Guild Wars 2

The good:
I absolutely love the design of the fights and all the mechanics. The split is cool and becomes intuitive after the first run; the duration of ~25 min fits the encounter really well. There is enough margin for error to make some mistakes and still pull it through; it’s not a ‘run nigh perfectly or gtfo’ kind of fight. This actually boosts the morale and the sense of community – well done on balancing that out.
The fights are generally easy but each has a twist which makes you stay focused rather than just zerk your way through. Coincidentally, most people i’ve seen going down or just wiping during the warden fights are zerkers (and not just warriors) who are used to stacking in a corner and then dropping all dps on mobs to see them melt. It does not work against wardens. And it’s really nice – more content requiring focus and reactive gameplay with proper micro-management of player assets is what i hope to see over time.

The bad:
Tying dodge-related achievements to all platforms being successful is a huge miss. I can perform perfectly each time, avoid all attacks, never get downed; my platform may kill our warden in the alloted time – so myself and my team, aka everything i can influence, can do it just fine, meet all the requirements… and yet i am denied my achievement because people i cannot influence or help didn’t pull their weight.
I am not pointing fingers at players who die during the warden fights, nor am i blaming them for not getting my achievements. It is a matter of faulty design. My achievements should focus on my performance, along with some being rewarded for overall success or some kind of teamplay (even if in a zerg – at least something i’m a direct part of). The Gauntlet did it right.
As it is right now, if i’m unlucky enough, i may never get some of the dodge-related achievements, even if i master this piece of content and perform perfectly. This is inherently wrong, especially that i can neither form the team for my platform nor for other platforms (as i can for anything instanced), and i cannot influence the outcome of others platforms’ fights.
I would not suggest to make the fight instanced – being in the open world adds to it, and a lot. I would suggest to make this achievement dependant only on the performance of your platform instead of the whole lane. If you manage to avoid all Marionette hits and your platform team manages to destroy the regulator, you should get the achievement regardless of other platforms’ success or failure.

The ugly:
Precisely because of the above, people tend to point fingers and blame others for them denying their achievements. This is somewhat true only there, on the spot, but it’s the achievements’ design that is faulty, tying you to the performance of, well, random people around.
Some wrong design choices in an otherwise really entertaining and gripping encounter make the community show its ugly face. Even the loot rewards do not propel that much hate, for lack of a better word, as this bit; actually, the loot is pretty well balanced for the content’s difficulty and duration.

I guess there are worse places she could be shooting the beam from.

drkn.3429:

and i cannot influence the outcome of others platforms’ fights.

I just wanted to tell a little story about how I got the Marionette Muter achievement today:

TC had failed boss 3 a number of times in a row and everyone was fighting madly to stop champions reaching the portal. With no chances left, one lane finally got it down, the next lane pulled off chain 4, and then my lane was up for chain 5 with reinforcements rushing in. Mapchat was ablaze with short advice repeating “stack” over and over.

I zoned onto my platform first, saw the warden against the power generator and rushed up to it, /saying “stack” to my team zoning in.

Almost everyone but two (and they were at mid-range only and possibly still zoning) rushed up and backed the warden into the edge of the power generator. Much AoE cleaving ensued. The other two must have come up behind us when they saw no wardens had escaped the stack.

Before you know it, our power gen was down, and I wasn’t at -all- touched by the Marionette’s AoE as planned.

Looking over to the other platforms was more worrying. Folks were scattered all over, not stacked on the power generator as I’d hoped, chasing after wardens, though they did seem to be trying to stack together.

Keyed to a fever pitch, terrified that the time would run out or the lane would leak, not sure when the stars would ever work on in my favor again on a chain 5 try, I typed in /mapchat, “Stack on the power generator, all together. The wardens will leap to you.”

I honestly do not know how many people read that, but I did see more movement toward the power gens together on the other platforms.

In the next 10 seconds, all wardens died, the power gens shattered, and TC won. By the skin of our teeth.

Marionette Muter dinging on my achievement UI was never so sweet. Someone else on my platform also got it too. You’ll be surprised what influence a little communication might have.

