Honestly super excited! Guild Wars is such a timeless game, and I hope this brings many new players to the community.

As someone just starting to get into Thief I like Antiquary as a concept, having a Thief with more buttons is good coming from how active and fluid Warrior, Rev and Ele are. I’m finding I don’t really enjoy anything other than Maleficent Seven Deadeye, so the (freshly buffed) artifact spammer build path looks really fun. PVP will be interesting too, as I’m seeing people start to homebrew bruiser thief builds and I think this is going to enable a Carrion bruiser to stand alongside the DA/Trickery Valk bruiser I’ve seen around.

Oh yeah, the improvement to resource economy is probably going to be huge for WvW. I know some commanders were saying they felt they had to be running Signet of Rage instead of banner or the new paragon elite just to maintain enough motivation.

As a newly hatched Revenant main, I’m both really excited to sink my theory teeth into Conduit, and also seriously nervous about how it’s being talked about, as if the spec just isn’t coming together in design terms. This interview was done a while ago though, so hopefully there’s been enough time to let the spec finish cooking.

tbh the extropians were the last of these TESCREAL NRMs that I actually kind of understood

Ooze or you lose!

They had me at Razah! Immediately rolled a Revenant, and will be playing it alongside my new Warrior while I figure out which I like more.

Really excited for the livestream to see more Conduit.

Can’t wait for the livestream to learn more about Paragon. I might be Warrioring through the new expansion…

Having Skritt buddies is tempting me to add Thief to my roster too!

The blog post elaborates on the spec icon at least, the big theme is gambling. Your Skritt pals will steal two random artifacts for you to pick from, and your new utility skill class can be recast while on cooldown, but with a risk of penalties to you.

I do think it’s funny that Thief is getting this, while Mesmer is getting bard troubador, given Mesmer has “chaos sorcery”… which is not wild magic, but space, time, mind and sense magic.

the most important thing was revealed though: I’m gonna get to take some fantastic screenshots of my Sylvari playing a lute.

Think this time was just right place, right time. A lot of retention mechanics are online now, like Wizard’s Vault, and also having a cosmetic set that interested me to keep playing for a while (Astral Ward). Rerelease of LWS1 helped me feel connected to the story as opposed to having no idea who the new Destiny’s Edge 2 crew was.

The sad thing is, after I bounced some time during the very first release of LWS1, I spent the following period constantly thinking “man, I wish this game was more like GW2”. But I’m back now for good, and loving it!

yeah, I think the problem was having a rotation of randoms, so lots of time waiting; although clear times were pretty consistent overall. also a lot of time spent doing quests. the post-dungeon voyage for handins always nuked the exp/h rate.

I finished up at 303 hours to 60, which was an extremely long journey. I think questing you can do it in 75-80h if you’re really efficient.

I think I read arms is basically an abandoned spec and you’re not really meant to run it? Like not even in PVP, they just dropped support for balancing it.

Big thing: improvements for alts, like the Warband system of account-wide reps like on retail. Looking at the potential for multiple Argent Dawn or Furbolg grinds on non-raiding alts like… maybe I don’t really need the profession recipes or dungeon sets.

you have to consider the cost in terms of real wages though, inflation only makes production costs higher for producers, for customers money is worth about as much as it has been since the 70’s; though this changes from income quantile to income quantile, and from market to market.

the price increases only reflects confidence Nintendo has in their DRM.

Happened twice, both to my #1 games. Tried Chrono Trigger as a kid and didn’t like it, then came back and played it as a young adult and was like… damn… this is an actual treasure.

In 2015 I tried FFXI due to the XIV crossover event, and I could not get past the eccentric and clunky UI and the pacing of the combat. I tried again a couple of years later and committed to finishing all the stories. It became my new #1 and I think genuinely one of the best games ever made, in terms of revealing and pushing the artistic potential of online games, and games in general. Actual masterpiece and a massive innovation, and unlike Chrono Trigger I think the lessons are going to be a lot harder to learn and replicate.

this is the entire cycle that keeps undergrad computer science going

I get the feeling that “Techdirt” may be a bit biased.

nano for editing config files, emacs if I’m writing code… kwrite or joplin if I need a scratch pad or to share notes between devices respectively