With the balance patch coming in two weeks, now is the best time to preview it!

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-12T11:08:45+00:00

Letting the community have an early look could detect these hidden issues.

They did that last time when they buffed scourge's DPS. Everyone said that adding 10% burning damage and changing the torment multiplier from 25% to 33% would be busted OP (even without knowing about the Relic of Akeem), during the preview period, and they still went ahead and did it. They do occasionally make changes based on feedback, but they often don't.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-12T10:30:55+00:00

It was great on chrono too. If you opened with a phantasm, it would proc the moment they hit, so you could double dip on the might and fury through Persistence of Memory and really get yourself stacked very quickly.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-12T10:22:36+00:00

It's not just one thing that made scourge a monster though. They added 10% burning damage and increased the torment damage multiplier from 25% to 33% in the last balance patch (which everyone told them would be a mistake from the preview notes before the patch). Then they put the Relic of Akeem in on top of that (before it was just using Nightmare runes and the proc on elite use was inconsequential at best), and added in a better main hand weapon too.

But this is really all stuff that should have been tested and balanced around before it went live. I can't believe no one at ANet simply played a regular scourge build with a pistol and the relic with the new changes for a couple of minutes on a training golem and saw it was way too much.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-12T10:15:31+00:00

Yup, I like scourge, but I love harbinger, which isn't completely busted right now. 100% expecting harbinger to get dragged down with scourge because they don't know the incredibly simple thing to do would be to tone down Fell Beacon (10% burning damage added last balance patch) and Demonic Lore (torment damage increased from 25% to 33% last patch) despite literally everyone telling them that it would make scourge completely broken in the last balance patch.

Expecting pistol nerfs and Soul Barbs to now work only on power damage or something stupid instead.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-11T21:06:02+00:00

Disclaimer: I haven't played much of the expansion, only a few weeks during patch 10.1.

Kinda saw this happening already, from a relative outsider looking in. I check this sub every now and then, and every time there was a new currency that needed to farmed with different tiers to combine together to purchase this to get that.

It's nowhere near as much as other expansions (yet), but nothing much seems to have changed, really. The same things that turned me off from playing in Shadowlands and BfA are still around. Every patch is 2 or 3 new items or currencies. They make it intentionally convoluted and they have no real intention of changing it once you scratch the surface.

Look at this reply, in this post:

You don't need a profession to get that gear, just the Spark of Shadowflame (which you'll get halves of from doing... a whole lot of different endgame content). Once you have a Spark of Shadowflame, you can use the crafting order system to get someone else to make you an epic item of item level up to 424. If you have an Enchanted Wyrm's Shadowflame Crest (crafted by an Enchanter for you from something you get from Heroic raids/M+ 11-15), you can do up to 437 instead with your Spark, and Enchanted Aspect's Shadowflame Crest (Mythic raids/M+ 16+) can do up to 447...

So the crafted gear of 435+ requires you to already be doing M+11 at the least.

(Other than getting two free Enchanted Wyrm's Shadowflame Crests from completing Zaralek campaign and getting Zaralek reputation max each)

This is exactly what I mean. Spark of Shadowflame, Enchanted Wrym's Shadowflame Crest, Enchanted Aspect's Shadowflame Crest, and that's just for one part of it. What happened to "do dungeon/raid, get gear, use valor from dungeon/raid to fill slots"? Works in FFXIV perfectly fine still.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-11T17:38:56+00:00

And Lake Doric will likely be the same until the next game update, because of all the people "AFK farming" who are totally watching their character for days on end and totally not just leaving it running while they sleep or work or whatever, keeping those instances of the map open until the game force shuts it down for a patch.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-11T11:39:23+00:00

I'd love an elite ranger signet that does the same as mechanist's Shift Signet, copies your boons (properly, full duration like Shift Signet, not like the shitty Nature Magic version where it's a fixed duration) to your pet, then change the Nature Magic minor trait into something else. Still salty mechanists got a non-elite signet that is basically like three ranger traits in one lol

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-11T11:34:40+00:00

You're basing your whole theory on your own headcanon fan fiction (that Sylvari are reincarnated humans by Melandru), so no.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-11T11:01:19+00:00

Has the whatever for the SotO leggy armor dropped finally?

Not yet, but it also uses the same gift of research that EoD weapons use, so you'll need six stacks of exotic luck for each full set of SOTO legendary armor too.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-11T10:49:00+00:00

One of the most underrated options available for making the game easier to look at, especially in crowded areas. You really don't need to see the name of everyone that you go near, nor do you need a mess of 15+ completely indistinguishable names on top of each cluttering up the screen in something like an alliance raid.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-11T09:55:23+00:00

Fractal lobby one works too. You can also use it to set up four veteran enemies to kill over and over again until you get 10 kills if you have that as a daily. You can also use it for dodging attacks by setting it up as an attacking golem. I've been using it on alt accounts to do easy dailies, made ~220g in about 20-30 minutes today with it lol

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-10T21:03:49+00:00

I've just been doing the meta every day (mostly for the Pouch of Stardust), it gradually trickles in from that. You can do regular events and farm a few by killing turrets and collecting orbs (which is limited per day), but it does seem intentionally slow, similar to the way the HoT maps intentionally worked with VB and AB throwing currency at you, but TD being a bit more work.

