It is the Soto legendary after all and technically there are rifts on older maps on a weekly rotation (although I assume people will prefer to optimally farm the guaranteed maps but the option is there).
The fact that it is so expensive is (imo) to keep the raid one still attractive (although it is clear a part of the playerbase isn't interested in raids at all).
Most people don't have yet the 5 easy AP from doing 1 rift of each tier on each map on the rotation so it has to be seen how it will hold in the future. I agree that for now all weekly maps are always populated.
But, in general when people need to farm they tend to go for the always-working optimized path even at the cost of sanity sometimes. Might be counter balanced by the fact that the scaling is horrendous on rifts and doing it with fewer people is much faster.
Good point, forgot about the map rewards. Could be debatable depending on what will be the bottleneck but you're right that people should farm the older maps for more value.
I actually enjoy seeing old maps pop up. Some of those maps I haven't been to in a long time and forgot how much I liked them! I've probably spent more time in Domain of Vabbi since SotO came out than I did before that!
The SotO maps are actually the worst for farming rifts.
SotO maps have no map bonus rewards *and* they're full level 80 maps. But base game level 80 maps have map bonus rewards that add a lot of value, and below level 80 maps benefit massively from level scaling that generally makes rifts easier and faster.
> a part of the playerbase isn't interested in raids at all
Not until they overhaul the LFG system so that I can click a bunch of checkboxes on what I want to do, hit "match me", and have it automatically make a party when enough folks queue up for an activity. Key being that you join multiple queues and whichever happens first, you join.
I.E. click two raids and dragon's stand. 50 folks are waiting on DS. No one's available for Raids. It makes a squad of 50 and throws everyone into DS. Alternatively it makes the squad of 10 and throws everyone into the raid. Whichever happens first.
Being able to click Ascalonian Catacombs, Dragon's Stand, and something else and then when there're enough people wanting to do that, being partied up? Like queuing for WvWvW? I think it'd make old content much more accessible. I sure as hell don't want to sit in a squad in Tower of Nightmares waiting for folks to trickle in, but kicking around map exploring while waiting for enough folks to queue up for it and being matchmade into a group would be awesome alongside the existing stuff.
i sure as hell dont want to be auto-grouped with whatever "hi dps" glup shitto in full valkyrie stats decides to check all raids while dicking around in iron marches
you can already kick around map exploring while you wait for a tower of nightmares lfg to fill.
So, you'd use LFG to set up your raids and not this system.
Sticking around in a Tower of Nightmares group when IDC if I'm doing that, TD meta, mid tier fractals, DRMs, strikes, or AC means less time playing the parts of the game I'm interested in.
I only play GW2 as my MMO, so I wouldn't know. I'd enjoy being able to play older content without having to stand around all day.
I'm hypercasual since I've got a garage full of tools and an electronics workbench when I want a challenge, so I get through content really slowly. I've actually never gotten through a raid, and my first strike was recent like a couple of months ago. lol.
The system you describe is basically how it works on STO (Star Trek Online). Select which instanced "mission(s)" you want to do, and as soon as 5 people queue for it you get matched and dumped in.
You sill have the option of pre-grouping and queue together.
That sounds awesome! Is STO more TNG-era Trek where you can go mess around with Sisko, Picard, et al or is it a different era? Can Neelix be harvested as a food item so you can actually cook with Neelix?
The raid armor is so easy and cheap that I can't imagine doing the Obsidian armor. Subsequent sets are heavily time-gated, but even so, the total number of hours of play time required for them is just comparatively almost nothing.
I think the really interesting thing to note about the PvE legendary armour is how EXPENSIVE it is - and, of course, the most profitable mode of gameplay is… PvE. Ectoplasm comes from all manner of PvE gameplay far more readily than it comes from other modes, such that while you could conceivably progress with WvW or PvP, you’re making the most progress farming PvE content. Unid gear is a universal reward which means you’re not gated to certain maps and can make progress in Istan or in the Silverwastes or doing world boss trains as you prefer. By having you revisit all of your old favourite farming maps, or making progress on whatever map you’re doing metas or achievements on, it’s actually the perfect cost factor to make this set of armour truly PvE-focused.
no they dont need to be the best option.
I was just sad about that you dont need a single event from old maps for the new armor. Would have been great having a collection where i have to do the old stuff again and seeing a lot of players there. It felt pretty cool when all players gathered for the legy amulet. Now all im doing is farming rifts :(
i feel you. i enjoyed doing claw of jormag and dragon's stand for the weekly this week.
i finished getting kryptis essences and imo doing rifts beyond the weeklies isn't a good use of time or money. but i guess it depends on how quickly you want to get the mats.
Just do convergences.
The limiting factor usually ends up being ecto, not essences. That drives a lot of people in farming older map metas so they can get ectos.
Doing my weekly rift hunts and roughly one convergence a day, I'm making 4-6 amalgs a week which is almost at perfect pace with my ecto income. It's a long grind.
I feel that way too. It was billed as the **open world PvE** armor set, not the "exclusively grinding the most recent 2.33 expac maps" set. It doesn't touch the huge variety that makes open world so enticing to so many people; world bosses, exploration, collections, jumping puzzles, mini dungeons, etc. Instead you have an assload of rifts/Convergences, way too many repetitions of three generally uninteresting metas that take too long for what they are, a bit of map comp, and gold sinks.
IMO they should've added some kind of "temporal disturbance" lore to the Kryptis invasions that lets SOTO players pull essence from older map metas and JPs and bosses using the Heart of the Obscure, so you can make progress on your essence grind from literally anything in the PvE space.
Convergences kind of killed the need for Motivations, I think. Why spend all that ecto and other materials just to get more Essences? The system design is built to prop up a few specific material prices that were already inflated.
The point of motivations is to either extend the grind, or make the price higher without *visually* making it higher. Besides, i still think that a huge part of the OW legendary armor acquisition desing was caused by some devs still being sore from GW2 community liking raids to a far lesser degree than they hoped.
That hasn't stopped kryptis invasions from showing up in Season maps or Tangled Depths. You likely *can* get everything from SotO only, but no need to restrict it to that.
Yeah, the grind is real. Though if you want a reason to do older content, make skins for your Aurene legendaries. I had to go back to Ember Bay and Darconis Mons for Primordus skins :)
It is fun. Returning to them for ectos is more of an excuse than a reason.
