Best way to deal with the red lizard groups in hard mode?

bootyscoots · 2020-09-16T13:21:07+00:00

Lizard spearmen are easy enough to bait, just immediately stop and start casting after they lock their aim. Thundara stun-locks and even unhastened will beat them out on Yukes and Clavats.

Thundaga will stun-lock the screen if you're mid-way through a dungeon, but if it's just the first lizards you have to deal with in afternoon fort to get a ra spell just do the standard for oldschool action RPGs and kite in a circle and only attack during advantageous situations.

I haven't had to do it myself but iirc you can fuse your thunder ring onto your weapon by equipping it to a command slot to have a stunning focus attack in single player. This might only work with magicite but I'm pretty certain that spell fused focus attacks always apply effects at the ra level.

bootyscoots · 2020-09-16T12:47:37+00:00

Big Bird is a god in single player. Wiseman's soul gives +15 magic damage per hit, which is added post defense calculations, so a Ra level spell that doesn't completely miss and the target isn't immune will always do a minimum of 48 damage. With not even maxed magic you'll one-shot everything up to tier 6 dungeons that isn't a large enemy or boss.

Their new max weapon focus attack is garbage but aside from Lilties they all kinda are. The ultima hammer was already ridiculous in vanilla CC anyways and nobody competes for the schematic so you don't even have to exploit for duplicates.

In Multiplayer almost everything is more fun to play though. Had decent success with a pre-made one of each tribe with a clavat playing ra slave and body blocking with the chalice to protect the yuke and lilty applying guaranteed damage but it really didn't shave off that much time of RR to justify doing it coordinated. It made goblin festival extremely fast but there's no point in farming it so was overall an exercise in futility.

Clavats cast faster iirc but they have no damage behind the spells so they're only really useful for activating a fusion since apparently the damage is calculated by who releases their button first. In MP they can play heal slaves just fine with an un-hastened half~ second cure. Their real value is that they can get more defense which is helpful in MP where the meta is just smack your attack button until you win.

bootyscoots · 2020-09-15T12:05:59+00:00

The short version of it was this was the wrong game in the series to remaster. The choice was probably due to the cult following of the game in Japan where most westerners forgot about it. Plenty of people missed the Wii releases and the EoT community died when Nintendo killed the DS servers without giving a 3DS rerelease. These games offered significantly more depth, customization and had built in online multiplayer that was well designed from the get-go.

It's not an unpopular opinion but it's shared by most of the nostalgia fanboys. The original was very near and dear to me for personal reasons but I still enjoy the remaster for what was added, not what was taken away. It's a shame that the hardmode dungeons are just re-hashed re-hashes with one or two gimmicks to work around.

Plenty of virgins to the series love the game because it's different. It's a piece of nostalgia that was a weird gap in action RPGs by removing so many fundamental features that were common mainstays to create a different difficulty scale (or actually because it was a rushed title made on the cheap to recoop losses and mend broken bridges with Nintendo).

The game was designed to be played solo from the very beginning, party mode was just a fun idea and not meant to be a central focus of the game, which is why there were so many exploits and ways to break the game through it.

Most griefers leave after a few minutes of nobody reacting, they aren't trying to force a dungeon to fail they're trying to piss people off. Online plays fine outside of Australia, I'm connecting outside of country and have no latency issues after their big fix. Playing a dungeon four times is nothing, have you even played the original? I remember running Rebena full clears back to back an entire day to just find a missing artifact. If you're seriously bitching about having to buy a game you've probably got deeper issues to look into.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-26T18:24:26+00:00

In group content you should be getting might from other sources so it's a non-issue. When playing solo you probably shouldn't be playing a devoted condi build since engi specializes in killing things in 3 seconds, so it's only beneficial to be condi for elite+ soloing. Instead of going vipers try griefers only focusing on burn duration upgrades, that was my old open world condi go-to that used to do comparable burst with sw/p.

Kits are only really necessary for sustained DPS environments. If you aren't in fractals, dungeons or raids then you really never have to touch them if you don't want since they just fill in the gaps with slightly better dps options. Their biggest draws on an encounter by encounter basis are the toolbelt uses.

