Dragon's end Meta event

[Maledict.7891]

I know this has been discussed many times before, and for a first threat creation not an original topic. But please, for the love of god, re-look at this meta event. It is incredibly unfun as it currently stands, for two main reasons:

 

1) Failing feels totally out of the players hands. The final fight is an absolute mess of effects, and requires huge amounts of CC from large numbers of players in a short time period. No matter what individual contribution you make, winning the fight is entirely dependant on lots of other people doing something you can't control. At the same time, all the other key points are equally out of your control - breaking bubbles and switching to the tail. It leaves you feeling incredibly helpless as a player compared to other events, and thus extra frustrated because it feels like your individual contribution has no effect on the outcome. 

 

2) If you fail, the rewards are terrible. It is literally one of the worst uses of time in the game. Compared to other big map metas, the length of time it takes for a failure is astonishingly unrewarding. You would be better off doing practically *anything* else in the game right now than the EoD end meta if you don't win. 

 

I appreciate that Arenanet have said its win rate is now equal to other meta's, but I honestly think either a mistake has been made or you are looking at the data wrong. Because literally every other meta I can join via LFG and have a decent chance of winning. I have failed *repeatedly* with this one over the last few weeks. It doesn't feel like it has improved at all since the expansion launched. 

 

Suggestions for altering the fight:

 

1) Rebalance the rewards so it's not so appallingly unrewarding if you fail. The fight takes an hour win or lose, you shouldn't feel like it was an absolute waste of time if you participate. 

2) Lower the CC requirements for the head, and lower the health for the tail. Make both elements MUCH more visible to players. One tiny little blue buff you have to hover over for the tail buff is not good, and if you aren't an English speaker you're easily going to miss a one off audio line. The fight should have much bigger visual and audio queues as to what you need to be doing as a player. 

3) The CC shouldn't rely on an entire raid grabbing an Icebrood Saga war table buff, multiple times throughout the fight and using that. If you're seeing players use that as their basic strategy for winning, something is wrong. 

 

It's a fantastic spectacle of an event, and deserves to be seen and won more often. But right now, its the worst meta in the game to run. Content from 7 years ago in Heart of Thorn is a better prospect, and that's just sad. 

[IAmNotMatthew.1058]

3 minutes ago, Maledict.7891 said:

1) Rebalance the rewards so it's not so appallingly unrewarding if you fail. The fight takes an hour win or lose, you shouldn't feel like it was an absolute waste of time if you participate. 

EoD metas aren't known for decent rewards if you exclude DE. Adding a few chests with a sticker of "you tried" should have been done like... week 1.
On the note of failing. No, it doesn't feel it's out of the players' hand. It's just like failing Gerent, not enough people bothered to contribute.

5 minutes ago, Maledict.7891 said:

2) Lower the CC requirements for the head, and lower the health for the tail. Make both elements MUCH more visible to players. One tiny little blue buff you have to hover over for the tail buff is not good, and if you aren't an English speaker you're easily going to miss a one off audio line. The fight should have much bigger visual and audio queues as to what you need to be doing as a player. 

Waystation, use it. Makes the required CC nonexistent. That's why people place it everywhere.
Aurene is screaming at the top of her lungs about mechanics, there is no need for more audio queues, since then even the deaf would hear it and the blind would see it.
Pay attention.

5 minutes ago, Maledict.7891 said:

3) The CC shouldn't rely on an entire raid grabbing an Icebrood Saga war table buff, multiple times throughout the fight and using that. If you're seeing players use that as their basic strategy for winning, something is wrong. 

Without balancing for the Waystation CC requirements would be nothing, yet people would still fail it.
Anet can't lower it so it's doable without Waystation, because then it would be free damage for doing nothing.

10 minutes ago, Maledict.7891 said:

Because literally every other meta I can join via LFG and have a decent chance of winning. I have failed *repeatedly* with this one over the last few weeks. It doesn't feel like it has improved at all since the expansion launched. 

