Zephire.8049

No thanks, I'd rather resources be spent on other things because this is way more likely to backfire than be neutral let alone a positive.

RPGs can be modded so you can get around romance restrictions that the devs put in. You can't mod an MMO without getting banned which means Anet would either need to decide who each PC can romance or make each romance available regardless of PC. So that automatically means 2 options per race of the commander. But wait, what if your commander is fine dating other species? Now each race needs to be available to the PC to romance including gender.

To make it feel personal, you need to add custom dialogue referring to the PC's gender and race, if not their profession as well. Difference races value different things so you can't just copy-paste responses because then you might get weird combos like an asura praising a norn for their intelligence, a norn praising a sylvari for their strength, or a charr praising a human for being agnostic. So that would have to be multiple custom responses for each romanceable NPC for each PC combination and vice versa. Even without voice acting, that would be a lot of writing and a lot of scripting in the code.

But there's more!

Some people feel really strongly about what their character(s) are like and who (and if) they'd be into dating so even if all of the above is done, a good chunk of people would end up pissed off because none of the romance NPCs are the type their character would be into so now all this time and money went into developing romance options and they _still_ get nothing out of it. And players whose PC isn't into romance or it's not a priority for them right now also get nothing from such a large update.

Anet would also very likely have to create brand new NPCs or use minor ones because they couldn't use major characters as that would affect the canon. People still complain about Dragon's Watch and how it's way harder to connect with them compared to Destiny's Edge (even though by this point DW has existed for years longer in-game) so either the romance NPCs will take years to develop or show up and suddenly your character is into them and they're into your character. Either you get burned out waiting for the updates or you're annoyed at how forced it is.

And if there are locks on race/gender, you now have to roll a character not because you like them but because at some point in the story you'll be able to romance an NPC even if you dislike the race and/or gender.

Single-player RPGs have the luxury of incorporating romance from the design phase and controlling the player character. Some MMOs have tried it but the options are limited and it falls flat. It is better for everyone involved—including the devs—if MMOs don't add romance options since that's what headcanons, fanart, and fanfic are for as it's literally impossible for an MMO to make everyone happy when it comes to something so personal.

Junk items like that exist to give players a better sense of a reward. Giving players a random 2c here and there isn't noticeable and players actually complain when they aren't notified of drops (not just in GW2 but in MMOs/games in general) since they feel like they're getting nothing out of the work they put in.

Junk items can be annoying—especially when their vendor value is so low—but there's a psychological reason for them being there in addition to taking up bag slots that force people to find a merchant.

As nice as the in-game wardrobe is, it doesn't actually show every skin available. Some are missing because they're locked behind achievements, others because a dev forgot to put them in, and some unique karma skins may or may not be included (I can't remember if they are or not). To see the full wardrobe for your account, you're better off using gw2efficiency's wardrobe table as that includes everything that's in the API. You can also search for gold-only skins and you may be surprised at how much you're missing that isn't from the gemshop.

But this is a very subjective question and opinion. I don't like particle effects or auras to be the main focus of something, so I generally prefer the thousands of in-game skins over the gemshop ones. If you don't like "plain" skins it makes sense that it feels unfair that the gemshop has exclusives that are "shinier" than a lot of in-game skins, but for players like me, the skins from new content are generally more desirable and usable than shins that came out in the gemshop the past 3-4 months between episodes.

Worst case scenario you can use the RNG wardrobe unlocks to nab the gemstore skins. Or grind gold to buy gemstore skins since they aren't reserved only for those with IRL money. Or take a break from playing between content patches.

> @"weaponwh.9810" said:

> any idea which LSW 3/4 map worth to get karmic retribution for solo? also world boss or meta vs doing map event which is more efficient?

Sandswept Isles.

The Specimen Chamber meta on the south island has a pre-event that lasts 8 minutes and spawns enemies constantly. With tier 3 Karma Retribution, you can pull in 35k-45k karma per meta if you use an AoE tagging build. That meta goes approximately every hour, too, and it's one of the most consistent karma farms in the game so is still active over two years later.

