Electric Wyvern location: Was this necessary?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: GlitchyBat.3682
I try to not qq or anything, like pitching middleground ideas, and can sympathize with gamedevs because I’m aware of how the industry and fans can be towards the creators. That being said, I was a bit irked today about something. inc rant
Little Electric Wyvern is potentially the most obtusely hidden pet for rangers, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason why. I was surprised glancing through the topic names, none seem to reference it. When I first heard about their location being on the last map, I figured it was just being treated as an end-game-expansion treat. As I finally finished Dragon’s Stand while preparing to do the end of the story, my mate as Druid went to get a Wyvern. Now I’m rather peeved because I know those who designed this stuff are better than the padded gates and artificial time limits involved.
1 Actually reaching the region in Dragon’s Stand involves having a map set up enough to complete the meta-event. If you don’t have a good map, you’re stuck spending time surfing lfg and getting lucky with getting into a good map. Key word being luck, because the player has little control over this. What doesn’t help all Dragon Stand maps are in synched timers, so if it takes too long for them to get a good map and it’s too tedious, might as well just wait for the next cycle… in two hours.
2 Once you get in a good map, you now have to run with a zerg down the lane and see the event through to the end. From my experience, it took about an hour to reach the final area. I believe that’s considered average. So now in addition to getting a good map, you’ll most likely have to be on that map for another hour and hope that the groups suddenly don’t suck somehow, your client crashes, or disconnects. Even if you have a party friend to bring you back, you’d now have to fight everyone else on that instance and it’s lfg slot competition all over again.
3 So you made it to the end, beat up the boss, and everyone’s high fiving and stuff. Now you have to go and actually get Electric the Wyvern. But your map did good. The boss was beaten an hour before the map is closed. But despite your map doing fine, you’re still limited with 15 minutes to get your new friend. Map completion with 15 minutes for the average player is another topic. Any rangers who didn’t look up where the exact spot for wyverns are will ultimately end up asking mapchat. The environment isn’t exactly the most straightforward with everything in sight, so you’d be flying around a lot to try and find a path to where people might tell you where the wyverns are.
4 Which leads to the next issue. The reoccurring Masteries gating. Due to the experience curve for higher levels in Masteries, Advanced Gliding takes a lot of labor. Even the chain events begin to feel like they’re giving mere slivers as time goes on, and nothing can even really be done about it. It is possible to bypass this by channeling your inner Mario and pretending some tricky flight and jump tricks to reach the island, but it isn’t obvious, and most likely not intended. The player still has 15 minutes every time they’re there to even have a chance.
tl;dr
Your ability to get an Electric Wyvern is gated by luck of a good map instance, staying in that map for about an hour (or constantly trying to enter a party member’s instance), and require you to know exactly how to get there due to an arbitrary 15 minute crunch time no matter how well the map performs. It also demands L4 gliding mastery which, due to the slow nature of higher mastery levels, are gated by grind. Better off to do glide and jump shenanigans to get to the island.
While I’m not familiar with the Guild Wars 2 Pokedex of locations, I feel like it’s safe to say no pet is as poorly placed as the Electric Wyvern (I don’t know if Tiger has a similar problem. Tigers aren’t as adorable as wyverns so I haven’t researched). Fire Wyvern was sensibly placed, and I personally don’t see why Electrics weren’t on another island in Verdant Brink like that. Or in literally any other area that doesn’t involve gates, timecrunches, waiting, and luck.
So to sum it all up, was this really necessary for a single pet to be so difficult to get? (reminder to designers and players alike: difficulty != challenge)
inb4 git gud
[EDS] Elder Dragon Sympathizers