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.

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.

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.

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