Guild Wars 2

And this is part 2 because I’m a wordy idiot.

What I DID NOT LIKE AT ALL. Is the player character responses. In fact I have disliked most since the end of LS2 onward, to the point where I just ignore it and make up what I would do in those situations. I knew when Caithe took the egg, it wasn’t because she was a Mordian. (Even though it got spoiled for me that the Sylvari were from Mordy before I did LS2 ep8) And I HATED the way the PC was disdaining her at every turn. Other characters it made sense, because they had not spent as much time with her. Marjory saying she was going with Lazarus and the PC response was annoying. I trust her, in fact I would have asked her to go keep a eye on him before she even pipped up she would, due to her detective background to see if he really means what he says. (First choice would be Rytlock because he doesn’t seem to care, you betray, your dead. But he has other issues atm…..which seem dire) I think I understand why your making the PC choices be specific, (less work, not branching so no need to make extra lines for different outcomes, cant really have branching storylines with choices that matter with consequences in a MMO (a major issue SWTOR is having atm) but please give us some variation.

Sorry for it being long (I know you said 50 or less but I couldn’t, I have so many thoughts!) but thanks for the new content. Havnt tried the fractal yet, the qauggans up north make sense, because of them getting kicked out due to Bubbles, er I mean Steve, and then getting kicked even farther north due to other races. Shows people just look at them as cute little helpless morons but…..hey they fought off dragon minions and have been for years. Don’t really like the new outfits for the heros. (Though Rox’s was ok) LOVE the Kodan fighting tonic, Heartseeker and Shadowshot with BOOM awesome rofl

Overall, mostly good. So thanks to all you Anet guys and gals, keep up the good work and cant wait for more! (Please let a storyline heavy chapter be soon, idc about a new map)

Overall I’m somewhat more towards “I like” on this one, but there were a few things that really detracted from it.

Combat would be the lowest marks from me. It was challenging enough (I ran the story solo), but the mechanics could use some help.
Example 1: The ooze fight. I’m fighting off some oozes when the generator goes down, suddenly a wall drops, and there are a dozen oozes suddenly attacking me, doing damage, imobilizing….and I can’t do anything to them because they are on the other side of the “wall” that has gone down. My pet can’t attack them because of this now invisible barrier, and I can’t cross this border because I’m constantly being immobilized.
Example 2: Fighting the big modrem thrasher…. for 15minutes. Get his health 10% down, only to watch it regenerate because my pet was too close, or I failed to dodge. The crucial part is that through all the living story stuff it has never, in my opinion, been solidly defined that: White AoE will only help/assist you. Would much prefer the circles had been green, or at least tinted green to indicate “good”.
Example 3: Final fight. The boss mob had wiped out about 75% of his minions before I figured out that was what was happening. I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to game mechanics, but a single line comment from one of the characters remarking that the boss was killing his own minions in order to get to you would have made a difference there.

Of course all of this is moot now as pretty much everyone that likes to go into these things blind has now finished them and the mechanics of the fights are common knowledge.

Visually, I enjoyed all of it. The new zone is beautiful, and I am ecstatic to see some truly big trees. New versions of the mobs we are used to have some variation which mixes it up nicely.

Story-wise, it was great until we caught up with Braham. I’ve never liked him in the first place and this only solidifies my opinion of him. What I fear most is where the writers are going with it, because right now it is heading towards some obscenely cliche endings.

Out of 10? I’d say 6 of 10 overall.

As I think you have too many critics out there, so I will go to the good points.

Nothing to complain for while. I completed the history and map exploration yesterday smooth without any “guide”, based only on a intuition… I notice that the Anet team responsible for these maps seems learning more and more with errors and correctness. This new map is still better balanced than the previous one. With this third map I am confident about the quality of the next chapters. The celebration here for the team is deserved, open the champagne.

1) History. We have aggression, we have tension, we have hate, angry, balanced the paternal (or maternal) role with Glint’s cub. I’ve always felt really lacking in really tense chapters and for some reason Hot Historyle’s did not bring me that. In this new LS3 chapter the intense fights reminiscent of the first time i was in Claw Island battle.

2)Map design: is in state of art. Coincidentally these days before the patch, I remembered Neverwinter online and the Dwarven Valley map that was absurdly beautiful. (Anet’s team could look after the neverwinter “campaign” concept later).

Episode 3 was good.

First, I love Bitterfrost Frontier. The map was simple, fun to navigate, rewarding and most importantly, lag-free. HoT maps lag a lot, I actually have to turn the graphics to low settings just to get 27-30 fps. Also, I feel you guys got the night time environment right in this map. It was DARK, as night should be. Another thing, thank you for putting back the classic battle themes.

Second, the gameplay was ok. The story quests were ok. The bosses…meh, nothing special to say really. I didn’t like that grawl quest, I think combat would’ve been the better choice.

Finally, the story. I’m going to go against the consensus and support Braham. I didn’t even get mad at him. The reaction was justified. If anything, he made good points. (won’t spoil here) My character, though, needs more development than we see. He’s just so kitten robotic, it’s as if he doesn’t show flaws or vulnerability. He’s the “commander” or “guild leader”. The only development we see is with Aurene, a newborn dragon. Never mind our comrades. Sorry, I’m not feeling “Dragon’s Watch”.

Still, good chapter. The only thing I haven’t played yet is the new fractal!

My only complaints about the release is that the density of active creatures is a tad to high on the map and some combat parts are a bit grindy especially the last part of the story. Long segments of story instance aren’t good for people with limited time to play.

