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Champions episode is lackluster at best.


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@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:Neither I nor anyone has said they had to release a strike mission with every single chapter.It seemed that it was inferred by the complaint that "yet another chapter" did not have a strike mission.

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:

  1. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga.

This is why I questioned it several posts back. I didn't understand the expectation and disappointment when it was never said that a strike mission would be released with every chapter. Perhaps I read too much into your complaint. If so, then sorry for the confusion.

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@kharmin.7683 said:

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:Neither I nor anyone has said they had to release a strike mission with every single chapter.It seemed that it was inferred by the complaint that "yet another chapter" did not have a strike mission.

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:
  1. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga.

This is why I questioned it several posts back. I didn't understand the expectation and disappointment when it was never said that a strike mission would be released with every chapter. Perhaps I read too much into your complaint. If so, then sorry for the confusion.

Perhaps if I rephrase, it might clear things up.

"Yet another chapter" equates to me saying "here we go again; another two more months without content I would actually enjoy playing in my favorite game. " Keep in mind that Whisper of Jormag is the last thing that was released that even resembles a raid, and it's release date was January 28th. So what you're seeing in my words is a general frustration in them going away from that sort of content over the past 10 months. Sure a majority of people don't like raids, but that doesn't mean that us minorities should be dismissed. I know I'm not alone in saying it's my favorite part of the game and shouldn't be just flat out ignored for over a year and a half now.

I feel even worse for the WvW and PvP players who are desperately in need of something to sink their teeth into, even more so than raiders. They only got legendary trinkets and a warclaw mount. Not much.

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@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:

  1. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga.They might have realized this simply doesn't work. Strikes, for the most part, were drawing the very same crowd that was raiding earlier, and i doubt they eased into raiding enough of players that wouldn't have raided otherwise for it to matter.

@radda.8920 said:And why arena could not satisfy several types of players, the raiders AND the casuals players?Because they didn't have enough resources for that, and trying just made everyone unsatisfied.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:
  1. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga.They might have realized this simply doesn't work. Strikes, for the most part, were drawing the very same crowd that was raiding earlier, and i doubt they eased into raiding enough of players that wouldn't have raided otherwise for it to matter.

@radda.8920 said:And why arena could not satisfy several types of players, the raiders AND the casuals players?Because they didn't have enough resources for that, and trying just made everyone unsatisfied.

they didn't make anyone happy with this update. They didn't try to make HM content and yet even the casuals find this new chapter completely bad

Same, with drizzlewood coast, it was pure casual content. spam 1 zerg kikoo to destroy doors and ridiculous champions ... and yet the majority of players hates this update as well.The problem with arena isn't that they try to keep everyone happy,but they don't make an effort to create innovative and interesting things.I hope they will prove me wrong with cantha because this saga was an abomination for almost every types of players

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@radda.8920 said:

@"Svennis.3852" said:

The writing was great

it's so funny, you're a hell of a joker

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:I know you guys are all gung ho about End of Dragons, but this has to be the worst content release since I've been back to the game. Lets go through the worst points I've experienced.
  1. ONE STORY INSTANCE. that's it? Just one? Disappointing.
  2. No new map to explore? Even more disappointment.
  3. Dragon Response Missions are not only buggy, but lackluster content at best.a. You have to be in the same EotN instance as all your party members in order to join the same instance of the DRM.b. I did the CMs with a pick up group of people without so much as a healer or any boons and completed it with over half the time still on the clock. CM still stands for "challenge mode" right? As in something that requires coordination and skill?
  4. New set of Stormcaller weapons that are only luck based drops attached to yet another high AP achievement. (Current TP price 400g ea.)
  5. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga.

Bottom line: Casual players rejoice while raiders continue to cry. (Reminder: Last raid released 17 months ago now.)

I'll leave you guys with this quote and I do hope you all have a great day regardless of my complaints about the design direction.

A partially cooked poached egg needs to be put back in the oven, not given up on entirely.-Mighty Teapot

Guild wars 2 was or should never be about raid. Its was an experiment the major part of the community does not give a f. about raid. Stop whinning and move on, there are plenty of other mmo focus on raiding.