I even have short descriptions of Warden fights along with tips how to approach them prepared for quick copypasta all the time. It still is a gamble – sometimes people read and react, sometimes they don’t; it still isn’t fair that your achievement depends on people whose outcome you can’t influence yourself.

I second the comment on the dodge achievements. I’ve run the fight 10+ times, and managed to dodge the marionette attacks in at least 7-8 of them after I started to figure the fights out. Still have not gotten even one of the dodge achievements, and at least five of the fights I’ve run have been wins, not fails.

Sorry to hear that, Heez. It might have been your typical bug, or you might have been downed throughout the fight – as experience shows, this also denies getting achievements, but it’s at least something on our end, even if not stated in the achievement descriptions.
Common bugs aside, what bugs me is the intended design behind those particular achievements, tying us to pretty much random people around (and i do not use that term derogatorily here).

I’ve been in fights where I did not get hit by the Marionette, was never downed, and we killed the warden, but I did not get the achievement because another lane failed and thus phase 2 failed.

This is why these dodge achievements are all but impossible to get for many; because it happens very often at least one lane fails in phase 2 (some fights I’ve done there was a fail on every chain or all but one and it was still a win).

This seems to be the biggest problem people are having, and it’s a legitimate gripe because the reason for failure really has nothing to do with an achievement that requires you to stay alive and dodge some attacks until the fight ends.

It’s like drkn say.

The mechanic of this fight is really nice to play. I really enjoying stuff where you have to find strategy to defeat the enemy and this game has really a potential to create more of that.

But the arvhivements for a living story which is just temporary should really focus on the players behavior. I don’t want to complain about others to be the reason why i don’t get my archivements, but there is a reason why i didn’t got it even when i’ve done everything right.
For me it’s a failure in the development of the requirements but there are a few players who just don’t see it simple like that and start to offend others. And that fact can ruin the fun at the end.

I love the fight myself, I’ve done it dozens of times by now. My main problems with fight isn’t the fight itself but the players and the mechanics to which the fight is subject to.

When do I see most of the failures happen? When people don’t work together. To be more precise, when they’re not resurrecting the people that are downed. I’ve seen it happen again and again. They don’t realize that when they can safely safely resurrect someone, this will actually help themselves by being able to kill the champion faster. When they themselves would accidentally get brought down, this would mean there’s also one extra person to resurrect them. All in all, it’s a boost to the survive ability and damage of a group.

Yet there are people who are adamant in their selfishness. Just earlier this day my platform cleared its champion first, giving us a brief moment to catch our breaths and monitor the situation. We couldn’t help out the platforms besides us, because their champions went down immediately after ours. Yet in the distance, we could see trouble. There was a platform with several people down and 2 people left standing. I asked in map chat to heal the downed and, after they all went down and our line failed, got told that “it’s not their responsibility”, that “the others shouldn’t have gone down in the first place”. This train of thought is downright wrong and has, in my experience, always guaranteed failure.

The second player related problem is the choice in gear and weapons. When a person wears full cleric or soldier gear and they’re tossed in a group with offensive geared players, they blend in. However, while it doesn’t happen often, it does happen that the composition of a platform is nothing but people wearing support weapons and soldier or cleric gear. Needlessly to say, they fail to put even a dent into a champion.

These are, like the previous group of people, people that are adamant in their selfishness and are unwilling to be flexible. This fight is a damage dealing race, not an endurance test. If people are unwilling to adapt their tactics and equipment to suit and obvious encounter like this, then they are at fault. The excuse that having multiple sets of gear is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of players is moot, especially since the price crash of exotic armor.

These 2 problems that I’ve highlighted first, come purely down to the unwillingness to adapt by certain people (and from my experiences, a minority) and are not a fault of the fight itself. I hope Anet does not listen too closely to the protest of these players, because they will never compromise for any future challenge either.

However, there are a few mechanical flaws to the game that rear their ugly head. The first of these, is the high amount of damage that the champions deal. For more advanced players like myself, with a lot of experience from fractals and dungeons, the tells of a champion become obvious after a short while and we manage to absolutely destroy them while dodging or avoiding all their attacks. However, what I see more and more everyday is that people are downright terrified of getting hit by the champions and restrict themselves to ranged weapons.

