Have been playing the first map and not that far into the story yet.

The new map feels great. It looks beautiful and plays very well. There are a lot of mini bosses and events, that makes it really engaging. The verticality is well done so without adding to much orientation complexity. The meta was pretty nice, even though it bugged out on our first try (funnily while a dev was participating in it). What I don’t like is the use of the special action key, where you channel for a very long time to cleanse invulnerable opponents. This takes very long in some events, when there are only a few players.

I have mixed feelings about the new login rewards. I don’t really like that your selection (PvE, PvP, WvW) affects which objectives you get. Why do I have to choose what I want to play one day/week before? Just give me all of the objectives, reward me for the first X and hide the modes I didn’t select. It’s perfectly fine for me to have 6 PvE, 6 PvP and 6 WvW objectives and get a reward for the first 6 I do.

Another problem I see with dailies/weeklies is that they aren’t synced between players. It would be great if my friends would have the same objectives as me, that we can pursue together.

What astonished me is that they didn’t remove alt account farming. You srill get 5 AA each day for simply logging in and can buy Mystic Coins or materials with it. It seems like they didn’t identify this as a problem.

My experience has been similar to what was already posted, to be honest. I reached chapter 7 before finishing last night and found the story so far to be quite engaging. I like the new characters, and introducing them while removing the pact members from the story really makes it feel like we’re in a new era. I feel the narrative team has done a good job moving the story forward, so far.

Skywatch Archipelago is a good map - decently sized with enough unique biomes to not get tired of it quickly. At first I felt it was a little bit of a cop-out to make a “Dragonfall” map with existing parts of the world, but when I really explored it, I realised the entire map is unique - and has some really interesting concepts at work in a ‘what-if’, fractal way. The meta is well designed and enjoyable, though the last boss already feels a bit tiresome and I’ve only done it three times so far. It also doesn’t help that the last boss bugged out on one of those tries, so we got nothing out of it. I haven’t explored too much of the hub yet, but it feels like a nice place with everything we need in a tight area, which I like. From what I’ve seen, it also doesnt have any NPCs giving the same dialogue every single time you walk past them, which is a big bonus.

In regards to systems, I’m not blown away by the glyph system - most of the ones I’ve seen are useless to my spec, I’ve gained 4 so far and, at least for my main character, I don’t really feel like I want any more. I like how we were able to choose which ones we wanted, at least. However the daily system is a big downgrade in my opinion. I like how we can select what we want now instead of constantly being given items we don’t want, but that’s massively offset by the new daily/weekly system. I don’t want to guess ahead of time what content I want to do, and I don’t want to be forced to complete activities I don’t enjoy just to finish the daily / weekly path. The old system of choosing four of the available twelve activities worked great for me, all they needed to do was maybe remove some of the trivial ones like Mystic Forger, Forager, Vista Viewer and add in ones from EoD and SotO. Personally, I don’t want to be forced to log in for 30 minutes every day just to do my dailies, as well as be forced to do exactly what the game wants me to do with no exceptions. For me, GW2 is a casual game I’ll play for a time when not subbed to WoW or engaged with another game, but then I’ll want to drop back to 10-15 minutes of login, dailies and crafting when I’ve got other things to play. GW2 doesn’t have enough engaging current content for me to make it my “only game”, so forcing me to spend more time doing mundane daily tasks is just going to make me want to quit entirely, rather than engage with those systems. If the goal of the new system was to get me to spend more time in the game, they should’ve spent development time on making it more painless to do the content that already exists, and tell me what I’m missing out on, rather than make it more painful to do arbetary tasks. Thats just my opinion, though.

So I actually ran into a bug that kept me from playing much. When I finished part 2 of Act 1 it dumped me in Lions Arch and stripped me of my masteries and elite specs. Thankfully closing and rebooting the game fixed this. The continued problem was that I couldn’t continue the expansion as it never put me in the Skywatch zone. So I had to replay the second story again. While semi-quick was just a feel bad moment that kind of slowed my hype.

I’ve always been garbage so the new runes thing is whatever. Though so far as a Necro they feel pretty eh. Dailies changed are okay at first, but they feel worse to do now. Mostly because it feels like you will get 3 done easily then be stuck working through the 4th for a while.

I like it! I thought the story was interesting, I like our new allies, I think the maps are gorgeous.

The story version of the first strike was dope. I absolutely loved that fight. The story version for the second strike wasn’t bad, but I have zero clue what I had to be doing. I’ll be trying to LFG the actual strikes later.

