Upcoming Changes to "The Battle For The Jade Sea"

[Blaeys.3102]

At this point, I have decided that ArenaNet is COMPLETELY out of touch with most of their players. 

 

I'll still be playing the game, but Im done with gem purchases until this mess is fixed and the majority of the player base is able to enjoy the fight - and I am definitely in the "whale" category when it comes to investing in this game.

 

The biggest issue with this fight is RNG, but there is another. The fight is a DPS race, plain and simple.  Even if you do the mechanics perfectly, which - if RNG favors you - it is VERY easy to do - you still have to have a group of 50+ people in full ascended gear who are performing in the top 75-100 percentile of their preferred dps potential (Im completely convinced of that). 

 

Want to play that cool new mechanist build you enjoy? Screw you - play the meta.

Want to play with that weapon you love? Screw you - play the meta.

Dont want to spend 10+ hours learning a rotation. Screw you  - play the meta.

Fights should be about the mechanics - not the dps or ridiculous RNG factors. 

That isnt what GW2 is supposed to be - especially in open world with thousands (maybe millions) of players trying to enjoy the content.

 

It is time to fix the train wreck for real.

The worst part is they have a system that would meet everyone's needs - the bronze/silver/gold reward model based on how fast you kill. They just, for some reason they wont even tell us, refuse to do so.

Edited March 12, 2022 by Blaeys.3102

[Random Wax Orc.7695]

On 3/9/2022 at 7:08 PM, Sentient Anomaly.9473 said:

Second, in the March 15 update, we’ll be providing players with an alternate path for acquiring the Siege Turtle Egg, which unlocks the collection required for the Siege Turtle mount. We’ll be adding a new vendor to the Jade Sea map that will sell the Siege Turtle Egg at the cost of 200 Writs of the Jade Sea.

I have a better idea.  Why don't you give me (and everyone else) 200 Writs of the Jade Sea for wasting over 10 hours of my time, and award the Turtle Egg for defending the hatchery in the meta pre-event.

[Gilosean.3805]

On 3/10/2022 at 10:04 AM, LAZ.2740 said:

I am a casual and this is my first time posting on this forum because I've never had concerns over the game and my enjoyment of it, until now.
I don't do fractals, I don't do raids, and I don't care to git gud.
I'm here for the grandiose, sprawling environments and to collect new mounts or abilities that make traversing the world more fun.
I like to collect things and have a cool looking character and I don't mind putting time in to get what I want, because those things are "extra". As in I was never gatekept out of systems. It took a while until I had my first legendary weapon, but I wouldn't say the game requires that, and no part of the progression is locked behind having one (and that's a good design philosophy).

So let me tell you how this expansion played out for my friends and I, who are all ostensibly "casuals" where I am probably the least of the group. I kept up with updates, so when the expansion came out I was the first of us to purchase and start playing it and I told my friends to come have a good time. Which we all did and we were all anxious to start working towards the highlight of the entire expansion: the turtle mount. Here we are, at dragon's end, I still don't have access to the turtle mastery track, and my friends (who trail my progress by roughly a map) are starting to wonder, when?
So I start looking at resources and it turns out I have to beat a meta, ok fine. So I do the meta, I follow the instructions of the commander and die once at the start not knowing the mechanics, but overall I did pretty good, largely because of the great shot calling.
 

2 hours of that and we fail, obviously. Okay, maybe it was a fluke and our team was bad right? So I do another 10 of so of these metas over a week, all of them fails, and as far as I can see, it doesn't matter how good I play or how great the commander is.
No matter what, there's people in the map who get dragged into it who were just doing quests or fishing, or whatever it may be.
Every time we fail, we have to wait two hours and by the time that happens, it's a new group of people who may (or may not) know the mechanics of the fight. One time we have a ragtag team with super low dps, but we get lucky with the rng and get the boss down to 20%. The next time, we have maybe 4-5x the dps but the boss never gives us more than 4-5 seconds of uninterrupted damage, and she spams tail the whole fight. We failed that one at 40%. How? Why?

But more to the point: Why is this even a requirement to start progressing on the highlight of the expansion?
Have the fight be a super difficult thing so raiders can tap themselves on the back for beating it, but after telling my friends what's required of them, they stopped playing.
To be honest, I'm just done at this point, all of my map progressions are 100%, I have all the mastery points.
So I'm just wasting time until I get the track unlocked, and I have no way to speed this up because I have no control over who and what happens during the meta.

Also what's the deal with the entire world hanging in balance but right in the middle of a battle to the death, the boss just leaves cause you didn't pass the dps check? That's not thematically or logically satisfying.