The reason for this simple. The damage of the champions is so high, or follows up so fast, that players are instantly downed (even in soldiers gear). It doesn’t help that their attacks also knock players down or push them back. It’s a binary situation, either you completely avoid the damage or you get hit and it’s game over. The problem isn’t only prevalent in this fight, but it’s recurring in all aspects of PvE more and more often. In my humble opinion I not only find this kind of design too difficult for the average player, but also downright unfair for them. As a veteran player, even I myself find it becoming increasingly tedious. It’s longe overdue that passive defenses are brought more to the forefront instead of this 1 or 0 scenario. Anet themselves have renounced the dominance of zerker gear, yet at the same time continue with delivering unforgiving content like this. It needs to change.

The second problem is also another well know issue, namely condition oriented builds. I myself am a greatsword focused zerker guardian, so I am not affected by this myself. However, this does not take away that there is a critical and well known problem with conditions that also rears its ugly head in this fight. When one condition user is placed on a platform with power builds, it works great. When several of them get tossed onto a platform together, their combined damage is neutered. Conditions in PvE need to be fixed, it’s not a problem related to this fight, but one affecting the entire game. I realize that a possible solution would be a better group distribution, made possible by buffing the players in the lane or portal (or at least the initial wave of players), but I also realize that this would’ve added extra complexity and gameplay/technical issues. However, it would’ve still been nothing more than a band-aid for the underlying problems in PvE.

That’s my honest feedback about the fight. Again, I love the fight. I love doing it several times per day almost a week after it’s been launched. With this feedback I hope that I made it clear that the major problems that I’ve experienced in this fight are not so much related to the design of the fight itself, but rather underlying problems that need to be addressed on their own. I hope that Anet decides to create more similar well designed fights that are fun, in the future.

I can’t agree about the difficulty of the fights. I was asked by a guildie to complete the meta achievement for her on her behalf, as she’s recently moved and has no internet connection. Her best geared and prepared toon is a full glass mesmer. I don’t play mesmer, it’s the profession i am least familiar with even in theory, and being a full zerk didn’t help either. I still managed to complete the whole event multiple times to get some of the achievements, all without going down even once – after all, dodging is the same across all professions, and it’s the single resource and mechanic you need for pretty much anything PvE to survive.

Also, sometimes reviving people is a bad idea. Getting yourself killed while reviving eventually leads to two deaths. It’s a matter of careful estimation whether it’s safe(ish) to revive or not. I’ve seen three people rush to revive someone at the third Warden, only to wipe to a single bomb nearby, because ‘we must revive asap no matter what’. That attitude doesn’t work either.

Be reactive. Stay focused. Use your brain rather than ingrained schemata.
I do not mind the ‘all or none’ clause for succeeding the whole fight and getting the loot; i am strictly against only tying my personal achievements to other people’s performance, as they should be related to my own abilities and input (whether it’s ‘skill’, ‘grind’, or anything else).

I know what I’m doing, but last night during Warden 3 my platform got 4 people downed by what I’m assuming was one bomb. I never saw it. I asked if any of them saw it and no one ever bothered replying to me.

We must have missed seeing it. This bothers me, since everything in my head is screaming there was no bomb.

I love the marionette fight. It is one of my favorites and I try to go on two or three runs a day. I have won quite a few, and lost the same. It is a very good way to learn how to dodge, and pay attention to your foe.

My only complaint happened over the weekend. We were in an Overflow, 5 minutes to go, people were whining about overflow. There were no commanders, so myself and another player were giving directions in map-chat on how to win in each lane. All of a sudden I got hit with “Message suppression.” It irritated me because in LA the fevered ramblings of a diseased mind can spend hours discussing the latest conspiracy theory of A-net controlling the ecto market through global positioning satellites, yet when we are using map-chat to help set up a fight we get suppressed. We ended up winning the fight, despite having an overflow with no commanders, and message suppression.

The “BooBot”, as my guild has dubbed her, seems to delight in stomping on my little Asuran mesmer. But tonight Gate of Madness took her down on both main and overflow. This was after a frustrating string of failures, so you could say we’re a little proud of ourselves. I find it to be quite enjoyable myself, if a bit harrowing.