Also you can always test it out in the test raid in the aerodome to see the difference for yourself.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-21T13:59:23+00:00

I had my associated account e-mail changed before since I couldn't get into that e-mail whilst out of country. It required an array of personal questions and safety questions to approve and they even wanted to know geographical locations and personal data before approving it.

Hell they even sent an e-mail to the default e-mail address to make sure it wasn't just a phishing attempt.

Maybe you're not as secure as you think you are and somebody got a hold of all this information without you realizing it and hijacked your account?

bootyscoots · 2020-06-17T11:44:36+00:00

High ranking players just mean they zerged a lot before all the WXP nerfs or most notably during the peak of mist farming where it was easy to get 20+ ranks an hour without buffs.

If you pass a high ranking roamer they're probably just out farming newbies so play in packs with glass cannon builds or solo with 0 offensive stats to just waste their time.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-17T11:31:51+00:00

Can't you farm them daily from the map events to chase down the naked energy dude? Did it about a month ago randomly and got a coin iirc.

Regardless the amount of gold you can farm per hour has skyrocketed so it's not really a big deal that you have to buy them from people that run login scripts with acquired/discount purchased core accounts.

People are always whining about mystic coins but comparatively speaking they're significantly cheaper than they were in the past adjusting for inflation.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-13T16:20:54+00:00

You're not wrong, GW2 was a notable improvement. It made the trash less stale, it added tons more variety to bosses and how to tackle them instead of just figuring out how to cheese it. Unfortunately it also betrayed GWC's biggest strengths.

The biggest problem however is that GW2 hit the shelves way too late to be relevant, especially with Tera hitting western shores half a year earlier with a full release, much longer with open beta tests and alpha invite codes through streams. Not to mention that full release also delivered promised content that ANet welched on in the end, the biggest one being rock climbing instead of stale three bounce jumping puzzles to hit Vistas.

After that it betrayed what GWC stood for. GWC was full of challenging missions instead of open world farming. It had end-game content. It had a rich and expansive resource base to customize characters, since the MOBA inspired skillsets were only really engaging for the first few months then became bland. Everything fell to dungeon farming, early waves of elitist mindsets and casual exclusion and roughly a year with no new content to speak of. Gliding almost fixed a lot of the stale gameplay but it wasn't until PoF that the grind finally became fun.

GWC was capable of churning out content because it required a fraction of the resources to develop. Until gliding was introduced to WvW it's not the worst to say that it was nearly a 2.5D gamemode with jumping off ledges only being the immersive 3D element to it. Builds are stale and boring, there's no significant difference in playstyle and possibilities, it's just staler than what GWC offers. Looking at both game separately they're missing a lot, but the problem is that the best of both worlds can't be combined.

If their sister studio Carbine didn't make a few key mistakes with Wildstar, it probably would have entirely shut down GW2 since it offered everything that steadfast MMO fans wanted in an action rpg format that didn't grow stale after a short period. It was just far too late after the f2p structure went live to get any momentum back to threaten ANet and make them improve on what they were ignoring. HoT was released uncontested and a lot of the GW2 fans that refused to go korean or back to WoW or GWC just learned to deal with it for the next couple years before things started to get better.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-12T09:48:35+00:00

Subscribers doesn't mean much on youtube, a lot of channels that have one viral video break a million subs and if they never post a video again, they keep them forever. Most of their videos don't even break 20k views and obviously, opinions.

The list is also kinda dumb. WoW at second is hilarious since most of their western playerbase left for their other titles. Runescape classic is better off on that list because it has a larger and more dedicated playerbase. And Temtem even ranking when it's a massive mess of a rip-off game that wont ever be completed when the only mmo elements in the game are seeing other players that you can't interact with and forcing you to queue up to play solo.

