Guild Wars 2

My guild tried this Saturday night. We ran four consecutive guild bounty tier 1 runs. Not successful on any of them.

My thoughts: These guys are hard to find in fifteen minutes. We attempted to do the guild mission without ‘cheating’ and looking at the internet for locations. It took us around 8 minutes average to find 1 guy. And we had about 18 people on, so that should be enough to do these missions I believe.

It almost seems you are forced to look up the locations of these bounties, track all potential bounties ahead of time, and then start the mission. This does not seem like a great solution to the guild bounty mission. You should be able to start the mission with no pre-scouting and then accomplish the mission with a reasonable amount of chance for success.

When we did find a bounty, they were insane to take down. 16+ stacks of confusion. Other insane buffs. Took all 18+ of us about 4-5 minutes to take 1 guy down. Some of those 18+ people probably were not as experienced as others, but a good 10 were level 80 and quite experienced.

Again, it appears that you need to look up information concerning these bosses ahead of time so you can ‘prepare’ a build before you engage them. There is no way someone running blind with no before hand knowledge can jump into a random fight with one of these bounties and be prepared.

We had fun as a guild, but the guild bounty mission as a whole left me and a few others a little frustrated and disappointed. I like challenges, but I don’t like feeling like I have to ‘cheat’ and track bounties ahead of time and look up their skills ahead of time and prepare for them accordingly.

We are not supposed to know where these bounties are and what skills they have starting the mission. But doing the mission this way appears to have very little chance of success. I’m sure if we track every bounty ahead of time, our chance of success will be greatly increased. But I just feel like this is not really the way the content was designed and feel like I am almost exploiting it by doing this.

I’ve done two guild bounties so far, and they are a blast!

I loved hunting down the targets ahead of time, locking them near WPs, and then coordinating based on which ones were targeted. They have some pretty interesting mechanics, and were relatively challenging to be honest… More challenging and interesting than most dungeon bosses (this is a very, very good thing). They also scaled very well to the 10-20 players we had attacking them.

It’s not cheating to find them ahead of time. Tracking is a critical part of bounty hunting, and I think a fully intended part of the missions. Besides, I think it adds a lot of fun and coordination to the missions, and encourages the guild to visit more areas, solicit more help, and meet more people. It is much better this way.

Also, the rewards are very nice. I felt appropriately rewarded for our success (only 4 more weeks for an ascended item!).

If I don’t know until a guild bounty is activated who the bounty is, and a clue as to where he might be, then what I just assume is that I should be able to find that person from the clue after the bounty is activated in a reasonable amount of time.

Without searching the internet for names/locations, how would you possibly know who to look for ahead of time and where they might be? You might run into 1 or 2 here and there by just travelling, but without looking this information up you really have no clue.

If they had intended us to have this information ahead of time, they should have had an accessible list of bounties with their associated ‘clues’ posted or listed within the guild tab and available before a guild mission starts. That way you could track down the potential bounties ahead of time.

Not trying to sound like a complainer, because I like the missions and the idea behind them. This is just my feedback on them.

If we are supposed to track down in advance, give us a complete list of names/clues to access. If we are not supposed to track down in advance, there should be ample time to track them down after the bounty has started. And let’s face it. 15 minutes to blindly find and kill 2 champions is pretty daunting.

Mad Rasputin.7809:

My guild tried this Saturday night. We ran four consecutive guild bounty tier 1 runs. Not successful on any of them.

My thoughts: These guys are hard to find in fifteen minutes.

Errrrr…. :-/

You knew what zones to go to, right? Tier 1 is completely doable (and even easy :-x) with a group of 18. You should split up into two teams to track, make sure to ask on map chat if anyone has spotted them, and as soon as one gets taken down have everyone else pour in toward the other.

Tier 3 is when tracking all 15 in advance become a key part of the equation. But even that is a lot of fun. Having your guild spread out through fifteen zones across Tyria and keeping tabs on every possible bounty is a great feeling!

And let’s face it. 15 minutes to blindly find and kill 2 champions is pretty daunting.

How does fifteen minutes to kill 6 strike you? :P

I just wish the hints for each bounty were accurate. My guild failed a bounty because we couldn’t find Trikksa, whose hint says that she’ll be near Steeleye Span, and we actually found her half an hour later in the complete opposite corner of the map.

