Guild Wars 2

1. I can complete the activity in the festival area but for the many reasons listed above, it is time consuming, expensive, frustrating, and not fun.

2. I can complete the activity outside the festival area— which I prefer to do. It costs snowball bundles, but that’s still cheaper than paying for a dolyak run. I prefer the Akk Wilds area, near the potato farm.

I miss the original way it was done, with snowball-skritt running around. It would also be nice if you could tell if a snowball hit besides having the achievement up to check the counter. Most skritt don’t fall down for a hit. They just stand there.

Furthermore, why do the snowballs even bother having a green target? It doesn’t work. The key is to aim the cursor’s target where you want to hit. You need to completely ignore the green one because ‘throwing’ a snowball at the foot of your target will be a miss every time.

I found the DR skritt attacking the dolyak the most reliable, but you had to be quick to hit them because of all the kicking around. Wasn’t usually worth the wait for the event to start anyway – who knows how long that will take?

Infinirarium skritt were a bit of a nuisance because as soon as you get into combat… nope. If you can find somewhere they can’t hit you (which usually avoids the combat thing) it might be OK.

I also tried hitting green skritt in other places of Tyria. (Yes, I know, throwing snowballs at innocent skritt minding their own business… but I didn’t put the achievement on the table. Sacrifices must be made.) These seem to work if you bring enough bags of snowballs but they’re an awful pain to actually get hits to register on. GW2 will seemingly try its absolute hardest to make the snowball visually miss, and even if you find the spot that fools it, it probably won’t register. So, the advice up above to watch the achievement panel and ignore what the in-game graphics are showing you seems to be the way to go… but that’s hugely unintuitive.

End result, the most obvious places you’d think of to go find skritt to pelt are all painful to actually attempt the achievement on.

Sirius.4510:

I found the DR skritt attacking the dolyak the most reliable, but you had to be quick to hit them because of all the kicking around. Wasn’t usually worth the wait for the event to start anyway – who knows how long that will take?

Infinirarium skritt were a bit of a nuisance because as soon as you get into combat… nope. If you can find somewhere they can’t hit you (which usually avoids the combat thing) it might be OK.

I also tried hitting green skritt in other places of Tyria. (Yes, I know, throwing snowballs at innocent skritt minding their own business… but I didn’t put the achievement on the table. Sacrifices must be made.) These seem to work if you bring enough bags of snowballs but they’re an awful pain to actually get hits to register on. GW2 will seemingly try its absolute hardest to make the snowball visually miss, and even if you find the spot that fools it, it probably won’t register. So, the advice up above to watch the achievement panel and ignore what the in-game graphics are showing you seems to be the way to go… but that’s hugely unintuitive.

End result, the most obvious places you’d think of to go find skritt to pelt are all painful to actually attempt the achievement on.

Not true at all. Many places where you have skritt they just stand still with the occasional patting around. Can easily be done in a few seconds time. I myself go to Caledon Forest, stand outside their aggor range because if you get into combat any hits don’t count, drop snowballs and pelt one several times. Voila, achievement done.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I want to say how much I appreciate all this info. I’m going to leave this up over the weekend, then make up an attractive pie chart with sound effects and glitter and … Ok, ok, I’m probably not going to make a pie chart. But I am going to put together a set of stats. Sure, we’re just one player each, and yes, this is anecdotal. But I think it’s worthwhile information, and it seems to me our QA Team will be able to give this activity a good look.

Thanks again!

Thank you. Although I would love to see the attractive pie chart with sound effects and glitter

This quote sums up my feeling about this daily :

So, to sum it up, currently it’s in state of “too annoying to attempt”.

For a more in depth analysis just look at the the post from Illconceived Was Na (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Skritt-Hit-wintersday-daily/page/2#post6455738) I share his (her?) feelings.

My two cents about how to improve: I think this daily should be doable in the Wintersday area, without having to go into Tixx’s Infinirarium or to a completely different map. So you could add skritt that cannot be kicked to the escort event and/or lower the requirement to 3 skritt being hit. Preferably both.

First a positive note: with the changes this season the achievement was changed from practically impossible to possible, but impractical. Though not yet good this was a huge step forward!

I can get the daily in DR during one or two dolyak escorts. One trick that helps is standing where the Skritt are going to appear and throwing the snowball at close distance. I haven’t noticed invulnerability, but that may be due to lack of attention. Another tip, iirc from this thread, is hitting Skritt during their despawn animation. It counts and resets this animation, plus kicking players ignore them. But in total due to the problems already mentioned repeatedly in this thread I usually don’t care and just skip this daily.

