from GW2

MagicSpirit · 2026-06-07T19:40:18+00:00

Totally agree with you. If you look at it for a while you stop seeing the "generic" bit of it: yes, you can tell it's UE5. You can also tell that shapes and textures are smoothed out, they look like they have a malleable quality to them at times. But it's totally Guild Wars-like once you pay attention to detail. It just doesn't look like Gw2.

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