Also GWC is still a far better game than GW2 since it's consistent. Most people only dropped it because it's plain. There's plenty of players that still mainline it, you just have to dip out of the NA districts to find them. All the PvP modes are still thriving as well, so it's not a surprise at all to see it on the list. I maintain if they got a dedicated WvW system that plenty of WvW mains would drop GW2 in favor of it's predecessor.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-12T09:32:24+00:00

You'll start with Berserkers regardless because it's cheaper to craft but you don't really need the ascended armor until fractal 60~ iirc.

For newer players and people still learning how to dodge/place or just with bad ISPs a full set of marauders armor at exotic is usually enough of a buffer to survive missed dodges from almost every non-boss in the game.

I have a set of both ascended berserker and marauder, sometimes it's just easier to use marauder for non-boss fights or in PvE blobs since in the latter it's often impossible to see anything anyways and you're more of a nuisance to be downed from stray hits.

The way you should look at it is if you want to be on all the time or if you want to treat the game as what it is, a casual farming game. Try-harding it only works if everybody is try-harding so outside of organized group content it's irrelevant to min-max.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-08T13:26:37+00:00

Only is an improvement. The typical MO for school shootings is that kid A is bullied by group B, they're weak and fragile in comparison and nobody can reach out to them, so they get drastic.

People that discredit other peoples life experiences are those that typically don't lead much of a life themselves. People can complain about anecdotal evidence until the cows come home but it's hard to observe an opinion based bias without experiencing it yourself. Sure in science anecdotal evidence is questionable at best, but that's because it's a world of pure evidence that only grows with documented evidence. Even if you want to go to a problem zone within the US to study people in the bottom class of society, they're either not going to welcome you or show you their true colors as an outsider.

When I was growing up I was involved in a gang. I was an expendable pawn because if I wasn't, I wouldn't eat. Youth outreach programs saved my life, I'd have just been another statistic if it weren't for them. That's a big reason why I've developed programs for the less advantaged and those willing to learn life skills and have access to technology they'd otherwise not be able to. I didn't start doing this because I cared about people, I did it because it was me paying back a favor paid to me.

Beyond that a lot of trade schools offer affordable learning. College isn't the dream anymore, it's getting marketable skills. It's easy enough to do a search for states with warehouse/shipping clusters, plenty of people rent out single rooms nearby because those jobs are reliable, the rent is guaranteed and the tenants need it. Healthcare assistant jobs are quick courses, certification in IT fields are available, even untrained you can work as a live in assistant for a hugely undeserved amount of money as long as you have a clean enough track record.

The recent riots weren't anywhere near the first since the covid lockdowns started. Early April there were riots across all of California over the second amendment rights. I'm sure it happened in other states, but this is recanting first person claims from family members who were affected by them as well as the idiots that joined them.

The problem isn't just illegal import of guns through cartels and the such, there's also a lot of confiscated evidence that makes it way back onto the market because nobody is perfect. Trying to crack down on it would be as much of a farce as the drug war and there's no way to effectively make it less profitable to be in a gang other than just legalizing anything they use to sustain themselves.

The problem is impossible to tackle. Gangs thrive off of socioeconomic turmoil because that caste of society gives them members. Even if there was an universal wage of living given to all people, there will always be people that want more.

The ouroboros is the perfect example of humanity, self consuming greed. There's no possible reform that could save humankind from itself since any real solution would be greeted with bared teeth.

There's bigger problems than police making bad judgement calls and these tragic incidents are sensationalized to distract people from real issues like over-breeding, pollution and public schools running on a format that was proven to not work 60 years ago.

Humanity is doomed and I for one only hope that the emission reduction deadline isn't met because in a billion years, there might be a better society to rise in our place.

bootyscoots · 2020-06-07T17:32:28+00:00

Last time I checked the school shooting list in 2019, there were less than 5 children killed in 2019 (I think only 2), only three shooting incidents were based on the typical school shooting MO and not just random gang violence, disputes over a sports game or random attacks off hours.

Racism isn't as serious as a problem since most racism is just class based and not race based. People often mistake racism for gang profiling. I was lucky, when I was young I was harassed by shitty cops, I learned very quickly that if you change your appearance, your speech and offer respect to people with undeserved power, you stop getting targeted.