Then you haven't played the meta on launch, the difference is like going from Forgotten Zealots to Pinata. It's far easier now.

[yoni.7015]

The meta is fine, no need to change anything besides maybe better rewards. 

[soul.9651]

How on earth do you fail.. just join any organized squad at lfg and thats it.. i have been farming this meta for months without any fails. At this point it just feels like another version of tarir meta...

[Ashen.2907]

37 minutes ago, Maledict.7891 said:

No matter what individual contribution you make, winning the fight is entirely dependant on lots of other people doing something you can't control.

This is open world meta events, not just DE. If you do not care for needing to rely on other human beings, whom you do not control, then you should not be doing large group content.

Edited October 29, 2022 by Ashen.2907

[gateless gate.8406]

When Anet says the DE meta succeeds at the rate of the other common metas, I agree with OP that they're likely looking at the data wrong (probably because they subconsciously don't want to admit their big beautiful creation kinda sucks). As it stands, there's simply no rational reason to do DE unless you like to gamble with your time.

[yoni.7015]

3 minutes ago, gateless gate.8406 said:

 As it stands, there's simply no rational reason to do DE unless you like to gamble with your time.

How is it gambling with your time when you don’t fail? I have now done the meta over 100 times without a fail. 

[Ashen.2907]

12 minutes ago, yoni.7015 said:

How is it gambling with your time when you don’t fail? I have now done the meta over 100 times without a fail. 

I would like to add a question relating to this specific point as well...

How is something worth doing if you are guaranteed success regardless of effort? 

[gateless gate.8406]

3 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

I would like to add a question relating to this specific point as well...

How is something worth doing if you are guaranteed success regardless of effort? 

Did I say that? No reason to invent unrelated hypotheticals and try to attribute them to people who didn't say them. My point, since you missed it, is that DE is simply too risky of a time investment -- IF your goal is to earn gold (if you have some other reason for doing DE, more power to you). You can read on for elaboration.

16 minutes ago, yoni.7015 said:

How is it gambling with your time when you don’t fail? I have now done the meta over 100 times without a fail. 

Since you're having difficulty understanding a pretty simply sentence, let me clarify further: It is gambling with your time (to an excessive level) because it takes more time than other metas, and has a higher chance of failure. There are other metas with non-zero chance of failure -- eg, Chak Gerent if you get into a late map with few people/commanders -- but if you fail, you have only lost a few minutes (let's say 15 minutes at the worst). That's an acceptable gamble, in my opinion. Indeed, you can often quickly evaluate whether you got into a "bad map" and go do something else so you don't waste time. DE is not quite the same; you will heavily rely on the skill/builds of 50 random people, and you won't know whether those 50 people will perform adequately until near the very end of that 1-2 hour time investment.

[Zok.4956]

15 minutes ago, Ashen.2907 said:

How is something worth doing if you are guaranteed success regardless of effort? 

The immense amount of players that are still doing world bosses are proof that it is worth doing.  At least for them.

[yoni.7015]

8 minutes ago, gateless gate.8406 said:

Did I say that? No reason to invent unrelated hypotheticals and try to attribute them to people who didn't say them. My point, since you missed it, is that DE is simply too risky of a time investment -- IF your goal is to earn gold (if you have some other reason for doing DE, more power to you). You can read on for elaboration.

Since you're having difficulty understanding a pretty simply sentence, let me clarify further: It is gambling with your time (to an excessive level) because it takes more time than other metas, and has a higher chance of failure. There are other metas with non-zero chance of failure -- eg, Chak Gerent if you get into a late map with few people/commanders -- but if you fail, you have only lost a few minutes (let's say 15 minutes at the worst). That's an acceptable gamble, in my opinion. Indeed, you can often quickly evaluate whether you got into a "bad map" and go do something else so you don't waste time. DE is not quite the same; you will heavily rely on the skill/builds of 50 random people, and you won't know whether those 50 people will perform adequately until near the very end of that 1-2 hour time investment.