> @"Danikat.8537" said:

> > @"Atomos.7593" said:

> > I always wondered why you can't do this too, since you can do it in a lot of other MMORPGs. I'm guessing one reason is GW2 was also designed as a competitive game so the devs wanted to make the UI and combat system the same for everyone as much as is possible. I personally don't think this would cause any problems and I think it would be a nice feature to have.

>

> I don't know for sure but I suspect it has something to do with weapon skills being tied to the weapon and the way weapon swap (and other types of skill swap) work.

>

> GW2 uses a modified version of the GW1 engine and in that game you could place skills wherever you wanted on your bar, but it created some weird effects if you did anything which changed your skills. For example if you start one of the Wintersday mini games which give you special snowball themed skills and rearrange those it would also affect your normal skills - when you leave the mini game your skills will be messed up - based on where you moved the snowball skills.

>

> I don't know for sure but I suspect the same would have happened in GW2. Let's say you're using greatsword as one weapon set and sword/torch as a second set, if you swap greatsword skills 1 and 5 it would also move sword/torch skills 1 and 5...and the same would happen with any other skill sets, like engineer kits or transformations. If that's the case I imagine they weighed up the pros and cons of letting players place skills vs. being able to weapon swap and have the skills update automatically (which didn't happen in GW1 - you were stuck with the same bar even if you changed weapons) and have all these other different skill sets and decided the second option was better.

>

> It is something I miss and would use if it was available, but I've gotten used to it. Moving my skills to a more comfortable layout (in my case putting them on the number pad) helped a lot, because it meant I wasn't trying to stretch across the number keys as much.

In addition to this, at release and for 1 or 2 years after, weapon skills would be locked until you had used the previous skills enough times to unlock the next weapon skill slot. It's easy to say "Well the skills should unlock from the bar only after you unlock all the weapon skills" but we have no idea what the coding for that is like, especially as the release designs/coding are likely to be close to hard coded, if not completely hardcoded, and require a lot of work to get around. If we only got dyable backpacks this year, I wouldn't hold my breathe for moving weapon skills around.

And I definitely second moving keybinds to what works for you, not sticking to the default keybinds. It does nothing for the visual aspect but it really helps your hand(s) and reaction times once you get used to the disconnect between what you see and what you push.

Also: Look into a keypad if this is an issue across multiple games.

It's not a leak if they put it out intentionally :p

Depending on where they are in production, they may not have even finalized what the new elite specs are, let alone what their unique abilities may be or if they can even make them work.

I'd like them to at least hint at what they'll be sooner rather than later, but I'm fine waiting closer to release to know what all they do simply because I'd rather speculate on what the elites will do than be told they'll do X only for them to do Y at release instead.

> @"Yggranya.5201" said:

> > @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> > > @"Yggranya.5201" said:

> > > > @"Funky.4861" said:

> > > > SPvP, Raids and WvW combined are probably 15% - 20% of the total game population. The reasons for this are many, but off the top of my head is that GW2 is advertised as a casual-friendly, hop-in and out, play how you want kind of game. If you want to be useful or have any sense of progression/contribution in those modes, it's anything BUT casual/play how you want. Perhaps it's also human nature that co-operation is a better reward than the ego-stroking endorphin rush of ruining another player's game experience.

> > >

> > > Too bad co-operation tuns into the same idiocy in every MMO. As in: You do all the work, we all get the same rewards, even though all most of us did was show up at the appointed time. And we all know what that leads to.

> > Well, most other MMORPGs are still running on old-fashion shared loot system, so no, players do not receive the same rewards there. Not that it helps any - loot division is frequently a source of tension in itself, and is one of the main things that ends up killing raid parties in most MMORPGs.

> >

>

> Really? Give me some examples then. Name some game, for starters.

* World of Warcraft

* Black Desert Online

* Final Fantasy 14

* Lord of the Rings Online

* The Secret World

* Star Wars the Old Republic (this one may have changed last year but I'm not digging through a patch notes article on it)

* Elder Scrolls Online has shared mob loot but server-side loot chests on the map that players fight over.