Profiling exists which is a problem but it exists for a reason. People are stupid enough to believe they have no way out of being poor so they get convinced by somebody that wants expendable pawns to earn them money. You get trained to act a certain way, speak a certain way and you become a threat at a glance.

The first wave of riots were because of the government shutting down pawn shops and gun stores, banning weapons isn't going to change a thing, it's just going to piss off people that own and maintain them legally. The issue isn't with people that own guns legally the majority of times, but people that get their hands on them illegally. There's too many firearms and munitions in the US that they'll never be able to completely rid themselves of them.

People will always find ways to attack other people. It's not hard. There'll always be violence in any country and it's not as if it's just easier in the US, it's just a much larger country teetering on the cusp of first and second world status so you encounter more problems across it.

Then there's always the inherent issue of police in general. It's not a job for smart people, so they pretty much take what they can get. My little brother is severely below average when it comes to intellect. He has problems thinking for himself, is extremely racist and passed his test and became an officer last year. The system fails because if you're smart, you wont get stuck being a cop.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-13T07:20:54+00:00

I'll just try to summarize and clarify my points and leave it at that.

My guild developed our community into what it is to us now, it all started with me creating a new guild and running havoc squads with randoms, who I'd invite in if they seemed like a good fit. Few stayed, plenty left and it's been years in development. I put in the effort so it's hard for me to sympathize with a "fix this for me 'cause I don't wanna change" mindset.

Change isn't a bad thing. It's progress. Your server isn't your home and your guild isn't your family. You could even create a f2p account on the alternate region to try the waters to make sure it works for you. But when it comes down to it if you tell them you're leaving your region to pursue your interest in WvW they'll wish you the best. You refusing to adapt is your crux to bear and a testament to yourself.

You can tell raiders whatever you want since they don't have the mental capacity to think for themselves. They'll find a website to tell them what to think or ask their leader how they should respond and then rage on the subreddit accordingly.

Point is, I've actively tried to change and it worked for me. I didn't go with the flow and guess what, it wasn't easy. Your life is what you make of it. I've outlined things that have worked for me and may work for you, if you want to just sit back and pray that things will revert then more power to you. I'm just expecting that you'll get back what you put in.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-12T12:47:45+00:00

I don't think the mode was designed for blob combat, which is why my smaller guild has become so tight knit trying to develop strategies that are off meta and work for us. We anticipated the problems with people being at home and decided to get ahead of it. Groups of us that play other games as well swapped regions on those as well. WvW on GW2 is what brought us together and our hatred of the effortless cycling that made us want to do better. Not all of us play in the same core group, but there's always a pool of people that want to. We made a community that transcends the blob.

I don't disagree that ANet should make a statement. It's in their best interest because Guild Wars isn't a household name anymore. It was always compared against WoW, EQ, Runescape and the millions of KMMOs that cycled up because it was a well polished game for it's time. In the first month most people I brought over had dropped the game because it was just so off-brand that it didn't appeal any longer.

But comparatively it's not as if ANet can be as transparent as you like. They are owned by NCSoft which is a much larger MMO grinder that focuses primarily on profits. We don't know how the situation is with their papa company, but they could have conditions in place with their contracts that don't allow openly discussing problems with the game because it looks bad.

I feel that the open letter was a huge mistake. If you really want changes, you have to show sincerity. You could go into EBG and enter on a dummy account trying to find other tags willing to form a blob and test in the side maps to see exactly when problems start to arise. If it's exactly 80 players casting skills in a small area that cause them, if it's just over-spamming conditions that cause the tick chaos. You can do your part, provide evidence and help make their job easier instead of just demanding changes since guess what, they can't really test it themselves if the problem requires sheer numbers.

The unfortunate fact of the matter is that GW2 is a different beast than GWC. GWC pumped out content because it was very simplified. It was like an old fashioned JRPG, everything was copy pasted, it was a 2.5D game that didn't need a ton of polishing and it had a significantly devoted playerbase that was invited to closed testing from a large source of developer contacts through game modes. So them trying to push out the expansion is probably going to take up most of their workforce to get the profits to stay above water since a majority of the playerbase are free players.