The more I look at the design of Bitterfrost Frontier, the more the map doesn’t feel cohesive. It acts more like 6 small maps jammed together, and not even in a logical order. Why aren’t the Svanir camped out next to Bitter Cold, instead of at the two furthest possible corners of the map? How are the Quaggans hanging out in a hotspring undefended right next to all those Icebrood? Why are there Grawl and Icebrood right next to each other in a cave system where the icebrood are blocked in? Why is there a random old growth forest? Why are the Kodan putting giant fires ON FLOATING ICE? What is the point of the underwater layer? Why is there a single random leyline loop with updrafts under it that don’t even send you high enough to get you on it? Most importantly, why do all these parts seem to have completely different things going on that are totally unrelated to and unaffected by each other? It just never comes together holistically, stylistically, or loreistically (copyrighted new word).

From a gameplay perspective, Bitterfrost Frontier has 3 problems:

1. The amount of inventory junk is ridiculous. 3 items for the Svanir, 3 items for the grawl, and 4 for the Elixir. That’s 10 items that either are going to be in every characters’ inventory, in the bank being swapped around, taking up 10 very expensive shared slots, or constantly deleted and reacquired (which will increase players’ annoyance with the map).
2. The event timers are too short. You can easily get hit with 2 hotspring defense events in the course of a single visits to make elixir. This follows for the brazer defense as well.
3. Repetitive Elixir quest needed to access part of the map. Likely this will rapidly become annoying, leading to people doing it a couple times to get everything in that part of the map, then never going there again.

Regarding the Bitter Cold section, WHY would I even want/need to go there again? Do any events spawn in there?

JTGuevara.9018:

Episode 3 was good.

First, I love Bitterfrost Frontier. The map was simple, fun to navigate, rewarding and most importantly, lag-free. HoT maps lag a lot, I actually have to turn the graphics to low settings just to get 27-30 fps. Also, I feel you guys got the night time environment right in this map. It was DARK, as night should be. Another thing, thank you for putting back the classic battle themes.

Second, the gameplay was ok. The story quests were ok. The bosses…meh, nothing special to say really. I didn’t like that grawl quest, I think combat would’ve been the better choice.

Finally, the story. I’m going to go against the consensus and support Braham. I didn’t even get mad at him. The reaction was justified. If anything, he made good points. (won’t spoil here) My character, though, needs more development than we see. He’s just so kitten robotic, it’s as if he doesn’t show flaws or vulnerability. He’s the “commander” or “guild leader”. The only development we see is with Aurene, a newborn dragon. Never mind our comrades. Sorry, I’m not feeling “Dragon’s Watch”.

Still, good chapter. The only thing I haven’t played yet is the new fractal!

Oh yeah, that’s another thing I forgot to add. “Dragon’s Watch” is kinda lame. I liked a combo of the other choices “Eternity’s Watch” or just do what Braham wanted. SPOILERS Though, if “Dragon’s Watch” has a double meaning for what I think it might doubly mean…..then maybe…..maybe it might grow on me. But don’t like it atm.

The final fight in Frozen Out is very unclear as to what you’re supposed to do- or maybe it’s just me. I’ve only seen bits of what people have said, are you supposed to have the champion run over the minions? At what point? I ran around with him for five minutes, moving him all over the place and he never seemed to take any damage.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Black Iris Flowers.3418:

The final fight in Frozen Out is very unclear as to what you’re supposed to do- or maybe it’s just me. I’ve only seen bits of what people have said, are you supposed to have the champion run over the minions? At what point? I ran around with him for five minutes, moving him all over the place and he never seemed to take any damage.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Click spoiler for it. Hope that helps.

Lakemine.3014:

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

When you agro him, every about 10s or so, a red arrow will show up under him. The red arrow indicates where he will run, kinda like the charge the Bloomhunger does, just with a red arrow showing where. You want the little adds between him and you, so he runs them over. There are 4 little adds to each ice core. When each of the 4 adds are killed by the ice beat running them down, the core will break and Braham will run over and pick up the scroll and say its the wrong one. Rinse repeat till the last ice core is down, then Braham picks up the last scroll, shoots the fire arrow and removes the 99% reduced damage buff, and then just dps and CC as normal. Watch for the freeze tell, raises his chest a bit and his charge, the red arrow.

Click spoiler for it. Hope that helps.

Thank you so much! Going to restart and try that now

Frankly, I agree with most complaints so far. I was excited for the new map and new episode. Sadly that excitement was short-lived.

Pros

• New map, new events, new loot, new collectibles. Always good

• Map scenery is quite stunning

• Interacting with Aurene’s development. We protected the egg with our life and it is rewarding to see her starting to grow up. Besides I love the idea of being foster mum to a dragon

Cons

• Tedious open world NPC dialogue during story. If I wanted to read a story I would buy a book. Please let me play the game. Standing around with the huddled masses listening to a quaggan drone on is not my idea of fun.

• As has been mentioned (a lot) previously. Boss fight mechanics seem to require you to be a mind-reader. A hint here and there would go a long way towards lowering frustration and increasing enjoyment. I don’t mind a challenge, but I would like to start a fight with at least some idea of what I need to do.

