Guild Wars 2

I really enjoyed a lot of this chain. Some bits were so dull I felt like going out for a snack. Let’s tighten this thing up. What worked?

Pro:

• I really liked the “attack the Ancient” portions, where you knocked rocks down at him, or used steam geysers, or those sorts of things. These segments were each cleared in about five to ten minutes, had varied and interesting objectives, and were just generally fun.

• the chain of events, forcing the Ancient across the map, was a lot of fun.

Cons:

• I did not at all enjoy the “Reinforcements” section. The enemies had way too much life. Even the “Veteran Young Crabs” took what appeared to be a dozen players up to three minutes or more to defeat, the Veteran adults and Champions took dozens of players ten to fifteen minutes each to wear down, sometimes even with siege weapons! This was ridiculous. Whatever scaling mechanism was in place clearly went into overdrive because each “Reinforcements” segment took about a half hour or more to clear, and that was about three to four times longer than it was any fun. The enemies in these segments need to be taken down a notch, so that the small ones only take a minute or less, and the larger ones only a couple minutes. They should not be that much stronger than the typical surface mobs.

• the range on some of their attacks seemed a bit problematic, particularly the “coat the ground with poison” attack that Champions seemed to have. This was a serious issue in the “Spiral cave” portion, where they could coat the entire ramp with poison, making advancing extremely treacherous, and often leading to complete zerg wipes.

• The “barrel roll” or “charge” attacks may be perfectly fine in normal scenarios, where you can see it coming and dodge out of the way, but they don’t work at all in zerg situations, where the enemies are invisible until they’re already past you, and the first hint that the attack is coming is that you seem to be downed. And now you’re dead.

So I think if the Reinforcement sections can be weakened to be doable in about 1/4 the time, and the insta-gibb attacks can be reduced or removed during the event chain, it can be made into one of the most fun event chains to participate in of the whole game.

Agree, the event was a lot of fun aside from the reinforcement sections, which felt overly long and more like filler between the fun and unique parts.

That’s not to say that zerg versus zerg of monsters isn’t fun mind you. The bits at the end where you had to persue the ancient past an ever-spawning horde of hatchlings was fun, and probably would have been just as much fun with stronger karka.

It’s also fun to hit the players with a single large wave of enemies, or several waves of scaling intensity or different monster types. That adds a sense of progression to the “kill many monsters” objective.

However, in the reinforcements sections of this event is was just wave after mindless wave of the same enemies, in the same place, for extremely extended periods of time.

Any situation where the players need to just destroy a horde of monsters needs to be designed with the end goal in mind. Killing a bunch of monsters for the sake of killing a bunch of monsters is rarely fun after the first five minutes without some kind of secondary objective to spice it up.

Agreed. The reinforcements bits were needlessly long and tedious, though I almost feel like they were intentionally so to give as many people as possible a chance to participate, since the other segments were done relatively quickly. Still could have done with a bit of toning down or something to make it more interesting.

That’s not to say that zerg versus zerg of monsters isn’t fun mind you. The bits at the end where you had to persue the ancient past an ever-spawning horde of hatchlings was fun, and probably would have been just as much fun with stronger karka.

Oh, that reminds me, I really did enjoy the bit where you had to follow the Ancient through a swarm of Flood, though this segment too hit the culling issue, where the Flood were not actually visible until after they had attacked, so the only defense was to spam attacks and hope that you got them before they got you.

However, in the reinforcements sections of this event is was just wave after mindless wave of the same enemies, in the same place, for extremely extended periods of time.

I don’t actually think it was that many waves. I think it just seemed that way because A. they each took an insane amount of damage, B. They kept turning invisible and visible again due to visual culling, and C. They kept insta-killing people so one tends to lose track of what’s going on. By my count there were only 1-3 actual waves of Young Vets, usually with a few large vets in there, and then 1-2 waves of Champions towards the end. I don’t think that they kept coming, just just think that they weren’t going away fast enough.