Guild Wars 2

Noticed there wasn’t much feedback on adventures yet. I made time to unbug the events and check out all 3 of the adventures in the beta, thoughts below. Feel free to use this thread for your own feedback too.

Bugs in the Branches — Video from Lekyii

“I can’t see the one right in front of me!” — 7/10

This adventure becomes available after the Itzel hylek have completed their hunting events in the Outpost: Jaka Itzel chain. It involves collecting bugs around the landscape (or gliding and catching them from the air). To catch a bug you need to touch it.

• Getting silver on this adventure is moderately tricky.
• Getting gold on this adventure is overly difficult, because bugs are hard to see when close but might be OK otherwise.

This adventure is hard to test because the event chain breaks too easily, meaning the adventure never unlocks.

• There is no NPC near this adventure to explain it to you, or to explain why is is unavailable. An NPC should be added to this adventure to explain why the adventure cannot be started, or the message when you attempt to interact with the flag should tell you why the adventure is unavailable (the Itzel village must be secured first).

• When getting near to bugs their name disappears, which means they can be really hard to spot, epsecially if you are in mid-air and your body/glider is obscuring the bug. The names should not disappear when close OR the bugs should be changed to be ‘fireflies’ and have a visible glow on them.

• One of the branches has a bug sitting on it does not have collision, so attempting to get that bug makes you fall through the branch down to the bottom (it is the branch that strecthed the furthest out into the map).

• If you hit the updraft at the bottom it does not take you high enough to land on a platform.
  The updraft gives you more height the higher you hit it, but there is no indication where the updraft area starts.

• The updraft should be changed to take you to a certain height no matter where you start in it OR the updraft should give you more height OR the updraft should be moved upwards.

• The lower set of branches can be tricky to walk across.

• If you are doing this adventure as day turns into night, mordrem tendrils will spawn and throw AoEs at you while you attempt to collect bugs.

Tendril Torcher — Video from Lekyii

“139 seems impossible even if my flamethrower was working” — 7/10

This adventure becomes available after completing the first set of the Laranthir event chain during daytime. It involves burning tendrils with a flamethrower while avoiding the knockback from bombs.

• Getting silver on this adventure is moderately tricky.
• Getting gold on this adventure is overly difficult to impossible, because the flamethrower misses tendrils too easily.

• This adventure is easy to test. It is somewhat clear why it is not available, but sometimes it is not available even when there are no active evnts or defences nearby.

• The NPC should tell you why the adventure cannot be started, or the message when you attempt to interact with the flag should tell you why the adventure is unavailable (the Itzel village must be secured first), or the adventure should be disconnected from the event chain.

• The flamethrower is really hit-and-miss. It appears there is a sweet-spot that you need the tendrils to be in for the flamethrower to count, but its non-obvious. Sometimes tendrils get burned when they don’t appear to be in range, sometimes tendrils stay alive when it looks like they are getting a good torching. The aear-of-effect of the flmaethrower should be increased to match it’s visible area, maybe make it a bit wider.

• The bouncing mushroom on the lowest level of this adventure has a habit of bouncing you straight up in the air rather than onto the top of the cliff above. As a result you fall back down to your death and the adventure ends.

• Players doing this adventure should be immune to boons, movement speed bonuses and portals from anything other than speed msuhrooms. Currently the best way to achieve a high score on this adventure is to have a guardian and a mesmer run along side you stacking speed and portalling you.

• If you are doing this adventure as day turns into night, mordrem tendrils will spawn and throw AoEs at you while you.

Salvage Pit — Video from Lekyii

“Oh? I finished already? Cool, free mastery points.” — 8/10

This adventure becomes available after capturing the ruins in the south part of Verdant Brink. It involves picking up salvage items while being attacked by mordrem tendrils.

• Getting silver on this adventure is easy.
• Getting gold on this adventure is easy.

This adventure is very difficult to start because it requires advancement of the Pale Reaver meta event chain, which is currently bugged.

This adventure seems really easy. The amount of time you get to complete it is more than enough, and you can just run around the edges of the arena where you will not be attacked to get most of them.

• This adventure needs some extra jeaopardy to be comparable to the others and for the gold reward to imply you were good. A few pieces of salvage should be moved from the edge of the map to the middle.

• When picking up salvage, the game should play an audible noise cue or show some more prominent visual feedback that you have made progress.

• There is no NPC near this adventure to explain it to you, or to explain why is is unavailable. An NPC should be added to this adventure to explain why the adventure cannot be started, or the message when you attempt to interact with the flag should tell you why the adventure is unavailable (the Itzel village must be secured first).

• Players can cheese this adventure by having stability, swiftness and aegis applied to them. Players doing this adventure should be immune to boons and movement speed bonuses.

• The more players you have in the pit, the easier it is to avoid tendril attacks or move around (as you can wait until another player triggers the tendril spin before walking up and grabbing the salvage). I can’t offer a suggestion to fix this.

• Some classes have an easier time in this adventure due to higher base health, higher armor or tankier gear. Players doing this adventure should have their maximum health adjusted to a fixed 15000.

General adventure feedback

Overall: A fun distraction, but they need to be available more often.