It's so arrogant to say that.And why arena could not satisfy several types of players, the raiders AND the casuals players?

Casus have 99% of the game made for them so I don't see the hassle of creating HM content sometimesFor example for the next extension (cantha), they can create lots of maps for casuals players and 2 raids for hm players (urgoz and the abyss like during gw1 faction) ..

Yeah sorry it was kind if arrogant, was in a bad mood when I write this, nothing personal, again sorry. But I do think, that raiding will join the dungeon club in the long run, they are kind of expensif to make, if my memory serve me well a dev speak about it during season 4. And seeing the already thin content release, spreading it more would just hurt the game bottom. Sadly I do think raider are not where the money is. And for personal opinion instance content does not belong in a mmo. But thats my taste.

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@Obfuscate.6430 said:I kind of liked it. I liked that it drew people back to older content.

Same here.The way how they butcher new maps made me appreciate the old maps. Not every place needs a meta or a warzone.I also got a nice GW1 feeling with the destroyers rising up.Only thing i would change is more story and the way how the story is presented.Having those conversation in the background while being busy fighting makes me lose the story feeling

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I personally don't think Champions so far is BAD... I liked the story and NPC interactions you get in them. (But read further...) But I feel that the combination of "short content" + "tedious grind" was a very poor choice. On their own, the DRMs are short and easy enough that they're useful "jump in with 4 PUGs and go" content for when you have 15 mins to kill in between other stuff. The problem is that you need to grind them repeatedly to get the currencies you need for skins, collections and AP, and so this "short and sweet" content will wear out its welcome VERY quickly. That endearing NPC chatter I mentioned earlier? It won't be so pleasant the 10th, 20th or 40th time you do it, which is what you'll have to do if you want to complete the Dragon Slayer weapons.

To make matters worse, the rewards for the DRMs are fairly lackluster. The only really worthwhile thing of value from them are the Volcanic weapons, and they're fairly rare/locked behind RNG. (This could be partially corrected by allowing players to buy the Volcanic boxes for currency + mats though. It would also give more value to Tyrian Seals/faction tokens.)

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I could pug Urgoz and UW. Doesn't seem like people pug raids.
To many, raids are content that they will never play.Making raids a weekly thing is also troublesome for those who have jobs, kids etc. Hard to schedule with people's lives.I have no issues with raids at all but it doesn't seem like strikes or the dragon missions are leading up to raids at all.

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@"Teratus.2859" said:Much like dungeons there is a lot of waiting around for characters to talk

There is - at a MINIMUM - 10 minutes of unbridled exposition IMMEDIATELY when starting this story. I listened to it the first time around, second time I was so bored I timed it. 10 minutes of exposition starting a new story. About 5 minutes in HoM, about 3 minutes in Rata Sum, and then another few minutes in the instance before you even get to actually do anything.

I thought I hated it when I reached the steps in the previous ~4 stories where it's just "run around the map, kill things and do events to pad time because we can't be bothered to come out with meaningful story content to fill in here". At this point I'd take that over the mind-numbingly mundane drivel that I have to listen to every time I replay the story on an alt. At least I can actually work towards moving forward instead of the game telling me "no you can't play the instance now, listen to these guys bickering first".

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@"Galmac.4680" said:You tell us that Dragon Missions are NOT Strike Missions?????

For all intents and purposes they are. "Dragon Response Missions" are the same as "Strike Missions". Just like the "Icebrood Saga" is the same as a "Living Story". A new name just makes it seem newer and shinier than the rest.

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@Stormcrow.7513 said:I could pug Urgoz and UW. Doesn't seem like people pug raids.

To many, raids are content that they will never play.Making raids a weekly thing is also troublesome for those who have jobs, kids etc. Hard to schedule with people's lives.I have no issues with raids at all but it doesn't seem like strikes or the dragon missions are leading up to raids at all.