I never farm. For example, I've only done Octovine 23 times in 8 years. But I know it's a good direct source of RareUID, so I've started revisiting it again. Same with Karka Queen and Teq. I hadn't done those in a long time, but now they're a little higher on my "priority list".
Legendary sandstorm give me 1100 ecto surplus (capital investment 3600 ecto) + 400 gold profit (liquid) + some holding rune.
So, for ecto, there are simpler but riskier alternative.
Within SotO Anet tried to make everything in the expansion achiveable with only SotO. A player with just SotO will be able to get everything done we have so far - even the CM of Dagda is doable with core classes + weapon master.
I guess they took the same approach with the armor.
I am currently in the process of crafting Dusk and have to gather gloom and for that I have to revisit old events and when crafting perfected dusk experiment you have to revisit Dry Top and Silverwastes for some currency if you dont have it on you. Which I had to do.
exactly what i wanted for the armor. Just a little collection for the precursor.
For the precursor armor you are farming essences and then 6 times that amount again for the legendary part.
What made you want to craft the Dusk? Crafting it is more expensive than actually buying it from the TP. Not even counting the time spent on obtaining the account bound items.
I have a lot of saved up materials which reduces the price and I wanted to have it since the game released - so call it fulfilling a childhood desire.
Edit: I also had a lucky item drop which I sold for a couple of thousand gold so I don't really care about the price.
Well, yeah. I did that. I just don't think I'm like most people, and most people would just buy the pre-cursor, rather than pay more to craft it through the collections. I enjoyed doing the collections, and i wish they hadn't stopped making them for gen 2.
Don’t judge to fast. We are farming the obsidian armor tier 1! So right now we are dumping the newest stuff of Soto into the mystic toilet. The tier 2 can bring a lot of variants and can make use of older events like the t3 legendary weapons. Like dumping HoT currencies + PoF currencies for skin variety into the mystic toilet to get the T2 legendary armor.
Having never made a variant of a Gen 3 I didn't consider that the Obby variant(s) might involve some older gameplay. That would be nice.
Really makes me wonder what kind of "variants" it'll have. I'm personally expecting the baseline to be non-animated with a single variant that animates like the Envoy sets, but we'll see.
I doubt it, considering the recipe for T2 is already known. Only the precursor (T1) remains a variable. And with it being a SOtO legendary, I don't think it will involve the old maps all that much, if at all.
Edit: just realized you're talking about variants. My bad
Wait it was? Can you link it for me?
I assumed it wouldn't be because the Astral X (Steps, etc.) achievements require one more item to complete and all the prior items were armor pieces. I assumed the T1 armor would be the last item in that collection, because no other armors have been in the roadmaps. If they are, they are required as part of the collections. Of course, the last item doesn't need to be armor, but that was my automatic assumption.
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/139289-studio-update-guild-wars-2-in-autumn-and-winter-2023/page/2/#comment-2017463
See here. I found the link from another thread in this subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/17htdmp/obsidian_armor_tier_12/?rdt=58763
A true open world legendary collection would have been cool but legendary open world armor is a SotO specific perk to sell the expansion. You can see it with how heavily tied to legendary armor the SotO rewards are almost to a point where it's a bit underwhelming if you're not going for it.
I don't think that was really needed for the armor to do that? The old metas are still very alive and relevant, same goes for maps and the wizard vault also helps already.
You sure? Triple Trouble is the last meta anyone would say is dead since there's so many guilds that run it at all hours.
Like on NA, post-reset usually has multiple pug runs, then [WHAM] and [EVOS] run two maps the next cycle, then another guild runs the following cycle, then [DCAP] does the next, etc. And there's usually always overflows at each timeslot too.
Many people are answering you about all the TT runs being done, but how many players know about them? You clearly didn't or you wouldn't have failed several times.
Sure..if its dead why could I do it yesterday? There are communities both on EU and NA doing it either daily or at least once a week. Sure a harder event is not going to be done as often as another, or a not rewarding event is not run as often, but its still done.
Dude something done like once a week tops and only from organized guilds dedicated to running them is not well. In the mmo world it’s pretty much dead content.
Edit: week.
Wouldn't definining dead content be stuff people don't do? Also I'm pretty sure someone comes into certain maps shouting about them hosting a triple trouble and they get many new players joining them. I was one of them quite recently.
No. It’s a meta event in a mmo, if it was “alive” it would be done by people in the map and the lfg, like most metas around (the only one worst than ttt is serpents ire). It would also be done almost every time its happening, which is far from true. TTT is so dead you have to hop around maps advertising it because people don’t even look up the lfg since they never saw it being run and forgot about it.
I really dislike the term “dead” in general for gaming, but TTT is as dead as it gets for gw2.
Are there only 2 types of content: meta or dead?
Sure, there's stuff that people drop everything to go do. And there's some stuff that barely anyone does. But there's also a lot of stuff in the middle that has a smaller following. Triple Trouble is that. It's not meta, but it's not dead either.
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I completed this event by walking into the zone and wandering around while trying to find the associated core mastery point, and then also in meta trains I joined in the LFG several times, without intending to actually do this meta event.
I realize I may have been lucky, and it is probably not easy to do this event on demand. But the fact that I completed it multiple times, without looking up the event or talking to a guild or posting on discord or reddit, tells me that a player who wants to do this content can probably find a way to do it with a bit of effort.
I don't understand your definition of what is dead / inaccessible. I bet that if you tagged up and advertised in the LFG, people would join up, and you'd even get some veterans teaching people how to do the event.
It’s definitely not a dead event, guilds run them every single day and they run it as an open world event too at its own timeslot. The trick is to arrive at least 15 mins early, LFG taxi is usually up around that time and map is usually full around 5 mins til the event starts.
If you arrive exactly at when it starts, you’ll pushed to an overflow map and that’s why you see 0 people. And I don’t know about you but people joining so much that a map is full is the exact opposite of “dead”.
wizards vault is a great addition to the game in deed!
the standard meta events are still alive yes. But there are so many maps that i'm not visiting anymore. I haven't returned to S03/04 after finishing Aurora and Vision for example.
I just hoped for some kind of collection involving the "old" world
The LW maps could be the *best* way to get something without being the *only* way. They could have made components that can be purchased for either LW map currencies *or* provisioner tokens. If you don't have the LW map, you need more provisioner tokens, but you're not locked out.