And that about covers all the larger MMOs these days AFAIK, so yes, GW2 is the only one aside from ESO that gives everyone an equal chance at loot and the only one where people don't compete for map-based loot.

Definitely. I'd rather miss out on the occasional cool usage of an infusion if it meant reducing visual clutter and improving performance. Especially when some people's aesthetic is whatever will annoy others rather than be a coherent look or colour scheme.

Honestly, there probably wouldn't be nearly as many complaints about particle effects if there was a way to reduce and/or turn them off completely.

I'm still in favour of adding mount rental NPCs to maps. That way it can be restricted how Anet wants to do it an where, people couldn't skip through map after map without paying a fee each time to do so, and free/heroic players could get a taste of mounts that aren't quite as useful and/or have as many QoL features as PoF accounts. This would be especially handy for people on classes that don't have easy access to swiftness.

Mount rentals are already a thing with festivals, it shouldn't be too hard to add a handful to core maps and if a new player would rather spend 10s to move faster (until they hit water, take enough fall damage, end up in combat, or hit the 1 hour on that map mark) than focus on better gear or leveling up, fine by me. I'm not angry at the thought of non-PoF players having access to a mount outside of a festival and having played MMOs that had rental mounts, they can really encourage people to play more and invest money in the game. Even if the game was a grind, the fact they put the option in made it seem like they did have some consideration for my personal time even if that wasn't the case.

Don't knock the positives that giving players minor (or even perceived) QoL improvements can do. I'd rather new players have an option to try things out and choose how they play the game than force them to play the core maps as they were at launch/during LW1 when there's been two expansions and several years of updates that made that less of a slog.

For the lore side, it would be impossible as only animals that are similar enough to each other can even produce offspring but those offspring are almost always sterile. One of the exceptions to this is wolf x dog hybrids, but that's because domestic dogs are a subspecies of wolves so they're genetically similar enough to produce viable offspring. However wolf x fox or dog x fox is impossible because while everyone involved is in the canidae family, they are too genetically separate to produce offspring, let alone offspring that are able to reproduce themselves. (You also have to have the male be the smaller of the two if there's any notable size difference, otherwise there's a good chance that the female and/or offspring will die during the birthing process as the fetus will be too large)

Charr, norn, and asura are the only playable races that evolved on Tyria yet they're very much different species, not even in the same family. Sylvari are new and magical and don't reproduce sexually, period. Humans evolved on a different planet thus cannot be related to any other species.

Even if you involved magic (since this is Tyria) it would need to override DNA and chromosomes and keep a pregnancy viable to full term, and do so without Full Metal Alchemist-ing the fetus. How much of this magic could be produced and be accessible to anyone and everyone who wanted to have a hybrid baby?

Now for the development side, there's the added design work, assets, and voice actors, among other things. With the exception of norn and humans, every other combination has drastic differences. It's not like something such as D&D where you can just slim/bulk up the hybrid, alter their height, and change their skin colour and call it a day. It would take a lot of time and effort to come up with hybrid designs that would be acceptable internally, which says nothing about whether players would like the designs or not. And they'd have to come up with 20 hybrid designs so no race was left out. If they can't/won't come up with a single new player race, why could/would they make 20?

Something like hybrids would need to be designed for in mind from the ground up. Or at the very least, design the game so new playable races would be easy to add, something which is not the case with GW2 or the GW2 engine.

> @"Yellow Rainbow.6142" said:

> Why does it bother people so much? Just play your game and let them do whatever they want. It's a game, and anet is okay with it.

Exactly. AFK farming doesn't even bring in nearly the same amount of gold that, say, doing RIBA or Drizzlewood does so the impact to the economy is minimal and I could see Anet actually accounting for AFK farmers to bring in T3 and T4 mats to keep the price of those low. AFK farmers aren't a pretty sight but unless you're doing a heart or event where they are, they don't affect nearly as much as people think they do. And I'd rather contend with them than people who get a kick out of killing mobs before anyone else can tag them.

