Guild Wars 2

So while most of the previous topics deal with the one-time event and loot controversy (and I agree there is a problem if this many ppl got annoyed, although ppl do prefer to moan than acclaim), I wanted to address something I found a bit annoying: the final event and really, all big boss events.

So here is the thing: I loved how u rarely fought the actual ancient Karka but rather hit him with other means, like defeating his minions and chucking huge rocks at him it would be really boring to just sit there let ur sword swing again and again and again… but w8 a minute isnt that what happened anyways? The champion karkas, took FOREVER to take down! And they posed no threat! Sure I had to dodge every once and a while but that was it!

I suggest this structure for big boss events: break it down into smaller events like you’ve been doin (like take out the leg, or fire rocks at it or so on) but raise the teamwork AND risk. That was one of the few good things about the holy trinity: you felt u had a role, u felt that without u, everyone was screwed. And that feels good. Now you addressed that by making everyone be able to do everything. And that’s great. In small parties. When it’s a huge event like this, with 30 ppl or whatever, u really just end up minding ur own business, or rather, sit around and let auto attack do its thing (aside from the occasional res). Which is not cool. So why not take the roles idea further (but keep the flexibility)?

For example for the champion Karkas: why not have it so players can either get rope and hold own one of the legs of the karka, or get bombs and try and dodge in and place one under it (or be boring and just fight it with ur good ol’ sword) and both roles would be avaible, through your amazing environmental weapon system. And hey, seeing as this is a game about timing and staying alert u can take one step further (and this is what I’m talking about more risk): Why not have it so that players that are holding down the legs have a set 3 skills: left, right and back. Then whenever the karka tries to move in one direction(represented with a corresponding arrow), the player has to pull in the opposite direction. And then if too many players mess up (encouraging more players to help, to better ensure that the plan works), the Karka breaks free and deals MASSIVE AoE damage! But if it does work, the bombs can do massive damage to the Karka and the players sont feel like they’re grinding! Up the risk and the rewards, and ppl will want to work together more while making it more exciting.

Please discuss and give USEFUL feedback to Anet so we can make this a better game for all!

sorry for the english mistakes, I had to write quickly.

Some parts were fun but the fun was ruined by the grind. My overflow was sick of farming waves of karka not even halfway through. We pulled our hair out when the wave event repeated itself further down the road.

However the parts where you load geysers with rocks, trigger a landslide, and open the volcanic holes was fun. The final battle wasn’t half bad either.

If the grindy parts took a third of the time, it would have been a pretty decent event.

Fun in a sort of sadistic constant battle enjoyment sort of way…

neoxide.7320:

Some parts were fun but the fun was ruined by the grind. My overflow was sick of farming waves of karka not even halfway through. We pulled our hair out when the wave event repeated itself further down the road.

However the parts where you load geysers with rocks, trigger a landslide, and open the volcanic holes was fun. The final battle wasn’t half bad either.

If the grindy parts took a third of the time, it would have been a pretty decent event.

true

Boring as hell. My idea of fun is not running around with a stupid zerg killing karka’s.

I’ll second (third?) the sentiment that the ‘defeat the reinforcements’ parts were far too long and tedious. They dragged on far too long and were tedious as anything. Several people I was playing with during the event actually logged of out of boredom during the second of those fights.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if that part was only run once, not repeated, and/or if the fights were closer to 10 minutes than 30.

The rest of the battle was all right, though lag in the hive was a pain. If anything, I felt like the final phase actually taking down the Ancient Karka directly was anticlimactic.

Grind! Also, since the threshold for gaining XP/loot was not adjusted to account for the masses of people who would be participating, most of us got zero XP or loot from 95%+ of all the Karka we participated in killing!

Add it to the big list of fail that needs to be part of the studio wide Post Mortem analysis of the event that I really hope will take place at Arenanet this week.

If they learn from the vast multitude of wrongs associated with this event, the entire thing will at least provide some value for improving future events. If they just sweep it back under the rug and hope that things go better next time, a huge opportunity will have been wasted.

My guild stumbled on an entirely empty overflow and did it up until the steam vents with two groups. It went several times faster, and was actually quite a lot of fun. Its actually quite a shame that this was a one time only event. Its a lot of development work to just flush down the toilet.

Unfortunately it was getting late for us so the zerg was called to blitz through the last bit. Which was fortuitous as we were lucky enough to get it done before Anet shut us down.

Honestly, if Anet toned down the final loot drop to be dungeon level, and a couple of the spawns, they would have a very nice extra dungeon to put in.

The invisible Karka was so frustrating. How can ya fight something or defend in a constructive manner if you can’t see them coming. I was amazed at all the group wipes because of that.

