Guild Wars 2

Really early in looking at the new event difficulty scaling in Orr, but I wanted to comment on the changes to the Shelter event:

1) From a game play perspective, I like the addition of Champions to this event as a method of working on event difficulty.

2) The event feels less rewarding. It seems like the Champ takes the place of a wave spawning, which is fine, that makes it more difficult…. but nuke 1 champ for 1 blue vs nuke a wave for several drops….. yeah, it just doesn’t add up.

Suggestion for improvement: If the event scales to the point where it spawns champions, also spawn an event chest at the end of the event?

Alternately, take a second look at champion loot tables, if we’re going to be seeing more of them, 100% chance of blue item feels a little lack luster.

TL:DR = Gameplay wins, but rewards lose.

this place was nice for make money without become a korean…

and now I hesitate for ten minutes before starting the game…

I did penitent camp last night a few times, maybe with 10-15 people in the event and we had a lot waves with 2 Vets in it, seems a bit to much and a good chance for prices on T5/T6-mats to rise.

In every wave there was a Vet when i did these events…In 2 of the waves, there was also one Champ. Neither of the champs were killed by the events end though due to scripting of some sort they still do die upon event completion by default granting you kill credit.
Of course people were being downed all over and the event reward is either the exact same with more effort…or even possibly reduced.
Will discourage people to be honest.

Well I agree with the OP. I think a fix would be to allow champions to be able to drop more than 1 piece of loot. Like lets say up to 5-6? And maybe three for Vets.

I would love to see a Dev comment on this if we could get some confirmation on the scripting: Does the event spawn a champion instead of a wave or does it spawn a champion with a wave.

It felt to me like the champs showed up solo, but the wave they spawned with could just have been nuked before I saw it.

Getting Vets in the waves was normal and existed before, but the champions are something new…..

inbetween.5623:

In every wave there was a Vet when i did these events…In 2 of the waves, there was also one Champ. Neither of the champs were killed by the events end though due to scripting of some sort they still do die upon event completion by default granting you kill credit.
Of course people were being downed all over and the event reward is either the exact same with more effort…or even possibly reduced.
Will discourage people to be honest.

Just ran into the new scaling in the Krait event that spawns north of Sunless. Nothing but vets and champs after the first few waves. Needless to say, they wiped the floor with the players, meaning that after repair costs, most players probably made just a few silver.

Haven’t tried Orr yet, but I hear it’s less harsh than this event was. Don’t know if it’s the scaling on this one event, or if it’s a combination event-scaling and player-scaling, or what. . .

I saw the same thing at the krait event you’re talking about, lures. There seemed to be a disproportionate amount of dead people (including many people who are veteran players) at that event, considering I’d done a few events in Cursed Shore (Penitent and Shelter’s Gate, plus Plinx) before that where I saw no mass deaths like this.

I farmed the tunnel in Orr today, including Jofast camp. Overall I’m very pleased with the new combination of mobs. Farming is now way more challenging and I get more loot than before, because mob waves do not die instantly anymore.

What bothered me a bit was the fact that I didn’t get any credit for camp defense events twice after coming late to the event, but still doing damage to mobs for roughly a minute. Usually I already get Bronze medal in events as soon as I’m contributing to killing one or two mobs.

Love the gameplay on pen/shelter, the battle felt epic. Yes, the rewards should be fixed so champs drop better loot or more loot.

Cracked me up last night at penitent to see a chat post from one participant cursing the devs: “There’s a Champion Risen Chicken!! Argh!”
That was immediately followed by a Vet Risen Chicken.. Fun!
But OP is right – the Champs and Vets should drop more now that the mobs are smaller. It takes longer to drop them so the reward should be greater

I fully agree withe the OP regarding the new event scaling.

I love the new scaling. In fact, I wish regular mobs had more HP when the event scales

Currently it’s too easy to be selfish to just run around and try to tag as many mobs as possible because they die so easily. Raise the HP too please.

Also, loot was increased across the board meaning they want to spread us out instead of farming -_-

Branskins.9752:

I love the new scaling. In fact, I wish regular mobs had more HP when the event scales

Currently it’s too easy to be selfish to just run around and try to tag as many mobs as possible because they die so easily. Raise the HP too please.

Also, loot was increased across the board meaning they want to spread us out instead of farming -_-

The devs have said that they want normal farming to be viable game play, some people even like it.