• Map navigation and layout is ill-conceived. There is so much wrong here, I barely know where to start. If you want players to only run around, at least tone down the mob spawns. Can barely take two steps without encountering a mob. When do I get a chance to enjoy my stunning new surroundings? Defending Winterberry gather nodes with 6 or more monsters. Are you kidding me? When I first encountered the Thermal Tube mechanic I was a fan, that is no longer the case. Unlike Skritt Tunnels or Nuhoch Wallows which tells us clearly where they go, Thermal Tubes seem to be placed haphazardly and in Bitterfrost Frontier do not represent a truly alternate means of map navigation. Don’t even get me started on how utterly useless Ley Line Gliding is here.

• The Elixir should be a mastery line similar to Poison Mastery. You should only have to make the Elixir once as part of the story, or as an alternative while completing mastery line. I for one, will not be gathering and making an elixir everyday for the sole purpose to enter a part of the map I have no reason to visit once I have done the story and received mastery insight.

• The need for a Svanir disguise each time to access heart vendor I believe could be handled similarly to my suggestion about The Elixir. I am starting to think Anet have a team of devs specifically dedicated to find new ways to introduce tedium and inventory stuffing to gameplay.

• While I like the idea of incorporating existing mechanics (eg bouncing mushrooms) and monsters into a new zone, mushroom mobs do seem to be an odd inclusion. Fair enough they live in the hot springs zone which may be similar in climate to Maguuma Jungle, but I believe a new monster evolved to cope with the extreme cold and taking advantage of the hot springs would’ve worked better. (For an example see Japanese Snow Monkey) Even Quaggans gone rogue would’ve been better.

• +1 all previous comments relating to Commander Doormat.

Any reasonable person understands you can’t please all the people all of the time. However, I am sorry to say after spending >12hrs in the new zone I find it and LW Episode disappointing. So much potential wasted. This latest installment does little to make me optimistic or enthusiastic for what is to come.

Lakemine.3014:

Black Iris Flowers.3418:

The final fight in Frozen Out is very unclear as to what you’re supposed to do- or maybe it’s just me. I’ve only seen bits of what people have said, are you supposed to have the champion run over the minions? At what point? I ran around with him for five minutes, moving him all over the place and he never seemed to take any damage.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Show Spoiler

hide spoiler

When you agro him, every about 10s or so, a red arrow will show up under him. The red arrow indicates where he will run, kinda like the charge the Bloomhunger does, just with a red arrow showing where. You want the little adds between him and you, so he runs them over. There are 4 little adds to each ice core. When each of the 4 adds are killed by the ice beat running them down, the core will break and Braham will run over and pick up the scroll and say its the wrong one. Rinse repeat till the last ice core is down, then Braham picks up the last scroll, shoots the fire arrow and removes the 99% reduced damage buff, and then just dps and CC as normal. Watch for the freeze tell, raises his chest a bit and his charge, the red arrow.

Click spoiler for it. Hope that helps.

The fact that this is so hard to figure out without help is a major issue. The game does a horrible job of indicating what to do in that fight. And the tell for the freeze is way too subtle in the craziness that is going on.

MissCee.1295:

• Map navigation and layout is ill-conceived. There is so much wrong here, I barely know where to start. If you want players to only run around, at least tone down the mob spawns. Can barely take two steps without encountering a mob. When do I get a chance to enjoy my stunning new surroundings? Defending Winterberry gather nodes with 6 or more monsters. Are you kidding me? When I first encountered the Thermal Tube mechanic I was a fan, that is no longer the case. Unlike Skritt Tunnels or Nuhoch Wallows which tells us clearly where they go, Thermal Tubes seem to be placed haphazardly and in Bitterfrost Frontier do not represent a truly alternate means of map navigation. Don’t even get me started on how utterly useless Ley Line Gliding is here.

• The Elixir should be a mastery line similar to Poison Mastery. You should only have to make the Elixir once as part of the story, or as an alternative while completing mastery line. I for one, will not be gathering and making an elixir everyday for the sole purpose to enter a part of the map I have no reason to visit once I have done the story and received mastery insight.

• The need for a Svanir disguise each time to access heart vendor I believe could be handled similarly to my suggestion about The Elixir. I am starting to think Anet have a team of devs specifically dedicated to find new ways to introduce tedium and inventory stuffing to gameplay.

I have whole separate threads on these issues.

I’m going to have to join in on the numerous complaints about the last instance’s boss fight, specifically:

1. having to redo ALL of that instance if you’re going after achievements; I am SO SICK of fighting those waves of mobs again and again to get to the boss

and

2. the Ice Beast itself. I got the first achievement by just afking the entire fight out of range of its charge attack and the falling rocks. I literally had to do nothing. Now I am working on the second achievement, “Slain the Beast quickly”. I’ve tried this four times now. How in the world do people avoid the trillion falling rocks? Even if I run and strafe, sometimes I get knocked down not once, but two or three times in a row, chipping valuable seconds off my time. I’m just about to ragequit that particular fight and call it a day. Playing this on a toon that does not have reliable pulls makes this fight a serious pain in the rear.

I will try to finish this achievement once I’m not about to put my fist through the screen, and then I’ll see about replayability on other toons.

terrible gameplay, and filled with game breaking bugs. good job. typical of what we expect of you.