(And before anyone accuses me of being an AFK farmer, I actually report them when I see them. I just don't work myself up about it because at that point it's in Anet's hands and either they'll do something or won't and I'm not going to try to moderate their game for them.)

> @"Linken.6345" said:

> Not sure new players would be happy to pay an additional 10 silver every time they got in combat having to switch from rental mount to weapons and not being able to switch back tho but sure let them have it.

That hasn't been an issue for about a year or so now. At some point Anet changed it so when you rent a mount you get a buff that lasts an hour and if you talk to a mount rental NPC at any time in that hour, you can rent a mount again without paying. It doesn't work between different mount type vendors (not sure if that's intentional or not) but if you rent a raptor and end up dropping the bundle, you can talk to a raptor vendor and say "I still have time left on my rental" and you get a raptor again at no cost.

It would still be a hassle to go back to a vendor, but it's 10s per hour (just don't leave the map) instead of 10s per time.

It's definitely something I think should be in the game. Maybe (probably) not all mounts, but the basic raptor and a few mount rental NPCs on maps would go a long way in offering a QoL feature (for a price) to new players and show them through hands on experience that mounts do make a difference and GW2 mounts feel way different than mounts in other MMOs. Some people won't be tempted to buy PoF, sure, but if mounts, gliding, unlocked chat, the full Trading post, and elite skills aren't enough for someone to upgrade from a free account, nothing will and features should not be added or designed around them.

Yes, you have to wait a week between drops. This is a marketing scheme to induce pressure to buy early for the best deal. Artificial scarcity is also why skins and outfits rotate in and out of the shop, as that tends to increase sales in video games. As this Supply Drop has an outfit voucher, a weapons voucher, and a Backpack/Glider voucher, these will allow you to get a skin that's not currently in rotation, though. The Bizarre Beast License isn't in the shop because it's a brand new item, but it will be added on Tuesday.

Included in this Supply Drop is 1 Bizarre Beast Select License and either 1 Select License of a different set of skins or 1 random Bizarre Beast License. These are just skins though, not the mounts themselves. If you do not have the mount, you cannot use the skin until you acquire that mount.

LW1 is sadly not likely to be available to play in full again. It was coded very differently compared to what we have now so between that and part of it taking place in the Open World, it would be a lot of work at the expense of current updates to add it to the game. 4 parts of LW1 instanced content was added in the Visions of the Past update, though to unlock them you need to play through that episode and there is no connecting story—they are just snapshots from LW1. The only way to experience the whole of LW1 would be to watch one of the videos on Youtube that is the whole thing edited together.

Italics do work on the forum, you just can't have a space between the underscore and the letters. So _ this will not italicize_ _but this will_.

Nope. Swim speed infusions were added early May 2018, that means you had up to over two years of enjoying a static swim speed increase.

You will still be able to enjoy faster swimming in areas that don't allow mounts, fractals, and in combat but mounts should be equal no matter the gear/gold someone has, provided the people have the same masteries unlocked.

> @"Halbarz.3854" said:

> - Introduce a monthly limit of Gold to Gems (750 gems), if you do not want to spent some cash, save up :astonished:

Why? Just why? Also what about all the people who buy gems and convert them to gold? Are they limited to only selling 750 gems a month now, too, or can they sell however many gems they want? Because either the conversion will make gems dirt cheap even if people can only get 750 a month or people will stop buying gems to convert to gold because it's just not worth it, which could in turn lead to a rise of gold sellers as the gem<->gold system was designed to limit gold selling.

> - Sell skill sets in the store to further expand classes, these do not require a new weapon but could just add to the core class!

Would still need to be balanced around and the game becomes pay-to-win as the moment a gem-only skill is meta for raids or WvW or PvP, serious groups will require people to buy it.

> - Weapon animation packs: New animations for the ele staff for example.

This has been requested for a long time but probably won't happen outside of re-colouring effects due to the work involved.

