It’s just so unfun now, I remember farming Siren Brute when I first hit 60 to push watermark, we used to farm the priests, doing parkour shit on the roof, sometimes we’d go to Eternal pool if we’re bored then for that boss, then 3 Siren boss farm was discovered and that was where the action is. One by one AGS made them all irrelevant and just made an open world so empty. They doubled down on the orbs being weekly, introduced Gypsum and made orbs cheaper and it made the game lose even more people because people finally caught up and realised their ambitions for good gear is not doable. AGS then introduced GS 625, which is super insulting to everyone to make gear so hard to obtain then up the GS max so soon. If they wanted to increase GS they should of made acquiring gear so much easier but no, they nerfed every open world boss and made them all ghost towns, they stuck down on making dungeons accessible 4 times a week, made the items drop unbearable and game modes like OPR/War/Invasion/Arena caches are a joke, PvP drops are 505 max or something and 90% of the perks in this game are wank.
They should of just let us have fun instead (crazy right), get gear how we want to get gear, if someone wanted to cheese at Myrkgrad and do Assassin Creed shit with a group or two to farm gear so fucking what? Someone likes to PvP? Let him/her do OPR all day and open world fight. They should of removed these shitty elite chests and made all the mini bosses drop it, they were able to make their HP scale to the people inside the vicinity so they could of made the bosses drop distribution balance to the amount of people there so no one is missing out. Let us play how we want.
It doesn’t help how terrible 90% of the perks are and how generic they are, it’s shit like “If this weapon does X, get fortify for Y seconds”, wow how boring. Loot 200 items at Mines and see this Fire staff has strength on it? What planet does someone want strength on their FS? Loot a glove with focus and strength and then a FS perk, why are there gloves with 3 variations in a game that only lets you wield 2 weapons? What build benefits a glove with Focus, strength and then a intelligence weapon perk lol? Imagine if the perks weren’t so generic and they could stack with diminishing returns and we were playing an open world sandbox mmo, imagine you got shit from doing wars and OPR caches and it was good then we kept it thinking “Yeah this’ll be good for a build I can think of” and we had variations of pvp styles from everyone? Like someone did the maths and did 5 empowered fireball perks and it did like 66% more damage after diminishing returns and had fun trying an off meta build. What if there were perks like Maelstrom does more damage per target inside or Ice wall now has increased length or rain of arrows had a bigger AOE or spear throw can penetrate now. Whacky off the walls shit that were all fun and didn’t make you think “Damn, another ok roll but I got damage to X type” but instead you’d think “Hmmm, this entomb perk gives an exploding after effect when broken slowing targets in an AOE and dealing damage, I could try this with my FS perk that makes fire dash leave a trial of flames on the floor and go on suicide missions into the zergs” and think fuck it, stack the fire floor damage and see the absurd numbers pop up.
THEN AGS could of brought out Mutators with 601-625 GS drops and 615 expertise you had to farm/push to, making the items people acquired pre-601+ not so relevant. Mutators were clearly made in mind to have us do them a ton of times to progress the levels, if you didn’t have 610 GS for example the level 4-5 dungeons would scale too hard for you so we’d be doing level 1-3 a few times over the span of a few weeks. No cooldown, just fun and hard PvE stuff to do. PvP’ers would still get drops from OPR and open world kills and hopefully 3v3 arenas with some currency with an arena shop.
We’d all be doing whacky off the walls shit, playing how we wanna play, see a lot more variation in PvP builds and cool off meta shit. See people in the world again fighting open world bosses everywhere, some doing arenas, some doing dungeons. No “WTS 90k C/O” BS cause any good item is that hard to get.