Loot was not increased across the board, what was changed is the criteria to qualify for loot, On balance, you would think that decreasing the mobs in a wave but increasing the frequency with which players could qualify for loot would result in things staying equally viable.

In practice, the threat is increased, which makes people back off damage and bunker down a little bit more… which is better game play, but gets you less loot.

Hence my suggestion: Keep the change to events, we like the better events, but if we’re fighting more champions, take a 2nd look at champion loot tables / consider more event chests if the event scales enough to spawn the champions.

I agree these new events are more enjoyable and make for more teamwork play. But I have a few issues.
1- The champion despawning at the end of the event without rewarding XP for the kill or any drops. I have been in many groups trying to take down these tough cookies, focusing fire on them instead of going for the easier mobs, to have them disappear at the end of the event without any reward for all our hard work.
2- Drops despawning. We all know the events have become more chaotic, with less time to pick up our shiny loot between waves. Maybe a slight increase in drop despawn time is necessary?
3- As mentioned in the comments above, champion and veteran drops should be adjusted.

Champ Krait are evil

Not sure if working as intended but:

At the krait event at the lab behind the beach where Tequatl spawns, with a 20+ person group, the 3-4 champions that spawn hit for 15.5k with Impale, and veterans hit for 13k with poison cloud. Some of these have red circles but with the amount of people plus the culling, it’s almost impossible to see before you get instantly downed.

Note: I am running a glass cannon thief, but even at level 80, champion mobs don’t hit me for 15k in a group event.

I like the fact that things are scaling better, but I don’t believe the champs are really needed. If you want to scale events you shouldn’t be adding one boss in there, you should be adding more vets!

The problem with champs is that they do this roflcopter ever squishy in the area and make the rest of us constantly rez them. I can’t even tell you how many dead bodies I have seen in orr. This necro has seen enough death for one day!

I think with vets you get the added HP and attack without making things annoying and less rewarding. It would feel much more like a difficult dungeon, rather than Anet laughing at us behind their screens -.-

I think part of the reason we see so many people dead at events right now is because the previous status of the game forced many of us into glass cannon builds for open world event play.

I recently rebuilt my thief in ’zerker’s gear with runes of Scavenging for event farming because I needed to do more damage before things were killed by everyone else, or I wouldn’t get event credit. Survivability wasn’t needed because nothing lived long enough to be a threat. Everything was damage – damage – damage.

Now, the mechanics have shifted, but because a respec means replacing armor, the meta will be slow to respond. People have to go put together a tankier (more balanced) armor set to deal with the harder events, and that will be a huge barrier for some, and others will simply say ‘kitten this, I’m moving on’ rather than deal with the changes.

On the plus side, we don’t need to deal as much damage to get credit, so we can switch to a tankier platform, but….. it’s going to take me a week or two to get up the dungeon tokens to get different stats for my armor, and then I either have to buy the runes all over again, or buy transmutation stones or a BL salvage kit to move the runes I have onto different stats of armor.

Not fond of what it takes to respec in the face of a shift like this

Croth.6287:

At the krait event at the lab behind the beach where Tequatl spawns, with a 20+ person group, the 3-4 champions that spawn hit for 15.5k with Impale, and veterans hit for 13k with poison cloud. Some of these have red circles but with the amount of people plus the culling, it’s almost impossible to see before you get instantly downed.

This. Been there yesterday with my necro (20K HP when not downscaled and 1700 toughness, so not exactly glassy) right before the dragon fight and got insta-downed twice without ever knowing what hit me. Now, I like the general idea of making open world events more challenging (previously the only real difficulty besides Orr temples was tagging the mobs before they died), and seeing people dying like rats in a open world event was kind of refreshing, but this seems a bit OTT, especially with all the culling issues (is it just me or culling becomes worse with every patch?).

Interesting thing is, after Tequatl died I repeated the event with some people that lingered at the vendor, and it was much better; it still was much harder than before, and there were people taking dirt naps here and there, but it no longer felt like being hit by an invisible truck. I think upper range of scaling needs some tuning.

Event champions despawning when timer ends seems a bad mechanic IMO. It wasn’t as obvious before with everything dying in seconds anyway, though entire groups of risen dropping dead halfway to Shelter’s camp looked kind okittenward, but now it really gets in the way. Is there any reason for mobs to despawn in such manner? I think it would be much better if the timer simply stopped new waves from spawning, not magically removed everything from contested area. Let players do the mopping up.