> - New races, these do not require a new zone and can be introduced as refugees from the north for example (cutscene).. you start in the Norn area. or you start at 80 In the silverwaste like the level boosts.

Even without a personal story, new races require new animations, new models, new textures, new customization options, new voice actors, new lines written, existing armour and outfits need to be modified to work on them, etc. Locking race between a paywall is a terrible idea and anti-consumer. At this point in the game, any new race would have much higher res textures and animations thus making them visually "superior" to the free races unless every playable race also has a graphics and animation overhaul.

> - Introduce housing, this is a feature that can be monetized easily (furniture, pets, NPCs, vendors, etc)

Been asked for for years, no word on if/when it will happen. But if it does, anything that isn't purely cosmetic should not be locked behind a paywall. Especially if your suggestion of limiting people to getting 750 gems per month with gold is taken into account as, going by the prices of the gemstore, that would mean people who don't buy gems with money would be able to buy one (1) small decoration a month.

> These changes would not take away from the experience that you are having right now, in a sense it would give then more revenue which leads to more development and it is still all optional. The only restriction that you have is that you might have to save up on gems if you do not want to spent some money.

Who are you to say this wouldn't affect players? I'm on a fixed income meaning I buy all my gems via gold. If I had to start saving up gems because I couldn't buy what I wanted when I wanted it, I would just stop playing. Especially if they added skills or races to the gem store at the same time as I am not going to play a pay-to-win game that forces people to buy the premium currency with real money and guilts people if they can't.

I get it. You have a bunch of money IRL and have your own idea of how Anet should operate. Except Anet has always designed GW2 as being accessible to everyone regardless of their IRL income. That was one of their main design philosophies since the game was in development and it was a promise to players that the game would not become pay-to-win or lock things behind a paywall. Now, there is debate about whether or not some elite specs count as being pay-to-win but those at least are tied to expansions instead of just being in the gem shop and requiring you to pay $30 to unlock them.

Nothing is "too consumer-friendly" and that should never be a bad thing, especially when it comes to the video game industry which is infamously and insidiously exploitative of players. GW2 isn't perfect but it's a heck of a lot better than so many other games and MMOs out there.

Because people who have unlocked every single dye are the minority and the birthday dyes not being account-bound would destroy the dye economy and also all but guarantee people wouldn't buy most dye kits in the gem store—why spend 125-2500 gems at a shot at something when you could buy it for 1-50 gold and get exactly what you want?

Dyes being in birthday kits does lower their price overtime (e.g. Permafrost, Shadow Abyss, Blacklight, etc.) due to them becoming slowly more available and reducing the demand for them while not crashing the market. Not everyone can make use of birthday items and instead of wanting to crash the dye market it would be more feasible to ask for/suggest an alternative for people who have all dyes unlocked, especially as with more and more time going on, more and more people will have unlocked most/all dyes of earlier years, such as getting an option of your birthday dye kit to the gem store RNG one of the same name so you can gamble on what dye you get and being able to sell that on the TP.

> @"Randulf.7614" said:

> Correct me if I am wrong, but we get so much more than we did for a GW1 anniversary. I loved getting a mini, but the amount of duplicate minis I got is crazy. At least I always get plenty of new things each year here.

Yes and no. We do get more than from GW1, but GW1 had more variety in what we did get (even if it was RNG), they counted towards the HoM and thus exclusive GW2 skins, and undedicated minis could be sold to others for platinum. And from the 8th birthday on, you could select which birthday year you wanted to gamble on.

It's also nice being able to boost people's HoMs by 8 points just by having a GW1 account that's old enough to have a good chunk of or all the minis needed to max the HoM devotion track and get someone upwards of 8 points. 8 points unlocks the entire heritage armour skin sets, a staff skin, and a shortbow skin, and is 50AP and a title. Even if I personally don't get much out of something anymore (such as GW1 birthday minis), being able to help others with what I do get more than makes up for it and that ability to help friends and strangers alike is missing from GW2 even though it was always possible in GW1.