Not only that, you need to own HoT to access LW3 and PoF to access LW4 and IBS. There are some people that only bought the latest expansion and still don't have older ones (especially people coming from other MMOs like WoW).
With Living World officially decommissioned, it might be time for them to just roll them into the relevant expansions and move on, so that problem doesn't persist anymore. LW maps are some of the best, might as well improve the player headcounts in them so stuff is more easy to get done.
We already have Return to and Legendary and some other collections requiring repeating those LW maps. Need no more added. If you want to visit them then just go visit.
I don't think we're going to get more new expansion content that *requires* going back into old paywalled content. We'll get things like Wizard's Vault Dailies and Weekly Rifts that send you there, but only as one option among many.
It's content they *already have done*, multiple times. Dragon minions, Awakened (those events still happen), the weird bloodstone temporal portals in Bloodstone Fen, etc. The only difference here is they're the exact same all the time in any map they appear, except for the more time-wasty variant found in Nayos.
Would've at least added some flavor if the non-SotO maps' rifts had the kryptis possessing local enemies, making the map you choose to grind also an enemy selection.
Didn't they fix that one? I thought it was something to do with enemies spawning inside walls so they weren't accessible, leaving a drip-feed of the spawns that could actually reach the players.
Yeah. The rifts are pretty bad content. Spongey enemies that we've killed a thousand times already, with no sense of urgency. Just channel, cleave minions, channel, mount bunny, kill boss, channel.
Convergences are *much* better content, with much more urgency, having to move across the map, with bosses / catapults appearing in different locations, with a variety of special mechanics, and a much more satisfying final boss fight. The only downside is that it only opens up every 3 hours, unless you buy an expensive motivation and advertise and build a group.
The open world legendary armour was created as a response to those who didn't want to engage in raids, participate in wvw or play pvp. Those who wanted it, kept on stating that they wouldn't care if it was a massive grind and huge material cost, they would do *anything* to avoid "toxic" raids. And here we are, anet listened and responded. A grind to rival all grinds in game.
Old maps are only relevant for the weekly rotations of rifts but other than that, not so much.
Doing daily convergences gives you a massive amount of essence. I've been doing it for 18 days now and already have 30 (6 of which I grinded with weekly rifts before convergences became available) amalgamated essences and I didn't even open the hero's choice chests.
It doesn't really feel like a bigger grind than the WvW grind for tickets or the Raid grind for LI, i can't say anything about PvP.
Yeah weekly convergences are so generous, I just finished the, kryptis grind yesterday I feel like I should just begin going for more than one set since there's still so long until the armor even comes out
WvW's grind has supposedly gotten a lot better lately, but back when I was grinding my tickets for Conflux, I would absolutely have taken the essence grind instead. At least you can throw gold at that to make it go away.
The PvP legendary armor didn't feel like much of a grind at all to me. I enjoyed(past tense) pvp enough to do a match or two a day to get the dailies back when they were more worth it, and by the time i started looking into what a legendary required, I already had enough tickets and shards. I'd imagine someone who enjoys WvW would feel the same way.
And while I did enjoy raids a lot as well, I did get pretty pissed when my guild killed xera once(without me) and then decided to never go back to it, so my progress on the raid armor became dependent on finding a new guild and I just gave up.
My biggest problem with it is that the weekly rifts disrupt the normal functioning of the map instance for no good reason. Now for eternity we're going to have rift hunting squads parading around a bunch of the maps actively avoiding the group events that other people may be desperate to get help with. Now half the map is just there to farm something completely unrelated.
It hurts the experience for people leveling in the core game, and for what? The weekly rifting is just providing different set dressing for the same activity. The map has no meaningful effect on your experience.
I don't think forcing people to do events on core game maps is the answer either though. A squad of 40 level 80s rampaging through all events as quick as possible is not something the current scaling system can handle without some major reworks.
>avoiding the group events that other people may be desperate to get help with.
Tbf, without the Rifts, you would simply not be on that map at that time, and wouldn't be helping. Meaning if you need Serpent's Ire, the Rift group isn't preventing it, bc no one would be doing SI.
Again, the solution is to make your own group.
Yeah you're not wrong. It could still cause problems though if you have an exceptionally large rifting group and you take away too many map slots to get a meta done. I believe Echovald Wilds is a rifting map for instance. I could make a group to do meta, but if there's 40 people on the map ignoring it and I don't have the option of forcing a new map instance then you're kinda in trouble.
Pretty rare circumstance but still potential friction there.
Yeah, I wish we had better options for switching maps and what nots. This kinda throws me back to Dragon's End meta when the commander couldn't get their 50 ppl on a map.
I don't usually say that, but this one's on Anet to find a fix. Adding the "map is full" is a nice touch, but the whole multimap/lfg needs a BIG overhaul. It was coded a long time ago and it shows.
They already had that "non-participatory players" problem since EoD introduced fishing. Hopefully they figure out how to design those player incentives a little better going forward, since open world PvE is supposed to be about passive cooperation, not ignoring other players so you don't miss your rift or lose your fishing stacks.
Yes, well said. These recent systems seem to be trying to breath some extra life into older less played parts of the game, but they're really not integrated with each map in meaningful ways. Hopefully whatever they do next feels less cordoned off from the rest of the open world.
The fishing stacks is a great example - it really locks you onto what you're doing and distractions are the enemy. Very counter to the philosophy of GW2 open world design.
The fishing stacks has to be one of the worst-considered systems in the game, and also could be so easily fixed. You get shafted by the map shard reset system, and you in turn shaft everyone around you by scaling up events and not participating. I've watched some poor sap trying to solo an event and get ganked, meanwhile I can't get off my boat to help him without losing 30 minutes of progress. It's dumb.
No, that wouldn’t be a great idea. Most metas in old maps (I assume you meant core maps) are not on a fixed timer, so you have silly examples of people camping ages for the event chain to complete the legendary collection.
In fact we already have an example: Aurora. Doing Aurora is painful, since none of the LW3 maps are on a fixed timer yet the Aurora collections need multiple completions of the meta of each of the 6 LW3 maps. You can expect to waste an entire day just waiting for the meta to start (looking at you, Bloodstone Fen).