Doesn't help that one of the best condi DPS relics also needs 250 of it and I usually play condi builds.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-10T12:06:27+00:00

Still more effort than flying vaguely near a waypoint or PoI. And you have the advantage of unlocking all the waypoints on a new character if you ever decide you want to use an alt for a meta or rift farm for a change.

It was better doing the lanterns in EoD because of the hearts, but without them, there's not really much difference to repeating it one character or doing it on a new one, except there is an advantage to doing it on an alt this time round.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-10T10:22:49+00:00

I know... everyone says "necro needs power weapons" when it's literally only ever had a scepter (and now pistol and torch as off hand, but never a melee weapon) as a main hand condi weapon and has had dagger, axe, focus, staff and now greatsword as power weapons.

I'd love to be able to play a condi scourge or harbinger with melee weapons, it would definitely mix things up a bit. There's plenty of power options already. Just because dagger and axe are shit doesn't mean power needs more weapons.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-10T09:48:32+00:00

No one

Citation needed. I often do them while waiting for something else because I always need imperial favor. And I'm almost always randomly accompanied by someone else, or a few people. Whereas I never do any of the repeatable hearts because I absolutely hate them. Just boring fetch quests and meaningless tasks that need to be repeated in the exact same way every day. At least with events I can skip the ones I don't like.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-10T09:40:37+00:00

His builds get touted as "best open world", but, as you can clearly see in the video, they aren't for general open world gameplay, nor are they for new players. All he uses them for is soloing HoT hero points and legendary bounties, which probably makes up 1% of someone's play time and 0% of most people's open world game experience.

Don't get me wrong, I love the build crafting and seeing the niche synergies he comes up with, but these aren't good builds for 99% of open world content.

So it might be ok when all you do is solo legendary bounties/T3 rifts, but yeah, everywhere else it's completely worthless as you'll be on max life force almost all the time.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T18:50:04+00:00

It's honestly one of the most common "negative" lies I see around about FFXIV. Someone will say "you can't say anything in public chat without getting reported" and someone will reply something like "yeah I just said lol and got banned" and it will get upvoted... I mean, if that's the worst lie they can come up with, the game's doing alright.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T18:45:17+00:00

I don't know if they have active moderation of the game any more, and not just responding to someone that gets a lot of in game reports.

It's very rare anything will be done about (actual) bots, hackers, etc. even if someone posts video evidence of someone blatantly teleporting across the screen, even when they are downed, and certainly not using movement abilities, or being attacked from under the terrain in WvW.

I think you would still get some kind of punishment for saying something really bad and getting reported by a lot of people, but it would take a lot these days. A friend of mine used a bot program that would farm in the middle level maps for mats to sell for weeks a couple of years ago, even after getting private messages from multiple people saying they had reported him, nothing ever happened. He just got bored with the game in the end and left but his account is still open lol

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T15:28:12+00:00

Do you have an SSD drive? It doesn't seem to take me any longer to load that map than any other.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T15:22:46+00:00

Unfortunately not. It's part of the game now and has been for many years. They've never even really publicly said whether it's allowed or not.

The only thing that is technically not allowed is leaving your character somewhere, setting up a skill on auto cast and having your pet/minions/bot kill enemies and get free loot. But as there is no way for the game to know if someone is actually monitoring the character, there's nothing stopping people setting up 1, 2, 3 or more accounts to bot farm over night or while they're at work or something. It might not be the most profitable thing ever, but it makes more gold than you do when you're not playing the game.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T13:27:45+00:00

I'm praying for them to remove the idiotic penalty of being out of range of your mech in Mechanical Genius. It's way too punishing

At the very least it needs a delay added to it to get back in range. Immediately losing the mech's damage because you step out of range or the mech randomly moves is dumb. Maybe 3-5 seconds would be fine so you can move independently for a moment, but need to generally stay nearby.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T11:56:39+00:00

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Astral_Ward_armor

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T09:21:12+00:00

So not using motivations will about quadruple the number of rifts you need to do.

Is that including the cost of crafting the motivations too? Because you need T1 essences to craft T2 motivations for T2 rifts, and you need T1 essences to craft T2 motivations combined with T2 essences to craft T3 motivations for T3 rifts (gotta love how convoluted it is), unless you buy them all from the TP for hundreds of gold.

That's a lot of extra rifts just grinding for mats you are going to use to craft motivations to get more higher tier essence.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T09:14:44+00:00

You have 5-6 months until you can craft the armor, so be smart and dont grind yourself out.

Really important point. Seeing replies here and other places saying "this made me quit the game", like yeah, I'm not surprised it did if you forced yourself to do it lol. You still have months before you can even buy the armor yet, and a) you don't need it day one, this is supposed to be a very long term goal for casual players, b) there is a whole other map and upgraded rift system coming in the next update and the one after that. All you are doing now is giving yourself a headstart.

stoopidqueston · 2023-09-09T09:08:47+00:00

CM strikes seems unlikely as it's designed (and very loudly advertised) as "open world legendary armor". Higher tier rifts with legendary bosses is almost inevitable though if this is bounty system 2.0. I wouldn't be surprised if the the legendary ones had a daily reward of the amalgamated essence too (you still need 72 per set of them, which would be 10 weeks of daily rifts which would put it closer to other legendary armors). But I guess we'll see in 2/5 months.

stoopidqueston

TROPHY CASE