I don’t have any difficulties understanding the sentence, what you are writing is just not the reality. You can easily know before you join a squad for DE meta if it is going to be a fail or not. At least on EU most squads in LFG at prime time are organized squads that don’t fail the meta. 

Edited October 29, 2022 by yoni.7015

[gateless gate.8406]

Let me also add that the possibility of disconnecting during the DE meta (and not being able to rejoin your map) as well as the special case of getting a "this map is closing in 59 minutes" notice and literally having a full, participating map shut down on you are additional "risks." It is possible to disconnect during other metas, but again, it simply doesn't hurt as much because the time investment is much lower. The second case (of getting your map instance shut down) is a special vulnerability in DE because of its excessive length.

[gateless gate.8406]

12 minutes ago, yoni.7015 said:

I don’t have any difficulties understanding the sentence, what you are writing is just not the reality. You can easily know before you join a squad for DE meta if it is going to be a fail or not. At least on EU most squads in LFG at prime time are organized squads that don’t fail the meta. 

So, aside from the fact that you only tried to negate one of my points (I'm guessing you can't do so with the others), how do you "easily" evaluate that? Remember, it needs to be quick and easy. You need to be able to see the builds (and gameplay skill) of the majority of the random LFG group you joined (to keep the situation comparable to other metas/gold farms). You also need to be able to foresee whether you will disconnect mid-way through your lengthy time investment, or get a map closure. Please, let me know.

[yoni.7015]

21 minutes ago, gateless gate.8406 said:

Let me also add that the possibility of disconnecting during the DE meta (and not being able to rejoin your map) as well as the special case of getting a "this map is closing in 59 minutes" notice and literally having a full, participating map shut down on you are additional "risks." It is possible to disconnect during other metas, but again, it simply doesn't hurt as much because the time investment is much lower. The second case (of getting your map instance shut down) is a special vulnerability in DE because of its excessive length.

You don’t get a map closure with a full squad on a map, at least it never happened to me in over 100 meta runs. If you get a disconnect you can get back on the map. This happened a few times but I was always able to get back on the map. 
You are inventing problems that in reality don’t really exist. 

Edited October 29, 2022 by yoni.7015

[Ashen.2907]

30 minutes ago, gateless gate.8406 said:

Did I say that?

Yes.

By arguing against a chance of failure by describing such in negative terms, you are arguing for guaranteed success. 

[Maledict.7891]

15 minutes ago, yoni.7015 said:

You don’t get a map closure with a full squad on a map, at least it didn’t happen to me in over 100 meta runs. If you get a disconnect you can get back on the map. This happened a few times but I was always able to get back on the map. 
You are inventing problems that in reality don’t really exist. 

I had this happen literally two days ago. Map had a commander, people doing events, every region was at High participation. Two minutes before the meta starts, the map closes down. Which of course then shunts you into a map which is totally empty and has no completions in any area.

 

This *absolutely* happens. People aren't lying when they say it is. 

[Maledict.7891]

1 hour ago, Ashen.2907 said:

This is open world meta events, not just DE. If you do not care for needing to rely on other human beings, whom you do not control, then you should not be doing large group content.

 

This isn't true though. 

 

There isn't another meta in the game that has this high a level requirement combined with zero impact from the individual player, other than maybe the Triple Triad event. I like doing world events, I *love* doing map meta's. I think they are one of the best parts of the game and an absolutely amazing aspect of GW2.  None of them are like this one, which seems to entirely rest on a huge number of people doing specific actions in a set time or massive fail. None of the Heart of thorn meta's are like this, none of the other EoD meta's are like this, none of the Living Season meta's work like this. In all the others you can at least feel like you are contributing. 

[yoni.7015]

8 minutes ago, Maledict.7891 said:

I had this happen literally two days ago. Map had a commander, people doing events, every region was at High participation. Two minutes before the meta starts, the map closes down. Which of course then shunts you into a map which is totally empty and has no completions in any area.

