Frykka

^ true

The OP was not about botting although that is absolutely a real concern... we all have concerns about cheating and catching cheating or rather designing mechanics that cannot be macro'd efficiently. Macroing knotwood farming for dust and embers is probably more profitable in the long run than macroing campaign re-entry.

Yes, there will be training tomes to make and sell from your extra points... they will not be available until a post launch patch so be on top of your training before then. The game will not be forgiving for people unwilling to pay attention.

The drop from mobs is still a placeholder, a new placeholder granted... discs will be crafted by runecrafters and the thrall component will be the one we hunt that is rare. Blair said the disc recipes are done... we can hope the first iteration for thrall capture and an actual use for polished soulgems comes with 5.9. For this patch it is mostly... oooo PvE... yawn, rest up for 5.9. Yea, the grind for the discs really sucks.

17K to lvl a white vessel will take you how many times in and out of cw? I don't think so... and you get none of the goods... *runic recipes. lvl 12 in under 2 hours + 200 leather and meat, 5 embers 300 dust... lvl 24 in 3 more... plus 1.2 K gold, 4 runic recipes 2 minors and a bunch of body additives. You may do that but seriously? Burning your exports for 40g each seems silly unless you are like some of us with many accounts.

A Pitfighter or Alphawarrior with AA or SS makes a better ranger honestly and has tools for siege that a ranger doesn't... e.i. neckbreaker. With a 40m raged bow and a dive and exit strat it is better than Warden at it and more fun.

Any cc associated with 3rd LMB works at full range of the LMB... Ice slow, Crushing stun... making a good bow with min-maxed range forces you to take a hit on dmg or stats since even with 22 pips you can't even fill 3 lines of blue experiment pts. Other CC i.e. root is 35m max. .

Gods reach will be open on Wed... players could have recipe scrolls, dust, discs and lower tier gear all made and ready when the CW starts if it allows imports.

This division is more pronounced when high rank harvesting nodes are too plentiful... the gear progression needs to be non-linear and that is best controlled by the actual map resources we get, not by a direct limit imposed on the campaign world choice. Also having the nodes be predictable because they are always the same rank in the same spot for an entire campaign lets a continuous harvest of high rank mats happen at such a rapid pace. Since it is unlikely that we can get a full randomization of material locations across a campaign map, I tend more and more toward the idea of these fixed position material nodes ranking up over time and down each time they are harvested. Engineering a rank up and down mechanic should not be too difficult and it would address some of the uncle bob issues. We all have seen those R2 nodes way out some spiral arm of a map and they are nearly worthless to the game. If all nodes ranked up over time those nodes would always be worth running out to check on. If you found a series of R8 nodes and your combat main is in green gear you could run a circuit out there for blue mats for an hour or so and those nodes would get pushed back down to R5 after 3 circuits. It could be like 4 hours again before they ranked back up to R8... the harvesting player would have short term knowledge of the timing of those node ranks and be able to perhaps grab several harvest runs at optimal rank or someone else looking for green mats would run the circuit more and push the ranks back down to R3 making it an 8 hour timing before they would get back to R8. Finding an unharvest R9 material node set would be more like Christmas, guilds geared out in blue would actually have to stake out the node and protect it as it ranks to 10 to get any epics. This also would allow a scout disc that can track node type and rank to easier find the higher rank nodes more efficiently. This mechanic would make the resource quality available non-linear. Epic and Legendary gear should be extremely rare but in a fashion controlled by the players harvesting strategies. WE want the gear progression to be meaningful at all stages and not a short sprint to legendary. At each progression stage, most of the population must be in essentially similar ranked gear with just a small percentage ahead of the curve. Yes, off topic for this thread... I am for locked majors, play with what you built or build another toon. Just provide plenty of ways to gain exp besides grinding dumb mobs.

Dex was giving a huge mitigation boost to rangers... with the new armor system we will need to check if that is still similar. Ranger survivability is key because their damage output is subpar no matter how much you min/max it. The meta has consistently been about outlasting your opponents more than out damaging them. As we can most confidently say though, "things may change."

Highly unlikely until 5.9 release where we will again probably see 300+ for a few weeks for Alpha testing. Big numbers won't show until Beta. A few may return for a short stint with the 5.8.6 wipe but without a full wipe the experienced players will be in epic/legendary and the new runic gear in just days. Then it will stale just as fast. It is still Testing and NOT, very much not a "game."

The maps will also expand according to pop as well for a campaign... there can be more zones with bigger maps. There will always be times and places to solo harvest if you need to.

Yes... /who can go. Multibox, multiclient... No, that is part of the game... need my leadership bot in my ek dust/ember farm. Having no tab target or follow removes inactive bot play from fights which is the old school reason to limit multi-accounts.

But engaging and tactical are not anecdotal... its is the make or break for people to spend money on. Your position lacks the subjective assessment required for testing purpose. How do you know what is fun and engaging if you haven't tried it. I don't say gf when I lock up and dc from performance... I say it when the battle was engaging and tactical, whether I win or lose the fight is irrelevant. I hear players saying the blob is part of making the sieges less fun and less tactical given good performance. There is lots of adjustments to do still...

Simply because it is the meta doesn't make it either fun or engaging... the battles get fun after they spread out, the chokepoints can be mitigated by blowing more holes and approaching in stages. The blob is not mitigated by anything but another blob. The question isn't why are we forced to blob up, whether by the range of our classes, by the physical terrain, or for mass body blocking or even by design... the question is whether a blob is engaging and tactical play. In fact I question your conclusion that it is a design choice to create the blob.