Guild Wars 2

The majority of posts on forums are usually negative or complaints and I wanted to post one appreciating something. There some negative things that I found with the patch and I have commented in other posts appropriately. That being said, I killed Mariontte with my Jade Quarry friends this afternoon and I want to say it really felt good.

Last night, when we first started (Attempted 2 times with WAY too much waiting in between) it was very difficult and hard to coordinate. We never got her down and failed. When my friends an I logged in today we changed our builds around and saw how we could maximize our contribution to the fight and then tried to get other people to also manipulate their builds and organize more. We were able to kill her! and it felt really good. It reminded me of the first time I used to kill raid bosses and of the earlier kills of Tequatl. From the sounds of TS and mapchat, everyone else was really happy too.

I think that it felt good because it required cooperation and when we did find the right approach to killing her and it worked, it was rewarding. I looted the chest and didn’t even pay attention to the loot; I could care less what dropped. I was more appreciative of the experience of coming together as a server and killing her.

The way that the fight takes place in smaller groups and how each lane has a unique setup (Try a different lane and you’ll know what I’m talking about). It allowed people to organize into 5 distinct groups where people have different tasks and can communicate better amongst themselves. Compared to the Tequatl fight, where there are smaller groups(North cannon, East Cannon, shipwreck, waypoint), the majority of people are in the DPS group just going through rotations while following the pin strafe. I felt like my contribution was much more recognizable with this fight than with the Tequatl fight when I’m not on cannon or guarding a spawn.

I think this would’ve been a better time to introduce the new Asura and other characters in celebratory cinematic because that’s where we first see her and it would’ve added to the dramatic effect of the fight.

Granted there are many things that could be fixed in this patch, I am happy with this fight. GW2 is a bit shy of where I imagined living story and events to be, but I see improvements being made. Thank you very much ANET & Please if you have something constructive to say, whether you agree/disagree or you find something else you enjoyed please share.

TL;DR
Positives of Marionette Fight:
1) Nostalgic and emotionally rewarding kill
2) Smaller group combat was better experience than zerg
3)Cooperation and improvements can be seen amongst players

I beat the Marionette today for the first time, it was my…. 4th attempt? Anyway, it was very satisfying. It also got me all the codes I needed to complete Scarlet’s journal as well, so… bonus!

This was a great fight, and felt like we scored a big victory against Scarlet. Excellent work, ANet! I am excited for part 2 next month!

marionette is defiantly working its way up to my favorite world boss, and i have yet to beat it. it also explains how the fight work so much better then teq or the wurm with the regulator wardens. i want to see more bosses this epic with such a player friendly explanation of how to fight it.

only downside……. respawn time is tad long

I agree that this boss is great. What I do dislike though is the lag/loading screen when going to one of the platforms and the achievements tied to the wardens. Would be interesting if they TRIED a living story patch without any achievements..How would people take that?

Anyway, the fight overall is nice and it does bring the community together, cheering and wishing goodluck before they enter the platforms etc. And you also want to show other lanes that your lane is the one that can change the outcome of the fight. I like it a lot. Thank you for this boss Anet.

ps. Yes, the respawn time is little too long but at least it’s consistent unlike claw of jormag for example.

I think this battle is really fun, win or lose. The fact that the first time I beat it (today) was also my first time at commanding made it even better!

Excellent work, Anet!

Crosknight, I agree. Especially when taking into consideration how early you need to arrive there to make sure you kill with your server, I only have enough time to kill probably once or twice a night. This should be plenty though for everyone to get in kills and complete the achievements.

GuzziHero, congrats! On that note, I noticed this fight gave new PVE commanders a chance to lead and learn. During the Teqtl fight I’m used to seeing the same 3 commanders all the time and no one else will really risks a new commander to try leading.

I’ve yet to succeed ( usually getting 4/5) but I honestly feel like this will be the perfect difficulty level to please (most) people. It’s a good middle ground between the old snorfest boss difficulty and the new Teq level difficulty, with a bit of a leaning towards Teq.

Positive:
- Fighting champs during phase 2 is pretty fun but it’s like 2 minutes out of a 2 hour cycle, so not so fun after all?