This is a long one, props to whoever reads it. That's my 2cents~

 

Yeah, ANet's bait and switch with the turtle is a huge disappointment. That said, the update coming on Thurs adds a merchant that sells the turtle unlock for Dragon's End writs, so now nobody has to do the meta who doesn't want to. 

[Gilosean.3805]

18 minutes ago, Random Wax Orc.7695 said:

I have a better idea.  Why don't you give me (and everyone else) 200 Writs of the Jade Sea for wasting over 10 hours of my time, and award the Turtle Egg for defending the hatchery in the meta pre-event.

 

A+ idea. It makes a ton of sense story wise *and* keeps people happier & more engaged on the map than just 'grimly grind out writs to unlock'.

[WeightTrainer.3219]

On 3/9/2022 at 7:08 PM, Sentient Anomaly.9473 said:

Hello everyone, we have an update from the Guild Wars 2 team. We'll be localizing this for German, French, and Spanish as soon as possible:

Hi all,

Last week we made some changes to the final encounter of the Jade Sea meta event to help improve the accessibility of the fight, and we’re happy to see that the rate of successful event completions continues to rise each day. We’ve kept a close eye on the community discussion after those updates were made, and today we have two more changes that we’d like to discuss.

First, effective immediately, we’ve reduced the frequency at which the Jade Sea Final Boss activates their 'Tail' by about ~50%. This will give players longer windows to deal damage to the boss and contend with the various other mechanics of the encounter. To be clear, this change does not require a game build to take effect.

Second, in the March 15 update, we’ll be providing players with an alternate path for acquiring the Siege Turtle Egg, which unlocks the collection required for the Siege Turtle mount. We’ll be adding a new vendor to the Jade Sea map that will sell the Siege Turtle Egg at the cost of 200 Writs of the Jade Sea. The Siege Turtle Egg will continue to be awarded to players that successfully complete the “Battle for Jade Sea” meta event, so players will have the choice to unlock the collection via a challenging meta encounter or through time investment.

We’re looking forward to seeing how today’s “tail” adjustment plays out, and we’ll continue to iterate on the fight until it achieves our goal of being a challenging yet doable encounter for most of our players. Achieving that goal will require continued attention from us, and some patience and learning from our players. This situation feels not too dissimilar to the release of Tequatl, Triple Trouble, or Dragon Stand, all of which are popular encounters in Guild Wars 2 to this day.

As always, thank you for your feedback!

We'll see you in-game,

• The Guild Wars 2 Team

 

The DE meta event can still be challenging without arenanet designing it to be raid level difficulty. Does the community enjoy Tequatl? Is it challenging? This isn't the first time arenanet has designed a meta event. Arenanet has designed plenty of successful/challenging meta events, so I am a little confused as to why y'all are trying to reinvent the wheel. >.>

[Gilosean.3805]

6 minutes ago, WeightTrainer.3219 said:

 

The DE meta event can still be challenging without arenanet designing it to be raid level difficulty. Does the community enjoy Tequatl? Is it challenging? This isn't the first time arenanet has designed a meta event. Arenanet has designed plenty of successful/challenging meta events, so I am a little confused as to why y'all are trying to reinvent the wheel. >.>

 

TBH - do they still have the people who designed those meta events?   There's been enough turnover that I'm not sure they do. I think that's part of the problem here. 

[BluePT.6481]

I love this game.. but this EOD Meta... for me its not about RNG.. or the DPS race..or the mechanics...its the 90 MINUTES you have to spend for this meta.. and AT THIS MOMENT.. those 90 Minutes are not enough.. BECOUSE you have to join a squad almost 45 minutes before the meta.. to BE ABLE to try to beat the boss and the events on the next hour.

MAPS are pretty empty until you have to join the squads for meta.. but then they are always full.

THIS IS NOT the ultimate open world meta.. THIS IS the ultimate pacience and Turn off event, for the majority of players,  in the game.

I don't want it to be easier.. i just want it NOT TO BE a dissaster like Marionette.

 

[Zephire.8049]

27 minutes ago, Blaeys.3102 said:

The biggest issue with this fight is RNG, but there is another. The fight is a DPS race, plain and simple.  Even if you do the mechanics perfectly, which - if RNG favors you - it is VERY easy to do - you still have to have a group of 50+ people in full ascended gear who are performing in the top 75-100 percentile of their preferred dps potential (Im completely convinced of that). 

There's a reason why DPS checks in raids tend to be light on mechanics with the mechanics involved being pretty simple. You can either maximize DPS or run around doing mechanics, not both. Bosses with a lot of mechanics tend to have less health so that what time is spent DPSing them means something. Yes there's the chance power creep will impact encounters, but that's a future issue—DE is less than two weeks old and it will take years for power creep to make skipping mechanics the go-to method.