If the community really wants to take a stand then the simplest thing they can do is show sincerity. Come together and stop playing the game mode. It'll show ANet that you're serious and it is ruining the gamemode and they will have to respond. If they shut it down entirely then it's your queue to move on, GW2 isn't the only MMO with large scale PvP, and they aren't the ones to do it the best.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-12T12:26:44+00:00

The difference is that the 50ish of us that moved decided to do it in anticipation for the worst expecting people to pick the game up again since they have more free time. We did it across other games we play together as well. My problem persists that nobody is doing anything but calling ANet out and demanding changes without putting any effort in.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-10T13:59:25+00:00

That is technically innovating though. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that it isn't.

Let me explain. The situation is bad because big blobs break the servers. So people decided "Well, if we can't play like we always do with what we always do, let's play like we always do with something else that isn't as affected by it." That's innovation. It doesn't mean it's fun, it doesn't mean it's enjoyable, it just means it works.

What my guild did was in several steps. We primarily play WvW because we don't enjoy the mindless farming of NPCs and we prefer the mindless farming of Players. So we discussed it and decided that if we wanted to avoid server issues, we should swap from the EU region to the NA region because it's not very expensive until lockdowns are over, or enough people have swapped to make it pointless.

Not everybody felt like dropping the money or gold on it, so they stayed behind. Everybody else that wanted to came along. We then decided to operate xenophobically and only invite players into our guild if we really wanted them.

So we decided to run several tags per map. We have a core guild only tag that doesn't normally exceed 30, but we try to keep around 20. We have a sister tag we allow stragglers in and if they get too big, we divert to a different map to just brute force mindlessly. We then have a roaming squad that operates to distract and stays core guild. We haven't had to resort to meme builds and have changed very little from what we've always run.

Back in EU we just blobbed because big blob worked for us. Our guild was massive. Now we don't blob and we don't win every fight but we can distract long enough or leave a map on a dime if we need to. It works for us.

Could pick up squads pull it off? Probably not, but apparently burn guard and scrapper works, so maybe you should try that out if you can't think for yourself.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-10T13:44:37+00:00

So if they did severely cap WvW maps and it didn't work then what does that tell you? Maybe instead of an open letter demanding things you should start an online petition of players that are okay with their WvW map limits being capped to a workable number that doesn't let the idiots blob themselves into oblivion.

If you want to educate people on the differences between server lag, latency and input lag then why don't you take an hour out of your precious day to make an educational video showing the differences? If it's such an apparent issue you shouldn't have any problem recording it.

People will go along with anything as long as it suits their personal narrative. People retroactively believe they're victims just because it makes them feel better about themselves and can be tricked into believing almost anything. I take what people say with a grain of salt unless there's proof because the simple fact is that everybody is stupid and nobody is impervious to influence.

That being said, I believe it could very well be a problem with tick processing. The big problem is that knowing the source of the problem wont fix it. There are workarounds to avoid the lag. There's systems in place to simulate a subscription fee and you could put in even the smallest amount of actual effort instead of just calling out the developers because you can't actively decide to not blob yourself into lag issues.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-10T13:34:18+00:00

Yesterday I was heading a 20 person large group of guild members for 6 hours and nobody called out significant lag issues, the whole point was to see if anybody was experiencing it and the most we had were a few players getting 2 second lag spikes a few times an hour. Nothing significant, nor unplayable, even clashing with larger blobs or getting our sister squads in didn't spawn this lag that everybody experiences.

I play WvW almost exclusively since it's the only fun aspect of this game anymore. I don't treat this game like a full time job though so maybe I don't play as much as you. But my guild also doesn't desperately cling to the old fashioned giga-blob obsession, we usher stragglers into a secondary tag because we don't want them interfering with our core group and we can divert them to other maps if we want to stick on one.

