I love Dragon Response Missions

[AliamRationem.5172]

@"HnRkLnXqZ.1870" said:The first positive thread about Dragon Response Missions, where people share why they like this new feature. But I guess we did not have enough negative threads, so people continue to talk about how much they dislike them. What I have seen so far, many of the negative complaints are a bit shortsighted.

Things I like about the DRM:

• engaging and interesting NPC dialgue
• easy warm-up events which make you familiar with the territory and the situation
• moral boost mechanic, which rewards you for completing these tasks
• time limit is short enough to be challenging for solo-runs
• challenge motes can be done solo as well, which is really nice
• the old multi-area AoE attacks returned, have not seen them in ages
• modified attack-pattern for the bosses, but not too difficult to learn. No lethal 1-shot attacks to punish players.
• public versions do not rely on squads/parties, so the meter-people are on their own
• the loot is OK, no Tarir-Multiloot obviously
• they feel engaging, almost like the LA evacuation/assault events

A few basic hints, most should be common-knowledge already:

A common complaint I always hear/read, the missions take so long. You can speed the escorts up a lot. The NPCs can be buffed with Swiftness and Superspeed. Tell your party-members not to stack at the leading NPC, else they consume the speed-buffs (boon-prioritization). You do not have to catch all of the NPCs, you only need the lead-NPC. The others will magically move with the same speed. Classes which can help with this are Elementalist (Tempest) and Engineer (Scrapper). Superspeed has no real purpose in PvE, but it works amazingly well with NPC escorts. I used this strategy in the Drizzlewood Coast already, works great.

The spawn-locations of the NPCs are all scripted. So you can use the Raptor-Engage and other pulls, together with your meta-dps to speed up things quickly.

The United Legions Waystation works in the DRM, so you can even speed up the final encounter with the boss. If you run solo, the EMP is powerful enough to take down the entire break-bar. So you can focus on DPS and sustain in your builds. Or bring a healer and do it Fractal Style.

The player started events require 1 player to start. So you can split up and let the fastest of you, preferably with area-Swiftness/Superspeed trigger the event while the others already camp the exact spawn-locations of the next NPC attack.

Regarding that "long" waiting time at the intro-missions:

• you do not lose progress even if the destroyers regain-control over the area
• you can park your characters already at the next scripted spawn locations and just let one player camp at the starting-spot (see above)
• we are talking about 3-4 minutes of extra time. If you RL 24h schedule gets messed up with this already, maybe re-think your time-management?
• Daily Destroyer Hunter is permanent. It can be completed easily in the intro-section and gives nice rewards. If you are really short in time, just do that and leave the DRM.

3-4 minutes of wasted time if you're running the private mission for achievements and it's time you get to waste every run you repeat! As suggested, they should offer the option to skip ahead when the challenge modes are selected. This allows this event to serve its apparent purpose in the public mode, while not wasting the time of those participating in private mode.

I think the suggestions made so far were reasonable and the complaints are mostly spot on. If they want this to be repeatable content moving forward, they should tailor it to that. Better rewards, less filler and wasted time.

[SpellboundTutor.4257]

I only have constructive feedback on Dragon Response Missions in that I feel they could have made them so much better by looking at the Steel and Fire strike mission with the Steel Warband.

It's definitely good content, I just feel like it's a bit too straightforward and lacking spice. But that said, if people enjoy them as they are, it's not my place to say they're wrong!

[BadHealer.3608]

I love it being in a public DRM and be finish with all the quest and have 3:00 minutes left to wait. I mean there isn't much points in the game, where you can just stand around for 3 minutes and do absolutely nothing, waiting for the time to reach zero so that you can than wait till the NPC appears and you can do something. This is really the greatest idea ever. Do nothing, get nothing and just WAIT, WAIT, WAIT.

Please gave us more content where we have to just to wait till something happens. Maybe do a week long event where we wait till it reach zero and than nothing will happen. This will be so exciting.

[Qori.9671]

I enjoyed them the first run through for the story. I doubt I will feel like doing them on the daily. I dunno they seem like they might be a better fit somewhere at a lower level. Like something you do before dungeons , to get your feet wet. But they cant expect people who have obviously done pretty much everything else in game to get you to this point to be thrilled about running them everyday. But it is only chapter 1 of this story arc so maybe it was intended to be mellow to start. Remember when fire and ice came out , how exciting it was to run around fixing fences and sign posts in wayfair's foothills after having killed Zitan LOL.

[Black Storm.6974]

@"HakuroDK.9385" said:I only have constructive feedback on Dragon Response Missions in that I feel they could have made them so much better by looking at the Steel and Fire strike mission with the Steel Warband.

It's definitely good content, I just feel like it's a bit too straightforward and lacking spice. But that said, if people enjoy them as they are, it's not my place to say they're wrong!

