EOD Event Chains and Uneven Challenge

[Gibson.4036]

Much of my play time involves playing as part of a duo. We're capable of duoing most of the HPs in HoT. We cc blue bars, move, try to understand our skills and traits. Which is just to say we're defnitely not great players, but we're not auto-attacking bearbows, either.

One of the things we're running across uniquely to EoD zones are event chains with drastically variable challenge. There are "group events" that we could easily solo, events not labeled "group" that start doable but end in a champion beyond our abilities, and event chains that aren't labeled group for the first or second stages, that end in a group event.

I have no problem with group events in the open world, but it does feel weird to repeatedly start event chains that are incredibly doable, then suddenly jump to impossible for the two of us for the final event in the chain. It starts to feel like we're not actually helping anyone in the world, we're just stirring up more trouble than we can handle and then bailing on the poor citizens of Cantha. Was Joko right? 😄

And I'm wondering... is there just some weird scaling at play here?

Or if they're working as intended, how were they meant to play out? A group event that is labeled so from the start gives you the chance to call out in map chat to see if you can get a handful of people to jump in before you trigger it. Other events, like leviathan, have reasons built in to get people to come across the map to tackle it. Meta events are on timers, so people know to watch for them, and have incentives to do them.

But if you start a standard, corner of the map chain that has an easy first event, an easy second, then throws you a challenging Champ at the conclusion, do you just bail, and remember not to trigger the chain the next time unless you can get a group? And will people be that interested in doing it?

It occurs to me that perhaps this wouldn't be a problem if the maps were more densely populated. There'd be enough people roaming around that there's a good chance you'd have a handful of people nearby who'd cross the short distance to jump in on the Champ phase. Was that the intent, but map player caps or other design choices are working against it?

Below, in the spoiler box I've listed several chains we've encountered in Seitung Province and our experiences with them, if specifics would help anyone to understand what I'm talking about. We've also run across examples in Echovald. Somewhat paradoxically, I've found most of the preparation events in Dragon's End scale really well to both me soloing them or doing them with a group of people.
 

Spoiler

 

Stop the extremist speakers from binding the spirits -> Escort Kyung -> Defeat Tai-Young is labeled as a group event from beginning to last. We did the whole thing easily with one other person who jumped in at the middle, escort event.

Defend the Monastery -> Escort Officer Roz -> Defeat the Aetherblade Champion, none of which is described as a group event, went from two very doable events for two of us to a very challenging Champion we were unable to defeat.

Unmask the Purist sympathizers -> Subue the Purist operatives is labeled group event for both parts, but the first event is a social pass-out-drinks-and-food event, followed by a very challenging Champion mesmer and two elites.

Defend the village's supplies from naga raiders -> Defeat the naga tide priest is a very doable non-group event that leads into an event labeled as group that needs a group to output enough damage before the timer runs out.

Help the students win their training match is a single event labeled as group, but easily soloed.

 

 

 

Edited April 5, 2022 by Gibson.4036

[Shadowmoon.7986]

I think the logic is that people would be drawn to the solo event over time so the follow up would be trivial if done by 5 people. So the increase the difficulty to the theorical 5 people who would join. The problem is once people have their achievements and masteries, most of thos events will be ignored.

[Zephire.8049]

I wouldn't be surprised if scaling was bugged for some events, honestly. Just look at the Jade Maw and how, despite being labeled a group event, you want the minimum number of people doing it because it scales so high if more than 10 people show up.

"Group event" seems to be used for events that are part of a collection, too, even if they're easily done solo. I'm all for having a marker for events that are part of a collection but using "group event" it means you never know if something's a group event or a "group" event.

I think the intended goal is people will follow the single events and gather for the group event but that's not how it tends to play out, especially if you're playing during non-peak times or end up on a low population map. But with so many bugs and no comments, it's hard to know if it's a bug or a feature.

[Khisanth.2948]

3 hours ago, Gibson.4036 said:

Defend the Monastery -> Escort Officer Roz -> Defeat the Aetherblade Champion, none of which is described as a group event, went from two very doable events for two of us to a very challenging Champion we were unable to defeat.

That one ends in one of five different possible champions. One of the types is probably an outlier. I've done that one solo without finding it particularly challenging.

3 hours ago, Gibson.4036 said:

Defend the village's supplies from naga raiders -> Defeat the naga tide priest is a very doable non-group event that leads into an event labeled as group that needs a group to output enough damage before the timer runs out.

I think a lot of time is just wasted on the tedious luring it on to land part. I just ignore that event whenever I see it.

[Gibson.4036]

1 hour ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

That one ends in one of five different possible champions. One of the types is probably an outlier. I've done that one solo without finding it particularly challenging.

Ah, that’s interesting. I don’t know which one we fought. He was a massive damage sponge at first with no breakbar. Easy to avoid his attacks, but I was barely chipping his health for a good while on my holosmith, which isn’t my normal experience. At some point he did get a breakbar, but then started doing really hard hitting attacks that left little room for error.

1 hour ago, Khisanth.2948 said:

I think a lot of time is just wasted on the tedious luring it on to land part. I just ignore that event whenever I see it.

That could very well be. Avoiding the attacks while he’s out in the water was easy enough, but when he got to land we couldn’t do enough damage to beat the timer.

I wonder, are they able to pull a report that tells them how many success and fails there have been on each event across a zone? I remember seeing plenty of patch notes to tweak world bosses and metas, but don’t recall many tweaking run of the mill events. That might be just because I skim past them, though.

I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered regular event chains I can easily do up until a sudden challenge increase for the final before EOD. In EOD I’m hitting enough to make it stand out.

Then again, I didn’t play either expansion at launch, so maybe things get tweaked as players test them and provide data?

Edited April 6, 2022 by Gibson.4036