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Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons Final Review | MMORPG.com
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Guild Wars 2: End of Dragons Final Review | MMORPG.com
It's been almost two weeks since End of Dragons launched, and after seeing how things have played out on the live servers, this is still the best expansion ArenaNet has done to date. Read why in our final review.
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Shing Jei is beautiful. It's got such variety and is a delightful exploration map that feels very Core Tyria.
New Kaineng is one I had my doubts on. The jadepunk city-scape had the potential to be disrespectful, but somehow they've managed to capture the winding city streets, shady alleys, depressing slums, and roving gangs of the original in something so much more technologically advanced. I'm amazed by how much this map feels like a natural evolution of what came before, right down to the introduction of Risen being such a fitting replacement for the terrifying Afflicted of the original.
Certainly the new Echovald doesn't live up to the one of old (the depetrification of the forest kills much of the dead, Gothic tone that made the original so endearing), but what they've come up with essentially fulfills the promise of vertical and twisting forests that they attempted with Tangled Depths, but in a satisfying and navigable way.
And well, the Jade Sea. I adored the Jade Sea and always will.
The features of this expansion are not on par with prior ones.
Understandable, because how do you top gliding and the best mount system of any MMO. Where I'm disappointed is the places where more could have and should have been made. There are only a few new armors and weapons, and most of them are ugly as sin; notably disappointing when the eastern armor aesthetic is so desirable. There's only two new stat sets for gear when there are plenty of niches to be filled (especially those that could help less skilled players with better offensive/defensive compromise sets). Then there's the things that have no excuse whatsoever - like the complete lack of any new runes for the new elite specs.
The biggest disappointment is the new elite specs.
They just aren't as good or interesting as previous expansions. With the exceptions of the Mechanist and Specter that bring new and exciting twists to their classes and fill roles that other specs don't.
Bladesworn is bad. It's too based on telegraphed, delayed bursts of damage that take too long for most encounters.
Willbender is just not good.
Vindicator tries to do too much with too many restrictions. The new dodge roll is not good, and does not do enough to warrant the one-dodge restriction.
Untamed is incoherent and bad. I just don't have much good to say here.
Harbinger feels redundant. It slots into a profession that excels at condi damage and support... by offering more condi damage and support (this time no healing, more boons). And the power traits are so tacked on.
Virtuoso is boring.
And Catalyst. Oh boy. This may be the worst of the lot. It feels like Weaver 1.5 in the worst way with its boring elite skill and schizophrenic swap as much as possible playstyle. And that swapping is forced. Much of your hammer dps comes from skill 3, which on every attunement creates a spinning orb that deals damage. When you swap attunements and use the next skill 3, it makes another orb and refreshes the previous ones. So if you aren't perfectly attentive to that rotation, you lose all of your orbs and about a third of your dps, which feels like absolute shit.
Nothing new for raiders, sPvP or WvW players
This site is a joke. GW2 is dead trash nobody other than a few dozens play. Probably the bored devs.
The GW2 story was entirely forgettable at the time (as in most MMO), and I was salty because Arenanet betrayed the amazing concept of GW1. In fact, I am still bitter. I have so many good memories from the first opus. Its game mechanics are still prevalent nowadays with more than 1300 skills among 10 classes, knowing any character has a main class and a secondary one. GW1 was the MTG of MMOs. PvE could be challenging, and PvP was amazing if not the best I ever played.
In GW1, I was mainly a mesmer. When I was successful with it, I could really control the flow of a 8v8 battle, blinding and damaging the warrior who was trying to kill our monk, quickly switching to their monk to interrupt his 3/4 sec cast healing spell, so my teammates could simultaneously finish our target.... That was great !
The mesmer in GW2 is...... different. Not bad, but definitively not the class I wanted to play.
I returned to GW2 for HoT. I played it even less. Coming from GW1, I really tried to like GW2 but it never really clicked.
I won't buy EoD, for sure.
So Virtuoso is one I really have thoughts on. Its mechanic boils down to "lose clones, gain projectile shatters." And that's it. It's defined by what it doesn't do more than what it does. The new Bladesong shatters in typical fashion have the same effects as the core ones. In practice, I guess open world players will probably appreciate that their stocked blades will carry over and build up between fights, which should help with the short stop and start nature of things. But you're going to notice the decrease in survivability from losing your little clone tanks.
All of the utility skills are effectively AoE damage blades as well.
The traits are the worst offender. You've got a tacked-on condi line, which is actually the best one right now (saying more about how bad the other lines are). You've got an Aegis/block based line, which makes little sense on an elite spec that is intended to be ranged dps. And then you've got your main power line... which increases the point-blank damage of your ranged Dagger and does in-combat passive blade stocking (which feels like something you should just naturally do, since you already out-of-combat stock blades); it also feels notably useless, as players are already stocking more blades than they can spend.
There's not much to say for Willbender because it's a cumulation of balance issues more than a conceptual problem. Everything about it conceptually (a highly mobile, assassin-like Guardian more akin to an Inquisitor, with a sprinkle of martial arts) is really cool. But players are primarily complaining about the lack of fluidity in the skills. The OH sword is particularly slow, which leads to your power dps not following through after you blink in. I would more diagnose the elite spec as trying to fit a profession into a new role without thoroughly equipping it for that role. All of the new mobility through blinks is nice, but the Guardian isn't great at sticking to targets long term, and this isn't doing much to change that. It's also another case of a power spec that is outclassed by its tacked-on condi trait line because its power options are conservatively-tuned. Probably an elite spec that will shine after some balance passes.