I think for around 90 minutes or so it was much fun. Then when you have killed your 1346th Karka at some point it became really annoying and boring. You just wanted it to end soon “please, please lets finish this stupid thing finally – oh no its going all the way down again -.-”

Fun and hope next months is just as fun even with bugs and issues.Items and gold is just a bonus for playing this game for me

Did the Veteran Karka award experience and have drops? I spent hours Sunday afternoon fighting those stupid things. I never received any experience points or got a drop from any of the Veteran Karka. I started to ignore them because it wasn’t worth the effort. I ended up getting disconnected at the end, so the only thing I got out of the whole kitten weekend was a big armor repair bill and some crab meat.

It was fun overall. I enjoyed the multi-tiered progression of not only the Ancient Karka battle / luring, but also the initial assault on the nest.

However, certain parts did drag far too long or lean more towards “frustrating” than fun.

The biggest offenders of the above were the reinforcement bits of the Ancient Karka luring, which went on WAY too long (probably 30 minutes a piece) and had rather terrible difficulty pacing. Every time a new group of Veteran Young Karka popped up they would zerg whipe pretty much the entire group, and you’d end up with a fraction of the group either disengaging and surviving or waypoint rallying and slowly pulling 1 or 2 afterward, slowly making their way to revive the people who didn’t want to spend the money to rally or didn’t want to risk bugging / disconnecting at the loading screen if they waypointed. That sort of pace of “group whipe > outliers slowly kill a few and make their way to the dead” made the parts take even longer.

The same sort of group whipe situation also happened a couple times during the initial nest assault. At one point while fighting the Champion at the top of the nest there was a spawn of about 10+ Veteran Young Karka right in the middle of our group, which again led to most everyone dying and a few just running back down the ramp until they disengaged, then slowly coming back up and reviving everyone.

And in the first overflow group I was in (I disconnected from that one and got into a different overflow where the event was just starting) when we first got to the bottom of the nest there were probably 10 adult Veteran Karka and at least 1 Champion waiting (the second overflow group had nothing like that, just a couple vets and a champ, don’t know if the first was bugged or what). That was rather ridiculous, dodging the acid pools of 10 veteran adults at once may as well be impossible especially when half of them aren’t even showing up on the screen due to visual overloading (I even turned my graphics to minimum and I still couldn’t see half the enemies in that large group), so again it was an “almost everyone dies, a few run like mad and work their way back reviving everyone”.

neoxide.7320:

Some parts were fun but the fun was ruined by the grind. My overflow was sick of farming waves of karka not even halfway through. We pulled our hair out when the wave event repeated itself further down the road.

However the parts where you load geysers with rocks, trigger a landslide, and open the volcanic holes was fun. The final battle wasn’t half bad either.

If the grindy parts took a third of the time, it would have been a pretty decent event.

Completely agree here, this is how I felt as well. The geysers/landslides and volcanic holes were actually unique and fun, but the grind parts almost became unbearable. Especially the last one before the “geyser wall”.

Also I have to add that while the Karka events were a bit 50/50 on the fun scale, I absolutely love (!) the Fractals instance(s)!

The Ancient Karka event overall was pretty awesome, but a bit grindy. Especially:

-Having to clear the hive twice! (can’t we just do it once?)
-The two sections where the Ancient Karka calls reinforcements for 20 minutes straight

Maybe they wouldn’t seem quite as grindy if they dropped moar l3wt =)

Overall is fun, but they really don’t need to make it that long.

Karka reinforcement shouldn’t be repeated, same with going up and down in the hive.

I thought it was fun doing the other wacky things to kill him. It was fun when the objects changed. The only thing I didn’t like was reinforcement waves. They took way too long. I liked it when the object kept us moving around not just fighting the same guys for an hour.

Well, it was basically the hardest boss battle in this game so far. Maybe it was a bit too long but thanks to that this battle will be remembered or longer. In couple of weeks/months people will say, “You should have seen the ancient karka, THAT was a real boss battle”.

Also, the lenght of this event was well rewarded in my opinion, the 20 slot bag itself is worth over 10g.

I really liked the Ancient Karka, thought he was really tough and had more interesting mechanics than just “swing your weapons in the space near him for a while.” The whole thing with the rocks and geysers was ingenious.

