Guild Wars 2

While the other maps have problems, I think Dragon’s Stand is the worst of all the Heart of Thorns maps. Here’s why:

1. You can only get on a new map for about a 20 minute window every two hours. Since Dragon’s Stand takes at least an hour to complete, you’re out of luck if you get on at the wrong time and don’t have much time to play, or don’t want to wait over an hour.

2. It has the least replayability of all the maps. All 3 lanes are fairly similar, which means regardless of where you go there is not a lot of diversity compared to other maps. On top of that many of the events repeat throughout the lane.

3. Most of the content in the lanes is just face-roll damage spam in a zerg. Meh. Some events are fun, and the bosses have some interesting skills, but most of it falls flat for me.

4. If another lane fails at their blighting tower, you have to spend 10-20 minutes running in a circle hoping the pain will end.

5. The Mouth of Mordremoth fight is, and I can’t stress this enough, BORING. SO BORING. MY GOD IS IT BORING. Most of the fight is spent standing around, attacking inanimate objects that don’t affect the bosses health, attacking champions whose deaths don’t affect the bosses health, getting insta-killed by the occasional Wyvern, watching Mordremoth smear your allies corpses all over the islands while being impossible to damage, and watching Mordremoth float while being impossible to damage. The only phase in which it actually feels like you’re doing something is the mortar shell phase…

6. As if the Mordremoth fight was not boring enough already, the Mouth often bugs out when it reaches 0% health forcing you to wait an additional 2 minutes before the unskippable cinematic starts…

7. Once you kill the most boring boss in the game, you only get 15 minutes to explore the map before it is closed, even if you finish 30-45 minutes before the maps are scheduled to reset. If you’re fast and only interested in getting all the Noxious Pods, then this is barely enough time, but if you want to explore the map and/or are slow then it is not.

8. The areas where Noxious Pods spawn are kind of annoying (though this is not the worst thing about this map). :/

9. Leystone armor, one of the unique skins offered from this map, is almost exclusively available through low-RNG drops from the Noxious Pods. Yay, grind.

Discuss.

5. Mortar shell phase is certainly strong and sadly depends on RNG (positions)

7. The time after killing the boss is really weird. It’s a race of: “Press F and don’t die or get stunned”. Having to change your skills so you can LOOT better seems a little bit dumb. It’s also weird having to do that after you killed a huge boss. You have won!… but not entirely. I think they should increase the timer and add good loot for killing the enemies. Maybe have events like “Kill all enemies in the area” that grand loot similiar to ~3 noxious pods? Encourage people to kill the mobs and “work as a team for even more loot”.

I’m sorry it bores you. I’ve enjoyed every run, even the time I had to help kill a boss 4 times because the zerg fell apart and pods kept respawning. I love flying around the islands and rushing for pods afterwards (mostly because there is a pod heaven in the northwest). I like the banter in Map. The lanes are different enough to give variety if I want it.

Eye of the beholder, hmm?

(Now, Tangled Depths is a bit more annoying to me because it has large dead spots in the schedule and I can’t seem to get to all the events in a chain even if I start at the very beginning. Curse you, feed the young beetles, why can’t I find you?).

Dragon’s Stand is fine (if a bit too long) but there are a few major flaws.

The biggest would be the after-party pod run where you just run around opening as many pods as you can. That part must have been designed by some unmitigated genius.

I like the map, straight forward, cool boss fight. Of course it gets boring after you did it 10 times. What do you expect.

My only critique is the 15min window to get the Noxious Pods while trying to avoid getting killed by the mobs. Bad design decision.

The worst thing for me in DS is by far the timer. How many times did we end up with our guild by being split in different maps without any possibilities to join others’ map… That kills the fun. I don’t really see why the SW rules can’t apply here, especially since there is a requirements of player number for the first event to start. I could imagine they don’t want the boss to be farmed by map hoping, but normally to finish blighted trees you need a map that is almost full. And if this is too much of an issue there could always be a debuff that forbid to join a Mordy fight for one hour after defeating one..

And for the Mordy fight, yes, it ends up being a bit boring. The main problem is that the regular attack phases (on head and body) contribute for nothing in term of damage compared to the chopper phase. And this last phase is so RNG, sometimes you just don’t have enough time to go from the chopper to the dragon. There should be a better balance between damages in normal attack phase and chopper phase…

If they just extend the exploration time to the start of a new meta cycle, I would have no more complaints about Dragon’s Stand. Those 10 to 15 minutes for pod runs and exploration are the only annoying bit for me. They could easily change the meta so that we get to explore until the Mouth of Mordremoth has consumed enough ley line energy to kill the entire map and a new cycle starts.