I prefer the 8th birthday over the 7th, but just barely. Aside from the infusion being tied to a karma boost, as someone who mostly plays charr I'd rarely see the effect unless they adjust the positioning so it's not mainly inside the neck. The dye kit and other skin unlocks are to be expected, but I wish they'd have done something in addition to or replacing the 5k karma with something else. An amulet can be used on an alt, 5k karma is nothing and not useful by the time an account hits 8 years old—even if someone didn't play since launch, they'd still have gotten 5k x number of characters x number of birthdays.

I don't expect anything expensive—the dye unlocks you can use to unlock dyes worth hundreds of gold are good enough there—but getting something that's useful would be preferable. We don't even get level-up scrolls anymore and those were nice for alts and key running. An RNG mount skin voucher would be fine, as would any voucher, really. 5 keys, 200-400 gems, a chair, a boosted version of the tyrian exchange voucher, laurels, gold, the list goes on of things that would be better than 5k karma.

The amulet I can at least stick on an alt, that karma is just going to sit there because it's been years and years since I was ever approaching that low on karma. Heck, you can get about that much karma just by doing some events and/or hearts. It's like someone giving you a stale piece of bread to celebrate your birthday 8 years in a row—it's old now, in more ways than one.

It's so subtle you can't even see it on asura and barely see it on charr...

It looks good on human, norn, and sylvari, but it seems like they didn't do much or any testing on asura or charr given the bad anchor point on both of them—asura are in the body and charr are in the neck. As a result you get hints of it on charr (assuming you don't have a large mane) and every few seconds you see a flicker on asura (assuming you don't have hair and don't have any particle effects or auras).

Along with what others have mentioned, the instanced maps seem to act as a way to contain bugs, too. Just recently we had a patch where people interacting with a certain object in LA crashed the game for everyone in LA in that instance. If maps weren't instanced, there's a chance that it would have instead crashed the entire game for everyone.

There's been a number of bugs that made it to live/appeared when introduced to live code like that, where a certain object or skin or whatever would result in everyone on the map DC'ing or fully crashing. Depending on how the code or the servers are set up, removing the ability for the game to partition areas via map instance could easily result in such DCs and crashes affecting everyone in the game.

With the engine being so old and code being as spaghetti as devs say it is, changing something as key as map instances (something GW1 also had so it's likely hard-baked into the code), it's a lose-lose situation for something most people are fine with (if they even notice) and which benefits devs. That's if it's even possible to do.

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > @"Ashen.2907" said:

> > > @"Astralporing.1957" said:

> > > In addition to what has been mentioned before, it was my understanding that the "instanced" nature of every open world map, and their ability to dynamically create new instances/close old ones as needed, is something that greatly contributes to their ability to do maintenance/patching "on the fly", without the need to shut down the whole game, like most of other MMORPGs have to do.

> > >

> > > GW2's ability to run without the regular "maintenance" downtimes other MMORPGs have is one of the greatest (even if usually unrecognized) features. I'd really not want to lose it.

> >

> > This.

> >

> > Down time is not, "immersive."

> Heh, I remember when I played Black Desert. Gorgeous open world sure but then... all NPcs just stopped. Stood there in the fields. Permanently died until the world was empty. Time for downtime! ... For like 6 hours. And then when its up its broken within a couple of hours again and time for another downtime lasting a day.

>

And then there's WoW where there would be a regular "minor" patch that was scheduled to be an hour or two... only for something to break and the entire game being down for 12-24 hours with little to no communication from the devs. That happened multiple times when I played. EU going down earlier this year was bad, but that was a semi-regular occurrence with WoW and you never knew if it was going to be a regular patch day or one of _those_ patch days.

I'd rather deal with a loading screen that takes 1-10 seconds (SSD) and have the game always be available than have a completely open world but the game being down multiple hours a month.

Old maps are plenty populated. Maybe not as much when the game came out and people were roughly the same level, but they aren't dead unless you play at off-hours for your region.

