Guild Wars 2

.. a first impression of the battle for LA.

Escape from LA brought about some great changes. Changes that I see as good for the game. At the same time, there are things about Escape from LA which are bad for the game.

First, the bad:
#1: Getting loot for no effort. The whole issue of people being able to jump into LA and just afk the whole time to collect loot bags from the Group Events is simply poor design.
#2: Scaling is still off. Every time I go into LA now, map chat is nothing but arguments of people telling others not to join certain events because of the scaling. The elitists are 100% positive that only they and their 4 man crew have rights to miasma events because it supposedly only takes 5 people to do them. Avoiding zerging is one thing, but zerging is preferable to the toxicity in both map and local chat.

The good:
#1: The pace of events is great. There’s a sense of urgency. Some of the event speeds could be improved (ahem children), but overall many of the escort events have a decent set up.
#2: For a loot/reward system that is as bad as we’ve had, the rewards for this event are actually not that bad. The variety you get out of the alliance bags is nice, and adding ascended materials was great, but I’d like to have seen more T6 mats as well.

#3: The rescuing of citizens is the single best thing I’ve seen with Living Story. It gives a fantastic incentive to do anything but zerg. Five to ten player groups can patrol given areas and know that what they are doing adds to the total end reward. There are the Group Effort rewards along the way as well.
This is a fantastic introduction. The Zone-wide strategy. Where people need to spread out into small groups, each doing their little segment of the zone in order to help the entire zone reach an end goal. I do think the rewards for it are lacking slightly, as when it comes down to bag count, you get a lot more bags running the events near Traders Forum, along with some miasma events (I get around 125 bags when I do that, as opposed to roughly 40 or so when I stick with just helping citizens (numbers do not include final reward)).

edit: having posting errors with next segment, but the above sums up a lot of why I liked Escape from Lion’s Arch so well. Once I get the errors resolved, I’ll continue with my first take on the latest update…

i agree totally with your 1st escape form LA event the new one is just utter chaos….after reading forum and listening to people for two hours i have no clue what i am to do when i cant actually hurt the enemy …..

>BAD let me say the new event i cant do any of the bosses due to this nerfing of necromancers and condition dmg….ive even had a scene where some guard bounced my attack back at me and i bounced it back this went on like mad till i ran off….

also ive had several fights where in the new event the entire force im fighting just vanishes….

im done with it and the sheer amount a coordination on our server required to do these with so few of us doing any dmg means …they will never get done or done by a very few whom sit in the chat bragging about it and yapping about it at all of us….

well see ya on march 19th…..

its one thing to say they dont want all this condition use but its one thing to encourage it in one event and then dump everyone on the rolling next one….thats awful mean….

The latest LS installment is looking great so far, but I’m seeing some of the issues that have turned me away from large scale events. Specifically too much coordination is needed.

For events like Teq I can see this being a great feature, but much like the Marrionette, the Knights in LA didn’t take but minutes until there were people going apoplectic in map chat over there being too many players at one site or another. I don’t know where Anet got their information from, but “Go away noob! We don’t need you here!” is not generally the best method of retaining players or creating a good community. People want to feel included, not excluded.

On top of that, before reading too deeply into all of it, the first battle I came across was the red Knight, at which people were basically telling CondiNecros to get lost because condition damage wasn’t welcome. Great way to create community Anet.

Again, all in all, it looks like this will be fun, but I think they hit things right with the citizens rescue and the map-wide event and awards. Especially when it comes to fighting the zerging tendencies. Creating situations where players are telling others to go away though, is a major hindrance to growth.

Small update. From first impression to next.
I’ve played through a few of the fights against the Knights now. It’s a good thing that overflows are judged by player numbers and not player egos, otherwise there are a whole lot of players who would be soloing their instances.

This Living Story segment is, I think, a bust in my book. There are the three Knights and…. what else?

Yes, run around the entire map killing champions here and there, but overall I get more loot from the frostgorge champ train, so loot is out. The miasma type events are pretty much ignored due to the champs, and the zone-wide event feel that rescuing citizens brought about is gone.

I also think it was a bit of a cheap shot to have the spinal blades be a requirement to access whatever it is that requires them. If they weren’t, in my opinion, ugly and crude looking, I’d have considered making more than one set, but I know several people who simply didn’t bother because they didn’t like the appearance at all. Now they are penalized for not having wasted precious crafting resources?

Not to mention that one of the achievements requires equipping the spinal blades.

What next, Anet? Achievements requiring the purchase of gems with real cash? Because, let’s face it, the above issues are starting down that road.

If you think I’m blowing it out of proportion, consider if Anet had required someone to equip an ascended weapon in order to enter Scarlets Lair? Same principle. Spinal Blades require crafting materials (some of which went up rather sharply in price due to their introduction).

Final analysis (tl;dr):
Escape from Lion’s Arch = win
Battle for Lion’s Arch = not-so-win.

Let me just correct you on one part:

The spinal backpack is NOT required to access anything that you cannot access without it. The portal for which you need them equipped is merely a shortcut to the instance where you end the living story, bypassing both the fight with the three Knights aswell as the fight with the hologram.

Moreover, for this portal to actually work you only need the basic spinal backpack.

As for the Knights fight: I did it on an overflow, more or less unintentionally, with several minutes to spare…. on a ranger who happened to have nothing but conditiondamage. Heck, i didnt even have map chat open but i figured out soon enough that the condition reflecting buff vanishes at some point after which your conditions come in quite handy.

Mordachai.1896:

Let me just correct you on one part:
The portal for which you need them equipped is merely a shortcut to the instance where you end the living story, bypassing both the fight with the three Knights aswell as the fight with the hologram.

I had wondered if that was the case as to where it went. I guess I’ll be fighting the knights still. No idea which character I would fit the backpack to if I did attach it. Thanks for the info on the basic one though. I guess I could build a throw-away just for the time being.

Still, while it removes the whole gating issue I mentioned, I’m still uncomfortable with the direction Anet took with it.

In the spirit of “constructive criticism” I realize I should provide some feedback on how I would think they should fix this in the future.
I don’t think I’d have had quite as negative a reaction to it if it had been layed out at the beginning of the story that the segments in the future would allow you to produce/craft items that were a key part of succeeding segments.

I’m going to assume that the blue print pieces still drop, but I’m guessing they are also available on the trading post for exorbidant fees, as there were plenty of buy orders last week.