Negative:
- Overflows
- Waiting 2 hours to get an actual kill
- Spamming auto attack for defense event is boring
- Random distribution of players on phase 2 platforms
- Camera on platforms
- People who go into phase 2 platforms with zero idea what to do with poor dps specs

Of the two new bosses, I would much prefer we keep the marionette and throw the worm back to the fishes. I know even with the failure (death) and the long timer, I will still be doing this one for the entire two weeks due to the fact it is fun. The wurm however has already earned it’s place alongside Teq as an event I will avoid.

I’m having a pretty good time myself.

I have failed twice and won once (my second time on an overflow).

The wurm seems a bit insane for me, and that will easily be one of those things best done with one of those cross-server coordinated thingies, I bet, but I’ll easily be able to get the 3 escorts done for the living story side, so that seems nice.

My only negative, and I’ve harped on this before, is the difficulty ‘sub-tracking’ achievements. I have done 4/5 of the warden kills, but I have ‘no’ idea which is the one I need. Not a ‘huge’ deal in this case, as you don’t really have a ‘lot’ of control over which lane will get any particular warden, because of a failure in any lane before you, but something to keep in mind moving forward.

Now, if I can just get all my mini pets to swim and my human female running animation back, I’ll be 100% happy again. :p

I love the new living world, and the Marionette is by far one of my favorite bosses. Win or lose, it’s great fun and I wish more content was released like this. The only downside to Marionette is the many overflows that you can be put into if you don’t wait an hour for her to start.

I absolutely LOVE the marionette, and yes, the wurm bosses.

Completed marionette on my second try with my guild. The fight was fun, rewarding, and felt satisfying. When is the last time you remember a boss being satisfying? This is a big improvement on stacking on a bosses foot and just auto’ing its toes to death.

I havent managed to down the wurm yet, but you know what, I don’t really care. The whole fight is just fun. Frustratingly fun. It would be great to complete it and get the title and all, but for me, it’s really secondary to enjoying the fight and the story of this update.

Just one or two more marionette’s and hopefully I’ll be able to go lurking in Scarlet’s crib

i love the marionette, its the type that people rage over first and then over the next few days/week or two find out what to do and get better; to those raging over people not knowing how to do this, chill, its only day 3

I love the marionette, HoD as far I know hasnt killed it yet, but we were kitten close the last time I was on.

Just wanted to add one comment on the new patch/bosses/events. First…these are Epic HUGE Battles, and are great fun with tons of people on participating. But Anet needs to take into account the size of the servers, not all have a large number of people on them, so keeping a standard difficulty ratio for all servers combined makes it hard for smaller servers to beat the bosses and get the achievements. I think the events should be scaleable according to the number of people participating, like with the Champs in Queensdale ect.

I would love to have the hope of beating these events, but from what I can tell, our server just doesnt have the people to do it. Possibly on the weekends when more people are logged on. But as these events started on a Tuesday……its kinda aggrivating to have to wait for enough people to be on all at the same time, just to beat them.

I think the events would be fun, if I knew Isle of Janthir had a chance at victory other than just on a weekend. Food for thought ANET. Still love the Game, looking forward to the new stuff you guys have planned.

Congratilations on this world boss fight!

I failed a couple of times but it doesn’t matter at all! The fight was worth it.
( However I killed it a couple ot times with my guildmates in different overflows)
It was satisfying, very funny and (for once) epic!

I’ll miss this content once it will be gone, and I’m not the only one for sure!

P.S. The wurm is a little unbalanced. Nice mechanics and a hard fight but…wrong dps/timer values I think (imho)

same old story, you need a lot of people or you auto-fail
Regardless,
it’s actually a lot of fun {for a change} even if you fail
each lane has a npc, they’re not your typical npc in this battle.. taimi was surprisingly formidable.. and they all contribute to the in-game cinematics
the mobs try to push through the barricades at a pretty fair pace.. you’ll notice when you have too few people, or a zerg
and what is this massive area getting one-shotted After the encounter.. Not During the battle, After.. someone learned a few things, a tip of the hat and a tray of cookies to you arenanet..
managed to get into the arena twice.. one of my groups failed, the other succeeded.. and i’m not a gameguide junkie, the event itself is pretty straightforward and i don’t call them lanes 1 through 5, we’re not bowling.. in any case, it does take some time and coordination.. if you get into the arena, you get some spare fragments.. it’s not impossible to catch an event and farm the living story materials..
overall, this was a pretty good patch.. we have some old school quest scavenging, story to read or watch, and a large event that’s not impossible.. jungle worms and tequatl are probably just for the first m in mmo, so if you don’t like them.. just don’t do them

People wanted raid content. We get raid (ish) content. Win or lose you get fragments, which means cyphers, which means TONS of goodies.