Dragon Stand is one of my favorite new maps. Not everyone loves everything everyone else loves. Accept that. Move on.

Of course we haters won’t move on. We need to be tireless and as loud as possible. It’s the only thing we can do to persuade ANet to stop making content like this. Never let them forget that there are plenty of people hating it. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

I dislike DS, too. Definitely the most boring and tedious of the 4 HoT maps.

BloodyNine.7504:

Dragon Stand is one of my favorite new maps. Not everyone loves everything everyone else loves. Accept that. Move on.

Not everyone loves everything you love, either.

Accept that. Move on.

“6. As if the Mordremoth fight was not boring enough already, the Mouth often bugs out when it reaches 0% health forcing you to wait an additional 2 minutes before the unskippable cinematic starts…”

seriously what the hell is with that long weird pause when it dies?

and skip button for that cutscene? Yes please

After 20 times it’s getting old

1) You can start the map at any time so long as you have enough time to complete the blighting towers. The average is about an an hour but it can be done in less time than that. Find a map and use the LFG to ferry people onto to it. Just having the LFG post will make it visible to others that there is a map trying to start up.

2) Replayability is the same in pretty much every map.

3) Zergfests existed before HoT and you still see them in pretty much all Tyria core maps. All world bosses are Zergfests with a couple requiring some coordination. Farming Orr, and temples, are the same.

4) This is actually something I dislike and it has to do with people stuck with the lemmings mentality and only do what others have done. You see this all the time with meta builds and people who follow them without knowing why the build is what it is and when and what can be adjusted depending on the situation.

You saw it again when Dulfy released her guide for Vale Guardian and she now has to add disclaimers otherwise people will assume that her squad composition is the only way to do it. It’s also going on in TD when people are still crying out no CC (even at Scar…) without knowing why that method became favorable in the first place.

Going back to DS, the actual mechanic of the fight is not to circle around like how people are doing. There are pods below that you can destroy which will prevent the endless spawning of mordrem that come up the ramp when all 3 collectors are down. Players will not even attempt doing it that way even though there’s a good chance that you would only need a handful of people to handle the preservers for the collectors and pods enabling the Zerg to burst down the bosses at a much quicker pace and with less risk.

6) This was a bandaid fix to where the event would stall.

7) I’ve gotten all pods on the map as well as collection the items (e.g. Vista, poi, HP) that require the meta to be completed within that 15 minutes several times on different characters. Also keep in mind that doing the meta itself does not award you enough machetes to open every single pod.

8) If players went as a group and cleared everything, they’d be able to get the pods without risk of death.

Coyote Trickster.7319:

“6. As if the Mordremoth fight was not boring enough already, the Mouth often bugs out when it reaches 0% health forcing you to wait an additional 2 minutes before the unskippable cinematic starts…”

seriously what the hell is with that long weird pause when it dies?

and skip button for that cutscene? Yes please

After 20 times it’s getting old

“The technology is not there yet.” :P

Gilburt.9146:

While the other maps have problems, I think Dragon’s Stand is the worst of all the Heart of Thorns maps. Here’s why:

1. You can only get on a new map for about a 20 minute window every two hours. Since Dragon’s Stand takes at least an hour to complete, you’re out of luck if you get on at the wrong time and don’t have much time to play, or don’t want to wait over an hour.

2. It has the least replayability of all the maps. All 3 lanes are fairly similar, which means regardless of where you go there is not a lot of diversity compared to other maps. On top of that many of the events repeat throughout the lane.

3. Most of the content in the lanes is just face-roll damage spam in a zerg. Meh. Some events are fun, and the bosses have some interesting skills, but most of it falls flat for me.

4. If another lane fails at their blighting tower, you have to spend 10-20 minutes running in a circle hoping the pain will end.