Sovta.4719:

And what about guys that don’t have unlocked whole map?

Then you track down the one closest to an area you have. It makes perfect sense that an end-game activity would require you to do some exploration to participate.

Between this and DR, why do the devs have to design around such arbitrary slap-the-hand-in-the-cookie-jar mechanics? It seems like if they just designed working, balanced, and well-thought out systems in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this issue.

Has anyone noticed that the game seems to revolve around time tables?

1 Laurel a day
10 Laurel for monthly
3 Paths a dungeon, but repeating one in the same day gets you a slap on the wrist.
Can only get this guild currency once in the same way per week.
1 Rare per certain chest per character per day.

In my opinion, timers and time tables like this are beyond restrictive and really break immersion when they’re all the community seems to be concerned with. It seems like poor planning covered up with artificial bandages. Why is the game designed like this? Why not just accommodate the social impact in designing these features rather than trying to correct it afterwards?

lothefallen.7081:

Between this and DR, why do the devs have to design around such arbitrary slap-the-hand-in-the-cookie-jar mechanics? It seems like if they just designed working, balanced, and well-thought out systems in the first place, we wouldn’t be having this issue.

Has anyone noticed that the game seems to revolve around time tables?

1 Laurel a day
10 Laurel for monthly
3 Paths a dungeon, but repeating one in the same day gets you a slap on the wrist.
Can only get this guild currency once in the same way per week.
1 Rare per certain chest per character per day.

In my opinion, timers and time tables like this are beyond restrictive and really break immersion when they’re all the community seems to be concerned with. It seems like poor planning covered up with artificial bandages. Why is the game designed like this? Why not just accommodate the social impact in designing these features rather than trying to correct it afterwards?

It is very simple really. If they let you get 10 laurels per day, the hardcore gamers would overdose on laurels, grinding them to no end, and get their gear within a few days to a week. They would then come back to the forums and scream about how there is no end game. They would get dis-enchanted with the game and move on, or hang around as a vocal antagonist.

The casual game, who really has a hard time just getting a few dailies a week, would see himself constantly farther behind, and get tired of trying to keep up, and quit.

So they struck the balance between a system that is very restrictive (like one dungeon reward per path per week), and one that allows free-farming of the currency.

It is a very elegant solution to the problem, but unless you are right in the middle between a casual/hardcore gamer, you are going to have something to gripe about. But honestly complaining about the one guaranteed yellow per chest as a negative is crazy. It beats the heck out of a continuously lootable chest that gives blues and greens.

And guild missions, back on topic, are very casual friendly in design (all guild size issues aside). All you have to do is participate in a bounty once per week and you have gotten your max reward. Now if you are on 4 hours a night every night, and you want to run the bounty every night, more power to you, but you are not getting a leg-up on the casual players running it once a week.

The only comment I would have is that they should have added an insane grind to keep the hardcore players busy, like 250 tier 3 mats and 250 ectos to buy those ascended things out right to keep the guy who plays 10 hours a day quite, since he can get all his items without waiting the required 30 days. This is how they handled the fractal back items, and it worked pretty well. Run enough fractals to get your vial, and then spend gold for ascended, or run tons more fractals. Good system.

so the guild missions chest has a weekly reset or 24hours reset ?

So, uh… I’m guessing that anyone complaining that Guild Missions are too easy, hasn’t tried T3 yet.

Our guild tried T3, three times in a row Friday night, when we had the most people on. Had a group on each bounty each time.

We learned after those tries that on T3 you pretty much have to scout out at least half of the 12 possible bounties before starting the event and hope another guild doesn’t take it out while you’re waiting everyone else to find their mark.

Coordinating 6 bounties in 15 minutes is not what I would call easy, unless you have a pretty massive turnout.

Some of the bounties are definitely harder than others, too.

That frog? We had 50 people on him at once, couldn’t put a dent in him. Deputy Brookes has some nasty AoE, but melts in a minute or so.

T2 is pretty easy in comparison, sure, but we still finished with only 5 minutes left on the clock.

That said, all of us that did it had a blast. Really looking forward to unlocking the other variations on GMs.

Not that this has too much to offer in how to go about changing guild missions, but I thought I’d put this out there to those why will be running these missions in the near future on servers with large PvE populations.

