… which pretty much ruins the skin for me.

I’ve also pretty much finished SotO:

• Story complete.
• Wizard Tower Teleportation Stone
• Map Completion
• All Masteries unlocked
• Observatory Strike done
• Legendary Starter Kit, Ascended Armor and Weapons boxes, Cheap Gold and Griffon Skin (I like it) from Wizard Vault
• Kryptis Skyscale skin

I’m only missing a few Achievements to get both Map Masteries and the final Strike mission.

Overall impression … Mixed Bag. Feels rushed (as always) with many bugs, oversights and terrible optimization, especially in Amnytas.

I liked the Story (but please, no more unskippable voice-over) and most of the newly introduced characters, especially Peitha. I’d very much preferred Lyhr to die instead of Mabon, if only for the Dwarven Accent of Lyhr’s voice actor. If ArenaNet is smart, they’ll add Peitha’s Walking Animation as an emote to the gem store. 😏

For someone who already has all previous Skyscale Masteries most of the additional SotO Skyscale Masteries (which are the only ones relevant outside of SotO) feel very lackluster or rather gimmicky. The exception is obviously Updraft use and Endurance restoration when using a flying mount in a map which has lots of verticality and updrafts, e. g. HoT maps. I might actually go back and try map completion of Tangled Depth (@Fox without using Blish HuD and Markers).

Combat Launch would be more useful when it were on a shorter cooldown or at least when it were impossible to activate it by accident. I have a dedicated shortcut for the Mastery and I don’t want the 3 minute CD be wasted just because I mounted my Skyscale while I still had a condition on me. It’s kinda funny or rather silly that ArenaNet added those Skyscale in Combat Launchers to the (meta) maps, because they felt the need to to put a hefty cooldown on the mastery.

Rift Hunting is a complete (design) failure in my opinion. Rewards are very poor when doing hunts beyond the weekly bonus and only ever worth the time, if you still need “Essences”, i. e. those rewards are only useful for SotO (achievements) and clutter your inventory, because ArenaNet forgot to add them to the Material Storage or Currency Wallet. _{Fixed_2023-09-12}

I highly doubt that the SotO maps will see much play in a few weeks. There are a lot of places in the game that are both more fun and more rewarding.

The Wizard Vault rewards are probably the best part of the expansion. Especially when you are still gearing up your characters with Ascended or even Legendary gear.

I also like Weapon Mastery which IMHO could have been added to the game ages ago. For me it simplifies gearing up for multiple builds (less need for equipment templates just to switch to different weapons) and it shows that some weapons are just way better than others.

I almost forgot about Relics. I wonder why? Well, they have been added to the game. That’s pretty much it.