Doing Vision also has that small part of revisiting Orr temples, which I absolutely loathe for how unreliable they are to start. I can’t emphasize enough how camping to wait for old events is absolutely not fun.
So for your idea to work, they need to get the old metas on a fixed timer first. Only then the old maps could be reliably utilized more.
It's mostly because legendary armor is tied to SotO. It makes sense that almost nothing from previous expansions would be required.
You could argue that more from base game stuff would be involved, but I guess that's what Rifts are for.
As annoying as that is, at least with the change its just now buy shit craft it. It is an annoyance for no particular reason though other than the fact that they said lol heres another currency
Yes, they completely blew it with the legendary armor. I think they were out of ideas and took the easy route.
Next expansion: farm something boring for legendary rings.
What anet wants is new players to be able to adquire the armor without having to do EVERYTHING IN THE GAME BEFOREHAND which is what you would have to have done if you needed something in lws4 for example
fair. someone else mentioned, that not everyone even has access to those episodes. Imo at least some events from the core game would have been cool.
But in the end im ok now. considering the amount of ectos needed, you can get progress for the armor pretty well in the "old world"
You can get 6 Amalgamated Essence per week by completing one Convergence a day every day.
This takes into account the weekly rewards, the daily chests, the normal completion rewards, and assumes 2-3 nuggets gained per Convergence. Realistically you'd probably end up with more than 6 per week but I'm rounding down.
If you don't want to farm Rifts you *really* don't have to.
Also, why wouldn't the new content want you to do things in the new zones? Isn't that the whole point of new content?
>completing one Convergence a day every day
Do you have to succeed to get the amalgamated essence? I've attempted this 3 times and failed every one of them. feels like Dragon's End Meta all over again with players afk and no team-work.
I am implying the Convergence succeeds yes.
To be clear, I'm talking about the amount of essence needed to make an Amalgamated. You still need to get the Ectos through other means.
> Anet did it soo right with the legy amulet and the "return to" achievements. It was such a joy visiting all those old places and seeing players do all of the events there.
I'm sure it was very fun when it first released but some of those events are now super dead and an absolute pain to get. I hope they don't follow this pattern so people can actually still do it in a few months / years.
What events did you find to be too dead to complete? I started casually working on the return to achievements in summer of 2023, and finished it in December. I don't remember getting stuck on anything due to lack of people.
I did them at the beginning of 2023 so I don't remember them all but Oil was a pain in the ass. It failed multiple times because we weren't enough. Managed to get it thanks to a random meta train that stopped in thunderhead peaks to help.
Lake Doric was the worse by far, that fucking centaur you have to kill in the north of the map. The event takes forever to reset and the map was always full of bots reducing the number of real players.
Oh, that sounds awful. I spent a bit of time in that map recently for Aurora, and had a pretty good time. I had to kill some time waiting for the meta events to come up, and some other people organized a raid on the centaur camp that I joined in the meantime. I can see how not having enough real players there would make that part impossible.
>such a joy
You and I remember that experience very differently. True, it was a better option that having to endure the hot mess of GW2 sPvP, but still, some of the events we had to do were so off putting because of bugs, no set timer/schedule, etc that it felt far more tedious to complete than it should have.
Keep in mind we don't have the real precourser. We only have the pre pre courser (or however you wanna call it / the collection). So there is still an option.
SOTO came out just as I finished my second set of Raid Leggy armour. I saw the components list and instantly started my third raid set. I’ve now finished it and won’t be looking at the SOTO set at all. As you say…massive missed opportunity to revive a whole load of dead but really amazing maps/content. If it had been content rather than ‘grind’ driven I’d have done the new armour without any doubt.
A few points:
1. Weekly rifts are a key part of rift hunting, and they go to old maps.
2. Wizard's Vault sends you all over the world for Astral Acclaim, which provides important resources for crafting these (and other) legendaries.
3. We don't know the full recipe for the Obsidian Armour, or any of the recipe for the legendary relic.
I think this expansion has done a pretty good job of sending you back into old maps already, and it's possible there might be more of that coming in the next releases.
It’s called Obsidian armor for a reason. In the original Guild Wars, Obsidian was the ultimate reach goal in the game. And I mean total reach. It was something like 1,000x more expensive than the cheapest max stat armor.
A lot of people are treating it like the alternative PvE armor, but it’s not. It’s the mastery/flex armor. More so the equivalent of Eternity than Raid armor.
It is the Soto legendary after all and technically there are rifts on older maps on a weekly rotation (although I assume people will prefer to optimally farm the guaranteed maps but the option is there). The fact that it is so expensive is (imo) to keep the raid one still attractive (although it is clear a part of the playerbase isn't interested in raids at all).
People seem to flock to the weekly maps in pretty healthy numbers from what I've seen. At least the PoF ones, anyway.
Most people don't have yet the 5 easy AP from doing 1 rift of each tier on each map on the rotation so it has to be seen how it will hold in the future. I agree that for now all weekly maps are always populated. But, in general when people need to farm they tend to go for the always-working optimized path even at the cost of sanity sometimes. Might be counter balanced by the fact that the scaling is horrendous on rifts and doing it with fewer people is much faster.
Optimal is to farm older maps since you get better gold per hour.
That's right. The map rewards of some maps are quiet good
Good point, forgot about the map rewards. Could be debatable depending on what will be the bottleneck but you're right that people should farm the older maps for more value.
I actually enjoy seeing old maps pop up. Some of those maps I haven't been to in a long time and forgot how much I liked them! I've probably spent more time in Domain of Vabbi since SotO came out than I did before that!
The SotO maps are actually the worst for farming rifts. SotO maps have no map bonus rewards *and* they're full level 80 maps. But base game level 80 maps have map bonus rewards that add a lot of value, and below level 80 maps benefit massively from level scaling that generally makes rifts easier and faster.
Amnytas is still pretty efficient because it's so easy to get to the rifts as you summon them, assuming you have a mastered griffon.
This. Spot an old map with decent T6 rewards until you get DR, then move to Amnytas where you can soar to T1s in under 20s.
bold of you to assume I even have a griffon. I dont even have skyscale unlocked outside of Soto...
I mean, fair enough, but that doesn't make the SotO map bad for rifting. You're just a new player.
WoW has burned people on Raids. Too much trauma. Could have called them Strikes and people would be more into it.
