Guild Wars 2

I’ll second (third?) the sentiment that the ‘defeat the reinforcements’ parts were far too long and tedious. They dragged on far too long and were tedious as anything. Several people I was playing with during the event actually logged of out of boredom during the second of those fights.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if that part was only run once, not repeated, and/or if the fights were closer to 10 minutes than 30.

The rest of the battle was all right, though lag in the hive was a pain. If anything, I felt like the final phase actually taking down the Ancient Karka directly was anticlimactic.

Everyone in Lion’s Arch caught crabs at the same time (though you’d figure aphids would be a bigger problem for the Sylvari). The public health implications are going to be huge and far-reaching. There will probably be informational pamphlets being handed out all over the place.

The payoff from the final chest was the best I’ve seen from any chest in the game (three exotics, a rare, and the Ancient Chest that turned into a 20-slot bag and exotic back item).

Beyond that, the event was equal parts boredom and frustration right up until the final battle (which was an incredibly anticlimactic ordeal). The opening part planting charges was an exercise in death by invisible mobs, or one-shots by mobs that spawned right on top of you. The middle portion had some different parts to it, using the environment to help you, but the interludes killing reinforcements were way too long and tedious. I know they didn’t want the thing to end too soon, but it just turned into a really dull slog.

I’d have to agree with Siliconmana here. Something really seems off with the drops. It was clearly bugged when they first implemented the new loot scaling, as I remember farming small scales and weak blood in Queensdale when it went live and just about every scale and drake I killed dropped level 80 green and yellow items.

The new zone… I have not got one single drop from veterans or champions at all since it went live. And I know it wasn’t from lack of doing sufficient damage to the mobs to ‘tag’ it, as I took on a handful of veteran karkas with just two guild-mates once things calmed down later in the evening. None of us got any drops from these guys, and only one (probably whoever got the killshot) actually got experience for the kill even though we were all attacking from 100-0 (for both the armor and squishy phases). Something really seems off, and as far as risk/reward goes… It is unquestionably skewed way over to the ‘risk’ side to the point that I don’t feel much need to waste time and repair bills there until/unless something changes.

White Raven.4368:

We were happily fighting that Reef Drake champ when 8 standard Reef Drakes piled in on our flank.Considering there were only 5 of us,we did not stand a chance.

Do not know if that was supposed to happen or we just lucked out.

Had the same thing happen to me in a group fighting the Broodmother. We got her to maybe 30% health and then got zerged by a group of 6 regular drakes, all pulled into a pile and AOE’d to death almost instantly.

The drakes really are a little over the top. If they didn’t seem to be able to spam that confusion attack so fast they might be a little more reasonable. Even running as much condition removal as possible (and blowing one or two of their confusion attacks on pets/minions) it’s still not enough and you wind up with 6-8 stacks on you. I’ve given up on them entirely.

Had a similar problem the other night in the Asura Golummancer fractal. We got to the top of the electrified stairs and moved in to take on Old Tom (of whatever that sub-boss’s name was) in the poison/fan room. The guy we had working the fan control was pulled by the boss and we wiped, except for one guy who had gone AFK just before we started the fight and was standing outside the room, unhurt.

We were all stuck, dead on the floor, just hoping that this guy would come back and/or DC so we might have a chance to move on without quitting the whole run. I could imagine griefers deliberately doing something like this, just because they can. Something should really be done about that.

It’s an interesting combination of ‘stuff’ but really a mixed bag. The Jellyfish really was just a ridiculous spamfest with a boss with way too much health and not enough real sense of danger or strategy needed besides swim in circles and click skills.

The Dredge fractal ending with the Legendary Rampaging Ice Elemental broke our team’s spirits though. That fight was either bugged or just foolishly difficult. It’s one thing if you can only hurt him when he’s dripping with hot oil, but to have him fully regen as soon as he cools was a bit of a kick in the boys. Particularly when he would tend to stop and sit down for a while during the fight (giving just enough time for the superheated thing to wear off). Despite our best efforts we couldn’t dent him and gave up after 20+ minutes of total futility.

Been getting the same thing all morning. Followed by a black text box saying the client was unable to access the log-in server.

The last time I saw something like this was right around the time the game went from ‘3-day head start’ to ‘live’, so hopefully it is just an influx of players from the free weekend and people downloading the game updates.

I have had this happen to me on a few skill challenges. The challenger went agro before I spoke to them, and I can confirm that I got the skill point but the map didn’t update to reflect it (in one case it was the last piece I needed for 100% completion, which I didn’t get at that time).

I mapped out of the zone and back in and immediately got the skill challenge to update properly and got my 100%. I was able to fight the skill mob again (he went hostile again without me talking to him) but did not get a second skill point, so in my experience anyway it was just a bug, not an exploit.

I can confirm this. Was there from the start of the crystal pre-events. Just after the crystal closest to Earthshake Waypoint was destroyed the other remaining crystals ‘died’. The final crystal appeared, lost 90% of it’s life in seconds, then vanished and the Claw part of the event started.

The Claw started in ‘stunned’ mode, rather than raising the ice wall. The nextcycle of wall-stunned dragon went as normal, but the second time the dragon dropped 90+% of it’s health and started the final phase of the battle. It landed, regenerated health back to ~50% but died out of nowhere within 5 minutes. During this entire time the corrupted elementals and icebrood creatures were also going from full health to near death after a single hit, even the veterans and champions.

Also unusual, the Ice Worms that usually occupy that area repopulated almost immediately after the dragon was slain, before people even finished looting the event chest. There was also not an event completion notice after the Claw died. It did count towards daily event completion however.

For what it’s worth, the event also seemed to have started about an hour and a half before it should have based on the last event before it.

I do miss the GW1 necromancer MM builds and mechanics, but I suppose with shared, persistent explorable areas instead of individual instances they’d have had problems with not enough corpses to go around for all the necros that may be in zone at the same time (especially if they added/will add some of the old corpse-exploiting skills from the first game).

It would be nice to build a slightly larger minion army, or at least more than one of each type active at once. It’s nice that they’re still more-or-less modeled after living creatures. The worm is an undead worm, blood fiend is an undead breeze rider, bone minions are sewer rats, bone fiends are devourers, shadow fiends are shades (can you have an undead shade?). The only one that isn’t clearly modeled after a Tyrian animal is the flesh golem, which still looks like the bony abomination he was in GW1.

Now if he would just stop aggroing everything on the map…

It would be great if we could at the very least get the fleshy to stop Leeroying everything in sight. It’s generally more of a minor inconvenience while trying to get to events as his combat slows me down and occasionally drags a few ads to already hectic event battles, but he has killed me chasing down champion mobs a couple times.

I understand they don’t want to overpower MM builds, but it doesn’t seem to be asking so much to have a basic attack/retreat option attached to the minions.