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.

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.

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.

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’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.