5. The Mouth of Mordremoth fight is, and I can’t stress this enough, BORING. SO BORING. MY GOD IS IT BORING. Most of the fight is spent standing around, attacking inanimate objects that don’t affect the bosses health, attacking champions whose deaths don’t affect the bosses health, getting insta-killed by the occasional Wyvern, watching Mordremoth smear your allies corpses all over the islands while being impossible to damage, and watching Mordremoth float while being impossible to damage. The only phase in which it actually feels like you’re doing something is the mortar shell phase…

6. As if the Mordremoth fight was not boring enough already, the Mouth often bugs out when it reaches 0% health forcing you to wait an additional 2 minutes before the unskippable cinematic starts…

7. Once you kill the most boring boss in the game, you only get 15 minutes to explore the map before it is closed, even if you finish 30-45 minutes before the maps are scheduled to reset. If you’re fast and only interested in getting all the Noxious Pods, then this is barely enough time, but if you want to explore the map and/or are slow then it is not.

8. The areas where Noxious Pods spawn are kind of annoying (though this is not the worst thing about this map). :/

9. Leystone armor, one of the unique skins offered from this map, is almost exclusively available through low-RNG drops from the Noxious Pods. Yay, grind.

Discuss.

1. You can farm the map for noxious pods and then join another empty map and farm that one while you wait.
2. DS is more of a Big dynamic event, then a map by itself.
3.There are achieves that reward masteries that you can get in each lane that are different.
4. true and if one lane fails you’ve just wasted 2 hours. Completely relying on strangers to get access to those extra ores.
5. and the mortar shell phase fails everytime even when you are locked on target and in range of the dragons head nothing happens.
6. musta been fixed. Never seen this.
7. Yea its a sprint there after the kill not a marathon. Why there are even champs and legendary mobs there makes no sense other then to slow you down more and not let you gather the ore you need. (Ahhh Anet i see what you are doing there…)
8. see #7
9. Looks ugly imo on all skins.

Not even the resetting that is the worst for Dragon’s Stand. People are so set on killing the Dragon when asked for help with HP’s, interest points, or even vistas, they are rude and selfish and only want to kill Dragon nothing else. I even had someone tell me to leave the map which is extremely rude. Arenanet has made Dragon’s Stand very hostile environment when people are trying to complete the map. Can they possibly make it so people can get the HP’s, Vistas, or even interest points between the Dragon killing event?

Dragon Stand was a nice experiment, and I actually enjoyed it the first few times I played the event, but I also see the problems with it. Also OP should stop whining and give some actual constructive criticism, so we might be able to see improvements in the future.

I think for maps like DS there should be some kind of ingame mechanic where you can queue up for the next cycle, or even start a new map once enough players signed up and accepted to start it.

EDIT: Regarding HPs and Vistas etc. There really shouldn’ t be any on this map, honestly.

Dark Sorcerer.6420:

Not even the resetting that is the worst for Dragon’s Stand. People are so set on killing the Dragon when asked for help with HP’s, interest points, or even vistas, they are rude and selfish and only want to kill Dragon nothing else. I even had someone tell me to leave the map which is extremely rude. Arenanet has made Dragon’s Stand very hostile environment when people are trying to complete the map. Can they possibly make it so people can get the HP’s, Vistas, or even interest points between the Dragon killing event?

People are primarily there for the meta. It’s rude and selfish to want them to do anything but that.

You have a full 30 minutes to do map completion after the meta. Everything can be done solo once access has been given which is done through progressing the meta. There’s absolutely no reason you need help.

I completely disagree. Dragon’s Stand is by far one of my favorite aspects of the game. I find the three lanes to be rather different. The entire map comes together into a culmination that is epic in scope/scale. I truly enjoyed this content.

Dragon Stand is probably my favorite meta event in the game. Because I really am more interested in feeling like I’m part of an invasion force than just fighting bosses. The dragon bosses, don’t really do much for me. I think Triple Threat is silly. Particularly the wurm that swallows you and you have to find a spear inside him, over and over. This is so immersion breaking to me it’s not funny.

But I can completely immerse myself in Dragon Stand.

Really the only thing this map needs is to have the exploration phase last until the scheduled next meta event.

For me, it’s a terrible design and something I haven’t ever wanted to go back to as soon as I completed it on one toon, as finding a map to get the HP’s etc done is a complete pain, as you have to queue, hope you get a good map, finish event THEN find the HP’s etc before the map times out- and if you’re not good at getting around, expect it to take a few runs before the map is fully done.

The thought of doing it on other toons if I need it for map completion leave me completely cold. I’m not a fan of gated content and this is one huge gate for people with limited time or unable to stay at their computer for a couple hours straight.

Locking this up to avoid further necroposting