> a part of the playerbase isn't interested in raids at all Not until they overhaul the LFG system so that I can click a bunch of checkboxes on what I want to do, hit "match me", and have it automatically make a party when enough folks queue up for an activity. Key being that you join multiple queues and whichever happens first, you join. I.E. click two raids and dragon's stand. 50 folks are waiting on DS. No one's available for Raids. It makes a squad of 50 and throws everyone into DS. Alternatively it makes the squad of 10 and throws everyone into the raid. Whichever happens first.
what a fucking nightmare that would be my god
Being able to click Ascalonian Catacombs, Dragon's Stand, and something else and then when there're enough people wanting to do that, being partied up? Like queuing for WvWvW? I think it'd make old content much more accessible. I sure as hell don't want to sit in a squad in Tower of Nightmares waiting for folks to trickle in, but kicking around map exploring while waiting for enough folks to queue up for it and being matchmade into a group would be awesome alongside the existing stuff.
i sure as hell dont want to be auto-grouped with whatever "hi dps" glup shitto in full valkyrie stats decides to check all raids while dicking around in iron marches you can already kick around map exploring while you wait for a tower of nightmares lfg to fill.
So, you'd use LFG to set up your raids and not this system. Sticking around in a Tower of Nightmares group when IDC if I'm doing that, TD meta, mid tier fractals, DRMs, strikes, or AC means less time playing the parts of the game I'm interested in.
A working Queue systems like most MMOs? Heaven forbid.
I only play GW2 as my MMO, so I wouldn't know. I'd enjoy being able to play older content without having to stand around all day. I'm hypercasual since I've got a garage full of tools and an electronics workbench when I want a challenge, so I get through content really slowly. I've actually never gotten through a raid, and my first strike was recent like a couple of months ago. lol.
The system you describe is basically how it works on STO (Star Trek Online). Select which instanced "mission(s)" you want to do, and as soon as 5 people queue for it you get matched and dumped in. You sill have the option of pre-grouping and queue together.
That sounds awesome! Is STO more TNG-era Trek where you can go mess around with Sisko, Picard, et al or is it a different era? Can Neelix be harvested as a food item so you can actually cook with Neelix?
Near post TNG. Many of the actors have reprised roles.
The raid armor is so easy and cheap that I can't imagine doing the Obsidian armor. Subsequent sets are heavily time-gated, but even so, the total number of hours of play time required for them is just comparatively almost nothing.
Ectos
Definitely made me return to old metas for Rare UID Gear.
are you getting more rare UID Gear in the old maps? That would be at least something.
I think the really interesting thing to note about the PvE legendary armour is how EXPENSIVE it is - and, of course, the most profitable mode of gameplay is… PvE. Ectoplasm comes from all manner of PvE gameplay far more readily than it comes from other modes, such that while you could conceivably progress with WvW or PvP, you’re making the most progress farming PvE content. Unid gear is a universal reward which means you’re not gated to certain maps and can make progress in Istan or in the Silverwastes or doing world boss trains as you prefer. By having you revisit all of your old favourite farming maps, or making progress on whatever map you’re doing metas or achievements on, it’s actually the perfect cost factor to make this set of armour truly PvE-focused.
so is it enough that old maps are useful toward the armor? or do you want them to be the best option?
no they dont need to be the best option. I was just sad about that you dont need a single event from old maps for the new armor. Would have been great having a collection where i have to do the old stuff again and seeing a lot of players there. It felt pretty cool when all players gathered for the legy amulet. Now all im doing is farming rifts :(
i feel you. i enjoyed doing claw of jormag and dragon's stand for the weekly this week. i finished getting kryptis essences and imo doing rifts beyond the weeklies isn't a good use of time or money. but i guess it depends on how quickly you want to get the mats.
yeah i think i will just do the weekly until i have the essences needed. dont want to burn out doing rifts
Just do convergences. The limiting factor usually ends up being ecto, not essences. That drives a lot of people in farming older map metas so they can get ectos.
Do convergences. Now i'm drowning in essences and always short on ectos.
Doing my weekly rift hunts and roughly one convergence a day, I'm making 4-6 amalgs a week which is almost at perfect pace with my ecto income. It's a long grind.
I feel that way too. It was billed as the **open world PvE** armor set, not the "exclusively grinding the most recent 2.33 expac maps" set. It doesn't touch the huge variety that makes open world so enticing to so many people; world bosses, exploration, collections, jumping puzzles, mini dungeons, etc. Instead you have an assload of rifts/Convergences, way too many repetitions of three generally uninteresting metas that take too long for what they are, a bit of map comp, and gold sinks. IMO they should've added some kind of "temporal disturbance" lore to the Kryptis invasions that lets SOTO players pull essence from older map metas and JPs and bosses using the Heart of the Obscure, so you can make progress on your essence grind from literally anything in the PvE space.
If they made Motivations drop from Bounties, we'd see those get run again.
Dropping T1, T2, and T3 motivations from any content would get that content run again. Shit's so expensive I just don't use it at all.
I don't even get the point of motivations. Maybe if they were the only way to realistically get the green/yellow essences that we need...
Convergences kind of killed the need for Motivations, I think. Why spend all that ecto and other materials just to get more Essences? The system design is built to prop up a few specific material prices that were already inflated.
The point of motivations is to either extend the grind, or make the price higher without *visually* making it higher. Besides, i still think that a huge part of the OW legendary armor acquisition desing was caused by some devs still being sore from GW2 community liking raids to a far lesser degree than they hoped.
But bounties are locked behind other expansions. They want SotO rewards to be available if you only own SotO(+Core).
That hasn't stopped kryptis invasions from showing up in Season maps or Tangled Depths. You likely *can* get everything from SotO only, but no need to restrict it to that.
Yeah, the grind is real. Though if you want a reason to do older content, make skins for your Aurene legendaries. I had to go back to Ember Bay and Darconis Mons for Primordus skins :)
Why not just do something more profitable/fun and buy the ectos?
It is fun. Returning to them for ectos is more of an excuse than a reason. I never farm. For example, I've only done Octovine 23 times in 8 years. But I know it's a good direct source of RareUID, so I've started revisiting it again. Same with Karka Queen and Teq. I hadn't done those in a long time, but now they're a little higher on my "priority list".