I... don't even know where to start with the Untamed, because there is so much here. It's a Beastmastery 2.0 line that in some ways has less control than core Ranger. You gain the ability to manually use your pet's skills that it used to use passively, but lose the ability to command your pet to attack or back off specific targets - which really sucks in PvE because you'll be spending a lot more than in-combat with the pet doing its own thing.
And then there's the Unleashed mechanic, where you pass a buff between yourself and your pet. Untuititively, it isn't connected directly to a damage/defense buff for the holder; it buffs your damage while you hold it while buffing YOUR defense while the pet holds it - doing nothing for the pet statistically. It also replaces the holder's skills with improved Unleashed Skills. For pets, these Unleashed Skills are all the same, removing much of the identity of pets. For the Ranger, the Hammer gets a full set of skills, while other weapons only get an Unleashed Ambush skill that briefly and periodically replaces their autoattack (acting like a Thief Stealth attack or Mirage Ambush).
The traits are.... something. You get a big Vitality buff from a minor trait, but none of your other traits feed off of that (whereas the Virtuoso and Harbinger actually get stat conversions from Vitality). You've got an entire trait line based on improving your survivability in various ways (barrier on Cantrip, condi removal on unleash, and healing on hit). I'm left to believe that the spec is a tank from that and from the new Elite skill and healing skill, and yet the Ranger's only taunt is for their pet, and I question what utility they'd bring that would make them the tank of choice. Tanks are of course not even a role for regular open world PvE, so in practice you're just going to be a more durable core Ranger, which is fine, I guess.
You have a whole "disable foes" trait line. This gives you one boon depending on who is unleashed, inflicts one condition depending on who is unleashed, and reduces your weapon skill cooldowns (grandmaster). The grandmaster feels great, but the boon and condition traits are too short in duration, and feel like they were tuned for the game balance many years ago rather than current game balance.
And then you've got a line dedicated to improving your pet's Unleashed Skills. This is the more fun trait line, but only the first two skills are improved. The F3 is not, and the Grandmaster trait is actually pretty much Rampage as One's damage & movespeed stacks turned into a passive. This feels particularly disjointed because that Grandmaster feels complementary to the healing on hit one, and yet they're competing for the same slot.
Unfortunately they launched this alongside elden ring so I've been playing that more but guild wars 2 is still excellent
NGL, I looked at them after your first post and I was like "Willbender sounds cool" the idea of mixing a guard with some thief like teleport mechanics, but then you pointed out the attacks were slow, and the stats don't align, so it defeats the whole point of being able to blink in and do burst damage, which is what makes a thief ideal for it, and how they blundered it with the guard. LOL, seems fitting.
What you said about Ranger/Unleashed.. OMG that sucks, I agree with you, sometimes. just saying "OMG this sucks" is a point maker. Not being able to tell your pet to attack a target and then manually needing to use abilities. The hell they thinking?
But on the topic of Elite Specs... I've been saying it since PoF, but they need to decouple expansions from delivering a full set of elite specs, because elite specs should be something cool that adds something new to the base professions and you can't force that. I know a lot of people have been asking for new elite specs since right after PoF launched, but at this point I'm not sure we are best served with every profession getting one every expansion is the best play.
That said, I do like Untamed, it's actually the first Ranger elite spec I've been interested in so I'm interested to see how they address some of the issues. Willbender is cool as a "selfish" Guardian spec because they don't really have that. Catalyst I just don't know what they were trying to accomplish there. However, I don't doubt they will balance and rework things and eventually get things is a good place. Back when PoF launched it took about a year for everything to feel solid. I remember streaming sPvP back then and people were already asking for the next expansion and new elite specs and my basic response was basically "We just finally got t o a good spot with what we have now why would we upend all of that already??" Different segments of the community want different things though.
The Bladesworn is too gimmicky to realistically work for most encounters. It's a very anime profession, if you know what I mean. But I do think it will have some potential with ammo/shout skills.
Virtuoso is probably going to shape up into bland but viable territory. Which is honestly probably their intention. It's a Mesmer for people who don't like Mesmer.
If Catalyst has its skill 3 orb durations increased by ... a lot... it'll probably feel better to play, if bland and redundant with existing elite specs.
I wouldn't even know where to start fixing Untamed. It's an unfinished and incoherent idea.
I soon realized that the first part of the game, leveling from 1-80 and getting moderately decent gear, was fun enough, if not a bit shallow.
After that it was a series of spending far too much time trying to figure out things that shouldn't have been hard to figure out but were hard for the all the wrong reasons. Invisible cliff shelves that have you standing in mid air to get to a hero point. Using a dismount "bug" to access a zone wall that I couldn't simply walk to because... well, it was it's a zone wall.
I found myself spending as much time looking crap up on the internet as I was actually playing the game because of the fake, forced difficulty of bad game design.
It's now uninstalled. If End of Dragons is more of the same, I can't imagine why it was given anything more than a 5.0
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~
I played about 5 hours on launch and opened the game once again plenty of years later but I simply cannot forgive them for stepping away from one of the greater and more unique MMORPG ever created, which is Guild Wars 1. We are definitely a few who would like to see something similar again.
Holy hell, who let that Lost Ark fanboy out of his cage in here.
His other comments gushing praise on Lost Ark in other threads, and his attacks on anyone who says otherwise, kind of say it all.
lost ark is overhyped standard Shite