Some little flaws eg NPC not responding etc but compared to what is delivered I hv to congratulate the Dev team that works on this content. I truly enjoy exploring the new map and the story thank you for this content!
The only thing is.. it will be really really nice to hv new armour skin instead of outfit. I will definitely get it. I’m not a fan of outfit I’m sorry

I pretty much like the part with Aurene and where it is heading. I also like that Braham goes on rampage to kill Jormag even when it’s not good for all of us. But this whiny behavior of him is just annoying. He should be outraged to kill Jormag and doesn’t be this super big baby (maybe it’s the pretty bad voice acting on German in this LS – don’t know why though because it got much better over the last episodes).
Also there are some minor issues like Rox mentioned that we are the first ones in 100 years walking through a tunnel from which 5 minutes ago 30 wolfes appeared, can’t be that “untouched” then.
The map is nice though, but I won’t go back to the northeast when I have to create the elixir every time.

volpenvieh.3201:

Played episode 3 together with my boyfriend, he received the achievement “Vigilant” (probably because he was instance opener) but I didn’t

I had this too. I played the episode with my boyfriend and two of our friends. He got the achievement and we all didn’t. I think this kind of sucks, because I’m not going to replay the episode over again to get the achievement again. Should have just been given out to everyone in the party, in my opinion.

New map: overall great
Pro : nice environment for snow landscape. Return of enemies and allies long forgotten. Heart hidden through disguise. Mix of hearts and something like a Meta event. Jaguar cub. Water under the ice through cracks.
Con: no use of Counter magic, Koda’s flame not a nice mechanism for combat.

New episode: overall disappointing
Pro: liked first instance (and the return post story that feels like personal instance, too bad my nodes are not there). Bosses independent on the character build (more or less). Open world dialogue during which you can do other things after the first or second time. Liked the interaction with the Grawls.
Con: new directions but no resolving of other old plots. Somehow short. Too PC centric (no more friends). Caithe still sorry but does not really gives more insights of Sylvari/Dream/Pale Tree. Braham only back to leave (his anger, while a nice plot, is too sudden and is not rising up during the entire episode). Rox still a nice character that is not liked by writers. Taimi cannot be wrong (why does she even need us). Plant Vs death antagonism badly anchored to past story.

Rest: untouched
Haven’t had time to play Fractal but feedbacks in my guild are good.
Did not go to WvW but the change to war score feels good incentive to upgrade structures (but also to defend them).

fourhim.3584:

One other thing. WHAT IN THE WORLD is the purpose of the water in this zone? OK, I had to go down there to talk to the Quaggan lady. OK, it’s pretty. But really, that’s it? No events? No hidden mastery commune points? No big roaming champions to beat? No hidden tunnels or ruins? Not even a point of interest?

Its almost like the water was included just to have a 3rd “lower level” on the map, and to include it in the trailer. And the enemies down there are THICK, with lots of Veterans too. I appreciate at least having the unbound magic bubbles, but it seems you could have done so much more with the water here. As it stands right now it annoys me when I fall into it accidentally and my Flesh Golem goes on cooldown

I’m not gonna lie I decided to log in and complete this map because of the underwater trailer. I had a glimmer of hope they’d actually balance the classes out with maybe in the future allowing other skills to be used and maybe even an underwater elite for the water dragon unlocking the third weapon. High hopes I know but Mastery/Balance was all I expected turns out they just used it as bait to get more people to log in.

Too many items clogging the inventory is a definite con. Also, after Rising Flames I was hopeful that you’d once again allow us to complete only some of the achievements of our choice in order to get the big meta-achievement. Instead we’re back to “complete them all” system. I’m sure some power players would prefer it that way, but I don’t.

The new map: I don’t understand the torch events. They seem to be connected to each other, but I was not able to figure out how.

There are events to defend the torches, but it isn’t clear why you are defending the torches. For the chests you can open with the portable torches? For some general goal of a meta event? Or simply to hand out event bounties?

Lit torches are counted, but it isn’t clear what happens if they are all lighted or are all out. Champions do spawn, but it isn’t clear when they spawn. Is it scripted on a timer, or is it when all torches are lighted or all torches are not? Are torches lighted by lightening them with a portable torch? Or scripted? Or if a defense event was successful? And if the champions are defeated, is there something that happens because of that? Or does something happen if the champions are not defeated within some time frame?

It is all very confusing. In the current state, I run around and hit some defense events, but I don’t stay, because they are way too long. I hit some champions, but only because they are champions and not because of some greater purpose or progress in some meta event. Is there even a meta event chain?

I had a bash through this yesterday. Love the new map’s art, love the bonding sesh with Aurene. Broke my bank to make the mini, but it’s adorable. Please ensure everything I salvage from rares for two weeks is ectos, to make up for the cost, and also that I find T6 leather just by looking at dolyaks. Thanks!

Story was okay, but we did the disguise thing in Ember Bay, and it was interesting then, but shouldn’t reappear quite so soon. Also, my character is a mesmer. I’m disappointed she’s not able to pull an illusion out of her behind for the svanir disguise bit, but I suppose that wouldn’t be fair to others - except I recall in one part of the PS, Lady Wi disguises Tybalt as Demmi, so it’s not out of the realms of possiblity for another mesmer to be about providing this option for players (and any mesmer player could opt to do their own, for flavour). Less junk in the inventory and all that.

Speaking of which, I’ll echo others: enough with the multiple currencies and collectables in each (new) map. I’m now refusing to buy another bag or bank slot on principle.

Having to re-do collection parts to revisit parts of the map another day is not cool:

The Svanir armour, if the mesmer suggestion is not acceptable, should only take up one inventory slot as a whole (think someone mentioned this in this thread already), particularly once you’ve already completed that part of the chapter. If it is dropped thereafter, then it should be available from a nearby NPC (along the lines of - "hey, we collected this stuff after you swung by. Feel free to borrow it again if you want back up there!"). Players still can ’t use the armour if they want to complete the heart again, but it’s there if they want to talk to the heart vendor, and the pieces don’t need to drop from the mobs and take up more inventory space again.