I have a few more data points to add:

I went and looked for a place with magic snow and Skritt near each other. I found such a place at the moot in Kyesjard, northwest corner of Timberline Falls. I iteracted with magic snow and threw its snowballs at the friendly/green Skritt there. That was a moot point (bad pun totally intended) – it did not count. Neither the first snowball from building the snowman nor the ones spawning around it.

One of my characters chose to help the Skritt in personal story. Some of them now live in my home instance. I tried to throw the fighting cats’ snowball at them – didn’t count.

Btw, hitting Skritt with snowballs at the dolly escort does NOT give event participation. You need to kick them for that.

I also tried two more things, but did not really expect them to work: Throwing snowballs at a mini (Mini Munificent Gift Skritt) or a player using a tonic (Endless Skritt Burglar Tonic). And as expected they did not count. But worth a try anyway.

I haven’t tried the sealed package of snowballs at all. Even if it did work, the cost isn’t worth the gain.

My preferred solution would be bringing back the Skritt snowball fighter. Green/friendly Skritt should count and ideally both red and green ones react. A knockdown may have unwanted side effects, but at least let them /say (+ voice over?) something. Also moving the “snipers” during the escort event on higher ground, as they were in LA, so that they can only be hit with snowballs should help a lot.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I want to say how much I appreciate all this info. I’m going to leave this up over the weekend, then make up an attractive pie chart with sound effects and glitter and … Ok, ok, I’m probably not going to make a pie chart.

can we at least get a Venn diagram?

1 and 2, but Festival Area is by far the worst place to get this achievement done.

Only did it once, since I came across so many problems it didn’t feel worth completing.. I managed to get a whooping 2 hits in during an entire Dolyak escort, due to the normal issues; skritt getting kicked away, players getting in your line of fire, you getting into someone else’s line of fire, you getting hit by snowballs from those pesky NPCs that (during this particular daily quest) are seemingly only there to ruin your day.
So I got the advice to find skritt in the open world. Apparently any hostile ones would do. So I grabbed some Sealed Packages of Snowballs, and out I went. I came to the following realisations:
1) when you open your Sealed Package of Snowballs you just end up with a bunch of snowballs spread around the exact spot where you were standing at the time.. whoops.
2) skritt that are hostile and out in the open can easily get killed by other players while you’re attempting to pelt them with snowballs
3) skritt that are hostile can decide to attack you and then the snowballs can’t be used and you need to run away to force them to stop chasing you, at which point your pack of snowballs that you dropped on the ground (would be nice if this was a bundle with charges rather than items dropped on the ground, on a timer no less) have despawned
4) other players can steal your snowballs!! (again, would be nice if it was a bundle)
5) most hostile skritt don’t like standing still so you need to run back and forth between skritt and wherever you stupidly dropped your snowballs, wasting precious seconds (please make it a bundle!)
6) you need to go back to a trading post to acquire more Sealed Packages of Snowballs since you didn’t bring enough of them to waste as many as you did on silly things

I managed to finish it, but have since avoided it like the plague.. Fortunately there are other options so to get the 3 you need this one isn’t needed. Phew!
I do hear that it can be easily completed in the Infinirarium but I haven’t tried it.. I just skip it. Hopefully it will be better next year around.

Another thing; your face when you realise the reason you can’t seem to hit them with your precious snowballs is because you have “Snap Ground Target to Current Target” activated after a PvP session on a specific character.. and slap yourself for wasting even more snowballs (along with questioning why settings like these can’t be character specific). x.x

Yes, I can complete Skritt Hit in the festival area. As nearly everyone has mentioned already, it is extremely frustrating to do so. Most of the time, I got some snowball packages and cheesed it in the Infiniarium. I have no trouble aiming at skritt either in the festival area or in the Infiniarium, and it usually only took 2 packages.

If you are attempting it in the festival area during a busy time, such as the first hour or two after daily reset, the event will be swarmed with people, and you will hit them, or they will hit you. The dolyak walks down an extremely confined area, and any more than 10 people trying to hit skritt quickly becomes unfun.

Adding skritt that cannot be kicked away would help, but even then in the confined space I think it would still be frustrating. I don’t see an easy solution here.

If you are attempting this when it’s not so busy, expect to spend 5 gold or more of your own money for a single dolyak run. And even then, it can quickly fill up with people.

The easiest solution I can think of that solves the problem is this: Do not have the event be entirely dependent on player donations. After a minute or two, if Ho-Ho-Tron hasn’t gotten a donation of more than a gold, increase the bar 10-20%. This would insure the event starts every 10 minutes or so without a single player having to dump gold into it, while still allowing donation to move the bar along faster if people do want to donate.