nikidelvalle: I miss when you posted more content like this and less live streams. I'm really glad to see you doing it again, and I'd love to see more.

KROOF: My mind also went immediately to dungeon and fractals.

Would love to see these two combined — but branded them ALL as “Dungeons.” It leaves no ambiguity to the MMO community.

Neo_Kast: homesteads have offered quite a lot to the game in terms of community building and in terms of the in-game economy as material drain. This system has fostered a growing community centered around sharing their creativity and, while it may not have appealed to everyone, it was pretty successful in generating a lot of engagement for the playerbase. I personally gained a lot of content from this system trying out challenging player-made jumping puzzles. That being said, there's still a lot of space for improvement and I feel the system could benefit form a more integrative gameplay elements such as co-op achievements, build your own encounter tools etc... Anet laid some strong foundations with this system, hopefully future updates will bring it to its fullest potential

rayrayz4667: i expect nothing less than a 45 min analysis from one blog and one pic <3

RealMartie: Personally what stopped me from engaging with the Homestead decorating, has been the prices of decorations. Getting any number of decorations can cost a lot, and when I'm already spending months grinding for legendaries, I don't have the motivation to drop half of what I make on trees and tables.

graven2002: Grouch made a comment on the subreddit expanding a little on their thinking:

ziggyvb (redditor):

The way I see it is more time to get the story fleshed out before it hits the ground. The writers aren't going to be involved in balancing the first mechanics release so they'll be (hopefully) really polishing stuff up during the extent of the first part of the release.

Grouch:

This is the right way to think about it. The shift described in the blog gives us a longer dev cycle for QR2/QR3 story and open world content since we're not having to deal with overlapping dev timelines as much. We are aiming for a modest scope increase for the QR2/QR3 releases vs EX4/EX5 story releases, but the main benefit is having more time for iteration and polish.

Also, based on the blog post, this really sounds to me like we'll get 4 FULL maps with Expansion 6 - not an "accidental" 4 like with JW. (I do think splitting the last Janthiri map was the right call, thematically and mechanically. But it is best judged as 1 map's worth of content, as it was originally conceived.)

labdG: I wonder how these new elite specs will fit into the lore of the new expac. Like paragon is tied to Sunspears in Elona and Ritualist is tied to Cantha. Feels strange if we learn these elite specs outside of Elona and Cantha. We even saw new lore about ritualists in EoD. Like how ritualists are no longer allowed to force spirits to serve and instead sort of cooperate with willing spirits. Some do it the new accepted way and some stick to the old way of forcing spirits. I thought that was cool and it would annoy me if this new ritualist elite spec just ignores all that completely.

joshinana: The amount of times you distracted yourself only to have your questions answered in the following sentence is hilarious

DELTA38g: I'm ready for more Cantha

brspies: Fun times. The new arrangement is smart if they can pull it off, but I'm wondering if they'll be careful to craft the story to fit the release cadence. Meaning, in my mind, that base release probably needs to feel like it has a real ending (compare to say base JW which I don't think felt that way), because we'll be waiting 6 months to pick up and continue the story. Makes me wonder if they'll use it to justify bigger jumps in story or world content. Maybe the patch 2/3 maps and story beats don't need to be as closely related to the base release. I don't want to lose sight of the appropriate scope for these releases but it does make you wonder if they'll try anything noticeably different.

22badfish: A new stack of elite specializations is a lot of work. Appreciate what you see.

Nudasz: Hoping you do a retrospective video about the story like you did for EoD and Soto :)

stefanoandrianopoulos9071: Push is super fun for me, I found it more fun than conquest and that’s coming from a dude with like 7k ranked games played but I feel its full implementation is the only way to know that it will be a good thing or not for PvP.

candrian7: Homesteads havent done anything for me either. I think its because there isnt anything functional. You cant put down crafting stations or vendors or items for special buffs and the harvest nodes are insanely expensive in real money. Tbh I think I'd prefer it if it were more like Fallout settlement building or Animal Crossing - building up my home to attract npc friends to come stay.

SheenaMalfoy: IMO the raid and strike rework will be the main feature of the 3 month patch. It won't matter as much that you're not getting new story if your entire endgame has just been reworked and revamped.

RealOsquo: Personally, and this is possibly a hot take, but I'm actually pretty nervous about the return of elite specs. I'd been calling for them to be cut since before EoD even, and I was genuinely happy to hear they wouldn't be included in SotO (and JW as we would find out).

Don't get me wrong, they sound great on paper, but it's their Anet's scope with them that has always led me to think that they just weren't sustainable to continue on with. We have 27 elite specs- 3 per profession- and too many of those are already struggling with their identity mechanically. I worry that a new batch of 9 specs would just make this issue even worse.

To use ritualist-necromancer as an example: I love ritualist in GW1. It's a lot of fun, and I must admit that I am excited to see it coming to GW2 as well... but let's face it. Necro already has most of the things ritualist would do. There already is a spec that summons things that pump out boons and protection to nearby allies (much like your typical ST Prot from GW1) in the form of scourge. I worry that necro just doesn't have room for it to really shine.

I don't think this is a universal issue- I think paragon-warrior has a lot of potential as a wholly support-focused spec (even if that would synergize more with staff than spear, a stray bullet from the weapon-spec decouplement, perhaps?), and I think elite specs as a whole can be done well and done right. Right now I'm less excited for elite specs, and more hoping we don't get a repeat of the EoD specs.

This is a long comment already so I'll keep the rest of my thoughts relatively brief.

To my mind, the only (only!) thing that JW really need to be, was a noticeable, positive-oriented iteration on SotO. And I think, even with it's faults, it succeed in that department. For that reason I am hopeful for future expansions and releases, and I trust that Anet are really trying their best to satisfy us and give us an enjoyable product for the foreseeable future of this game.

jeffjohnson2525: I think Dzalana will be the new zone, it was mentioned in the JW prologue, and both the specs and the colors behind their leaks are very desert-y.

sartevez: I am not getting my hopes up anymore. It will be slashed content and less overall , no matter how they are trying to spin it

Borando96: Wasn't the hole point of mini expac, that it has more frequent content updates? Now it's gonna be after 6 months. I mean at this point, we could also just bring back the old system, which is to this day my more preferred one.

SoyElDoug: Dervish, huh? And here I was thinking it was Ritualist.

Fawstah: About the story being split up differently, honestly I can see it working a lot better. Mainly because it gives the writers a literal two act structure to work with, rather than a 4 micro-act structure. My main issue with the writing was the 4 stories felt completely disconnected from each other, and rather than “size” or “girth” of story, I think simply having setups and payoffs mean something is a much more needed improvement that would impact people without even realizing it.

pkidawmbt: I wish Icould say "its funny", but this has been their problem going wa back to when i was actively playing almost every day and for 20 hours over the weekend in WvW. They really don't learn. They say they do. They say they listen, and then they continue to do more of the same. Hey Anet stop walking in a circle, its bad for business. Anet: Oh ok, we heard you, so instead of going clockwise, we're going to start walking in a circle counter-clockwise. smh

jeffjohnson2525: Now I'm DEFINITELY sure that we're getting Dzalana for our new zone!

Jul 15 2025

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