Guild Wars 2

So now we have five stages. In each stage a number of events need completing for progress rather than a set number of kills. The drilling machines have been boosted with a lot more mobs. This all should be better in theory but however …..

The drilling machines are still ‘out of range’ more often than not, whatever range you are actually firing from. It seems typical for the developers to make content more difficult immediately (add hundreds more mobs) while ignoring genuine bugs (can’t hit the lousy thing) just to infuriate players. All the mobs summoned by the drilling machine carry no loot and this makes these events into utterly unrewarding murderfests.

The overall invasion rewards are less than for player effort than roaming in a zerg elsewhere killing champions (group mobs) for purses. This will have to be fixed at some stage since it means he invasions are always failing with insufficient player numbers. I also expect there are a distinct shortage of players at invasions because they are all started at graveyard times on the Euro servers.

The scaling of the aetherblade spawns means that a group of 3-5 players can clear an aetherblade landing and the captain faster than a zerg of 30-50 players. This should give incentive to players to split up and clear 10 captains and progress the invasion. However players still get much more loot from clearing one captain slowly in the zerg so that is what the commanders always organize players to do.

I’ve yet to see an invasion succeed since the last revamp. I doubt I will see an invasion succeed any time soon either until rewards for groups fighting group content are properly balanced (for time spent) against zergs fighting group content. This is a serious design issue in the game and until it is fixed commanders will continually expose this game flaw by organizing players into zergs for group content. Reducing the aetherblade zerg rewards will not solve this alone since players will just relocate to other content that does still reward zerg play.

You have just about summed up my issues with the scarlet invasions perfectly. The aetherblades are in the most need of a revamp. I am not saying a “nerf” to their loot, I am saying a reworking and adjusting of how the events scale to the number of players present. Their should be a fixed limit on the number of champs that can spawn for a captain phase, I think no more than 6 to 8 champs (not counting the captain), is reasonable and still a supremely large amount of loot. Either have it that new reinforcement aetherblades show up every 25% of the captain’s hp, or just no more than 4 “waves” of reinforcements to the captain. This will help give actual incentive for the farmers to actually attack the captain, instead of what I usually see is the farmers screaming “Don’t kill the captain!!! Kill the adds only!!!”
The other problem with the event scaling for the aetherblades, is the first part, the morale phase. When there is a zerg of 30+ players there, the moral barely goes down per pirate killed, even with the champs (which take a larger piece of the morale down than the normal pirates). By comparison if there is only 1 to 5 players at the event, each kill takes a noticeable amount out of the morale bar. So the moral phase needs some fine tuning to take out more morale per kill, when its upscale to a lot of people. More people should be making the event complete faster or at least at the same rate, not slower.

Does anyone still bother with Scarlet’s Invasions?