The elixir buff is something we should be able to apply once made, or heck, even buy for a small bit of unbound magic (or better yet, plain old gold, silver or copper), once you’re completed that part of the story, or made the elixir. I’d argue it should be free from an NPC of your choice after story completion, but I’m nice like that.

Mobs are a little eager from a distance, and a bit crazy around the winterberry bushes. I’m sure those spiders don’t really covet the berries, and they’re just being mean. Foo on them, I say.

The quaggan at the hot spring is hilarious. I’m formally requesting this quaggan join the new guild as my personal cheerleader ("ooo, you’re going to your death...s-o-o sad"* can follow me all day), since Braham is being a baby cat about the guild right now. Also my commander sucks at explaining stuff, but the V.O. was good (sylvari female) - and I did laugh at her Svanir impression. I’d love a video composite of all the V.O. Svanir impressions - it’s a bit soon, I imagine, but does anyone have something on Soundcloud or YouTube for that?

Lastly, I went back and saved a baby snow leopard.Touching, as in RL, those cats need all the help they can get.

*I paraphrase.

EDIT: Also, love Marjory and Braham’s outfits and the new glider/backpack combo in the gem shop. I simply, however, cannot afford them right now - will they be permanent, or at least, come back regularly?

What is the “Meta Event” in this zone anyway, or is there one at all? I don’t see any progress leading up to to some big boss battle somewhere. Have I just missed it?

An AHA moment. As I was being briefed by the Quaggan farmer, I understood something of the way the story is going.

I’m being placed more-or-less in the same position as Eir Stegalkin. Team leader with alienated team members because of my “mistake.” This is probably the reason Eir was the Destiny’s Edge member chosen to die.

The player is symbolically taking her place and also taking on her burden. With Aurene, I’ll probably have to atone for Glint’s death at some point. This is interesting. I look forward to seeing where it goes.

MissCee.1295:

• The Elixir should be a mastery line similar to Poison Mastery. You should only have to make the Elixir once as part of the story, or as an alternative while completing mastery line. I for one, will not be gathering and making an elixir everyday for the sole purpose to enter a part of the map I have no reason to visit once I have done the story and received mastery insight.

That’s actually a great idea for a mastery. Right now it is map specific, but as we get further into Jormags territory I could see it making a comeback in newer maps.Its also useful, unlike the kodas flames. I still haven’t found a reason to actually use any of those skills unfortunately

This is a formal petition to ANet to change the mastery introduced with LWS3E3 to include the effects of the elixir after you craft it once.

Goatfish.5082:

Rdiculous amount of oozes spawning, and surprise surprise, the last boss almost always takes no damage. and when it does, it instantly heals. seriously……what the hell is wrong with you people? THIS IS NOT FUN. you’re story missions are all the same kitten . tedious, ridiculous, and bugged to hell. god………wake up.

Set up your burst when you see the white circle appears, when Aurene breaks his bar just go full burst. You should only need 1 to kill the boss.

Also, it seems that there is a bug with minions causing its healing to become way too strong, so if you are any class with minions, keep them away from the creature during the fight (hard to do as ranger/mesmer but still doable)

@Ithilwen – Interesting theory. It does make sense, but I still don’t like the way that Braham acted during this episode

This final mission, while not bad, has a few issues. One of the first the scaling, it feels like it was set for a group rather than the individual player-base. Most players will do the personal story steps alone. The story seems to contain mostly veteran and elite mobs. My warrior was fine going through it, though a more squishy class it may create some issues to solo, especially with some of the one shot moves the mobs appear to have.
My biggest issue is with the boss achievements. The fight to get to the boss is long and the boss likes to get stuck upon the rocks at times. The lack of a challenge mote when the achievements are all boss related is VERY annoying. Re-implementing the challenge motes that were used in living world season 2 would be a huge improvement to this encounter. As both achievements are miss-able this feature would be greatly appreciated.
Skippable cut-scenes would be nice to have as well. Having already played through the story; watching the cut-scenes again, when trying to do an achievement, feel like it eats a little of our time without giving us any new information.

The only thing I had a problem with was that I had to cook the elixir twice to get my cold resistance yesterday, and it used 2x the materials. Other than that, everything went fine and I didn’t encounter any other bugs.

I love the map. It can be frustrating to navigate at times, but it is absolutely beautiful. The variety of landscapes built in a frozen world really surprised me, and I spent a lot of time just walking around to look at things. It’s really pretty.

I’ve felt a lot more engaged with the story through Season 3, as well. This chapter was another great one, in my opinion. I’ve been really enjoying the story, and the interactions with Aurene are the perfect, cute break from all of the really serious dragon stuff. I enjoyed the first part of this chapter a lot. I love seeing the way our interactions with Aurene are helping her.

I really don’t have anything negative to say about this chapter aside from the fact that I really just wish it was longer. I understand why it isn’t, and I understand splitting the story into chapters. I just want it all at once xD Otherwise, great job with keeping me engaged, and excellent work on the beautiful map!

The final mission is doable solo with something squishy such as an Ele. I did it with complete berserk gear (1000 vitality, 1000 toughness, results in about 12000 hitpoints), no problem. Was down once, but avoidable after I saw which enemies spawn and how they fight.

What’s not so good is the mechanics of the ice beast. I understand that I must make the ice beast destroy the ice piles by luring it into them, but sometimes all explodes, and sometimes not. I’ve yet to detect what additional thing is necessary to make it actually destroy the pile.