Raids are a weekly thing for literally every raider already. Most of us have static groups that clear the raids in a 3-4 hour period and then are reward capped for the week. The problem for us, is that the rewards are weekly locked instead of daily locked. If there was a way to repeat raids for a daily reward, that might be something that could definitely help our community a lot in terms of pugging. You'd have a lot more interest in jumping into raids every single day if there was a daily raid boss for extra loot beyond the weekly cap like how there is for strikes.

As for strikes not leading up to raids, they were before forging steel and cold war came into existence. You needed to have specific group comps for Whisper and Boneskinner to get gold credit and they each also had mechanics that needed to be handled. I've said it before so I'll sound like a broken record, but the next logical step of strikes was to have one that was tougher than Whisper that required someone to tank it in some way. Make it hit a bit harder so toughness and blocking/healing are needed to survive. Also, I know quite a few players who do strikes daily but don't feel they are ready for raids. Strikes were in fact getting players to look at things like boon uptime and skill rotations. Strikes also are not as restrictive as have been claimed here on the forums. Yes, there are groups of ppl that want quick kills that require KP from raids, but there are also people out there helping teach newer players how to do the content well.

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@Makuragee.3058 said:

@"Svennis.3852" said:

The writing was great

it's so funny, you're a hell of a joker

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:I know you guys are all gung ho about End of Dragons, but this has to be the worst content release since I've been back to the game. Lets go through the worst points I've experienced.
  1. ONE STORY INSTANCE. that's it? Just one? Disappointing.
  2. No new map to explore? Even more disappointment.
  3. Dragon Response Missions are not only buggy, but lackluster content at best.a. You have to be in the same EotN instance as all your party members in order to join the same instance of the DRM.b. I did the CMs with a pick up group of people without so much as a healer or any boons and completed it with over half the time still on the clock. CM still stands for "challenge mode" right? As in something that requires coordination and skill?
  4. New set of Stormcaller weapons that are only luck based drops attached to yet another high AP achievement. (Current TP price 400g ea.)
  5. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga.

Bottom line: Casual players rejoice while raiders continue to cry. (Reminder: Last raid released 17 months ago now.)

I'll leave you guys with this quote and I do hope you all have a great day regardless of my complaints about the design direction.

A partially cooked poached egg needs to be put back in the oven, not given up on entirely.-Mighty Teapot

Guild wars 2 was or should never be about raid. Its was an experiment the major part of the community does not give a f. about raid. Stop whinning and move on, there are plenty of other mmo focus on raiding.

It's so arrogant to say that.And why arena could not satisfy several types of players, the raiders AND the casuals players?

Casus have 99% of the game made for them so I don't see the hassle of creating HM content sometimesFor example for the next extension (cantha), they can create lots of maps for casuals players and 2 raids for hm players (urgoz and the abyss like during gw1 faction) ..

Yeah sorry it was kind if arrogant, was in a bad mood when I write this, nothing personal, again sorry. But I do think, that raiding will join the dungeon club in the long run, they are kind of expensif to make, if my memory serve me well a dev speak about it during season 4. And seeing the already thin content release, spreading it more would just hurt the game bottom. Sadly I do think raider are not where the money is. And for personal opinion instance content does not belong in a mmo. But thats my taste.

Well considering easy mode is so easy to make according to those wanting it all over the forum.

It should be the same level of effort to turn some of this easy content we get 99% of the time into new raid content just slap on some more mechanics and more preasure what could go wrong.

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@Kurrilino.2706 said:

@Obfuscate.6430 said:I kind of liked it. I liked that it drew people back to older content.

Same here.The way how they butcher new maps made me appreciate the old maps. Not every place needs a meta or a warzone.I also got a nice GW1 feeling with the destroyers rising up.Only thing i would change is more story and the way how the story is presented.Having those conversation in the background while being busy fighting makes me lose the story feeling

Yea were are all the vine touched/death destroyers from season 3.Why are there no new destroyers that are vine touched/death& branded now after kralk released its magic?

