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.

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.

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.

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’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!

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.

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.

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.