Make sure you watch the Jormag spawn timer and plan your guild mission events around it. We had 30 players for our mission and completed everything but the final target. That target was Tricksy Teesa, and even with a ton of people – from out guild along with PUGs who wanted to join in – we couldn’t even touch her due to the skill lag from the dragon event.

Anywho, just a heads up to those who may run into the same issue.

PS: Guild missions reset every Saturday at 4PM PST I believe.

Kilrain Daggerspine.6843:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

If you complete both targets you’ll receive the merits from the mission, which can be used to unlock more mission types (and rewards from those missions).

I’m looking into why some of the bounties don’t appear to be scaling normally. They might just need more health in general, given that many of them live in low-level zones.

Don’t even start thinking about bounties that are to low hp, the main focus should be to get a UI that is somewhat useable, the current setup is tedious and down right destructive to the enjoyability of the content.

Not to mention the pain a event leader goes trough trying to organize enough people to keep track of 15 diffrent mobs in 15 diffrent zones, with 15 diffrent pathings!

And thats before even adding in the pain of having someone else kill the bounty your tracking.

Want to look into scaleing check out the Mount Maelstrom bounty, what the hell is up with that guys hp? he makes lupicuses hp pool look like a joke.

Or the confusion spamming bounty.

Or the karka guy which you can spend a hour looking for without any signs of his famous chat bubble.

Don’t you dare make it any harder until you fix all the issues that make it artificially harder.

I enjoy the concept of guild missions, but having to send out scouts to 15 diffrent locations to make the missions even somewhat reasonable, is extremly messy, and not enjoyable for the person who has to micro manage it.

I want to be guild missions to be difficult, but atm they are just a stressful and tedious experience.

Edit: Dante, Im fairly certain its not daily, you most likely just hit the weekly reset timer..

Though I most definatly!!!! hope you are right, I will find out tommorow

Also, pretty much what this guy said. I don’t know how many of you have tried to organize 60+ players to move around the entire world map, but even with help it’s still more than a pain than it seems worth.

The micromanaging aspect of it already is more of a job than anything, and it’s a necessity for T3 missions. Please let us enjoy these challenges without them turning into a chore for some of the players.

The mission window is too short. 15 minutes is nothing, and the timer really forces everyone to be hyper-efficient at every single task. The missions are impossible without someone having a copy of Guild Wars 2 Wiki open. It’s not really a scavenger hunt if we’re just looking at guides because we’d be wasting our time otherwise.

I mean, the frustrating thing about the guild mission is that, ironically, you don’t get to interact with your guild. Sure, you’ve all scheduled some time to get together and play, but then when the mission starts…

1) Everyone splits up… I thought we were supposed to play together…
2) Talking is limited to mission critical information. Any conversations between guild members is detrimental to the mission
3) When target is found, the target is melted. Sometimes we don’t even get a chance to fight together as a guild!!!

For a feature that touts on giving more content that guilds can do together, it seems to want to do the opposite!!!

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

anyway. Also, we intend to add a few more that play “hide and seek” like Westward and Sotzz. Sotzz has 300 different places he can appear in Gendarren Fields.

These two were pretty hard, especially given that random people can kill the Karka even if its not activated.
We had to give up on Sotzz, and alot of guilds on our server didn’t find him either. Someone said he bugged cause their guild couldn’t kill him, and he de-spawned.

How about some bounties hiding in cities like Divinity Reach or Lion’s Arch? It’ll be a good place for new players to learn how exciting a guild is and of course for easy recruitment during guild mission.

Fnix.5608:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

anyway. Also, we intend to add a few more that play “hide and seek” like Westward and Sotzz. Sotzz has 300 different places he can appear in Gendarren Fields.

These two were pretty hard, especially given that random people can kill the Karka even if its not activated.
We had to give up on Sotzz, and alot of guilds on our server didn’t find him either. Someone said he bugged cause their guild couldn’t kill him, and he de-spawned.

We killed Sotzz just fine two days ago. He has some buff that significantly reduces the damage he receives. The buff icon looks like a jug of ale.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

OP shouldn’t worry about “not getting it”. A rather large number of players are never going to get this content because it’s gated and smaller guilds simply can’t play.

+1 Arenanet.