SOTO & Janthir are the new expansions worth it? | GW2 2024

[@Snebzor]

Absolute god. Thank you so much for supporting me!

[@Jaaanh]

I have a feeling that wing 8 will be a very long fight with very high hp pool bosses, its feels like thats their answer on high bench specs this days.

[@Azsharah]

Am very afraid of this! I love gw2 raids, IMO it is the best piece of content they ever delivered and after the complete reck that was the last 2 fractals, the strike missions and overall the SoTo garbage…am concerned that wing 8 will be crap :(

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

I'm hoping not, but anet hasn't said anything addressing the high health pools in anything official. Their priority should be making the content FUN and avoiding mechanics that stray from that, they missed the mark on both SS and LT

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

I am hoping for the best but expecting the worst. I think the legendary backpack will be related to raid wing 8.

[@ibrahimoguz4975]

Whoa, the 25$ math gave me a reality check there. 25$ in my country basically equates to 5-6 days of food. I saved up enough to buy the expansion, I'm just looking towards what it actually gives, but I didn't realise how big the economy gap was in different countries.

[@ThePainman88]

I envy countries with cheap food, in my country 25$ is one happy meal. I can skip one meal and I've saved for the expansion.

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Wow, I gave away $75 dollars worth of expansions/gems like a week or two weeks ago. One (of the three) winners is getting Janthir Wilds. There will be more giveaways on the channel so drop a subscribe and keep a lookout :)

[@ZanesZygot]

Yeah, even 25 usd is kinda harsh for me, some games/stores do regional pricing and use a better conversion, not the case for Arenanet. One of the reasons I didn't even get SotO yet.

[@MisterNo1111]

Its interesting to hier opinion from a veteran player on SoTo and game overall. Me as a werry casual only GW2 player and enjoyer can anderstand it, SoTo wos not my gem aswell. I am not fan of theme in last map, and agree on most of wot you sed. New expansion looks exactly my think, enviroment, atmosphere and all wot thay show i find super interesting. One of the best moments/ achievements wos 'Retourne to' achievement for me. It wos such a hipe and going with so much players thrue whole game storry i find so beautiful. I love feel of gameplay and characters/specialisations learning and mastering. WvWvW is aswell one of the best gaming experiencies overall, with my country guildies and rest of folks, me healing and suporting them from a back...so good. Thanx for video🕊🐣🕊

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Thanks! Yeah wvw is remarkably consistent considering it gets very little love overall.

[@senysenyseny]

Soto will continue to be recommended to new players solely because of the wizards vault (unless they change that) and the very important weapon mastery unlock! But yeah, for the complete package $25 isn't a whole lot... I do agree with your point about the state of Soto during release where you were basically just sitting around farming mats for unknown reasons solely because the developers didn't want to convey ahead of time what you needed for legendaries, collections, etc. Hopefully they improve on that, I don't want the first 3 months of isle of janthir to be also farming materials for unknown reasons only to find out you've farmed too little or too much down the line

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Yeah for sure! I hope the legendary spear stuff gets conveyed early on, I'm excited to go for that one for sure.

[@Elsinlock]

i man, wizards vault isnt soto exclusive, its base game

[@vidya2144]

for new players, it's worth it just for the skyscale XD

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

That's very true tbh.

[@Psoewish]

I'm at this point where I'm fluctuating between cautiously optimistic and just flatout hyped for the next expansion. SOTO was a clear flop, but it did introduce some individual systems that I enjoy. I'm just genuinely hoping that they have learned their lessons and now have a better understanding of what is and isn't possible with the time constraints that they have, but I suppose we'll just have to wait and see. Also funnily enough, even though as you mentioned it's not strictly a new feature, the wizard vault is by far my favorite feature in SOTO. It made me go from not caring about dailies at all (I'd do them when they happened to be in my path for that day), to me actively going out and completing my dailies almost every single day. Anyway, I really do hope Janthir isn't going to be a letdown, but they've got these sick looking new Kodan models so if nothing else, I guess I can just go stand around those and get my money's worth 😂

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

The new grizzly kodan are dope. Hopefully we get some cool stuff for everyone this expac it definitely seems like we will. I'm most looking forward to the new legendaries and raid wing I am hoping and praying anet doesn't f it up, I really want it to be good. I'm trying to manage my expectations so even if it flops I can still enjoy it and justify the money/time spent.

[@IvyPrice-oi9gc]

I did the lonely tower fractal today (I'm a T3 player right now so not T4) and we got the boss down to about ~25% before he got any envy stacks and the difference in difficulty of the fight is night and day. With no envy i'm mostly just running around as healing picking up orbs and healing party members with the ventari tablet but with the envy stacks it became so much tougher, it's especially punishing to get sucked into the red circle attack and have all my boons corrupted including swiftness so i can't break out of it. We were able to clear the fight but i think it's bad design for a fight to go from boring but simple to a complete nightmare because you failed one mechanic one time

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Definitely is a design issue, but now that it's here it's like "how do we deal with it". New players have to interact with it to climb fractal tiers so it's just kinda shitty overall that it's a buggy mess or annoying to deal with

[@ronalds5453]

I better play wvw for 6 month to get mistorged legy set than play soto. After pre ordering and playing that expansion for maybe 8 h or less, i never returned there. Not my cup of tea. Great video! : )

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Thanks! Yeah wvw is the tried and true gamemode. I wasn't a big fan probably a total of 10 or 15 hours in soto maps just for the masteries and stuff.

[@nielsjensen4185]

I'm glad that ANet chose a story that's mostly inconsequential to the going ons of Tyria that can easily be ignored and have no greater impact on the franchise as a whole rather than something like Janthir that's actually quite a deal. I would much rather they made the necessary mistakes with something like this that can be treated like WoW: Shadowland was when Dragonflight was released. The "I guess that happened, oh well, onto the hopefully better pastures."