And level 80 players with power classes could always stomp mobs in <70 levels. Ascended makes this more pronounced, but it's not a new phenomenon. 'zerker gear + build/spec for power = dead mob even if someone's "only" in exotics.

And I'm not sure why you're even bringing up HoT when HoT is level 80 content and downscaling only happens in all but two vanilla zones.

Celestial stats are fine. Celestial scourge still looks to be a viable build and celestial guardian or firebrand was an option for a time, both being in WvW (I'm not familiar enough with other specs to comment on them).

Celestial has always been a jack of all trades, master of none stat. This usually means running with a group of people who will sponge damage away from you so you can be an aggressive support player. If you're roaming in celestial, you're in for a rough time because like you've discovered, it does not offer the same survivability due to the stat distribution. In exchange your damage and support abilities aren't as low as they would be otherwise, but you really need other players with you for it to shine.

And not all stats need to be viable in all gamemodes. I don't PvP so can't speak for that, but in PvE no one would ever touch celestial even with a rework because 'zerker/marauder/viper/carrion stats are fine in OWPvE, and due to the toughness it wouldn't be used in raids outside possibly some meme builds. There's a finite number gear stats can have, distributed among X stats. 'zerker is about as ideal distribution you can get for power DPS, so unless celestial no longer resembled anything approaching celestial, it would not be useful or used in PvE so reworking it would be pointless. Even if you gave it non-stat buffs in something, it would have to at least be a sidegrade to what we have now for it to be used outside the occasional piece of gear or two when not min-maxing.

You can re-stat your ascended celestial armour (not trickets, though) with a mystic forge recipe, but honestly I'd look into reworking stats like nomad's, rampager's, and settler's before celestial. At least from a PvE perspective.

1) Kourna. The colour palette is muddy no matter where you go, it's annoying to navigate, and one POI is locked behind the meta and another behind an event chain that bugs out far too often. There's also a good amount of dead space where there's no mobs, no reason to explore, no events, and it's yet more brown.

2) Lake Doric. I want to like it but with the mobs being sponges and the hearts taking forever to fill, it's too frustrating so I don't bother outside of map completion. The leather farm is also a joke so the result is that entire corner of the map is impossible to survive solo and before the skyscale came out, you stood a good chance of being sniped and falling to your death before you could get that POI and/or escape with your life.

3) Brisban. The hearts are nothing special (and screw the math heart) but there's 16 of them.

Not a huge fan of the PoF maps, either, since many of the hearts are on par with or worse than Lake Doric's but they escape my top three disliked maps. Thunderhead gets an honourable mention not because of the map itself but because it is infamously laggy and that one POI was badly designed.

> @"DataLore.3916" said:

> Weapons could have random damage numbers in a set range making better rolls better to have .

> Weapons also have a random bonus this could be bonus stats to bonus boons making combinations of a good weapon with high damage and a good bonus more valuable.

>

That's similar to how it was in GW1 and it sucked. You get a cool weapon but it's a level or two below max. You get a max level weapon but the inscription sucks. You get a weapon that's both max level and has a BiS inscription but the weapon skin is awful.

Sure you could swap inscriptions around but you could do nothing about the level or skin so having a max level weapon in a skin you want is already relying on RNG two times: Once for the weapon to drop at all and once for it to be max level.

How would you even introduce different weapon stats this late in the game, anyway? There's 8 years of weapons sitting on the TP and in people's banks/on characters, so either you'd have to randomize what already exists, introduce weapons that are worse than what currently exists that no one would touch, or introduce weapons that are more powerful than exotics but less powerful than ascended and piss off the playerbase.

Horizontal progression is fine as it is and a lot of people play GW2 to get away from vertical progression/RNG gear stats. It's fine if you care more about stats than skins, but a lot of us lean more to the RPG part of MMO when it comes to GW2. There's also enough RNG carrots in the game, so why would you lock basic character progression behind RNG? All that does is benefit those with the most time they're willing to spend on a game, or those who have enough money to buy their way through it.