Guild Wars 2

I love this little event. Chaos descends on a zone, lots of running around, tons of champions and mobs and loot and XP.

But the overall event always fails. I’ve never seen past the Aetherblades.

I realize this is a holdover from an older LS entry, and most people must consider it old hat. Any chance we could get the timer increased to maybe 60m so we can actually complete it? I’ve tried a half dozen times or so now and we haven’t come close even once..

Supported. I’ve only been to a handful of invasions in the last few months, but each time it’s failed to reach the end because:

1. People are bored of the invasions and no longer bother showing up
2. Those that DO show up are more interested in farming the Aetherblade/Molten mobs for loot than actually completing the events.

This is something I’ve been saying for a while now, that the Scarlet Invasions need to be fixed and adjusted. All the waves need to have the required kills/events to complete to be reduced by 5 to 10%.(instead of say for example needing to kill 10 Aetherblade captains, have to kill 9 instead to advance to the next wave) The Molten Alliance tunnel machines need to be adjusted. In some maps their HP scaling is off the charts high compared to other maps (it takes me 3 to 4 minutes to kill one in Lornars Pass, when Iron Marches it takes me 1 to 2 minutes. That much extra time needed is critical in the invasion.
And the invasion timer NEEDS to be increased by 5 or so minutes. It is very annoying to get to the final wave but still fail, when all you needed was like 3 extra minutes to be able to win. So 50 minutes for the total invasion instead of 45 minutes.

And the other problem I have noticed is the difficulty of getting people to come to the invasions because they don’t even know its happening. All you get is a chat box message, and if you were changing characters, dc’ed, or had just logged in when it popped up (and this has happened to me many times), then you don’t know basically unless a guild member tells you or you use a tracking website for it.
There should be something like when you open up the World Map, a UI indicator will show if an invasion is active, similar to what we had when invasions first came out in Clockwork Chaos, “Scarlet’s Minions are attacking <xxxx map>.” You could even copy that basically to the World map at the top right corner. As it is right now I have to use a tracking website to see if an invasion is active. http://gw2.maximeloizeau.fr/invasions.html

Yep, all that.

This sort of stuff gets under my skin because it’s a perfect example of great content not being fully utilized because it lacks very simple tweaking that a developer could likely accomplish in an hour or two at most. Even just changing the “45” to “60” would help a lot.

Fortunately it’s still a lot of fun and the XP and gear rewards are pretty decent.

Last night we had what should have been a great opportunity, an invasion in Lornar’s Pass (a relatively low level so lots of people could participate) at prime time in the eastern US. We got 1/3 of the way through the aetherblade wave.

It definitely needs to be toned down, or the time limit extended, though I’d prefer just reducing the numbers and leaving the time limit the same, 45 minutes is already pretty long as it is.

It never completes any more. Heck, the in the dozen or so invasions I’ve been in since the actual event, I’ve never even seen one make it to the third wave of minions, so none have even been close to getting completed.

For that matter, I’d like to know why they split the second and third waves up. It used to be that the 2nd and 3rd waves would spawn both Minions and Aetherblades / Molten at the same time. You could work on both at the same time. Now its 1 at a time, gotta finish Wave 2 Aether / Molten before you can face Wave 2 Minions, which seems slower to me (though it could just be less people and bad scaling) and makes it seem like there’s 5 waves, not 3.

Just had it going again, Friday evening, was going faster than usual, figured maybe we had a chance.

Then.. wha? There’s ANOTHER minion phase after the aetherblades? Good grief. We got maybe 40% through that. Presumably there’s even more after that one too.

Really would be nice if they could lower the number of mobs somewhat so there’s at least a reasonable shot of getting ’er done…

The problem isn’t simple to fix. Events are not scaling properly in terms of challenge and reward. With more players the time taken and risk go down but the rewards go up. Game play usually gets worse with large numbers of players too . Since the event system is at the core of PvE it is a pretty serious problem that will undermine all attempts to make new event based content while it continues.