 

This *absolutely* happens. People aren't lying when they say it is. 

Was it a map with a full squad on it or just someone tagging up on an empty map? 

Edited October 29, 2022 by yoni.7015

[Gibson.4036]

Other long metas give significant rewards along the way. Redesign DE to do the same. Problem solved.

[draxynnic.3719]

51 minutes ago, yoni.7015 said:

Was it a map with a full squad on it or just someone tagging up on an empty map? 

I've seen it with squads that, while not full, certainly had a couple of dozen people with plenty of time to go. I think the problem is that the game closes maps in order of their creation, so a map with a half-full squad, which had been building up full readiness over the last forty-five minutes and still has half an hour to go, gets dumped into a relatively newly created map and has to start over from scratch. It certainly seems to happen primarily with maps that opened early.

 

On rewards - personally, I think you should be able to get the chests from participation stacks even on a fail. Serves as a consolation prize, and means that if you want or need that character somewhere else or you're planning on sticking around until the next attempt, you can cash out those stacks so they don't go to waste.

[Farohna.6247]

2 hours ago, yoni.7015 said:

How is it gambling with your time when you don’t fail? I have now done the meta over 100 times without a fail. 

I like the meta but I would say you're very fortunate.  Most groups I've been in, it's a fifty/fifty success rate.  Always need about two minutes more on the timer.  

48 minutes ago, Gibson.4036 said:

Other long metas give significant rewards along the way. Redesign DE to do the same. Problem solved.

Oh I'd like to see that very much.  As it is currently, I do DE for some achievements and gradually building up for the last part of a legendary.  It's not for the gold or rewards because they are sorely lacking for a big meta.

[Randulf.7614]

I agree about the effects. I enjoyed the fight, but it was a mess. Im not sure how the designers thought it was acceptable to have that much visual noise pollute an otherwise decent meta. They need to get their act together on that issue.

[Silent.6137]

2 hours ago, gateless gate.8406 said:

Let me also add that the possibility of disconnecting during the DE meta (and not being able to rejoin your map) as well as the special case of getting a "this map is closing in 59 minutes" notice and literally having a full, participating map shut down on you are additional "risks."

If you get disconnected, there is a grace period where the game will try to put you back on the same map.

2 hours ago, gateless gate.8406 said:

You need to be able to see the builds (and gameplay skill) of the majority of the random LFG group you joined (to keep the situation comparable to other metas/gold farms).

Why is that even relevant? A fully formed LFG squad for DE meta do not need it to succeed. It's ridiculous to think you'll be able to do that with a squad of 50 ( or need to).

2 hours ago, Maledict.7891 said:

Two minutes before the meta starts, the map closes down. Which of course then shunts you into a map which is totally empty and has no completions in any area.

Question is why would you change maps two minutes before the meta starts? You have an hour to complete the meta (from escorts to the final fights). That's more than ample time. If you do not finish it within that time frame, you have already lost even if the map is not closing.

If map is closing while doing Pre-events, that's because, there's many map instances open and the one you're on has low populations. You may see 5 other players doing the same popular events (south) but the rest of the map is probably deserted. If your full squad is on the map, that's unlikely to happen.

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

I've seen it with squads that, while not full, certainly had a couple of dozen people with plenty of time to go.

Maps are not necessarily closing even if you get the pop-ups. Often, it'll disappear if more players join the same instance.

Edited October 29, 2022 by Silent.6137

[Omega.6801]

4 hours ago, Maledict.7891 said:

I know this has been discussed many times before,

Then why post it again? If you've read the previous threads you know how this will go down. You say nerf it, others say keep it as is, one side calls the other elitist while the other side calls your side lazy, names getting thrown around and the thread gets closed without achieving anything or bringing anything new to the discussion.

[Sobx.1758]

I don't remember when was the last time I saw this event fail.

-HP is fine,

-break bar is fine,

-amount of rewards (and what it should be) for the players upon failing is debatable.

Edited October 29, 2022 by Sobx.1758