Showing Posts For Roggle.2901:
Overall, I don’t think the mastery point is that bad. Once I memorized his movement pattern it was much easier to get the food to the right place each time. The latency making aiming difficult and the Chef’s frequent movement does get frustrating, but I like the tight time limit — makes it a bit of a challenge.
That said, there are a couple QoL improvements I would like to see with that mastery point, especially since most people will have to make several (or many) attempts at it:
1. Shorten the pre-minigame dialogue for attempts past the first. Maybe add in another dialogue option to the pot for subsequent attempts that lets you go right to the minigame without the same explanation every time. The repetitive instructions at the start of each attempt were my least favorite thing about it.
2. Spread out some of the food items. This is mainly directed at the “clusters” of food items near the ovens where it’s possible to be within interaction range of two or three at the same time. I had a few attempts where I felt like I was standing right in front of the item I needed, grabbed the wrong one, and didn’t realize it until I threw it and the chef told me I was an idiot (or something along those lines). With the tight time limit, that’s almost enough to guarantee a failed attempt. Alternatively…
3. Make it clearer which food item we’re holding. If there was some way to identify the item we’re holding, we could see when we grab the wrong one and correct it more quickly than running and throwing the wrong item, and then having to run back.
I feel like with these minor improvements, a lot of the frustration could be reduced with the minigame while preserving the challenge.
Thought I’d tack my impressions in here as well.
I spent most of my time in the beta testing the Reaper and working through as many of the events in Verdant Brink as possible so that’s where most of my thoughts are going to be focused.
For the Reaper, as some others have already mentioned, the greatsword skills feel a little clunky due to their longer cast times. It felt strange to want to run into a pack of mobs (like those vicious Pocket Raptors) and then have to wait for attacks to go off. I remedied this largely by pre-casting shouts (more on them in a bit) as I started to approach mobs so they would go off as I reached the pack, but I think the spec would be served pretty well by having at least one greatsword attack (maybe #2?) with a lower cast time so the weapon feels like it can stand on its own without relying on specific utility choices. I think that would also make the slow #1 combo feel better if there was one other quicker attack to weave in between.
Reaper’s Shroud, by contrast, was a lot of fun to play in. The attacks felt much more responsive, the visuals were amazing, and I didn’t even care when I accidentally charged off a cliff in shroud. Twice. As time went on I started to lean more toward a playstyle where I would do most of my actual fighting in shroud and only using my base form for initiation and shouts in between shroud sessions.
Speaking of the shouts, they felt pretty much spot on. I love the different options they give for dealing with packs of mobs, whether through more damage or CC that synergizes really well with certain trait choices. As much fun as I had in shroud, the shouts were my favorite part of the spec. They felt impactful and presented tactical decisions that felt meaningful rather than just spamming them all.
As for Verdant Brink itself and the initial masteries, I love the complex layout of the zone (and this is only the first layer!) that really makes you feel the need to explore and figure out the lay of the land before really digging in. I’m eager to see a more complete version of the night cycle on the map to see just how much it changes things overall. Also when all the events were running, pacing felt good for gaining exp to train the initial gliding mastery.
Speaking of, I may or may not have spent 10-15 minutes after I trained that mastery just jumping off a cliff, gliding around to the bottom of the hill up to the cliff, then repeating. If it wasn’t for my friend wanting to move on, I probably could have spent even longer doing so. So much fun, I can’t wait to train the rest.
As one last thing, the difference in dialogue between Sylvari player characters and non-Sylvari player characters is a really nice touch that I was hoping for and am really glad to see.
All in all, great stuff so far, I’m looking forward to the next event!
(edited by Roggle.2901)
I actually don’t think the time would be nearly as much of an issue if there was:
a) More than 3 minutes notice in advance of a new build in the open world
b) No system that insta-logs you to update immediately upon zone change
Considering new builds reset all temple progress it is extremely frustrating to lose all that progress just because you happen to be in a different zone than, say, the Temple of Balthazar, at the time the build notice pops up.
First, let me begin by saying I did very much enjoy the event as a whole, particularly phase 3. There were some issues with lag and disconnects, but the event overall was good fun, even if I did spend a good portion of it raging about being one-shot by an enemy I couldn’t see. That said, here are some suggestions from my end regarding similar future events:
1. Break up long events into more numerous, shorter parts. By far the worst parts of the phase 3 event chain were the reinforcements phases of the Ancient Karka fight. They just dragged on forever and with how long each of the Veteran mobs took to die because of scaling and lack of rendering, it became an exercise in tedium. This portion would have been made much better if only normal Young Karka could spawn (die quickly) and only a few of the larger vets and champs throughout. Another alternative would have been to have the Ancient Karka move to different points within each area and spawn a wave at each of them so that at least players could move from point to point rather than staying in one place for upwards of 30 minutes at a time fighting one or two mobs at a time.
2. Make for multiple ways to progress events. This philosophy taken from the way many renown hearts are handled serves multiple purposes. First, it allows players to choose the way in which they want to assist with the progression of the event. That way, if there’s one event that sounds more interesting than another (Don’t like escorts? Defend the cannons!) players can choose which event they want to participate in. Second, it breaks up the massive mob of players that caused many of the gameplay difficulties throughout the event. Smaller groups of people means that the rendering cap is less likely to be a problem and each individual player or 5-man party is more likely to actually get credit for monster kills and thus a shot at loot drops. It does require a bit of communication between players in map chat to make sure all the events are properly manned, but I think that level of complexity would by and large be a welcome one.
I feel as though implementing these two design philosophies for a multi-hour event such as the Ancient Karka would greatly improve the overall quality of the event and make for an even more epic experience than this event already was.