Boneskinner is the only encounter I can think of that's come out where no one bothered with mechanics from the start, and that was because doing mechanics meant death so the barrier ball that steps to the left was the fastest and most viable way of doing the boss. DE requires you to do mechanics but also doesn't reward you for doing said mechanics unless RNG is in your favour and spares you from a tail turning into a swoop that turns into another swoop once the tail is finished.

[Ethan Mccloud.3218]

First off - Love the meta  - Thank  you for a very intense  fight-  I would ask to make just one change though -Stop the timer at the split phases of the fight - I feel like that Probably is all that really needs to be done -  Other Than that , Keep up the good work . 

As far as the Strike mission goes -  Thank you for not Putting a timer on it at all -  It makes all the difference in the world for non High Dps teams -  It makes the Fight feel more Natural -  once  we  understood  where to Properly stand during the Li encounter - it made all the difference in the world - Now  im happy to say thats its   something id be  happy to do over a few times with my guildies. Thanks again  for  something  fresh and exciting 

 

[Xentera.4560]

I would really love to hear about how this kitten meta design made it past anet’s QA testing before release.

[Huffinator.4598]

Of course with my luck when I was just playing all the events for the writs (Because I accidentally used the "consume all" option in the past that converts it into imperial favor) I beat the meta with a little more than one minute to spare. No raid builds required, discord optional, and we got it done. Not too much garbage throughout the entire fight that made it happen. This was a NON-advertised group run,  you had to actively be in the map doing all the events before all the organization happened. 100% meta participation for set up and the actual final fight. All the pieces finally came together and it was beautiful.

[Peth.5179]

1 hour ago, Xentera.4560 said:

I would really love to hear about how this kitten meta design made it past anet’s QA testing before release.

I am guessing they tested among themselves with the dev commands to be invulnerable or something, that is the only thing that make sense 😄 

[zityz.6089]

The Crazy part is that the story version of that fight is actually amazing .

Which makes parts of this meta even more upsetting. I would say that 45% of that fight is animations 2% of it is dialog queues cutting out or sound like its cycling through the mechanics, confused on what mechanic its actually going to do, and the rest is the actual fight. 

I'd say tweak the Meta, and you guys can always add a version of the boss fight as a strike mission, tailored to the original vision, if you really wanted to.

 

[Nuunes.5046]

[Removed]

Edited July 29, 2022 by Nuunes.5046

[zigzag.8159]

On 3/11/2022 at 10:18 PM, Albadaran.1283 said:

Its not the end of the story. In fact you don't even need it to complete the story.

its should NOT be challinging it should be fun and people should enjoy it. the game has many many other game modes that can challange you in raids fractals pvp and whatever kitten  but somehow anet believes catering still to the small group who enjoy these stuff should spill over to the pve area. personally i do not enjoy waiting for groups or forced to play with people just becoz i play a lot on weird times where there not that many people. i hoped that gw2 would bring the same joy as gw1 did for me and my small guild where we could do everything we wanted by ourself and have years of fun. sadly that is been proven wrong 

[daninumbers.4036]

And after you get it there is the strike for the collection. As I said before, all of this is just a way to make people try and get hooked to strikes, not even raids anymore. Nerf fractals and move the rewards to strikes. Chests with clovers for return achievements doing strikes. Now this. And really, there will be a lot of people that never liked it and never will try them, just be forced and leave to never be back once they are carried. Or straight give up on it or even the game if it's the directiong it's taking, a more hardcore playstyle rather than casual "play what you want".

 

PS: 9th attempt, 10 seconds left at 20%, back to invulnerable phase. Fail. Fun I guess if a no reward high failure chance wasting 2 hours per attempt is their definition of it. To me a staple meta is t he one that must  be fairly empty and go terribly wrong to fail with decent rewards. This is not that.

[Palador.2170]

Another attempt. Failed at 1%. Instant swearing in map chat, yelling at people and blaming them for the failure. Yep yep! This is one heck of an "epic" ending to things, ANet. After that, I went ahead and did the end of the main story. I'd been holding off, trying to do the meta first, but it's simply not worth it.

I couldn't help but keep that in mind during the ending, though. I mean, I basically skipped one of the major parts of the story. Knowing that, and knowing that if I want to see it, I'll have to settle for someone recording it and putting it up on YouTube? It felt hollow. Yeah, the story has a good ending, but ... there's a flaw to it, because of this. I doubt I'll ever see the end of the meta event, and that takes something away from the ending it leads up to.

The ending of the story isn't epic. It's just ... flawed and broken.

Edited March 13, 2022 by Palador.2170

[Bagnasty.1687]

I just realized I am going to have to do the story 8 more times because the jade bot is NOT account bound.  🤮 

[Dinova.8597]

22 minutes ago, Bagnasty.1687 said:

I just realized I am going to have to do the story 8 more times because the jade bot is NOT account bound.  🤮 

Dont, just dont.

