Festival of the Four Winds has been around for a few days now, and there’s good and bad to it. There’s stuff I like, and there’s stuff I don’t. So what’s bugging me?
Well, I’m going to start off with talking about the things I do like about the event.
Baby dolyak race. It’s pretty great.
Labyrinthine Cliffs remains one of my favorite areas in the game. It’s a gorgeous non-combat zone (there are things to fight, but for the most part you won’t ever draw your weapons), with a fair amount to do there. Sky crystals are back! Collecting these will test your jump puzzle skills, and while many are in the same places they were last year, there are also ones that have moved. There is also the addition of Master Sky Crystals, of which there are ten in total. They are supposed to be trickier than the regular sky crystals to collect. I haven’t gotten all of the regular crystals, nor all of the master crystals (I believe I’m at 24 regular crystals and 4 master crystals), but so far the masters don’t necessarily seem all that much harder than the regular crystals. I do remember some intensely tricky crystals last year, though!
There are two new events this year, that I greatly enjoy over the ones they replaced last year. One has you collecting essences from various charged crystals around the map and bringing them to the bar in the second level of the Cliffs, and the other has you racing to the top of the map as a baby dolyak. It’s silly, it’s adorable, and it’s a lot of fun. It functions similarly to a guild rush, where you have to beware of traps along the way, but unlike guild rushes, the traps are much more forgiving – they simply knock you down or cripple you for a short while, instead of potentially killing you outright.
There is one thing that the events do very well here, that I really like and allows everyone in the zone the ability to participate, as well as essentially guaranteed rewards for all. Each one works on a timer – you have a certain amount of time to turn in essences or race to the top. You then work towards different tiers of completion – the more racers that make it, or the more essences that get turned in, count towards getting that reward level to silver or gold tier. Even once it hits gold tier, you can continue to participate until the timer runs out. My only quibble with it is that the dolyak race only allows a person to complete it once – you cannot redo the race to help push the rewards to the next tier. As I’m used to guild rushes, where someone can complete it multiple times and each one count towards completion, and as the essence collection event allows you to turn in multiple ones and they all count, that seems weird to me, and as a result I’ve never seen the dolyak race finish with higher than silver.
Also, as the Cliffs are largely vertical, you will still fall and die a lot, though the addition of nets in certain areas helps with that.
I had been trying to take a screenshot from a crystal location. I stepped just a bit too far towards the edge of the rock though…whoops.
Last time around, I didn’t really bother with the Queen’s Gauntlet all that much. I didn’t find it fun, and I found the fights to be annoyingly difficult. I didn’t even finish the first tier of fights. The Gauntlet has returned and your progress from last time is still available, and now there’s a new title for defeating Liadri: The Blazing Light. Not going to lie, I do want that title. I decided to switch over to my ranger to do these, as my mesmer simply lacks good sources of stability (tons of stunbreakers but…not enough actual stability) or snares, which are greatly helpful. Yesterday I finished off the first tier and sailed right through the second tier with very few problems. And I currently have a note taped to the corner of my monitor that says that my ranger currently has my ascended sword and gauntlet tickets…because if I didn’t do that, I’d log onto my mesmer, wonder why those items were missing, and panic.
The Festival also has seen the return of many previous Living Story rewards. You can turn in the tokens you’re collecting for former meta rewards from different living story releases – there are skins like the Fervid Censer and Gas Mask, the Candy Corn node, as well as a variety of minis available to trade tokens for. The prizes average around 800 tokens, with a number of them at 1600, but gaining the tokens isn’t too terribly difficult – I’m sitting on just over three stacks right now, and you get 1600 tokens for completing the meta achievement.
Now…the Pavilion. You’ll note I haven’t said anything about it yet. The Pavilion has changed a lot from last year, and while some of the changes are positive, for the most part…this is where the Festival really falls flat. Last year during the Pavilion at any given point in time there would be two bosses up at once; between bosses there would also be events where you would have to clear enemies off the ‘spokes’ of the wheel that the Pavilion is shaped as. On top of that, the Pavilion was a great farming area. There were veteran enemies everywhere (seriously – everything but the bosses were vets), and the loot was good. Perhaps a bit too good, but spending time in there was certainly profitable. Boss mechanics weren’t much to speak of, and generally they died fast.
All six bosses run simultaneously now.
Yeah, that’s all changed. Now we have Boss Blitz – an event where all six bosses are up at a time, and they must be killed within a certain period of time. The fast you get them down, the better your rewards are for the event – gold tier gets you eight champ bags and a few other items, where as bronze – when the timer’s run out entirely – gains you two champ bags and a green. The bosses have greatly upgraded mechanics, which make them more interesting to fight, and when they die, they pass their abilities to the remaining bosses.
