Guild Wars 2

The time to complete lanes in Dragon Stand needs to be more even. There is a large variation in how long lanes takes to complete, which is unfair to all parties. Those in the short lanes are sitting around doing the gate defense over and over, while those in the slow lanes are getting yelled at to hurry up. The three lanes should each take bout the same time to complete, so everyone is working together instead of wasting time.

Notice how usually the lane that finish faster is the one that had more people in its squad?
Doing repeated gate defenses and waiting for other squads to finish is something that can happen at every lane. It all depends on where the people went.

Agreed with Astralporing, this waiting can happen no matter which lane I’m in. If a static group made a test and played all three lanes at different meta events, they might even need exactly the same time to do them.

And after the first part is done, it’s not over, because one group might not have the best composition to beat the master and the others have to wait.

The players need to organise the group composition. If one group lacks dps classes, a few from the other groups need to join. If I’m in a squad that lacks chronos, I ask in map chat if a chrono could join us. It’s not a unique challenge either, same happens with TT and Octovines. When gw2community does TT, they make sure there are enough condis and egg blockers and if there aren’t they don’t even start the event. They distribute the classes among squads so they are equally strong.

Without such organisation, you’ll have idle time like in DS, but even there people use an easy solution. We just move over to the slowest squad and help. You only need a handful of people to keep the mob waves at bay, the rest can help on other lanes. Chak Gerent, same story.

I really don’t see a problem here from a design point of view that ArenaNet needs to fix.

I think its more to do with the difficulty of the lane bosses. Stavemaster is the easiest to kill so north tends to finish first.

I’ve recently been seeing South finish first a few times. It all depends on the number/quality of players. How well they handle the bosses also matter too. I’ve seen some groups do Stavemaster without blocking projectiles causibgvthe fight to prolong. Hareth has a ton of defense and I see people also tend to not block his projectiles from the spinning attack (using the golem).

I’ve seen every lane finish first. I’ve waited ages for each and I’ve been part of the slow lane too.

It’s almost entirely a function of experience. Sometimes, North gets slowed by scaling up without having as many who know the events. Sometimes South is slowed by people not being willing to move over from the other lanes.

tl;dr the lanes seem equal enough to me already.

From my experience, south lane is always slowest, because its side events take longest to complete (of course, if you ignore those, you can finish faster — but that would be a waste of XP and Karma).

I had been watching south lane the last couple weeks while farming the last of my ore and it seems that it’s slow largely due to how they handle the boss and scaling of events. There are a lot of events that leave you waiting on spawns which takes a lot of time with a lot of people.

It depends more on how competent the players are in each lane. I did a DS run yesterday where Mid had about 15 more people than both north and south, but north and south were constantly waiting on mid, because the playerrs in mid were new and weren’t outputting any DPS, so it took them forever to kill anything and progress through their lane.

If you ever find yourself waiting on a specific lane and don’t want to be waiting, hop on that lane and help. Chances are there either aren’t quite enough people, or the people in that lane don’t know what they are doing. Either way, you’ll suddenly no longer be waiting on any lane, as you’ll be in the lane that is finishing last.

Personally I don’t mind the waiting if the lane I’m in arrives first, it gives me a chance to sort my inventory, salvage and list stuff on the TP between the modrem waves at the gate.

But as has been already mentioned by others, it just depends on the amount in the squad, their dps, their skill, their knowledge of the events etc. I’ve been in each lane lots of times, and it’s always different which arrives first and last.

I think one time I saw South finish first, and that was a run where all the lanes were doing well. My jaw dropped.

Part of it is the first event with getting parts up the bouncing mushrooms while dealing with Chak usually seems to go down to the wire even with coordinated groups clearing chak while a few people ferry the parts. And overall the distance to travel seems a little longer.

I don’t know how it could be equalized, though, since as others have said it does vary quite a bit with squad effectiveness.