Stamen.9240

Man, I hate reading about layoffs and sliding numbers and all that jazz. My heart goes out to the team and everyone around who's been busy putting out great content, great stories, and beautiful maps for so long. I thought I'd drop a quick note here to say why I've been spending less. Granted, I haven't been a big spender. I've bought gems here and there and a few gift cards aroudn birthdays and Christmas to pump up my account. I mostly just buy cosmetic stuff or practical use items like inventory slots, bank slots, etc.

Again, never a big annual spender, but I have noticed that I've not bought hardly a thing for a year now. In fact, I had like 1200 gems just sitting around in my account forever and I felt like I wasn't ever going to see something I wanted. I finally spent a few on the winter outfit... even then, it was more of just the reality of looking at them in my account for so long.

One of the things that has really thrown me off, really since HoT, are the dozens of different currencies. Each new living world was coming with it's own currencies... geodes, aurrilum, bloodstones, ley lines, mosiacs, on and on and on. Rather than just play the game, it felt like I was getting funnelled into doing the same things over and over for six weeks, then moving to the next currency grind. Honestly, it just got aggrevating after a while in that I never knew if I was coming or going on chapter, and why I was bothering. I cut way back on hours spent in gamea and just generally started losing interest. I always jump back in to run the story, then maybe do a festival for a few days, then I'm back out again. I don't stay on a mount long enough to by a skin for one, and don't play long enough to justifiy this skin or that... my progression in the game seems stalled because the grind for legendary armor seems to wide a gap for a casual...

My home instance needs a lot of work, but even there the price points on the nodes in the gem store are all but out of reach if I want to a complete job. The odds on rare skins feels insanely low so I'm not buying keys the way I once did. Anyway, I end up looking through the store over and over and just don't know what to buy. I don't know of much that's going to change the way I play at just a few hours a week these days. Hoping that changes for me soon.

Looking to do my part,

~ Stamen

> @Blego.1859 said:

> i for one started to love it after a lot of testing ... and for a power spec not condi

I am going to say that I agree here. I'm not all the way through my toons on PoF, but I have found the Renegade so far to be the easiest progression through content using a power spec. Sure, my conditions are only ticking for a 100 here and there, but the self heals and the damage have made it fairly easy to navigate the new content. I miss the near perma-stability from my Firebrand in some fights, but it is manageable.

All in all, I think there are a ton of wasted skills and abilities in this elite -- stuff that just isn't viable anywhere. But for purely pouring out the damage, I haven't been disappointed.