They also scale up to a ridiculously high amount of health if too many people are fighting them, which makes them take a very long time to die, so ideally people will split into smallish groups (about a dozen seems to work best) and each tackle a boss, aiming for near-simultaneous kills. Unfortunately, the game simply lacks options to really organize people in such a way – you can direct people via say and map chat all you want, you can try and get people to group at gates before the event starts so that everyone is split up…but realistically, it’s just difficult to coordinate people while playing the game. The UI lacks HP bars for all the bosses, so you have no idea how things are going in other areas. There’s no real way to tell how many people are in an area other than yours. There’s no way to call targets on anything for anyone other than party members. In other words, the fight is very anti-zerg, but it does not give us any way to try and break people from zerging.
The Watchwork Knight fight had a buff you needed to obtain to do damage, and they made it so only so many people could have the buff before there were no more available. You could easily see how many of these buffs were left and thus you could easily tell how many people were in an area and it was easier to direct people around. I honestly am confused why a mechanic like this was not included. Something as simple as a UI pane that shows the HP bar of each boss, as well as how many people are fighting there, would make things so much easier to organize.
Commander tags are generally useful for organizing players, but this is a place where they are actually a hindrance most of the time. If you have commanders on the map, you need enough so that there’s one for each group. That’s simply it. If you want to try for a gold finish, you will need at least four commanders – that are willing to work together – and preferably six, so that there’s one for each boss. I saw a suggestion on the forums that having a donation NPC (I’ll get back to that) at each gate, so that it would be easy to see how people are splitting, and for them to also sell temporary commander tags – one per area. If you have a large enough guild to fill a map, then you’ll be able to organize and get gold tier rewards – easily. But few are lucky enough to manage that.
Now, there’s another big problem with the Pavilion, and that is that there is absolutely no loot to be gained there. The only thing that the enemies drop there are gauntlet tickets and festival tokens. There is no loot for killing veterans, there are no champ bags if you kill a boss, and there is no area chest once a boss has been defeated. I just…absolutely cannot understand why they did this, especially looking at the achievements. There are six different “kill 50 enemies” achievements – one for each enemy type present in the Pavilion. For all of those achievements you have to kill 300 enemies in total. And you will not get a single thing for it but a handful of tickets, tokens, and some achievement points. I can possibly understand them wanting to lessen the amount of loot that was dropped by enemies, but not remove it entirely. This is especially irritating, being as to get the Boss Blitz to start in a decent amount of time, you must donate money to Heal-O-Tron. Money that you will not make back in return.
I see people on the forums complaining that the Pavilion last year broke the economy. Let’s get something straight here, people. The Pavilion did not break the economy. It helped it more than anything previously in the game (and since) had. It infused the game with a large number of materials and other items. What it did not do is introduce a large amount of actual gold – people were making money through Pavilion last year by selling the materials they were getting on the trading post, which is a minor gold sink, and were getting their money from other players. What broke the economy and got it into the state it’s in now was the large amounts of gold that were introduced once champion train farming took off.
When the Chaos of Lyssa recipe finally appeared on the trading post, this is what it was selling for. Note how many were available. As of writing, there are zero available on the trading post, and buy orders are now up to 1300g.
The other major problem that’s being seen is, as ever, RNG rewards. Sanctum Supply Boxes are meant to have a chance at dropping some of the previous LS items, as are the Gauntlet Chances that you get for winning a fight in the Gauntlet. The screenshot of the Chaos of Lyssa recipe when it appeared on the trading post yesterday just goes to show how incredibly rare these items really are. Rare drop rates on RNG rewards are nothing new. RNG is how GW2 does its major rewards. I hate it, but it’s simply what they tend to go to. The truly annoying thing is that these items, the supply boxes and chances, are by no means easy to get. Supply boxes you can get by turning in various materials – a thing that caused the price on many mats to instantly leap in price. Chances are gained for defeating enemies in the Gauntlet – one for winning, and additional ones for using gambits. Why don’t these work like previous boxes have? Why don’t they drop from regular enemies? Why aren’t you able to trade tokens for them? Something like that would instantly cut the rarity on these items. The Wings of Dwayna and Shadow of Grenth recipes were rare drops from Wintersday presents, but they weren’t so rare that getting one would make you rich. Even now they’re only a few gold apiece.
I was really hoping to get the Sun and Wind Catcher skins, since I didn’t buy them last time. I really want that Chaos of Lyssa backpiece. But with the rarity of these items, I cannot see that happening. I don’t have hundreds of gold. Right now I don’t even have a hundred gold, and my plan for making some money during this patch has been dashed.
There is a good amount to this patch that I like, but overall, it leaves me with a poor taste. It’s just…disappointing. I had initially hoped that the lack of drops in the Pavilion was a bug, but as there’s been several bug fixes since Tuesday and not a word has been mentioned about that from any official channels, it clearly was intentional in design. I can’t see any reason to go into the Pavilion once I finish those achievements unless I’m just going to go do the Gauntlet. The Cliffs will keep me interested until I finish finding sky crystals, but that’s about it. The patch as a whole just feels like a step back from previous events like this, and a lot of it has left me rather disheartened.
Give us ways to organize people in the Pavilion easily. Give us rewards for all of the things we need to kill in there. Make the RNG rewards more obtainable. Throw us a bone, and make it worthwhile. Please.
Under the Pale Tree 