Also not understandable is the 98%-less-damage buff on the ice beast. At the end all piles were destroyed, but the ice beast still had the buff, so I started looking around for something that can remove it. I found nothing, so I started to fight it anyway and prepared for a looooong fight. To my surprise, after the first attacks the buff was suddenly gone and the ice beast was down in a few seconds. But why the buff was suddenly gone escaped my attention. Did I do anything to make it go away, or is it automatically going away after the first attack after destroying all piles? I don’t know.

Please make the mechanics of such fights understandable. It’s the same with the torch events in the new map: something happens, but you don’t see why it happens and what you should do in contrast to what scripted thing will automatically happen and you don’t need to take care about.

^ It’s not the piles, it’s the minions that give it the buff. Once they’re all gone, the buff disappears.

New mastery feedback:

Perhaps it will just take some learning on using it but so far, unlike the Bloodstone Fen gliding combat, it feels like more trouble than it’s worth. This is because you can only use it if you find a source for a torch, and then the torch you are carrying burns out as you use it. Realistic, yes, fun, not as much. Combat gliding automatically happens when you glide, thermal tube use automatically happens when you get to a tube, but the Kodan Fire requires extra steps to use and then replaces your combat bar with skills that a) don’t seem to do much to the mobs and b) vanish after one or two uses.

It might help if one could light a flaming torch using, I don’t know, flint and steel, wherever one happens to be. Though I’m not sure how to manage that in the UI or confine it to particular areas if necessary. Maybe have scattered sticks all over the map, a’la speed and adrenal mushrooms, that one can run into to gain a torch when desired, and have them far more abundant than the limited brazier locations.

Boogiepop Void.6473:

Lakemine.3014:

Black Iris Flowers.3418:

The final fight in Frozen Out is very unclear as to what you’re supposed to do- or maybe it’s just me. I’ve only seen bits of what people have said, are you supposed to have the champion run over the minions? At what point? I ran around with him for five minutes, moving him all over the place and he never seemed to take any damage.

Any advice would be appreciated!

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When you agro him, every about 10s or so, a red arrow will show up under him. The red arrow indicates where he will run, kinda like the charge the Bloomhunger does, just with a red arrow showing where. You want the little adds between him and you, so he runs them over. There are 4 little adds to each ice core. When each of the 4 adds are killed by the ice beat running them down, the core will break and Braham will run over and pick up the scroll and say its the wrong one. Rinse repeat till the last ice core is down, then Braham picks up the last scroll, shoots the fire arrow and removes the 99% reduced damage buff, and then just dps and CC as normal. Watch for the freeze tell, raises his chest a bit and his charge, the red arrow.

Click spoiler for it. Hope that helps.

The fact that this is so hard to figure out without help is a major issue. The game does a horrible job of indicating what to do in that fight. And the tell for the freeze is way too subtle in the craziness that is going on.

Agree that it could be better. I figured out it had something to do with the charging, but I thought I had to make it charge into the ice blocks, not the elementals. This was reinforced by a couple of things:
1- At one point, I saw that one of the three were gone and Braham said “Try another one!” Which made me think I had to get rid of the blocks.
2- When it ran into one of the elementals, I was behind the block. It shattered the elemental and the block shrank at the same time the boss collided with the block.

Aurene section was pretty cool. It does not keep up for the rest of the chapter though. Too many fetch quests that were neither fun nor interesting in Bitterfrost. The last part with Braham and Rox had too many mobs with too much HP pool. They were not hard (I was not downed even once) just tedious.

Surely the weakest of LS3 episodes so far. Hopefully it is not the trend.

It’s not possible to follow any dialog or explaining chat text during the ice beast fight, because all my attention is 100% absorbed with constantly kiting/evading the red fields on the ground.
Either the mechanics are told explicitly in advance, or the fight gets a prelude where you learn what to do without being in danger, so you can turn your attention to what is being explained.

I saw the (real) connections from the elementals to their ice core, but I did not see any connection (virtual) to the ice beast. I thought I had to kill the elementals myself to severe their connection to the ice core, so the ice beast was able to stomp on the core. Now I am told that the ice core explodes by itself, after the ice beast stomps on the elementals. That’s good, but I thought the elementals were going down just as collateral damage when the ice beast stomps on the core.

This is all in all not the best design.

Hi ANet,

The new map is overall good. Here is some feedback…

The art is great, I wish there was more of the forest and that there was some more meaningful things to do there to justify being there more often. A world boss event or chain event would be nice. Please reduce the amount of mobs in the forest, the constant combat and chill condition becomes annoying. The forest is amazing though please make more of it and more reason to be there!

The torch map meta event is sort of disconnected, I don’t really see the purpose or meaning if it succeeds or fails. I like having a map event to do, please give it more meaning and purpose and be more clear about what happens if it succeeds or fails. Is there some reward if we keep all 9 torches lit and kill every champ before it concludes?

I would like more reason to be in the bitter cold as well. I like the concept of having to prepare to go into a dangerous area, but after completing story give me a reason to go back to it.

More relevant instanced content would be great. Since HoT came out and my dungeon guild died I just play solo everywhere and would be nice to have an instanced thing to do in a zone. I liked the GW1 dungeon concepts from EoTN, or something similar to this. If you only want to make new fractals then please do a fractal relating to recent events. A fractal from each of the new maps within a few months of them being released I think would help connect them to the game more than a fractal from LS season 1 that occurred a few years ago. I like playing as small teams so instanced things are good!