One last thing – with open world events getting a (welcome) difficulty boost, culling issues become a MAJOR pain.

Edit: “okittenward”? Who’d have thought “awkward” was a bad word…

TBH these new changes in the events in orr are great. I love the challenge, but omg they can get rough quick like real quick and are by far more difficult than any of the dragons or the other weakass chest events that are getting hammerd now *maw … fire ele .. Sb * I think if you were going to increase loot for a simple fight that all I have to do is really just show up and receive better loot, than really I ever got down in orr. You need to adjust the loot likewise around the board Champs are still a joke they are not worth the time put into killing them Still

It’s rather uncool to fail an escort quest immediately when the escorted npc dies by upscaled monsters in a couple of shots. This challenge doesn’t encourage grouping and planning strategies at all. This is just annoying.

The events scaled in difficulty mainly to compensate for the easier ways we have to qualify for loot (one needs to do less damage to qualify).

The changes are ok in my opinion, but the champion spawning should be scaled down a little bit – it doesn’t feel right for 2-3 champs to pop with 10 players or less in Pent/Shelter (above 15 players? pop as many champs as you like). The veterans that spawn more frequently now feel like they’ve been buffed (in the damage that thy deal), so I don’t see the reason to have 3 champs in 1 event with 7 players around.

I’ve run some tests with my guild at the Pent/Shelter events (6 players farming these 2 events for 6 hours) – total amount of gold earned in a those 6 hours was about 20%-25% less than before the changes*. The amount of exotic drops seemed a little lower, mainly due to less mobs killed per event.

The changes are really okay, we just need to change the way these events are farmed. However, I’d like to see champion spawns reduced a little bit (algorithm too snesitive to the amount of players?).

…………………..
*5 players sold everything including Heavy Moldy bags; 1 player salvaged everything and opened the bags for T5-6 mats. Salvaging the whites-blues-greens wasn’t as profitable as selling them (perhaps due to many medium armor drops and we all know the price of leather). In the course of 3 days it was actually more profitably to open the bags for the mats and selling them on the TP.

I hope this info is useful

Event scaling seems wonky when soloed now. Two different escort events in Timberline Falls had me face one or more veteran (two veteran ettin when protecting a work crew setting up a watchtower, one veteran abomination while helping a research team set up camp) alongside the normal mobs. In both cases the events ended in failure seconds after going into combat because the NPCs were wiped out while i barely scratched the veterans. And neither of the events were marked with [Group].

digiowl.9620:

Event scaling seems wonky when soloed now. Two different escort events in Timberline Falls had me face one or more veteran (two veteran ettin when protecting a work crew setting up a watchtower, one veteran abomination while helping a research team set up camp) alongside the normal mobs.

It’s pretty normal for a couple Veterans to show up in a non-group event at min scaling, I think, since they’re supposed to be soloable. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever gotten two at the same time, but I know I’ve gotten quite a few single vets in various events. Have you done these particular events before the patch and remember how many mobs were spawned then?

Could have sworn i completed at least the ruin one back when i was leveling my main character, but it has been a couple of months at least since i last set foot this far south east.

What worried me was how fast the events went from quite manageable to complete failure once the veteran(s) showed up.

IMO these changes to Penitent / Shelters are not bad, agreed with most of the ppl here that gameplay has been improved, loot has been decreased though. I was farming these 2 events for a pretty long time, it was profitable. Not anymore, I just play a couple of times before I give up because of the bad loot.

The solution, apart from fixing the champion’s loot table, would be to increase these event’s duration by 2 minutes at least, that would substitute the time “wasted” to kill champs.

digiowl.9620:

Event scaling seems wonky when soloed now. Two different escort events in Timberline Falls had me face one or more veteran (two veteran ettin when protecting a work crew setting up a watchtower, one veteran abomination while helping a research team set up camp) alongside the normal mobs. In both cases the events ended in failure seconds after going into combat because the NPCs were wiped out while i barely scratched the veterans. And neither of the events were marked with [Group].

I suspect the “veterans” were actually champions in disguise, since Timberline has at least two of those I know of (the spider guarding the one skill point and a crab on that one island) that have way too much health and hit too hard to be actual veterans.