The daily system was a bit of a bummer, but maybe with feedback, they’ll tweak it to give you options for your daily selections instead of needing to do all four. The reward choice is really great tho, especially the clovers (plus, I’m working on a legendary).

Weaponmaster Training was so refreshing. I’m sad we didn’t get full elite specs, but this does scratch the itch of trying out new weapon combos for my toons. Adding updraft and leylines use to flying mounts is a huge W.

I’m not sold on the relic system, especially as someone who has 6 legendary runes. The relic choosey chests are… okay, but IDK. Here’s to hoping we’ll get more interesting relics?

Oh, but making the portal tome scroll rock thing behind a collection was dumb. Shoulda just given it as part of the story.

Can’t comment on story much but voice acting and the setup are really good so far, looking forward to learning more about the kryptis, wizards and demons! It definitely feels soooo janky at times - overlapping audio, desynced cinematics and sound, progression breaking bugs in story instances, lots of backtracking to home base, etc. but its still fun.

The new WV reward system seems… interesting. If anything I think the rewards might be too good because I kinda want to grind every daily and weekly now and I’m pretty sure I will hate it by the end of quarter? I really hate the UI/UX on it however, it’s just a plain ugly interface that is not fun to browse. I didn’t even initially realize there are additional rewards if you scroll down, and then I realized you can’t sort or search them anyway. I’d rather have a basic list at this point tbh.

The rifts are kinda disappointing, we only have tier 1s and they are kinda lame both in terms of encounter itself and rewards you get from it.

Runes seem torn in identity, 90% of them are fun utilities but the 10% will be meta defining and the only ones in actual use. They should have made them either all utility and niche, or all build-defining. Trying to do both just makes most of them a waste in comparison.

I’ve been a bit underwhelmed so far. Hoping things get more interesting as I progress. I’ve only seen the first map so far, but it generally doesn’t feel like something new. Which I get is sort of the point with the story, but it just doesn’t provide the same excitement as Crystal Oasis did back when PoF launched.

I didn’t like the Wizard’s Vault at first - mainly because of the reduction in daily reward from 2 to 1 gold. As a more casual player, that seemed like quite the blow to my income. But later on I noticed I overlooked the 90 gold at 6 currency each. So I think I may even come out ahead with the changes. It’s also great to have a bunch of choices, especially regarding ascended and legendary gear.

I haven’t really touched the relics much either. I got one from the meta event and just equipped that for now to have something in the slot, but none of the options really seemed significant enough to care for now.

The any weapon on any spec thing, while interesting, doesn’t feel particularly useful as a thief. I’m also out of build/equipment slots to test out new builds - so I guess I’d have to use another character to figure out if any of those new combinations are worth it on my main.

So overall, I’m glad there’s more content, but I kind of expected more for the price.

I’m a f2p, so I haven’t even touched the expansion itself, but I’ve tried the systems.

Wizard’s vault is kind of interesting - the rewards you get daily/weekly are probably too rewarding, as after doing some weekly and daily tasks, I could claim 90 gold, something I haven’t ever gotten in 200 hours of play. I like how you can buy laurels as free to play now, I feel like it levels the playing field when it comes to WvW due to being able to buy ascended talismans, though no warclaw still hurts. Some of the tasks for the weekly challenges are terrible in my opinion, such as “escort 10 pack dolyaks in wvw” which is a literal chore that achieves nothing in the game mode. Apart from that, I do miss the daily jumping puzzles that would give momentary community interaction.

Relics are incredibly weird. They kind of ruined the choices between runes, now they’re purely stats, which makes a rune choice very linear. Now, speaking of relics themselves, so far I’m rather underwhelmed - the majority of the runes are designed for a specific class in mind and their profession mechanic, which aren’t applicable at all to the rest of the classes. The rest I feel are way too situational (depending on what type of elite skill you have), and the generalist relics such as faster weapon swap or better swiftness feel way too boring in comparison to the other relics.

Disclaimer: I haven’t played it. So speaking strictly as a prospective purchaser, the feedback from the community so far has not inspired confidence. I was hoping this expansion would bring me back to the game, but by most accounts it’s hard not to get the feeling that the new devs have lost the thread. They don’t seem to understand what was good about the previous systems–namely, that they gave players choices. Sure, people could funnel to the path of least resistance with the old dailies, but at least that meant you could get them done if you didn’t have a lot of time. As someone who burned out hard on PVP, I liked the idea of being able to play a match or two, and then if I got frustrated I could switch to PVE and still finish dailies. I could make the decision on the fly instead of being committed to something that didn’t incorporate how my actual gameplay experience might go. My understanding of the new system leads me to conclude that if I were to decide I want PVP, the choice is then to either finish all of the PVP dailies or bail for the day, no matter how the matches went. Also, some of the old dailies were clunkers. Having the option to do the easier ones meant that no one was stuck doing content they despised. Finally, jumping puzzle portal conga was a defining feature of the community. I hope it’s still around.