I like more serious maps, having one or two entertaining things in the game is ok, but less silly things like the circus in Ember Bay etc is good. Those of us who played the zones in GW1 would probably like for them to sort of feel like they are still related, dangerous areas and not where silly things exist.

I hope this was helpful and constructive feedback please keep up the good work and Happy Thanksgiving!

The last mission in the cave was awful, mostly for the two main reasons below.

1. It’s half an hour of “Kill x waves of x baddies”. Not fun at all.
2. Braham is back to crying and pouting like a little baby, and the commander is all of a suddenly acting haughty as well, and almost like a petulant child that doesn’t get his or her way, but still knows infinitely better tan everyone. Can you just kill off Braham already if you’re going to write him as a three year old?

I understand we can write our opinion,right?.
1.The Commander…..in some way I support Braham idea for fast kill Jormag,however I think our hero should use his/her own brain.Really…..I play only charr and strong,independent warrior listens only one person.Where is our commander form personal story?.I like Taimi and trust her,but our character is a bit boring at this moment.I play only 3-4 months,however even I can see our character was better in first story.They were using brain and tried do something by themselv.Now everyone is thinking,expect PC.Right now we are only fighting without idea.Can it be change?.My idea-Commander will go at his/her own hand much deeper inside enemy territory.It will take long months,but effects can be enough to tell:‘’I know something’‘.Then by herself/himself is discover Jormag or Primordus weak points.I miss for PC independent.Not listen Taimi like god.Stop it.Is it PC or second Kasmeer?.
2.Fights.I don’t get last boss.When it comes to the rest…..even good.
3.Map.Honestly?.I like new map.More events.
4.Story.When we’ll see Logan and Zojja?.What about Rytlock?.I would be happy see Destiny’s Edge once again.I don’t know what think about Dragon Watch.Even if Eir is deacesed,four members can be enough.I know Rytlock was right if going about next step.I do not see future in Dragon Watch case.Marjory is far away,Braham dislikes us.Rytlock in jail(maybe).Only PC with Taimi are members.
Anyway I’m waiting for next episode.

Standing at the Hotsprings heart quaggan, his merchant screen open, my inventory open. Suddenly, I’m being bounced all over the place, downed before I can close the windows and take control, defeated just as I can see my surroundings again. Twenty-ish hard-hitting mobs around me, for the event with the water temperature indicator.

That was just very, very irritating, especially with the lack of waypoints from which to take off for another attempt at shopping at the springs.

Hilarious bear tonic aside, this episode was a miss for me in a lot of ways.

The fights in Bitterfrost aren’t particularly hard, they’re just tremendously annoying. Enemies lack sufficiently different casting animations, so I can’t tell if I’m going to get a little damage or the annoying freeze effect with no stunbreak or stability counter. The aggro comes from really far away, and I can get slapped by that attack at what seems Range 2000.

In a lot of other areas of the experience, there were knockdowns galore, as usual. There are, in fact, other things to do to players besides hard-CC. If there aren’t, it’s the devs’ job to think of them.

Side note, and now all the mushrooms explode. Grand. -_-

The Aurene tests might have been interesting, but they were annoying instead. Unusual mechanics for recovering the faux-people instead of allowing direct healing or reviving, and if one portal gets beat on, the other spits out too many mobs that don’t seem to take aggro for anything but the wounded. Oozes were way too plentiful with far too many “elites,” and Aurene seems to have no impetus to press forward until every. one. of the. minions. is gone. I need a special command for “Go, Aurene! I’ll hold them off!” so the oozes stop coming. Her final fight had way too much time in between being completely ineffective and queuing up the combo attack. Good concept, languishing execution.

Abomination fight wasn’t so bad. Kinda basic, but livable.

Ice beast fight should probably have been a pure solo, no NPCs. It’s hard to gauge if the boss will charge in the right direction or not until it’s too late, and it wastes valuable time if going for the achievement. If anything, it should always, always go after the player for a charge.
I openly resent the mass of ceiling stuns and even moreso the poorly-telegraphed boss freeze, which is, again, another “oops missed that need to start the WHOLE INSTANCE OVER” achievement.

On that note, why haven’t the achievements been properly tuned to account for that? Where’s the humane design that some other episodes have had?

The conveyance just wasn’t there, either. Not to say that players shouldn’t have to puzzle things out from time to time, but there still need to context clues. The mastery points were another “can’t get there from here” set of pathing. I imagine that will get worse as more movement locks/unlocks progress the game.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the meta-event, but it seems the pieces of it are simple enough for in-and-out participation. The hot spring event is overly skewed, showing a large mass of level 81-82 Veteran+ mobs when there are only 5 or 6 people…

I wanted to enjoy the new content, but the keyword for what it brings is annoying instead of fun.

As for Braham, I’m okay with him being a frustrated snot right now. What I expect is for the situation to be handled in true Norn fashion (especially with a Charr commander): Full-on fist fight with a cask of whisky afterward. It’d make my day just to see that via cutscene.

Svanir disguise

Can these pieces be converted after first use to a special skill button that appears when within range?

I do not wish to have to re-farm the disguise or carry it around in inventory.

I enjoyed this release very much.

Okay so I can’t log one of my characters in right now due to a server crash / disconnect completely breaking that character (100% crash to desktop if I try to play that one), but I did get through all the story and I did map completion.