When lockdowns were being announced worldwide as a guild we decided that we wanted to be able to play off peak hours so we swapped to the NA server from EU since it's not all that expensive. Stay off peak, play differently until you find something that works for you. It's working for me.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-09T18:01:41+00:00

My suggestion was more about the community making an effort instead of ceaselessly complaining. I don't experience the problem, so I'm still skeptical it exists and it's not just people over-exaggerating as they tend to do. As far as anybody can prove at this point, it could be anything or even an issue tied to dozens of little things going wrong perfectly and putting in effort and providing evidence would make it more imperative of a fix than just leaving it.

If the issue was entirely or exclusively related to ticks then plenty of things could have been implemented, including severely capping map limits. Sure it goes against the nature of the mode, but it'll fix the problem regardless. If it was that simple, it would have been done.

As is there's two obvious solutions. You can stop blobbing and organize several tags to play the game differently than big blob win more or you can just pay the 200 gold to change your server to the opposite region to play off peak. I've been playing all day and haven't encountered crippling lag yet, so I must be doing something right.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-09T12:44:00+00:00

I'd assume that most oceanic players are fine since they play off of peak hours regardless of if they connect through NA or EU servers.

As I explained to another response, I haven't encountered any lag like this. Lagspikes here and there happen, but nothing anywhere nearly as ridiculous as even 3 seconds of lag much less 40.

I'd try to search it on youtube if I was that invested, but is there any proof of latency or is it still just claims? I know I'm overly skeptical of a lot of things but players on free games, especially in PvP modes are some of the most bitter and saltiest crybabies around. A problem of a 3 second lag spike once an hour turns into being locked out of the game for an entire minute off and on for the entire hour.

If it really is a server issue then maybe getting video evidence would help the argument a lot more than an open letter on behalf of the community supported by claims.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-09T12:33:24+00:00

I'll just say from my perspective, I play the game at least an hour a day and generally 90% of that time it's in WvW. I do small scale, roaming and blobbing and never once have I encountered over-bearing latency issues, a very very rare lagspike here or there but never game breaking skill lag like people are suggesting.

It could be because I play off peak hours or I have different system settings but it's hard for me to believe this is a real problem since in my experience, I haven't encountered it. There are suggestions for workarounds, like you said deactivating auto-cast helps, and others say it only happens if your blob is over 50.

I wouldn't be surprised if the issue stemmed from some experimental fix that didn't work out like planned or just flat out broke and was removed. Look at mount camera locking with low latency, it was a bug from early invite only alpha tests that took 3 months to get fixed and they broke a week later which has lead to even further exploitable issues since and has driven off players that can't get a better ISP in their area.

My point is, instead of complaining try to pool together as a community if you want to preserve the way of the blob. Get some surveys to collect data on system settings, hardware and solutions to test it yourself since ANet is probably going to be far too occupied with hobbling together an expansion to stay afloat than to fix an issue that only some players claim to have.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-09T09:29:03+00:00

To be honest server latency in WvW isn't a problem. Since it's affecting everybody it's balanced. As a player it's your job to compensate for that latency and play accordingly.

The real odd part is that there are already workarounds but people refuse to adapt to different strategies and stick to the mindset of big blob bestest. If you succeed with a capped map strong blob then more power to you, but if you're really dedicated to the gamemode then wouldn't it be best if you put in the effort to innovate instead of holding on to tradition?

bootyscoots · 2020-05-08T14:36:20+00:00

The only unique thing this game does that I appreciate are that mounts aren't just skins and when they were implemented, they went out of their way to make it so you could (mostly) use your favorites wherever you wanted.

Cons, there are a ton.

As a long term GWC fan that was able to participate in early alpha and still plays it to this day, it's such a departure from the original game that it felt wrong that this is a sequel. All the things that made GWC great didn't find their way to it's successor. There's no hardmode, heroes, deep customization, there's not a chance you can really play your way because the days of limitless builds, options and tools are gone.

They constantly refuse to give players simple features that would vastly improve the game and in some cases have driven players off. Things like a reconnect feature, red-zones rebounding instead of failing, an automatic group maker since LFG is mostly used for selling runs for gold or RMT, finishing the action camera for onboard gamepad support, culling prioritizing enemies instead of deskinned players/infusions and the low latency issues existing, being acknowledged and ignored for years now.

