SolarDragon.7063

This is a meta that just... puts barrier upon barrier in front of completing it, and doesn't even give full meta rewards because of the dual meta map it's on. Which results in a piece of content nobody wants to do for itself, that then has several collections put into it. This is a problem. So, first off. The Brand is a huge problem at every phase of this event. I'm sure it's meant to be part of the challenge, but that challenge means nobody does it regularly (especially combined with the reward problems) Phase 1 with the Zealots. This is a huge amount of just... busywork. You have to have people scouring the entire area (including some very tucked away spawns), instead of actually doing the meta. Also sometimes the djinni don't follow the zealots (the southeast point is very prone to this) so you die repeatedly because of Brand mechanics. Then you sometimes get chains of the same modifier spawning (I had a run recently with all 5 Shielded) which can be awful if it's a bad interaction with having to deal with the Brand. Phase 2 with the CC is... not the worst IF you have a squad doing it that has people doing full damage and CC, but the bars scale with the zone so there's not really any good way to do it by spreading out and CCing as appropriate, and the bar comes back up so quickly compared to how long it takes to drop. This all makes it more or less impossible without a large zerg squad. Phase 3 manages to be even less fun because of how the mechanics can combine. The most recent run I did, I spent about 90% of the fight unable to actually damage Ysshi, AKA the only target that damaging matters. If the spark invuln phase wasn't up, the ranged damage blocking was. While the idea here seems to be to encourage not just sitting at 1200 spamming 1, in practice it means that many builds that don't have the option to change weapons just... don't actually get to play. Then finally, it shares rewards with the other map meta that is both easier, quicker, and much more fun. So you can go through all this... and get rewards for killing a champion. So how to fix this? Make mechanics less busywork. Make it less about RNG hunting in phase 1. Make bars actually matter in phase 2. Change the Ysshi fight to not be about stopping people from playing the game. Rewards could allow for a Hero's Choice from each meta once, or give it unique rewards that aren't once off collection gates.

This meta is ridiculous in how inconsistent the arrangement of boss skills are, and how much that affects the difficulty. Having done the meta with an organised group, and seen it struggle more than half my other runs because it had so much worse RNG-this is the problem. Also, please consider your relative level of experience to most people, and possibly the level of organisation and contacts on top. Map metas are open world content that should not require absolute perfection to do. Map metas are not the place for your top tier endgame challenge. Difficulty is fine, but it has to be reasonable relative to the group that is expected to do them. Ignoring that does not serve the game as a whole appropriately.

One flaw I can see is that this could be rather prone to abuse by deliberately lowering player and/or guild activity previous to reshuffling, so that players/guilds get an easier matchup than they might have otherwise. Apologies if this has been though of earlier and I've missed it in 40 pages of replies.I'm overall supportive, the linking system has not helped the WvW situation as much as hoped, especially with the strange reluctance to allow links in T1-I've been on a world which has won T2 with links because of good coverage, then gets unlinked to T1 and gets flattened predictably.