The kodan & quaggan add really interesting lore and I love the gameplay of the map. I also like the grawl village in the cave, the svanir enemies, heck I like all the enemies. I play the underwater area a bit too for fun but there isn’t a lot to do beyond the welcome caches of magic and the ambient enemies. What’s there is still quite fun.

One of the events seem a bit hard to win at, which is where you defend the hot spring for the quaggan bathers and lose every time – a couple of random players can’t seem to counter the extreme aggression of the invaders.

The story missions had a nice difficulty level for my reaper. I got through fine first time, no downs or deaths, but it wasn’t faceroll easy either. Some interesting mechanics that I managed to figure out just by paying attention.

Braham will get a lot of hate for being an obnoxious, self-absorbed headstrong idiot but at this point that seems to be his character. As a norn player myself the one redeeming feature Braham managed to show was tracking down the means to make the flaming bow and crack the tooth – and in norn culture, legendary feats like that will smooth over a lot of personality defects.

I’m liking the map rewards too. I have one last ascended accessory to get to complete my full set and after that I will take a look at those aquabreathers to see if I need something like a viper’s or a trailblazer’s. I can see plenty of other stuff to look at if I want to do more later.

One last point in the transit around the map. Some like lots of waypoints, others like less. The map isn’t huge so I think what’s there is perfect, it’s a beautiful map (congratulations artists for a job well done) and I like running through it, swimming in it and flying above it. Once I can actually play my broken character I will go and enjoy it again.

Cirian.8917:

One of the events seem a bit hard to win at, which is where you defend the hot spring for the quaggan bathers and lose every time – a couple of random players can’t seem to counter the extreme aggression of the invaders.

It doesn’t help if half the players there get ganked and insta-downed by this huge crowd of icebrood they didn’t see coming because they’re shopping at the quaggan.

The updrafts leading to the ley line above need to be easier to jump into…

and I wish there were more ley lines, like in BF and EB.

Dialogs were not as good when compared to the previous episode so it felt lacking.
The event near the hotsprings with all the hotbrood spawns very frequently and is quite annoying since a player gets knockedback/frozen/killed all the time especially if not alot of other players are around. Having to collect the items for the fire elixir multiple times is also quite tedious. On the last mission fighting random mobs of enemies felt underwhelming until you get to the bossfight. All in all the previous two episodes were much better in quality (dialogue and gameplay)

It just occured to me but… that cinematic of Braham shooting the Fang of Jormag would have been a lot funnier if he was shouting “FUS RO DAH!!!” at the time. Also if the arrow had bounced back and struck him in the knee.

Cirian.8917:

Braham will get a lot of hate for being an obnoxious, self-absorbed headstrong idiot but at this point that seems to be his character. As a norn player myself the one redeeming feature Braham managed to show was tracking down the means to make the flaming bow and crack the tooth – and in norn culture, legendary feats like that will smooth over a lot of personality defects.

I agree with your vision, but still, it makes me angry to see his plan described as totally idiotic and my commander being such a spineless idiot when talking to Braham. The Norns have the Spirits of the Wild. Four of them fought Jormag to a standstill, and they weren’t the strongest of the lot, as far as we know. The Pact Commander should be able to rally enough allies to bolster the ranks of the army hunting down Jormag, and convince the Spirits (most of them) to join the fray, which should be more than enough to take down the Dragon. Instead we’ll get more Asura bullkitten to solve the situation, which is really infuriating.

The Norns aren’t dumb brutes, they are supposed to be the most spirituals of the five Races, the ones able to find inspirations in every aspect of the natural world. But beyond the first parts of the PS of a new Norn, you won’t ever see this aspect of their societies, they are always, always, depicted as brute and dumb overgrown humans (and the Icebrood presented as Svanir in this episode were… well, what I expect from Icebrood really, but normal Svanirs aren’t that corrupted usually). And now Braham add insult to injury, because he shatters the myth of the Fang and brazenly goes out of his way to show that doing it the Norn way isn’t the way to do anything. Doing the Asura’s way is always, always, a better option.

My main is a Norn, most of my character are Norns. had I wanted to solve everything like an Asura, I would have made an Asura as a main, but I don’t like those small gremlins, I don’t like their arrogance, and I don’t like their techno-magic bullkitten. I would have been okay with a whole expansion only surrounded by Asuran if it meant hunting down Primordius. But Asurans have been instrumental in Zhaitan’s defeat, in HoT Rata Novus was important (but not essential) and in LS3 they are front and centre even when it comes to Jormag.

This is a very bad message sent by the developers, it is almost as if they are regretting the creation of the Norns (who, as a race, have lost the most named characters since the launch of the game, Orr killed a lot of them, in fact, when there was a character who had to be killed and raised as a Risen, it was almost always a Norn). I don’t like this trend, and no amount of writing by ANet will make me change my stance on it. I don’t want to solve everything with a boring Deus Ex Machina in the form of Asuran tech.

Sometimes, a fight of epic proportion between an Elder Dragon and the Spirits of Wild is the better solution.

Two things:

1. Map feels so much bigger because it has just two waypoints. It pushes the players to explore and do the events.

2. I quite like the ending of this episode and that “real” talk between our character and Braham. Up until now everyone basically agreed with our opinion as a commander. It was so unrealistic. I like it so much that finally the main characters of this story have their own ideas and they are willing to pursue their own goals. Like quaggan

Valmir.4590:

I don’t want to solve everything with a boring Deus Ex Machina in the form of Asuran tech.

Agreed.

Gorgeous map though. Love the design.