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@Linken.6345 said:

@Obfuscate.6430 said:I kind of liked it. I liked that it drew people back to older content.

Same here.The way how they butcher new maps made me appreciate the old maps. Not every place needs a meta or a warzone.I also got a nice GW1 feeling with the destroyers rising up.Only thing i would change is more story and the way how the story is presented.Having those conversation in the background while being busy fighting makes me lose the story feeling

Yea were are all the vine touched/death destroyers from season 3.Why are there no new destroyers that are vine touched/death& branded now after kralk released its magic?There was an NPC who mentioned this IIRC, so it's a plot point apparently. Stay tuned, I guess.
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@radda.8920 said:they didn't make anyone happy with this update. They didn't try to make HM content and yet even the casuals find this new chapter completely badSo? Do you really think that with this amount of resources they would have been able to do even one good raid wing?

The problem with arena isn't that they try to keep everyone happy,but they don't make an effort to create innovative and interesting things.It's actually (as always) way more complicated.

  • they try to make everyone happy
  • they seem to not quite understand what would make players happy
  • they constantly try to create new and innovative (or sometimes just new) approaches to old problems
  • since they experiment, they often get it wrong
  • they don't have resources to make new types of content while keeping old and working content up to par, so they end up constantly abandoning old stuff
  • they don't have the resources to satisfy all the target groups they try to reach
  • (and, finally) they just don't have any unified vision for the game
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@Kondor.2904 said:

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:
  1. Yet another chapter of living story released without a strike mission that prepares players for raids. I thought the goal was to give people a clear path to raiding content? That is what you claimed back at the beginning of the Icebrood Saga.I don't believe that this was ever stated as a goal. Do you have a quote somewhere?

Here

@Fire Attunement.9835 said:Hey everybody, my name is Andrew Gray. I took over as Content Design Lead a few months back and I want to talk a bit about last year, this year, and what's on the horizon for
Guild Wars 2
.
  • Our intention was for Strike Missions to be that intermediary step into 10-person content. As we've mentioned before and you've likely noticed, strike missions are getting harder. Once a full suite of strike missions is complete there should be a graceful ramp up to the existing raid content rather than the imposing leap that previously existed, and our hope is once that ramp is in place, the number of players participating in raids will go up. In addition to that, we're striving to make improvements to Strike Missions themselves to make grouping easier, and to improve the rewards. We hope this will help introduce more people to 10-person content, which will in turn increase the number of people interested in Raids.

There is almost no logic to justify those claims. The correlation just isn't strong enough. Its like saying...if I wash my car windows I might wash my car? Ehhhhh....K.

A true logical ramp for Strike Missions to raids would be to pair a strike mission to a raid boss. For that boss, introduce a few mechanics that would be in the raid i.e. for Vale Guardian have the Ice Construct do similar things (ice pylons or something). There, we literally just trained for the raid boss so when we actually do a training run or group up with raiders we hit the ground running. The current strike missions don't fully work out because on a few of them you can just ignore the mechanics and heal through it all.

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@Delita Silverburg.8632 said:The truth is, Anet starts working on some great content, then at the first sign of dislike from the player base, they give up and do something completely different.

Yes, this is a common pattern that can be seen over the years with a lot of things in GW2.

We didn't ask them to abandon Strikes completely, but rather to double down on them and add more mechanics to make them more raid like.

Strikes were introduced as a stepping-stone to raids, to get more new players into raiding. I think that failed. And I also think it was/is a failure how Anet tried to push/force players, that do not like this kind of content, into Strikes.

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I also felt let down at first but now I realized I got more time to catch up to the stuff I didn't do earlier due to break. Happily enough, other metas' population was not disturbed by new content so in the end it is kinda a win for me.Also, I realized that us being mean towards ANet won't solve anything because the past has proven so. Let's not talk people who work at ANet down, we don't know how things really are inside and what decides on what content gets released and in what form. Critique? Yes. Straight up flamin' their asses? No.

You just gotta look for positives, man.