Qaelyn,

Originally the event was based around 3 waves of minions. When you killed the first wave, the second wave would start and in addition to that wave you would either have to kill the Aetherblades or the Molten.

Then, assuming the Aetherblade/molten wave was defeated, when the third wave of minions started, the other faction (aether or molten) would pop up.

You had to destroy all 5 waves within the time limit, and if you did so, Scarlet spawns somewhere on the map and you had to defeat her too (within a 5 minute timer if I recall correctly).

Now, everything is separate so instead of 5 overlapping waves (3 minions, 1 aether, 1 molten) there are 5 chained waves in a set order, plus Scarlet of course (who drops a chest on defeat). All of which now has to be done within the timer (as far as I know that includes the fight with scarlet too).

Make sure that if you defeat the 5th wave (3rd wave of minions) that you are ready to map travel to wherever scarlet pops up.

Kaz.5430:

Qaelyn,

Originally the event was based around 3 waves of minions. When you killed the first wave, the second wave would start and in addition to that wave you would either have to kill the Aetherblades or the Molten.

Then, assuming the Aetherblade/molten wave was defeated, when the third wave of minions started, the other faction (aether or molten) would pop up.

You had to destroy all 5 waves within the time limit, and if you did so, Scarlet spawns somewhere on the map and you had to defeat her too (within a 5 minute timer if I recall correctly).

Now, everything is separate so instead of 5 overlapping waves (3 minions, 1 aether, 1 molten) there are 5 chained waves in a set order, plus Scarlet of course (who drops a chest on defeat). All of which now has to be done within the timer (as far as I know that includes the fight with scarlet too).

Make sure that if you defeat the 5th wave (3rd wave of minions) that you are ready to map travel to wherever scarlet pops up.

The main problem is that you don’t get to Scarlet anymore. The waves take too long and require you to have an almost full map of players, which also doesn’t happen anymore, at least for NA servers. From my guesting to various servers, the only servers that seem have to have a usually medium to high-ish active participation in the invasions are Tarnished Coast and Jade Quarry, so I usually guest to there.
Out of doing many invasions over the past 2 months, since clockwork chaos ended and the waves were split up into 5 waves, I have only ever been in an invasion that got to Scarlet maybe 2 or 3 times. And none of those times did we take her down, as we got to that stage with under 1 minute left.

Seriously Anet, I’m asking you to please look at this stuff and see what can be done about it to make it better. Have your in-game developer players join the invasions and observe. From my observations one of the core problems is that the first wave (the first Twisted Minion wave) takes far too long to complete. Usually this wave is finished with the timer at the 33 to 30 minute mark. That is far too long. Doing the math, 45 minutes divided by 5 waves means you have 9 minutes per wave, and that’s not even considering time for Scarlet after the 5 waves. And considering that the majority of the players don’t show up in the first 5 or more minutes of the invasion, that hurts the invasion progress also, as the progress does not pick up speed until those players arrive and join the battles.

As many players have posted before, there are many different ways Anet that you can change/fix the Scarlet Invasions.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/lwd/Suggestion-Improving-Scarlet-s-Invasions
Add 5 more minutes to the invasion timer, reducing the invasion progress needed for each wave (less kills needed for Twisted Minion waves, less events needed done for molten alliance/Aetherblade waves), boost the finishing rewards, and so on. Many of these changes are super easy to do. I am still studying programing in collage right now and could make these changes in 10 minutes for free, as all I’m doing is changing a few numbers. :/

There has been no changes to the Scarlet Invasions for the past 2 months. Look at your data and you will see the number of times invasions have been won/completed. I had really held up hope that the Nightmares Within update would have fixes to the invasions, but sadly there was not any.

Appreciate the explanations. I understand what’s going on. It seems like it would be easy for them to adjust this. Would be nice if someone from Anet would weigh in on this as it seems a shame that new players never get to finish it.

I was just in one where we only had the first wave down 30% after 10 minutes. When it’s going that slow everyone just gives up (as I did). There’s no way to achieve the necessary critical mass any more even at peak times.

Old content needs to be adjusted to reflect reduced interest.