It is mostly a matter of taste. For my taste (and my mind abilities) Steel and Fire (Vision of the Past) could be the most boring thing I have ever done in a videogame. I need content which is shorter, much more straightforward (and I don’t mean easy, in fact often I seek challenges) and possibly thought to be enjoyable with far less players, otherwise I can’t keep playing it.

I think it is a nice thing that ArenaNet is developing different things for people with different tastes and necessities. They specifically said that this is what they are trying to do.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t try to improve DRM. I see some nice hint on how to improve them being discussed here.

[Black Storm.6974]

From what I read here, I think that adding a purpose to the pre events could be a nice way to improve DRMs, but that would also “require” to make sure they are not too harder to complete by “smaller parties” (1-4 players)

[Randulf.7614]

@Black Storm.6974 said:From what I read here, I think that adding a purpose to the pre events could be a nice way to improve DRMs, but that would also “require” to make sure they are not too harder to complete by “smaller parties” (1-4 players)

The pre-events are fine. Their purpose is to allow a window for teams to gather and then once completed, locks the instance. It's the overly long boss fights which need tackling. Right now, we have an instance which for most players is 20-25mins long, of which 2/3 is the boss fight with very little engaging mechanics.

If you look at Forged with Steel, the boss fight length is entirely dependant on paying attention to the mechanics and can be over very quickly if everyone works together to knock out the cc with the harpoon on the tank. If they don't the boss can't be damaged. Leading up to the boss, you have events and different ways to approach attacks - eg sniper, tank, zerg and so forth. On top of that, you have a mix of enemies and things to find. It may be a marginally longer instance, but it doesn't feel longer because of the variety.

Now DRM's could follow this pattern and be some decent content or they can shorten them and make the bosses maybe hit harder, but die faster. These should be 10-15mins hits at most at their current poor reward level (and which i notice many don't realise the end chest isn't auto looted)

Right now, Drizzlewood for all its problems, is still the most rewarding IBS content, followed by Strikes and Drakkar. And that's on top of earlier content already clamouring for players. If DRM's are to work they need better rewards and a more appropriate time sink. Otherwise they are dead in the water

[lare.5129]

@Black Storm.6974 said:I’m not saying they shouldn’t try to improve DRM. I see some nice hint on how to improve them being discussed here.I am sure what suggestion and vision people from any forum don't have any tie with main community vision.

[Black Storm.6974]

@lare.5129 said:

@Black Storm.6974 said:I’m not saying they shouldn’t try to improve DRM. I see some nice hint on how to improve them being discussed here.I am sure what suggestion and vision people from any forum don't have any tie with main community vision.

If you are saying that the popular opinions about the game that people share on the Forums are not a remotely good indicator of what the community playing the game is enjoying, I agree.

[Fozzie.5370]

@Qori.9671 said:I dunno they seem like they might be a better fit somewhere at a lower level. Like something you do before dungeons , to get your feet wet. But they cant expect people who have obviously done pretty much everything else in game to get you to this point to be thrilled about running them everyday.

^^ This is right on point. Most of my veteran in-game buddies would also strongly agree here. DRM's are in our opinion starter friendly, low-level casual PvE game content. If you are seasoned player like a majority of players regularly doing Raids, Fractals, WvW or even casual PvE open world meta stuff, the DRM's offer no real challenge or lasting appeal. The funny part @Qori.9671 I teamed up with my buddies on patch day and we could hardly bare to run the 3 new DRM's just ONCE: The idea of running them everyday: "A Big fluffy kitten to that"

[Sobx.1758]

@Crono.4197 said:

@Sobx.1758 said:

@Black Storm.6974 said:

@Sobx.1758 said:To me they seem to be a worse version of raids/strike missions. Definitely not a fan.

I think they are a totally different thing, they shouldn’t be compared at all to Raid or Strike Mission.

Why shouldn't they be compared?

Because not everyone likes raids and strikes. If for example DRMs had the same difficulty as raids or strikes, I wouldn't even touch them.

Sure. And that's somehow supposed to make them incomparable? Do you think the only things you can/should compare are the ones that are exactly the same? What's the point of comparing then?"I don't like one of these, so you can't compare them!"? I don't see how that's a valid answer to my question.

I'm kind of glad they added something that everyone can participate in, instead of adding elitism content, which I'm personally running away from ever since I stopped playing other games that were focused on such content. The game has content for everyone, I don't know why people aren't satisfied. Not every piece of content in the game is supposed to be done by every person in the game. Raid and Strikes are a proof of that.

Why some people might be dissatisfied: because this was supposed to be an lw episode release, meanwhile what we got are 3 replayable ""stories"" with mindnumbing fights, forced ""npc escorts"" (as in "don't run too fast, stay a little longer in this instance! -not because you want to but because we force you to") and the bosses that are literally auto-attacked to death inbetween the forced disengages to clear 3 targets every x%. Easy content? Cool, no problem. Easy content full of fillers to simply make you stay in the instance longer for no real reason? That's just bad.

And how can people be satisfied by that in a game that's supposed to be an action mmorpg?