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@Miss Lana.5276 said:

@"Teratus.2859" said:Much like dungeons there is a lot of waiting around for characters to talk

There is - at a MINIMUM - 10 minutes of unbridled exposition IMMEDIATELY when starting this story. I listened to it the first time around, second time I was so bored I timed it. 10 minutes of exposition starting a new story. About 5 minutes in HoM, about 3 minutes in Rata Sum, and then another few minutes in the instance before you even get to actually
do
anything.

I thought I hated it when I reached the steps in the previous ~4 stories where it's just "run around the map, kill things and do events to pad time because we can't be bothered to come out with meaningful story content to fill in here". At this point I'd take that over the mind-numbingly mundane drivel that I have to listen to every time I replay the story on an alt. At least I can actually work towards moving forward instead of the game telling me "no you can't play the instance now, listen to these guys bickering first".

Yep.. it seriously upsets the replayability factor doesn't it.I like story, happy to listen to it over and over when running alts through stuff but if it's some kind of dungeon or mission or raid or strike that is supposed to be something you can farm or rush through for the actual content then having a lot of dialogue in there that you have to wait around for becomes severely annoying.

This is actually the main reason I think Anet was right to separate the bulk of the Dungeon Story's into a specified Story modes while the explorable paths are much more designed for quickly running though.. most of the time anyway.We needed something similar for these Dragon missions, there's just too much dialogue on repeat runs which really drags them out..Again though I like story, it's what I play this game for mostly xD but too much in repeatable content like this is going to annoy a lot of people.You can at least get the single player experience by going in a solo private room which is nice but the dialogue is an issue in the group stuff.

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@Zok.4956 said:

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:The truth is, Anet starts working on some great content, then at the first sign of dislike from the player base, they give up and do something completely different.

Yes, this is a common pattern that can be seen over the years with a lot of things in GW2.Actually, I'm pretty sure that Anet has the internal metrics and knows what content players are actually playing. It may not be a "dislike" of content, but rather content that is preferred or more rewarding.

We didn't ask them to abandon Strikes completely, but rather to double down on them and add more mechanics to make them more raid like.

Strikes were introduced as a stepping-stone to raids, to get more new players into raiding. I think that failed. And I also think it was/is a failure how Anet tried to push/force players, that do not like this kind of content, into Strikes.Agreed. I think it was an incorrect assumption that including raids/strikes would pull players in from other games. From what I've read/heard, these content types weren't received very well. I think that it was a mistake for Anet to make GW2 into something it's not. IMO, they should have stuck with what worked and put resources into making that content better.

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@kharmin.7683 said:

@Zok.4956 said:

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:The truth is, Anet starts working on some great content, then at the first sign of dislike from the player base, they give up and do something completely different.

Yes, this is a common pattern that can be seen over the years with a lot of things in GW2.Actually, I'm pretty sure that Anet has the internal metrics and knows what content players are actually playing. It may not be a "dislike" of content, but rather content that is preferred or more rewarding.Yes, they do have such metrics. The history has shown however, that they are capable of making the most rudimentary mistakes when
interpreting
said metrics. Like it happened in the infamous Twilight Armor Forward Up path case (and, later Twilight Assault one).

Basically, the metrics can show them the trends, but there's nothing in there telling them the reasons behind those trends.

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@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Zok.4956 said:

@"Delita Silverburg.8632" said:The truth is, Anet starts working on some great content, then at the first sign of dislike from the player base, they give up and do something completely different.

Yes, this is a common pattern that can be seen over the years with a lot of things in GW2.Actually, I'm pretty sure that Anet has the internal metrics and knows what content players are actually playing. It may not be a "dislike" of content, but rather content that is preferred or more rewarding.Yes, they do have such metrics. The history has shown however, that they are capable of making the most rudimentary mistakes when
interpreting
said metrics. Like it happened in the infamous Twilight Armor Forward Up path case (and, later Twilight Assault one).

Basically, the metrics can show them the trends, but there's nothing in there telling them the
reasons
behind those trends.

I agree. I was arguing the point that it was because of the "first sign of dislike" since we can't know that.

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