Get 1 character through the story, get the aborstone teleport scroll, get a jeweler to craft tier 1 -5 (buy from NPC at the bot station), and you are good to go. Ignore the entire story, play it was for the lore, then just travel your chars over and roam free.

[Gorem.8104]

2 hours ago, Dinova.8597 said:

Dont, just dont.

Get 1 character through the story, get the aborstone teleport scroll, get a jeweler to craft tier 1 -5 (buy from NPC at the bot station), and you are good to go. Ignore the entire story, play it was for the lore, then just travel your chars over and roam free.

But if you want the E-spec skins, you need to play the story with each 9 different classes however, so yes this works, but doesn't solve the E-spec weapon issue. 

47 pages due to the games worst meta ever created in its entire nearly 10 year history. What an "ending" hey. Seriously if this was Dragonfall this would be 47 pages of praise, if this was LW4 i'd love to see just how much praise they'd get now. That was an ending. This is like having dirt kicked in your face as people get toxic in map chat, the defenders who want the game to die in map chat, and the normal 99% who just want to play a fun game, that's been casual friendly for 9 years and been a great place to relax and enjoy themselves with good entertainment. Well it was a game like that, before EoD. 

Did this fight get past playtesting cause you gave yourself 40k dps automatically and were all invincible while having cc that one shots the break bars or something. Those Whirlpools and being told the only way, not even multiple ways but only way to deal with them, is to die and respawn. I highly doubt normal raiders in a 10 man would enjoy a mechanic like that. 

[macc.4830]

after 12 times of failing my suggestion is to keep it as is with mechanics.  since it is a 2 hour meta if you happen to make it to the final battle just remove the timer at the end.  That would keep the Hard aspect and make it doable for the average joe to be in the group.    Make a Raid or a Meta with the final boss under a timer.   

[Zephire.8049]

Finally beat it after 27 tries but I am so burnt out on it I couldn't even enjoy it. Not knowing how long it would take everything, I also had to rush through some achievements but the diving goggles never spawned and I don't know if the shrine was also bugged or if I simply /kneel'd in the wrong spot.

It wouldn't be as much of an issue if it didn't take me ~50 hours for it. As it is, I got the achievement I wanted and have no desire to go back to that meta until it's adjusted to not be a huge waste of time 90% of the time.

[Lampshade.7569]

If they could manage to get over their . . . sabotage-enthusiasm against grinding then the pre-event could have been a dungeon with an un-borked reward. (Lots of people wondering why veterans aren't teching beginners new strikes, when we are incentivized to get that one gated reward and go fish.)

 

Completing the dungeon would award a meta-key, but only if you don't already have one. Parties with 5 keys could then queue up for the meta and when five groups of five are in the queue, boom, impromptu pug-raid, usually with groups that are proven competent, coming fresh from the dungeon.

 

The speed of the "pre-event" would then depend on player skill (remember speedrun competitions, before the bork?) rather than NPC movement speed.

 

Raiders could join as a squad for challenge mode, but only if they all have the key, so they are encouraged to mingle with the dungeoneers and perhaps even recruit talented people on the spot if they have room to fill, rather than complain about the bearbows and the fishermen.

[Kydar Schattendolch.6879]

I did ist yesterday and failes with 2% and was so mad, after the I evend dont know how many try.
It was an organized map, we were really good in time during the whole fight and the, we reached 20% and finished adds mit 4 min left....and then...fail.

It was a matter of 10 or 15 seconds pure dmg phase to succeed the meta but instead of getting a second!!!!! cc-phase in the whole fight, there had to be another tail @ 1:30 and of course a side-switch @ 30 seconds and thats it. Even if we did not suceed the cc-phase, it would have been enough time to dmg....or when there woudln't have been the side switch, whichs costs 10 s until we could attack again.
I really like the meta, and the mechanics are easy so far, but the rng is a killer. I'm tired of this event, because of the waste of  time for fails like this.

[Gorem.8104]

2 hours ago, macc.4830 said:

after 12 times of failing my suggestion is to keep it as is with mechanics.  since it is a 2 hour meta if you happen to make it to the final battle just remove the timer at the end.  That would keep the Hard aspect and make it doable for the average joe to be in the group.    Make a Raid or a Meta with the final boss under a timer.   

Tbh, if it launched with no timer that would have been a billion times better and at least we'd not have the toxic that Anet has created at all. I mean look at the end we've seen many times, in other zones you die, here? You just peace out and join the next map automatically. No timer would make sense then considering failing apparently doesn't even matter for the world compared to the apparently more powerful Elder Dragons of Grass and Purple Lightning.