Win or lose, you come away richer. Plus, its fun too!

I love the marionette fight. It requires coordination, but not abominably so, is easily explained before the event starts, and has you fighting in decently sized groups (20-30 people in the lanes, and 3-5 on the platforms). It’s still challenging, but doable enough for open world content. And since it’s only here for 2 weeks (supposedly), the 100 people requirement isn’t so bad either. And it feels really rewarding when you beat it

Now, if it weren’t for the platform phase bugging out on a regular basis, it would be perfect

Also, if you’re only spamming 1 in the defense phase, you’re probably playing warrior – you chose this, so why are you now complaining about the easy/boring gameplay? Other professions do get to use more of their skills to effect here :P

I like that this event engages a variety of roles instead of just DPS.

Snares are important for slowing the campions.
AoE skills are important for clearing waves of mobs (and a handful of people can do this well) but single target DPS is still useful for the champions.
The addition of siege is fun, barricades are also fun. I will say Toypocalypse does this better though. You have more control over the siege in Toypocalypse, this event feels like you’re just doing what your told.

I like that there is even boss encounter types of fight but I don’t like that everyone’s efforts are wasted because one group fails. One of the worst parts about the platform bit is sometimes you get a loading screen. I’ve seen several players die because they took too long to load. The platform fight is nice in that it is slightly more challenging, but again I think it’s lame that one group failing screws over everyone.

I wanted to add my voice to this as well.

I personally love the marionette fight. It forced Dragonbrand to pool its knowledge to figure out its mechanics, and organize and educate the zerg on how to beat her. It promotes a higher skill level of play rather than the typical throw-your-zerker-body-against-the-enemy PvE boss. It’s difficult, but not impossible, and it feels really good when you win.

My only suggestion would be to distribute platforms evenly and prioritize putting people in the same party on the same platform. The high randomness and high risk for failure associated with it is a bit too much.

I posted separately about what design mechanics make this fight work so well, but I wanted to add my voice here as well on a more personal level. I’m having a lot of fun with this event, even though I’ve only had one success out of 5+ tries. There’s a sense of working together that other world bosses lack that makes the experience rewarding above and beyond the material gains. It’s clear a lot of thought went into this one. Keep it up!

Great boss..great patch..a little hard is good for this game..GW 1 had hard mode and it was awesome..Im glad we have such fun challenges where it actually makes the group THINK and work together- i want more of those mechanics based fights with great rewards!
thanks anet

Twisted Marionette taught me that my server is hopeless and I should guest elsewhere.

Marionette has it’s frustrations, but overall it is probably my favourite piece of content on guild wars. There have been bad moments (like the time where on the last chain one platform failed and so the event failed and a couple of people felt the need to go the full on “I hate you n00bs!!” hissy fit over chat) and there have been great moments (lane 2 fails the first time, everyone on chat remains positive and by the time it gets back around to them lane 2 manages to finish it off) and frustrating time (this overflow has only thirty people, oh well stack lane one and we’ll get something), but I still make sure that I get to this event every day. Kudos to the team who designed this.

Never got more than 2/5 chains in any overflow (due to my own tardiness or crashing out of main), but did manage to complete it twice on my main server. It’s a tough fight that forces a bit of co-operation and with fun non-zerg alternatives (golems, arrow carts, the barriers) to dealing with the swarms of enemies.

Nobody I spoke to in map chat, or know, managed to get any of the additional achievements like the /cheer or the marionette dodges, etc. so that was a failure (bugged or simple badly implemented/telegraphed). Thank goodness ArenaNet had some foresight this time round, another positive, to allow for the meta achievement completion through simply doing Boss Thumper every day.

The increased loot was also a step in the right direction, but still way too little considering the difficulty in beating the marionette, or in simply farming key fragments.

I was on HOD yesterday and 4/5. We got SO close.

I love this fight but, amusingly, I felt like I was getting worse at it for a while. I got a couple of higher level yellow gear, but it was completely non specific in spec. Everything from Rampagers to dire to clerics. So I picked up more focused gear and improved some. The third boss is not to be scattered on it seems. Though 1 and 2 don’t seem to be difficult unless you’re trying to solo dps them down, and then its more of a time thing. (Granted I’m not in the zerker meta with my ele. My actual zerker character is still leveling.)