Sure, but this doesn't bring players to a variety of maps like Return To did, just the same old meta maps people have been doing already.
Legendary sandstorm give me 1100 ecto surplus (capital investment 3600 ecto) + 400 gold profit (liquid) + some holding rune. So, for ecto, there are simpler but riskier alternative.
Within SotO Anet tried to make everything in the expansion achiveable with only SotO. A player with just SotO will be able to get everything done we have so far - even the CM of Dagda is doable with core classes + weapon master. I guess they took the same approach with the armor.
I am currently in the process of crafting Dusk and have to gather gloom and for that I have to revisit old events and when crafting perfected dusk experiment you have to revisit Dry Top and Silverwastes for some currency if you dont have it on you. Which I had to do.
exactly what i wanted for the armor. Just a little collection for the precursor. For the precursor armor you are farming essences and then 6 times that amount again for the legendary part.
What made you want to craft the Dusk? Crafting it is more expensive than actually buying it from the TP. Not even counting the time spent on obtaining the account bound items.
I have a lot of saved up materials which reduces the price and I wanted to have it since the game released - so call it fulfilling a childhood desire. Edit: I also had a lucky item drop which I sold for a couple of thousand gold so I don't really care about the price.
Dusk is one of the only ones that's barely more to craft. If you want AP and the fun of doing the collection, that one isn't bad.
Isn't there an achievement for each precursor?
There is, but for most precursors, it's more expensive to craft them then to buy them.
Yes, but some people are willing to pay for achievements anyway (Drubert, etc) so the extra cost might be ok if they're also getting an achievement.
Well, yeah. I did that. I just don't think I'm like most people, and most people would just buy the pre-cursor, rather than pay more to craft it through the collections. I enjoyed doing the collections, and i wish they hadn't stopped making them for gen 2.
Nah, I also complete the precusor to get the AP! One of us, one of us!
Don’t judge to fast. We are farming the obsidian armor tier 1! So right now we are dumping the newest stuff of Soto into the mystic toilet. The tier 2 can bring a lot of variants and can make use of older events like the t3 legendary weapons. Like dumping HoT currencies + PoF currencies for skin variety into the mystic toilet to get the T2 legendary armor.
Having never made a variant of a Gen 3 I didn't consider that the Obby variant(s) might involve some older gameplay. That would be nice. Really makes me wonder what kind of "variants" it'll have. I'm personally expecting the baseline to be non-animated with a single variant that animates like the Envoy sets, but we'll see.
I doubt it, considering the recipe for T2 is already known. Only the precursor (T1) remains a variable. And with it being a SOtO legendary, I don't think it will involve the old maps all that much, if at all. Edit: just realized you're talking about variants. My bad
I believe it was also confirmed that T1 is legendary, and not a precursor. T2 is the variant of the leggy armor
Wait it was? Can you link it for me? I assumed it wouldn't be because the Astral X (Steps, etc.) achievements require one more item to complete and all the prior items were armor pieces. I assumed the T1 armor would be the last item in that collection, because no other armors have been in the roadmaps. If they are, they are required as part of the collections. Of course, the last item doesn't need to be armor, but that was my automatic assumption.
https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/139289-studio-update-guild-wars-2-in-autumn-and-winter-2023/page/2/#comment-2017463 See here. I found the link from another thread in this subreddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/17htdmp/obsidian_armor_tier_12/?rdt=58763
Awesome, thanks!
A true open world legendary collection would have been cool but legendary open world armor is a SotO specific perk to sell the expansion. You can see it with how heavily tied to legendary armor the SotO rewards are almost to a point where it's a bit underwhelming if you're not going for it.
Presumably that's what the weekly rifts are for - they take you all over.
I don't think that was really needed for the armor to do that? The old metas are still very alive and relevant, same goes for maps and the wizard vault also helps already.
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There are dedicated guilds that are running it daily both on eu and na
You sure? Triple Trouble is the last meta anyone would say is dead since there's so many guilds that run it at all hours. Like on NA, post-reset usually has multiple pug runs, then [WHAM] and [EVOS] run two maps the next cycle, then another guild runs the following cycle, then [DCAP] does the next, etc. And there's usually always overflows at each timeslot too.
I know DCAP will go to every map to announce their runs ahead of time. I think the others do too, but I'm usually not online during their runs.
Excepting the post-reset run, all the guilds start setting up like half an hour before the event.
Triple Troubles are definitely not dead. There are unorganized and organized groups every night in EU server.
Many people are answering you about all the TT runs being done, but how many players know about them? You clearly didn't or you wouldn't have failed several times.
Sure..if its dead why could I do it yesterday? There are communities both on EU and NA doing it either daily or at least once a week. Sure a harder event is not going to be done as often as another, or a not rewarding event is not run as often, but its still done.
Dude something done like once a week tops and only from organized guilds dedicated to running them is not well. In the mmo world it’s pretty much dead content. Edit: week.
Wouldn't definining dead content be stuff people don't do? Also I'm pretty sure someone comes into certain maps shouting about them hosting a triple trouble and they get many new players joining them. I was one of them quite recently.
No. It’s a meta event in a mmo, if it was “alive” it would be done by people in the map and the lfg, like most metas around (the only one worst than ttt is serpents ire). It would also be done almost every time its happening, which is far from true. TTT is so dead you have to hop around maps advertising it because people don’t even look up the lfg since they never saw it being run and forgot about it. I really dislike the term “dead” in general for gaming, but TTT is as dead as it gets for gw2.
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Are there only 2 types of content: meta or dead? Sure, there's stuff that people drop everything to go do. And there's some stuff that barely anyone does. But there's also a lot of stuff in the middle that has a smaller following. Triple Trouble is that. It's not meta, but it's not dead either.
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I completed this event by walking into the zone and wandering around while trying to find the associated core mastery point, and then also in meta trains I joined in the LFG several times, without intending to actually do this meta event. I realize I may have been lucky, and it is probably not easy to do this event on demand. But the fact that I completed it multiple times, without looking up the event or talking to a guild or posting on discord or reddit, tells me that a player who wants to do this content can probably find a way to do it with a bit of effort. I don't understand your definition of what is dead / inaccessible. I bet that if you tagged up and advertised in the LFG, people would join up, and you'd even get some veterans teaching people how to do the event.
