Guild Wars 2

1. Reinforcement waves are NOT fun. I don’t know a single person who enjoyed this portion of the event. And it not only happens once but twice. Please do not ever include phases of this type again. It was an exercise in frustration and complete and total boredom.

2. The rest of the meta-event was very good. The phases where you have to knock down the tree, the boulders, and use the steam vents were fun and fit much better with the meta-event text of moving the ancient karka back to its lair.

3. The events before and after you get the ancient karka back to its lair were not quite as bad as the reinforcement events but also felt like busy-work and went on much too long. Having to place bombs in three locations and then clear webs off in three locations felt too long. This portion of the event should have either been reduced to planting bombs in a single location or the amount of spawning mobs should have been decreased by 2/3s to stop this portion of the event from being tedious.

4. More generally, events which involve specific objectives are fun. Events which involve chipping away at the huge health bars of wave after wave of veteran and champion mobs are not fun.

During the reinforcements portions of the event i actually went afk to stretch and grab a drink or have a smoke. It was just so boring to do. All i did the majority of the time was resurrect people everywhere. Being directly underneath the mobs as a squishy little ele i had to dodge quite a lot, but kept tons of people up. Other than that it was just 1 2 1 2 1 2 5 1 2 1 2 1 2 5 in fire a lot lol maybe some chill and cripple but blah! so boring.

I thought it was going to be interesting when we started by knocking over a tree.

Rewards were worth sticking around though Had some fun aspects and some long boring ones.

Haha, reinforcement waves, we were all crying NOOOOO when the second started.

I think that it was a bad effect of upscaling. 5 karka per player x 200 players, adding champions, that’s annoying :P

The karka are a new enemy type that have a shell you have to crack to expose their vulnerable bodies. once cracked they exhibit different attack styles. This is an interesting mechanic that becomes burdensome when fighting scaled karka, as they get two very large lifepools. I think a good adjustment would be to have stacks of karka armor (scaled by number of players surrounding the karka, maybe 5 per player with max of 150) and have weapons infused with the Hylek potion strip the stacks. One attack from an potion coated weapon removes one stack. Each potion coating provides a player with 15 stacks of anti-karka shell potion. Weapons can be recoated for free at nearby outposts, or at cost with potions sold at vendors (or crafted by players). Environmental potion gun weapons with more stacks can also be provided (as they are now, but don’t seem to be needed).

Take this idea as malleable and not a specific unchangeable one. If the numbers are too low/high adjust as you see fit when responding.

I think it could have been really good done as a small-group instance.

The way it actually played out, just soo very badly revealed the weaknesses of the system (culling and very shallow repetitive combat system in big groups).

Long fights doesn’t mean fun fights, even if the game weren’t so crummy at it.

I am just trying to make some positive observations that hopefully will be recognized and applied next time around. The event could have been so much better with just a few changes as noted above.

mulch.2586:

I think it could have been really good done as a small-group instance.

The way it actually played out, just soo very badly revealed the weaknesses of the system (culling and very shallow repetitive combat system in big groups).

Long fights doesn’t mean fun fights, even if the game weren’t so crummy at it.

I don’t think the solution is to take a game that has started to embrace open world content and drive it into small group, instanced content with towns acting as hubs. Rather, they have to tweak the open world instancing they have. Technically speaking, the open world is an instanced. Zones have a capacity that once reached, new players entering the zone are pushed into an overfull zone that has a capacity. Once it’s capacity is reached a new zone instance is created and new players joining are funneled into there. So on, and so on.

This zone capacity may be good when players navigate around to things they find interesting, but it is clearly causing performance problems when they all funnel into one location. I can think of two approaches:

1) Adjust zone capacity during events like these.
2) Seamlessly transfer players/parties to overfull servers if too many gather in one location (they may not have the capability to do this easily, or without a load screen).

I think the major issue with the reinforcements were that the little veteran buggers just had far too much HP. They already hit like trains and then it took longer to take them down than a Veteran Adult Karka of the same level? Eh, I feel as though it would have been better if they had a little less HP.

I think that was just my major issue. Level 84 Veteran Young Karkas were just too tough and were responsible for about an hour to an hour and a half of the fighting.

If they just toned down the number of reinforcements it wouldn’t have been so bad. It did require group tactics (pulling the adds away from the boss and towards the mortars). Overall I thought the event was awesome! And it was great seeing 100-200 person zerg wipes for the first time ever :P

I thought it was perfect, if you take either enemy away from the other they become laughably easy. The reason those enemies were difficult is because they were designed to work together..cripples and knockdowns on one and fields of poison and glue on the other with parasites that weaken you?..and then it rolls over everyone while they are glued, crippled, knocked down and weakened? They didnt have that much HP, you just couldnt faceroll them..you had to move, dodge the roll and knockback, make sure to save aoes for the hatchlings, and not pull every blasted one of them from behind the Ancient Karka at one time. We had maybe..10 people on each vet young karka splitting up to minimize the effect of their area attacks, bottlenecking them if we had to using the terrain. It was fun..forced you to think..you werent going to just pound them into submission and it felt like these things were fighting for their right to survive..not just chilling on a beach while we walked by.

I feel like that is where their combat system lies..in forcing you to use terrain and what is around you to win

I have to agree that it was a little boring, and definitely frustrating, but that frustration is what made it so much better when we finally won. 2.5 hours to do this event with mountains of obstacles, it was really satisfying to see that thing fall into the lava.

Biggest thing I take away from this event? Don’t have a life outside of GW2. Don’t ever miss any of these “Special Events” or “1-Time Only Weekends” or anything of the like. An end chest with loot ranging from 10g on the low end and having the chance of Precursors drop? Wow, its good to know casuals need not apply.

Anet should have learned from the last event, and from beta, but they dont, so don’t expect the christmas events to go any better.

I wouldn’t know anything about this event as I was unable to attend it, or any other one time event due to scheduling conflicts. I very much disapprove of this model and feel they should go back to a model which has the event cycling several times over the course of a day. Of course you would make it so you can only get the special rewards from the event once.

The reinforcement events would be ok if they took approximately the same amount of time as the other events. Instead they took 10x as long, and there was nothing interesting about them. Hopefully arenanet will learn that no one likes those sorts of events and remove them next time around.

I kind of agree with everything but number 3, but i must stress this:

Arenanet, plz keep on using zerg wiping mechanics for these big events, like the roll on those karka’s, IT’S AMAZING!!!!! Really don’t hesitate to kill people ^^ We had so much fun on teamspeak with our guild!!! (not being sarcastic, it war hilarious!!)