• Adventures should be available more regularly. Most adventures are unavailable at night and would benefit from instead being active, as night in Verdant Brink is currently is ‘downtime’ which lends itself to doing adventures. Seriously consider if adventures should be separate from event chains entirely and unlocked all of the time.

• The names of the adventures often say “Airstrike” instead of the actual name of the adventure when hovered over in the map.

• Sometimes the adventures have a lock icon over them in map, which means that adventure is currently unavailable, but an adventure not having a lock icon does not mean it IS available.

• The leaderboard for the adventure shows the 3 highest players then 5 players near your position. A small divider between the two would make this screen easier to read.

• The leaderboard page for the adventure is very small. Showing the top 5 scores and 9 people near you would be more interesting.

• Adventures should have a ‘stop’ button for if you want to start-over while in the middle of an adventure (for example if you make a bad start). Have been informed that a close button does exist to stop the adventure, but its easy to miss.

• The scoreboard shown at the end of the adventure worked fine for me, but there have been reports (in-game and also from NitricRose.1863 in this thread) that the scoreboard continued only showing the top 3 scores even after completion of the challenge.

Just a note on your “stop button” suggestion: this is already implemented, there’s an X / close button at the status window on the right.
I agree with all your other suggestions.

I never managed to get in an adventure, it only says it is not available yet, and i never knew why, so please A-Net make it more clear, why an adventure is not playable.

Ty for taking the time to detail the adventures, your effort’s appreciated I didn’t do any of them because they were almost always unavailable due to the required quest line being bugged. The only active adventure I saw was the Salvage Pit, but I was unable to salvage anything, I couldn’t pick anything up.

I was also very confused why I could not do those adventures. They should NOT be attached to storyline. I only managed to try flamethrower thingy and it is NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE to get gold… i know adventures should be competitive and difficult, but this is kind of too much. Especially because flamethrower doesn’t work as it should.

Status window? Score? I never saw these. I have no idea whether I even made bronze. The UI at the end showed the top-3 players, that was it.

NitricRose.1863:

Status window? Score? I never saw these. I have no idea whether I even made bronze. The UI at the end showed the top-3 players, that was it.

I had a friend report the same thing: Even when they finished a challenge their score was not shown on the UI at the end. I’ll update my post to include this bug now I have multiple reports, thanks.

oRRs.5936:

Just a note on your “stop button” suggestion: this is already implemented, there’s an X / close button at the status window on the right.
I agree with all your other suggestions.

Thanks, I guess my party and I overlooked the close button. I’ve updated my post.

awesome post!

i did find the Tendril Torcher hard to “see” the tendrils, crtl dont work that much on that adventure.

skills should not impact you or others in this type of content, i did try to jump on the Salvage pit adventure and use skills to see if they work on other players and they do, i dont think they should work its a easy way to get on the top of the leaderboards when someone is giving you speed and protection, this should be for all adventures no skills no consumables.

On the Salvage pit, i did it with some ppl around me and i notice that you start right in front of tendril, and that can be frustating after many trys to start with 50% HP and poison, because the tendril attack other player 1 second before you spawn.

This isn’t my anet account!

-snipped-

Haralin.1473:

I never managed to get in an adventure, it only says it is not available yet, and i never knew why, so please A-Net make it more clear, why an adventure is not playable.

This! I knew the adventures were supposed to be active, but I never saw one actually working.

Byron Miller.4629:

This is a really great set of feedback for me, Famme. Thanks a ton.

The general notes I’ve taken away from this post are:

• Player skills are often damaging to the overall competitiveness of adventures (This has been addressed internally)

Glad its useful! Figured they needed some feedback rather than another thread about smokescales.

I just had another go at Bugs just before the beta ended and hit 25 on a fairly good run. I can’t see how I’d get 30 on a class without built in movement speed increase or portals/spectral walk though, although I’m sure that more optimised routes will get figured out to get me higher than 25 on a slow character.

Byron Miller.4629:

• There needs to be a clearer set of messaging for when/how adventures are unlocked.

I think beyond just messaging might be needed. The adventures that require events later in a meta chain to be completed before unlocking are unavailable for the majority of daytime, and then unavailable again at nighttime.

I think there should be a new chat line (that you can toggle on/off like all other chats), which announce events in that particular map, or even the world. I remember in GW1 we had world announcements and it gave everyone a good idea of what was going on. Even NPC’s would let you know, so there was no way to NOT know about what was going on.

Also with masteries, I found the whole thing a bit confusing. I found myself killing monsters to gain xp towards my glider mastery, but when I gained mastery points from various areas, I never seemed to have enough to upgrade my glider mastery – it’s as if the only method to upgrading it was through killing monsters or doing events, rather than gaining mastery points all by themselves and spending them on said mastery. I managed to get 2 or 3 mastery points, but still couldn’t seem to spend them on my gliding mastery. All the icons were locked. So in the end I had to kill things to level it, which was extremely slow, but yeah, it made me confused as to what the point of getting mastery points was if I couldn’t even spend them and had to level them by killing monsters and doing events instead.