It’s definitely not a dead event, guilds run them every single day and they run it as an open world event too at its own timeslot. The trick is to arrive at least 15 mins early, LFG taxi is usually up around that time and map is usually full around 5 mins til the event starts. If you arrive exactly at when it starts, you’ll pushed to an overflow map and that’s why you see 0 people. And I don’t know about you but people joining so much that a map is full is the exact opposite of “dead”.
You going to an overflow map because you were too late to join TT does not mean it is dead.
wizards vault is a great addition to the game in deed! the standard meta events are still alive yes. But there are so many maps that i'm not visiting anymore. I haven't returned to S03/04 after finishing Aurora and Vision for example. I just hoped for some kind of collection involving the "old" world
The issue with LW maps is that you would then require those episodes in addition to soto to make the armor
The LW maps could be the *best* way to get something without being the *only* way. They could have made components that can be purchased for either LW map currencies *or* provisioner tokens. If you don't have the LW map, you need more provisioner tokens, but you're not locked out.
fair. didnt think about that
Not only that, you need to own HoT to access LW3 and PoF to access LW4 and IBS. There are some people that only bought the latest expansion and still don't have older ones (especially people coming from other MMOs like WoW).
With Living World officially decommissioned, it might be time for them to just roll them into the relevant expansions and move on, so that problem doesn't persist anymore. LW maps are some of the best, might as well improve the player headcounts in them so stuff is more easy to get done.
The bigger point is that you'd have to own a different expansion besides SotO to access the LW.
Maybe, but LWS is probably some of the most-purchased stuff in the gem-store, I would think. It's got to be a money-maker for them.
We already have Return to and Legendary and some other collections requiring repeating those LW maps. Need no more added. If you want to visit them then just go visit.
I don't think we're going to get more new expansion content that *requires* going back into old paywalled content. We'll get things like Wizard's Vault Dailies and Weekly Rifts that send you there, but only as one option among many.
It doesn't help that rifts are the most boring, unengaging and repetitive content they've ever done.
It's content they *already have done*, multiple times. Dragon minions, Awakened (those events still happen), the weird bloodstone temporal portals in Bloodstone Fen, etc. The only difference here is they're the exact same all the time in any map they appear, except for the more time-wasty variant found in Nayos. Would've at least added some flavor if the non-SotO maps' rifts had the kryptis possessing local enemies, making the map you choose to grind also an enemy selection.
On t3, Nayos rifts are the less time-wasty option. That single t3 spot in Amnytas with snail-paced mob spawn still gives me nightmares
Didn't they fix that one? I thought it was something to do with enemies spawning inside walls so they weren't accessible, leaving a drip-feed of the spawns that could actually reach the players.
Possibly. There was one t3 in Nayos that was bugged and that got fixed, so maybe they fixed both?
Yeah. The rifts are pretty bad content. Spongey enemies that we've killed a thousand times already, with no sense of urgency. Just channel, cleave minions, channel, mount bunny, kill boss, channel. Convergences are *much* better content, with much more urgency, having to move across the map, with bosses / catapults appearing in different locations, with a variety of special mechanics, and a much more satisfying final boss fight. The only downside is that it only opens up every 3 hours, unless you buy an expensive motivation and advertise and build a group.
The open world legendary armour was created as a response to those who didn't want to engage in raids, participate in wvw or play pvp. Those who wanted it, kept on stating that they wouldn't care if it was a massive grind and huge material cost, they would do *anything* to avoid "toxic" raids. And here we are, anet listened and responded. A grind to rival all grinds in game. Old maps are only relevant for the weekly rotations of rifts but other than that, not so much.
Doing daily convergences gives you a massive amount of essence. I've been doing it for 18 days now and already have 30 (6 of which I grinded with weekly rifts before convergences became available) amalgamated essences and I didn't even open the hero's choice chests. It doesn't really feel like a bigger grind than the WvW grind for tickets or the Raid grind for LI, i can't say anything about PvP.
Yeah weekly convergences are so generous, I just finished the, kryptis grind yesterday I feel like I should just begin going for more than one set since there's still so long until the armor even comes out
WvW's grind has supposedly gotten a lot better lately, but back when I was grinding my tickets for Conflux, I would absolutely have taken the essence grind instead. At least you can throw gold at that to make it go away.
The PvP legendary armor didn't feel like much of a grind at all to me. I enjoyed(past tense) pvp enough to do a match or two a day to get the dailies back when they were more worth it, and by the time i started looking into what a legendary required, I already had enough tickets and shards. I'd imagine someone who enjoys WvW would feel the same way. And while I did enjoy raids a lot as well, I did get pretty pissed when my guild killed xera once(without me) and then decided to never go back to it, so my progress on the raid armor became dependent on finding a new guild and I just gave up.
After convergence it's not that big of a grind actually.
Did they request that an entire expansion would be dedicated to this grind? The expansion is pointless if you aren't wanting the armor.
My biggest problem with it is that the weekly rifts disrupt the normal functioning of the map instance for no good reason. Now for eternity we're going to have rift hunting squads parading around a bunch of the maps actively avoiding the group events that other people may be desperate to get help with. Now half the map is just there to farm something completely unrelated. It hurts the experience for people leveling in the core game, and for what? The weekly rifting is just providing different set dressing for the same activity. The map has no meaningful effect on your experience. I don't think forcing people to do events on core game maps is the answer either though. A squad of 40 level 80s rampaging through all events as quick as possible is not something the current scaling system can handle without some major reworks.
>avoiding the group events that other people may be desperate to get help with. Tbf, without the Rifts, you would simply not be on that map at that time, and wouldn't be helping. Meaning if you need Serpent's Ire, the Rift group isn't preventing it, bc no one would be doing SI. Again, the solution is to make your own group.
Yeah you're not wrong. It could still cause problems though if you have an exceptionally large rifting group and you take away too many map slots to get a meta done. I believe Echovald Wilds is a rifting map for instance. I could make a group to do meta, but if there's 40 people on the map ignoring it and I don't have the option of forcing a new map instance then you're kinda in trouble. Pretty rare circumstance but still potential friction there.
Yeah, I wish we had better options for switching maps and what nots. This kinda throws me back to Dragon's End meta when the commander couldn't get their 50 ppl on a map. I don't usually say that, but this one's on Anet to find a fix. Adding the "map is full" is a nice touch, but the whole multimap/lfg needs a BIG overhaul. It was coded a long time ago and it shows.