That being said: THE LAG. It doesn’t matter how awesome the fight mechanics are if we can’t actually participate because our abilities fire off 60 seconds after we pressed ythe button. This is the reason why I no longer do the dragon champion events. It needs to be fixed if they’re going to keep including this kind of content. I hope it is, because the general idea is kitten.

things i didn’t like were:

1) reinforcement waves /mortar section(before the part with the exploding containers). redemption point: healing mortars. was really boring with the abundance of Karka and their hitpoint amounts.
2) the battle just before that (killing the 2 champions + waves, after the tree)
3) why did we have to cross the map twice? demo team should have been an objective during the “herding back” phase. after reviving the demo team, i was lost on what to do next, until i saw the zerg high-tail it back to the top of the map. i just solo trudged my way to join the madness, now i have to run back through? that’s insane. doing that to make the event longer feels cheap.
4) no way point near the nest. with all the WPs in every other corner, running back to the zerg was no fun by myself, and during the event, when i wanted to port out to run back, the WPs weren’t showing up for me on my map, when i explored it hours before. thanks to all the people who ressed me last night!
5) the asuran guns near the nest area – were they supposed to shoot at stuff? kind of a waste being there if they don’t really do anything besides look cool aiming at the nest entrance. would have been cool for players to use the cannons at that camp, in combination with blowing the containers up. when we revived the rescue group, i was shocked and let down when they didn’t start firing the cannons…
6) the culling(?) – while not event ruining, half the zerg disappeared after getting barrel-rolled, so it was difficult to res the zerg back to full strength. it was tough running around the general area with the poison and AoE’s, looking for players to revive.

things i liked:

1) the zerg – kekekekekekekekekekeke!
2) the drops i received – The Energizer/precursor, Eir’s Longbow, Kara Accessory (+25 to all stats, 3% MF) and the 20 slot Karka bag, some rare gloves and a rare hammer
3) all the players ressing everyone. it was a good day for me, to be able to work on my ressing title, and players ressing me. was good fun.
4) the interacting with stuff (use stones with geysers, taking trees down, blowing up containers)

overall, it was somewhat fun, with the new bosses and objectives. i hope to repeat this event chain several times every weekend now, in hopes of scoring some more loot. my first participation got me 20 gold. so for 3 hour event, getting 20 gold on TP (sorry i don’t play the TP much, just quickly sell) was way more than i could make killing skelk.

thanks, anet.

I thought the indirect methods of causing the Ancient Karka pain were interesting, and certainly invoked some panic while trying to figure out what we were being told to do and exactly what parts of the environment were usable for the next step. Unfortunately, we were told what to do through the event assistant instead of a more organic method, like an NPC shouting orders or something similar; that I didn’t care for so much, and it took quite a long time for the group as a whole to figure out that that’s where our instructions were coming from so a lot of useless fighting happened instead of furthering the event chain.

I did not care for the Reinforcements section at all, and cared even less when it came around a second time, if it were even possible to care less.

Additionally, I didn’t care for having to go up and down the nest twice.

Those two parts were a grind. The first time was marginally acceptable, but having to repeat them made it seem like ANet was struggling to pad out the event to something that was “multi-hour”, like they promised.

I think it was more fun than a grind. On my overflow the whole thing took about 2.5 hours, somethings dragged but I mean the 20 slot bag would have been enough reward for me. I had two friends on skype, and we were just talking/bs’ing while having fun and taking turns rezing each other.

I think the biggest problems were the graphics loading. It’s very scary when a Veteran adult or 5 veteran young karka just materialize next to you, or if you just start losing hp from poison despite not seeing any where you’re standing. It’s also most likely the reason most people got wiped after every wave, how can you dodge against the veteran karka rolling towards you if you can’t see it till after it hit you? As a joke, I think ANet just tried to come up with the most annoying AoE to deal with the massive zerg that they knew would form.

A lesser annoyance was that it really felt like the Vets and Champs had a massive hp/armor boost compared to the “norm.” I mean I was able to kill a Vet adult by myself (and much faster with like 2-5 other people), but with 50 people it felt like the Vets were dying slower than with 5. Plus none of the adults wanted to drop anything. Mind you, I am happy with my 20 slot bag, and the 2-4g I’ll get from the exotics/rare the end chest gave, but it would have been nice if the Vets and Champs actually dropped things (I may have gotten a single piece of crab meat from one of them, but that could have been from a Vet young karka, which I noticed were dropping things). I just find it ironic considering the Nov 15th patch notes say that Vets and Champs will start dropping more/better things.

To actually addressed what the OP suggested: I really like your ideas, but I don’t think they would work in practice for a couple of reasons.
1) With the big zerg, there are problems of communication and cooperation. I’m pretty sure that even by the 2nd wave of reinforcements people were still trying to attack the ancient karka doinkittenage a shot. Or trying killing the champ before the vets, etc.
2) The graphics, if you can’t see your enemy, it’s hard to do the things you suggested.