Sure, there were optimal rune sets, but it sounds like those options have basically been removed altogether. Yeah, you’d have been a fool not to take Torment on your Renegade, but at least you could. Trapper sucked for the guy on the receiving end, but it enabled a whole new style of play. I feel like everyone predicted the rune/relic change would be garbage. Are there any relics anyone is actually excited by?

I also read this morning that armor weights are basically gone for the new expansion-defining sets. For people who might not have been around at the time: In Guild Wars 1, every class had its own armor styles. They switched to the weight system in the sequel to cut down on the design overhead, and now we’re abandoning even that. Looking at the quarterlies I didn’t get the impression that things were quite that dire, but doing away with basic content like class fantasy expression is not a good look.

The only good feedback I’ve read seems to be that the rewards themselves are better, at least on a reward-by-reward basis (if not in aggregate over time–mathematically it seems like just playing ordinary content is economically less valuable than it used to be). And apparently the maps and stories are pretty good?

The thing is, I liked Dragonfall. By which I mean: a new meta to run isn’t necessarily a selling point aside from just more variety. The systems are the thing that make the game fun to play moment to moment. If the systems feel shitty, then the game feels shitty, and it doesn’t matter whether the thing I’m swinging at is a spiky purple blob with red circles on the ground or a crooked green blob with red circles on the ground instead. I’d still kind of rather be playing my ritualist.

All of that said, to reiterate: this isn’t speaking from experience. It’s just my expectations based on what I’ve read and watched so far. I’m currently holding off on pulling the trigger in the hopes that someone will convince me it’s a good investment of time and money. As it stands, I’m not convinced that it isn’t really a step backwards with a view towards better monetization and cut development costs.

It is I, clearly an expert after playing for a few hours today!

I’m enjoying it, the new map visually looks cool and the story is so far engaging. I’m a bit confused by some dialogue since I think I heard it out of order but otherwise no major complaints!

I am a bit unsure what to think of the new rewards and I realize I forgot to collect the reward for finishing all the dailies since you have to click on them now.

Also unsure how to think about relics as well, I hopped into pvp and was like oh crap there’s a whole new system now in my build which was also confusing.

Liked the story better than EoD, even if it was dumb to see the commander keeping his “secret” without a second thought after jormag and onis

And they still overuse >!deaths of new characters!< way too much, it doesn’t have any weight when done like that

Anyway the story was different, no dragons, overall with a good pacing too. Also finally some new lore, and no magitech

So I still enjoyed it more than anything since PoF and S4 times

Also I’m interested in seeing the rest of it, especially if we end up “crossing over”, that place looked great

The maps are nice (nothing too great but enjoyable), rifts last the right amount of time to avoid becoming too boring immediately, the masteries fill up quick enough too

The vault system left me with a positive impression, it’s clearly something new to patch up (more dailies to choose between, mix between the games modes) but it shows potential. And they added gemstore items and gold to it, this can’t be appreciated enough

Relics were frankly a disaster. Almost all of them are boring, no more summons, interesting effects were removed, especially for condi builds there is basically no choice. For many builds not equipping a relic or equipping a bad one makes realistically no difference compared to equipping a “good” one

The idea to separate the bonus from the runes was good, but there was no reason to change the effects, especially not like that. They need a complete relics overhaul ASAP

The armor sets were nice but lacking variety. Also it has to be seen how annoying the legendary armor grind will be

I haven’t tried the strikes yet, so I can’t really say much.

All in all, I am satisfied. There are some things to fix but it looks like a step in the right direction

I’m just glad that we are done with the dragons.

Now, if for the next expansion we could also remove the f military bs, even if it means killing all the charr, then, I would be golden!

Ben slowly making my way through the story, and I’ve really been enjoying everything I’ve seen. Still in the first map. The map itself is really great, and why the map is the way it is, story wise is also impressive.

Could not play much due to work. Will really play it on the weekend and in my holidays next week.

Really loving it so far except the dailies but i am sure that enough people complain for it to be changed.