Disappointed.
Sure, the event as a whole was decent enough fun, it felt weaker than any event in GW1 though. And honestly, I feel like besides the hour or two it took for me to earn the memoir book, I should of just been playing GW1’s Halloween event instead of GW2.
The Halloween Rewards should of been earn-able through actual work, not dumb blind luck. For a game that touted pushing envelopes a little in terms of its design, it actually feels like it is falling further back onto the stereotypical “Asian F2P Grindhouse” style of RMT-dependent celebrations and legendaries that are only legendary in grind (I’ll not touch on my issues with legendaries here, suffice to say though that World of Warcraft does a far and above better job in handling their legendary items, specifically ones like Fangs of the Father or older ones such as Thunderfury or even the epic hunter bow or priest staff in Vanilla WoW).
I’d say drop the idea of the bloody lotto chests first of all. You want to sell costumes? Cosmetic flair? Fine. Yet don’t lock it all behind some cash shop bait like the black lion chests. I’ve been iffy on these things as it is, and the Holiday implementation associated with them has just completely soured it as a whole. I hate how STO puts all the new fancy ships and everything behind their lock boxes, or how Champions does the same with its costume pieces and such, I don’t want to see it spreading personally.
On that matter of skins and black lion chests, was there any significant reason why it seems like of the melee weapons, the greatsword got the most attention? The scythe and 1-handed sword look okay, yet didn’t receive nearly as much work as the greatsword did, like the additional bits of animation and sound effects, not to mention intricate detail.
A return to the token system (like in GW1) would be much more player friendly. And if you do want to lock the skins behind a paywall, then for the love of god just let people buy them off the shop. You’ll catch more flies with honey than what some might call a bait and switch, and if it is so important you can easily restrict the cash-shop bought skins to be account bound.
Otherwise? Besides wishing that the mad king’s armor wasn’t apparently just a copy-paste of an already existing armor set, or that the Ascent to Madness was still available via an NPC asking if we’d like to witness the King’s triumphant and brilliant loss or something similar? Decent enough. It has failed to motivate me to actually log in though, and the whole debacle with the Black Lion chests has turned me off from ever paying to open them. I’d rather sell them at a great loss on the auction house now if it means getting them out of my inventory.
Also, maybe add some mini pets that are also not locked behind the paywall perhaps? Specially if you are forced to buy them twice in order just to get one more pet?