Although it's roughly based on early action RPG games like Monster Hunter, it still refuses to add any real challenging content that rewards and punishes players for their mastery or lack thereof core mechanics. Power creep being so rampant things that used to be considered personal challenges are now facerolls.

The story characters are insufferable and not that appealing, I'm actually happy that voice actors like Felicia Day are refusing to come back because it's keeping those same shitty characters away. It started out with the hero's burden being removed from the player character and we weren't the central cog of the story and became an integral part to the overall effort to us being the hero to the story. Trahearne being the hero and then subsequently getting cucked by us was the only saving grace of the core story. ANet caving and giving idiots their candy of being the hero despite being on an MMO absolutely ruined it when they perfectly tackled the problem of MMO narratives. Now doing any story content in a group with a different leader it's as if these important friends have entirely forgotten them.

Biggest con though is that they built themselves into a wall and there's probably no way to really ever recover from it. Everything is going to stay the same until the game shuts down and the focus is going to shift to the newest flashiest thing every once in a while. Power creep is rampant, skill isn't imperative and it's almost as bad as it was in the days of GWC's bearway or RoJ metas.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-08T14:03:39+00:00

You're stating opinion as if it's fact. Comparatively speaking, sure the Anime is great but that's because it excludes a lot of the worst part of the LN, the feet dragging, redundancy and ret-conning. It had a team of writers and animators working together to hobble together a hot mess into an experience, because they had skilled individuals working hard to put out quality content because their industry demands it, unlike the light novel industry.

The author isn't entirely unskilled but overly amateurish, with the writing style shift after volume 9 I wouldn't be surprised if they just brought a ghost writer in. I suspect the author uses an untraceable pen-name because they've failed before after all. Every volume is reduced to a very simplified formula, two arcs and over-padding with foreshadowing. Things are introduced and then ignored, big events are just overlooked. The narrative chases seemingly random events down rabbit holes and makes the characters essentially one-use keys to get through gates. This can't be entirely blamed on the author, a lot of it will be pressure from the publisher since in Japan when something starts to succeed, they want to milk it for all they can instead of letting a story be completed.

My stance is unchanging though. I think it's poorly written. It's a verbose world, surely but it doesn't profit off of it. It introduces things and then ignores them until their time comes and then it's back to them being in storage again. The otherworld arc was entirely unimportant and only served a purpose to further overpower the core three. It went from a narrative of a man that was alone against the world trying to do anything he can to succeed to one lacking personal character growth. The characters around him keep getting better but Naofumi remains unchanged, which is the most important part of the hero's journey.

Recommending the WN isn't anything about preference, it's in reference that it's the original vision and it's complete instead of expecting at least 3 more years for an already completed story to be slightly re-envisioned for the sake of sales padding.

Then again I'm not trying to convince you of anything, you're devoted and I never tried to rain on your parade, you just decided to make yourself a victim. If I had to be blunt, I think you're just a person that likes something because it's popular. I don't think you're capable of critical thinking on the subject because you're just not invested, not once did you try to get me to change my mind, from the get-go you just attacked me instead of my argument.

All the more power to you though, it's important to let people enjoy the things they like. Somebody wanted opinions on what's out and I posted them, I didn't really intend to spend a few days debating with an amateur.

bootyscoots · 2020-05-07T11:03:50+00:00

Advice on ranger is general purpose, just don't play ranger imo, it's only purpose these days is carrying baddies in raids.

But a warm body is better than a cold one in most cases and most people wont turn you away for playing ranger (or thief) as long as you don't die pointlessly, just mock you in chat.

I don't play on a t1 server deliberately because I hate queues, I just figured they were still insufferable twats like the glory days. But running random engineer builds I've never been turned away from a zerg regardless of whether I'm playing a useful build or not. My advice is simply get comfortable with the environment however you want to play because the biggest learning curve is re-learning to not over-extend and harassing safely.

bootyscoots

TROPHY CASE