“The flamethrower is really hit-and-miss. It appears there is a sweet-spot that you need the tendrils to be in for the flamethrower to count, but its non-obvious. Sometimes tendrils get burned when they don’t appear to be in range, sometimes tendrils stay alive when it looks like they are getting a good torching. "

I did the tendrils and the salvage, and this was the biggest part of feedback that I had.

The only other thing I’d mention is that I only discovered the speed mushrooms were usable by accidentally hitting F near one – I thought their use was locked behind mastery points and never actually tried to use them.

Another note on the visibility of tendrils during the Tendril Torcher adventure: I had a hard time seeing the tendrils because of other players’ flamethrower blasts blocking my view. Is it possible to instance other players while you’re on an adventure like this? If not there is a lot of potential for griefing here.

Would definitely help if there was a UI option that you could turn on that would show interactables so you don’t have to always hold down CTRL.

I loved the difficulty of the adventures Tendril Torcher and Bugs in the Branches. Salvage Pit was a bit easier but I didn’t particularly mind. I like that they vary in difficulty. This is important to note; allow some to be easier in order for some to be harder. If all of them seem like an incredible challenge, then soon I will stop trying. However, if all of them are too easy the fun is lost. Balance is key!

Please do NOT make Tendril Torcher and Bugs in the Branches any easier. I spent hours trying to beat the other players (and hit top three in all of them, I believe) and I loved trying to figure out the fastest way or the best route. However, as I believe you have addressed, you need to standardize everything. Speed and skills. It is not a competition if it is about what class you bring and what food you have bought.
One thing I not only didn’t mind but also enjoyed was locking some adventures behind masteries. This was an excellent idea, and I really felt I had progressed when I got the ability to bounce on mushrooms, or fly around more masterfully. I hope to see more adventures with masteries tied into them.

As it is now, I’d like to play during the night. The current night version does not offer me enough interesting activities to force me away from doing adventures. Let me elaborate: to unlock certain adventures I need to further some event chains. Bugs in the Branches was unlocked in the middle of an event chain. This means I either have to abandon the story of the events in order to get enough time to do the adventures, or I have to wait for the end of the chain – but this leaves me significantly less time to indulge into the adventures. I know I sometimes have to sacrifice some things as I can’t be all places at once, but seeing that night isn’t keeping my attention, I’d much rather be able to do the full event chain and then go to the adventures.

If you asked me, I’d take all player skills away on entering an adventure. I’d strip them off speed modifiers (you could perhaps add a flat speed boost to make it more interesting). AND I’d make the player invulnerable to monster attacks while in the adventure. This way, monsters will not bother us during the night.

I agree with the other critiques and I’ll quickly run over them:
• Tell us why they aren’t available and what we can do to help unlock them
• Scrap, bugs and tendrils need to be more visible. Their names/tags seemed to disappear if I was too close, which was especially unhelpful when trying to figure out if I had torched a tendril or not

Oh and lastly, a small unintended feature. My friend was able to continue playing some adventures by never exiting the UI of the adventure. Even when the adventure was unavailable to the rest of us, he could continue playing like this.

Champ vine event in Shrouded Ruins.
Don’t know if this was a bug or not. Just an observation on my part. On the east side of the vine, there is a capture area. Though I suspect there weren’t enough players to complete the event in any case, we were finally able to clear out the Grunts and other creatures from the capture circle. The circle for the capture area extends part-way onto the bridge. Beyond the circle, if you continue onto the bridge, the environmental effect downs you very quickly.

The issue I see, is that the waves of creatures start across the bridge, but because of the environment effect you can’t actually fight them until they enter the circle. Therefore, you can’t seem to ever capture that area.

It doesn’t seem correct that the environmental effect comes right up to the circle. With the Grunts using the insect swarms on the bridge and the effect, there didn’t appear to be a way to actually keep them out of the circle.

I may be misunderstanding what needed to happen there. So maybe there does need to be a little more direction by an npc as to what’s supposed to happen. Additionally, earlier we approached that vine from the west side, where the mortars are. No one knew what needed done there either.
And, yes, I threw myself off the cliff once using a skill. Long run back. lol

Hope this is helpful.

Byron Miller.4629:

Vilkata.4725:

Another note on the visibility of tendrils during the Tendril Torcher adventure: I had a hard time seeing the tendrils because of other players’ flamethrower blasts blocking my view. Is it possible to instance other players while you’re on an adventure like this? If not there is a lot of potential for griefing here.

Instancing is something we’d like to do sparingly, but to answer your question: There are some things that can be done to reduce the impact that other players will have on your experience, even in the open world. Thanks for the heads up, and I’ll look into those options.

b.

i obviously don’t know how viable this is, or even if it would use similar tech, but what if the flamethrower effects were instanced? things like gathering nodes already have different appearances based on the player, rather than the world state, and even the adventure “thingies” (vines, bugs, etc.) are client-side (or at least per-client).

that wouldn’t solve the problem of player clutter *cough*2012clocktower*cough*, but it would help with the effect clutter.

I didn’t see any indication of which Adventures I had completed.. Is there any?

If not, maybe a map icon which by mousing-over the event and it might indicate what your current achievement level is..