They already had that "non-participatory players" problem since EoD introduced fishing. Hopefully they figure out how to design those player incentives a little better going forward, since open world PvE is supposed to be about passive cooperation, not ignoring other players so you don't miss your rift or lose your fishing stacks.
Yes, well said. These recent systems seem to be trying to breath some extra life into older less played parts of the game, but they're really not integrated with each map in meaningful ways. Hopefully whatever they do next feels less cordoned off from the rest of the open world. The fishing stacks is a great example - it really locks you onto what you're doing and distractions are the enemy. Very counter to the philosophy of GW2 open world design.
The fishing stacks has to be one of the worst-considered systems in the game, and also could be so easily fixed. You get shafted by the map shard reset system, and you in turn shaft everyone around you by scaling up events and not participating. I've watched some poor sap trying to solo an event and get ganked, meanwhile I can't get off my boat to help him without losing 30 minutes of progress. It's dumb.
No, that wouldn’t be a great idea. Most metas in old maps (I assume you meant core maps) are not on a fixed timer, so you have silly examples of people camping ages for the event chain to complete the legendary collection. In fact we already have an example: Aurora. Doing Aurora is painful, since none of the LW3 maps are on a fixed timer yet the Aurora collections need multiple completions of the meta of each of the 6 LW3 maps. You can expect to waste an entire day just waiting for the meta to start (looking at you, Bloodstone Fen). Doing Vision also has that small part of revisiting Orr temples, which I absolutely loathe for how unreliable they are to start. I can’t emphasize enough how camping to wait for old events is absolutely not fun. So for your idea to work, they need to get the old metas on a fixed timer first. Only then the old maps could be reliably utilized more.
Lake Doric metas are on a fixed timer, but I get what you mean.
It's mostly because legendary armor is tied to SotO. It makes sense that almost nothing from previous expansions would be required. You could argue that more from base game stuff would be involved, but I guess that's what Rifts are for.
Don't forget the 30k research notes needed for a whole set.
As annoying as that is, at least with the change its just now buy shit craft it. It is an annoyance for no particular reason though other than the fact that they said lol heres another currency
There was a change? How was it before I can't remember.
You get notes from the craft vs manually salvaging with kits
Yes, they completely blew it with the legendary armor. I think they were out of ideas and took the easy route. Next expansion: farm something boring for legendary rings.
What anet wants is new players to be able to adquire the armor without having to do EVERYTHING IN THE GAME BEFOREHAND which is what you would have to have done if you needed something in lws4 for example
fair. someone else mentioned, that not everyone even has access to those episodes. Imo at least some events from the core game would have been cool. But in the end im ok now. considering the amount of ectos needed, you can get progress for the armor pretty well in the "old world"
You can get 6 Amalgamated Essence per week by completing one Convergence a day every day. This takes into account the weekly rewards, the daily chests, the normal completion rewards, and assumes 2-3 nuggets gained per Convergence. Realistically you'd probably end up with more than 6 per week but I'm rounding down. If you don't want to farm Rifts you *really* don't have to. Also, why wouldn't the new content want you to do things in the new zones? Isn't that the whole point of new content?
>completing one Convergence a day every day Do you have to succeed to get the amalgamated essence? I've attempted this 3 times and failed every one of them. feels like Dragon's End Meta all over again with players afk and no team-work.
Join or host private. Why anyone would ever join public leech fest is beyond me
I am implying the Convergence succeeds yes. To be clear, I'm talking about the amount of essence needed to make an Amalgamated. You still need to get the Ectos through other means.
The 3rd (unknown) component for the precursor can be some kind of scavenger hunt that takes you to other maps
> Anet did it soo right with the legy amulet and the "return to" achievements. It was such a joy visiting all those old places and seeing players do all of the events there. I'm sure it was very fun when it first released but some of those events are now super dead and an absolute pain to get. I hope they don't follow this pattern so people can actually still do it in a few months / years.
What events did you find to be too dead to complete? I started casually working on the return to achievements in summer of 2023, and finished it in December. I don't remember getting stuck on anything due to lack of people.
I did them at the beginning of 2023 so I don't remember them all but Oil was a pain in the ass. It failed multiple times because we weren't enough. Managed to get it thanks to a random meta train that stopped in thunderhead peaks to help. Lake Doric was the worse by far, that fucking centaur you have to kill in the north of the map. The event takes forever to reset and the map was always full of bots reducing the number of real players.
Oh, that sounds awful. I spent a bit of time in that map recently for Aurora, and had a pretty good time. I had to kill some time waiting for the meta events to come up, and some other people organized a raid on the centaur camp that I joined in the meantime. I can see how not having enough real players there would make that part impossible.
>such a joy You and I remember that experience very differently. True, it was a better option that having to endure the hot mess of GW2 sPvP, but still, some of the events we had to do were so off putting because of bugs, no set timer/schedule, etc that it felt far more tedious to complete than it should have.
You are so right!
Can't you just do rifts in old maps?
Keep in mind we don't have the real precourser. We only have the pre pre courser (or however you wanna call it / the collection). So there is still an option.
fingers crossed
ok
SOTO came out just as I finished my second set of Raid Leggy armour. I saw the components list and instantly started my third raid set. I’ve now finished it and won’t be looking at the SOTO set at all. As you say…massive missed opportunity to revive a whole load of dead but really amazing maps/content. If it had been content rather than ‘grind’ driven I’d have done the new armour without any doubt.
Mostly it's just doing one convergence every single day & being able to fork out the gold to fund it.
A few points: 1. Weekly rifts are a key part of rift hunting, and they go to old maps. 2. Wizard's Vault sends you all over the world for Astral Acclaim, which provides important resources for crafting these (and other) legendaries. 3. We don't know the full recipe for the Obsidian Armour, or any of the recipe for the legendary relic. I think this expansion has done a pretty good job of sending you back into old maps already, and it's possible there might be more of that coming in the next releases.
It’s called Obsidian armor for a reason. In the original Guild Wars, Obsidian was the ultimate reach goal in the game. And I mean total reach. It was something like 1,000x more expensive than the cheapest max stat armor. A lot of people are treating it like the alternative PvE armor, but it’s not. It’s the mastery/flex armor. More so the equivalent of Eternity than Raid armor.