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Very true. Nayos can be abandoned just like the tunnel.

[@nielsjensen4185]

@@SilhouetteGaming1 Exactly, as a learning experience it's going to leave a bitter aftertaste and that's all. It's never going to leave a permanent stain on GW2. It does seem like they've learned some valuable lessons from SotO. One example is the presentation of the raid. The strikes have the same issues as the old raids, you never interact with them. In this case, you have forced interaction with them exactly once. Sure, the Cosmic Observatory exists in the game and unless you hunt Lanterns and/or chests you never go there and there's no Temple of Febe area in Nayos even though there should have been. This way where the raid is integrated into the open world there's a close to 100% chance that anyone playing the game will interact with the assets even if they never do the raid itself, and that would justify development time and investment into it. I just hope that they do something other than 'health sponge' though that's the weakness of the GW2 performance system in that due to the mutually exclusive nature of Utility skills as either utility or damage it's impossible to create an encounter with complex mechanics that also needs high damage. If you look at the mechanics of both HT CM and ToF they're simplistic in that anyone can do them despite the nature of the Utility system on paper allows for customisation of the mechanics. Everyone can stand in a green circle. What if the green circle requires the use of a survival mechanic or else the person who stood in the circle would be toast? That would be an interesting use of the Utility skills as every Profession does have a skill that gives them a survival mechanic. The downside is that they come with low damage and then the encounter will need a lower damage requirement to fit to that.

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

@nielsjensen4185 great explanation, each fight should have some kind of budget, that either it's a DPS check or a survival check and it should balance out at some point. In larger encounters it can be a phase by phase thing as well. But right now they just slap you with everything.

[@nielsjensen4185]

@@SilhouetteGaming1 We have plenty of encounters with survival checks and the players will then find a gimmick to ignore that survival check so they can go maximum unga bunga. Cardinal Adina is a good example of that. The hand knockback might as well be removed completely since it can be trivialised into nothingness with a Ventari Bubble or Stability. Stability is another issue, because it trivialises mechanics due to its binary application, so the mechanics that it counters have to be extremely punishing to make up for so people can really feel it if they get caught without it.. Examples of that are Hell Sister and Umbriel where if you have no sStab the lines and circles are instant down as you get caught in a positive circle where you just get thrown around and can do nothing until you're down. With stab both of those mechanics are at most annoying since, while they do damage, you can get out of them and thus only take the initial damage. It angers me whenever I see Sneb and TeaPot express that the combat system is fine and then the next express that the encounters are a bit flat without realising that the limitations of the performance aspect of the combat system is what causes the encounters to be flat. Encounter design will never in a million years be able to fix this as the limitations of encounter design can be found in another system.

[@dimitarivanov8864]

Decent value for $25, I just hope the raid is well designed maybe like Cerus CM, not like the Lonely Tower. LT is fun if mechanics are done proper, I think it's way too punishing, 1 envy shouldn't fully booncorrupt you for the entire fight (on CM)

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Yeah the boon corrupt is a nightmare. Either needs a way to clear stacks or only corrupt on a single attack that he has

[@nd6886]

It would be interesting how much a sales drop JW will have.

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

We will see. To be honest I'm kinda excited about JW. But if the content is problematic then a lot of people will lose faith that arena net can deliver.

[@skywalker00700]

I enjoyed the first map and hub of SotO, the new weapons and using all spec weapons was a nice touch with no new spec this time. huge value for new players getting a skyscale quicker. the story was a flop, convergences and the strikes were almost as bad. and I agree, I wont do t4 dailies if the new 100 is one of them, not worth till it's old content and the average pug understands it.

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

There's definitely a learning curve to the fractals. SS was skipped a lot but now most groups have it down in the LFG, I don't think I've failed it in months. So hopefully LT gets fixed or there's a reliable pug strategy.

[@haurg7418]

SOTO is ew, Janthir on the other hand looks fine, i am totally gonna buy it even just for the spear.

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Yeah I think the spear is going to be dope! I'm skeptical about the story but I'm hoping for something good!

[@Maebbie]

0:44 lmao, tbh the streamer stuff was cringe i just closed that vid

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

I personally only recognized lara and jebro but yeah I didn't want to include them in the vid. So I just found their appropriate wojak, it's interesting how art imitates life ain't it' lol.

[@Abyssal86]

Wait, two maps? So... This expansion sounds smaller than SotO, and I was already unhappy with how tiny it was...

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

It is two maps and a raid wing as far as I know, I'm not sure if there is a third map that drops 50/50.

[@SylvesterAshcroft88]

I already ran the second meta over a hundred times to try to get the sword, so for me it was worth it, but i must admit that the midnight king was a dissapointing and boring fight, and it felt like the story had a lot of padding, especially on repeat playthrough for achievements, but it did feel overall it was worth it, but it's a shame as it could have been so much better.

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Yikes! Did you get the sword drop? I was pretty unimpressed with nayos as a whole, and very very disappointed with the fractal.

[@Abyssal86]

After like 20 minutes of attacking the midnight king I got bored and left.

[@procticdice]

#PARTNERSIL #NOW

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

I love the enthusiasm, I may apply but I don't want to get partnered and then put under the spotlight for not being a "company man".

[@xddTREExd]

Lonely Tower requires the team to be skilled and it's super easy , it's clearly not for farmers and i really like that . I do the CM every day got the title in 2 pulls . Just get better .

[@SilhouetteGaming1]

Yeah I'll just get better.

[@missk1697]

The problem with that fractal is it feels more like a strike mission.