I think those ideas would be a cool feature in a dungeon though. 2 people holding down a leg, 1 bomb running, 2 doing damage. I think it’d be fun. Heck it somewhat already exists in the drege fractal, between the switches and the molten lead at the end. I just wish things were explained a little better or they were designed to work well with party chat. If I PUG it’s really hard to type and kite at the same time or try to explain what to do without dying.

rgrwng.4072:

5) the asuran guns near the nest area – were they supposed to shoot at stuff? kind of a waste being there if they don’t really do anything besides look cool aiming at the nest entrance. would have been cool for players to use the cannons at that camp, in combination with blowing the containers up. when we revived the rescue group, i was shocked and let down when they didn’t start firing the cannons…
6) the culling(?) – while not event ruining, half the zerg disappeared after getting barrel-rolled, so it was difficult to res the zerg back to full strength. it was tough running around the general area with the poison and AoE’s, looking for players to revive.
—-
overall, it was somewhat fun, with the new bosses and objectives. i hope to repeat this event chain several times every weekend now, in hopes of scoring some more loot.

5) I noticed the guns fire at the very start of the event. I saw the laser gun and the treb fire off to break a hole in the massive web wall at the front of the nest. I think they also fired a second volley right before the ancient karka started.

6) I think that was the point, but the bigger problem wasn’t the AoE poison or the rolling, it was that most people couldn’t see it before it was too late.

It was a one time event. So you won’t be able to do it again next weekend. To my knowledge it didn’t repeat either, so I don’t know how you did it more than once.

I liked the story a lot, but I didn’t like the execution. Frankly the reinforcement waves took way too long (and honestly constituted at least a quarter of the event on their own), and the adult karka constantly steamrolling entire groups of players wasn’t fun either, especially when the nearest waypoint was a good 3-5 minute hike through hostile territory away.

It could have been reworked to some degree, but it wasn’t, and that’s fine. It could have been better/more enjoyable, but it wasn’t, and I can live with that. What I can’t live with is the lack of appropriate server hardware to handle the massive groups of players paired with the gimmicky mechanics. It’s either one or the other. Watching 50 players die because they can’t see the poison they’re standing in or because they can’t see the champions rolling toward them is inexcusable.

Fun if you got a precurser, grind if you didn’t

Gotchaz.7865:

Fun if you got a precurser, grind if you didn’t

That’s really not true and it’s an unfair judgement on the players. I didn’t get whatever the heck a precursor is and I thought the event was fun overall.

Panda Shepard.1248:

Gotchaz.7865:

Fun if you got a precurser, grind if you didn’t

That’s really not true and it’s an unfair judgement on the players. I didn’t get whatever the heck a precursor is and I thought the event was fun overall.

A Precursor is a weapon that when added with a shopping list of mats, gold, Karma, Skill points, 400 crafting in weaponsmith, and special gift recipes bought for10gold a piece. You take ALLLLL that stuff to make 4 things that you throw in the Random Number Genarator Mystic Toilet, and in hopes to get 1 legendary piece.

The Precursor weapon is good chunk of the grind taking out to reach a legendary status weapon.

TBH I’d rather have an ascended weapon over a legendary any day. But knowing how the devs are I would be surprised if it did not take a legendary weapon to get an ascended one. But this game is all about the grind so it will most likely be a grind to get an ascended weapon. Even if it does not take a legendary to get one.

I found the event to be extremely fun, but there were several aspects of it that took the wind out of my sails. My favorite part about the event was the fact that we fought the boss with so many mini events and environmental mechanics, instead of your standard tank and spank. I’d LOVE to see more events and permanent dynamic event chains like that.

That being said, the extended combat mini events were extremely boring and seemed to annoy most folks. The bomb escort part was interesting and entertaining the first time I ran it, mostly due to the fact that the zerg in my overflow didn’t actually expect to get beaten back by the karka several times. After that though, the two wave events were dull and uninteresting. The champion and vet mobs seemed to have too much HP and felt like a gigantic time-sink, one which the event could have benefited from not having.

That being said, I enjoyed the event thoroughly and ran it three times with friends in their overflows (no, I didn’t get any precursors, so don’t even go there). I wish something akin to this event would be added as a permanent addition to the game, minus the go-make-a-sandwich-while-reinforcements-attack bits. The devs really just need to understand that bags of HP and long auto-attack fights aren’t appealing to most people. Dynamic, creative fights are golden though, imo.

The reinforcements parts were maybe a bit long but it really wasn’t bad if it all worked as intended given the rewards that were supposed to be offered at the end. If it was purely for fun without any reward of any kind? Yea then I would say it was way too long.