[Upcoming Changes to "The Battle For The Jade Sea"]

1 minute ago, CasualElitist.8795 said:

Ah okay, didn't think about that.

Well commanders should just explain to people what to do instead of believing that gatekeeping will make the meta succeed. Unless they themselves don't know what to do and just think that having exp raiders or specific roles will help them. Sad to see that.

Yeah, I agree that it’s sad, definitely. I would like to see everyone running around on the siege turtles but sadly that’s just how it is right now. 

It started out of necessity though because many people have spent 20+ hours of their life trying to do this meta but keep failing it because of things outside their control (ie other players that don’t listen or don’t speak English).

[Upcoming Changes to "The Battle For The Jade Sea"]

2 minutes ago, ribchop.1736 said:

I've not seen a single one of these in all 16 runs I've done, the only time I've seen this is when MightyTeapot's guild did this - your experience is not everyone's. You can win this fight no matter what classes with sub-optimal DPS and CCs, you just need a lil coordination. If you don't like loosing start running and explaining the mechanics to the new people. You'll find more and more runs get closer to passing.

My experience at this point is around 11 attempts, so I’d say I have a decent enough sample size to make an assertion. I’ve also been in a lot of groups with more than “a lil coordination” and they fail because of griefers or non-English speakers that can’t understand any instructions. Every run I’ve done has had more than enough explanation given but people don’t listen or can’t understand. The power of one person to be able to grief an event, resulting in a 2 hour time waste for all of those 50+ people is insane.

[Upcoming Changes to "The Battle For The Jade Sea"]

9 minutes ago, CasualElitist.8795 said:

They can kick you from squad but you can still remain on the same map, so it shouldn't make any difference to you, no?

No, we didn’t all go into a map until we had 10 subgroups with quick+alac+3 dps. Then once everyone was sorted, we rushed into an empty map.

[Upcoming Changes to "The Battle For The Jade Sea"]

The success rate is increasing because players are forming organized squads and gatekeeping non-meta builds. After around 8 or 9 attempts, I finally joined one of these squads and saw countless people get kicked because they weren’t quickness or alac builds. They even kicked everyone that was playing a new elite spec. Even with hours of prep work and squad organization, we only beat it with 30 seconds left. Now, the successful squads that I’ve seen are either squads that only take the role they need, or squads that require a decent kp to join.

If your goal was to gatekeep most of your average player base from completing this meta and getting the turtle mount, mission accomplished.

[DO NOT nerf Dragon's End meta.]

I finally completed it with an extremely organized group that started prepping (ie organizing subgroups, swapping classes, etc) 3 hours prior to the meta. Overall, that was close to being the most fun I’ve ever had in PvE—comparable to the feeling of clearing my first raid.
 

However, this isn’t a raid or strike. It’s an open world event where most players aren’t going to spend 3+ hours organizing groups. These metas are supposed to be for random players to join together and have a good time. Having said that, it is ridiculous that a mount is gated behind something that requires you to either (1) devote hours to gather 50 people into an organized squad that fit into 10 optimal subgroup compositions, then somehow get all of those players into the same map instance, or (2) get extremely lucky by finding a map of people that doesn’t have at least 1 troll, can pump out almost raid-level dps, can follow directions, and are decent with the mechanics.

 

The siege turtle was the poster child of EoD, but the average player has nearly no chance of obtaining it.
 

The mechanics are fantastic for an open world boss but the health pool relative to the time given is unrealistic considering how horrible an average player’s dps is. Nerfing the health would both (a) further reward people for doing the mechanics correctly and (b) nullify the power of one of two players to fail an event for a whole map of players who just spent over an hour and a half doing pre-events. Reward average players for doing mechanics correctly, doing average dps (I don’t mean just auto-attacking), and dedicating their time to the content. Tuning the health to average dps would also increase the impact that skilled players have on the meta, making it much easier to succeed if you’re good rather than just being punished for others being bad.

 

Just to address any concerns about me saying “average dps,” what I meant was the dps that average players pump out when they’re trying. The issue usually isn’t just the rotation—or lack thereof—that many players use, it’s the fact that they don’t have optimal gear or builds. 

 

As much as I love the difficulty of this meta, it would be incredibly selfish of me to just say “git gud” to all of the people that want to obtain a mount that was one of the big expansion selling points. And, even though I love the difficulty of the meta, I won’t be doing it again unless it’s nerfed because the level of organization and optimization required is just ridiculous for an open-world meta. Organizing 5 people for a fractal? easy. Organizing 10 people for a raid or strike? still easy. Organizing 50 people in open-world for a meta that can be easily griefed and is required for a mount? horrible.