The Lost Shores update is here! I am a little bit surprised that it came well before the Lost Shores event starts (11/16, 1200 Pacific), but here it is. Lots of good improvements all around.
The biggest change, for me, is in the Items section. Now level 80 loot will drop for level 80 players as long as they are playing in level 55+ content. I feel this is fair, and it will stave off most of the issues of low level ‘EZ-mode’ farming. I am pretty sure that the calculated drop rate (i.e., gold/hour) is set according to the content level. Still PvE decompression from Orr is A Good Thing. The other advance is that killing champions and veterans (as well as dirty Sorrowsites in WvW) has a better loot table with a higher chance of getting a rare or exotic. I’ve never rolled an exotic from an open world mob, so I am hoping that now even with the RNG hate of me, I might.
Obviously the headliners are the new dungeon Fractals of the Mists (opens Friday) and the new zone Southsun Cove (opens Saturday). GW2 Hub has two great previews: one on the Fractals of the Mists and the other on Southsun Cove. I am very excited about the new dungeon, despite its likelihood of overshadowing the other dungeons, and the new enemy type in the Southsun Cove looks like a challenging alternative to Risen, Risen, Risen. To combat the shadowing of the dungeons, the way loot is distributed has been changed so that decent loot is handed out at each stage of the dungeon including dungeon tokens at 3 explorable bosses per path.
Apart from the ascended armor, which I personally want to see how it plays out before soothsaying ahead, the other hot topic is going to be Consortium Chests only available for a “limited time” and having unique miniatures and skins. It gets a bit confusing in that all special items in the Consortium Chests will drop as rares “during the Lost Shores event”. So I am guessing that after Sunday, Southsun Cove will not drop the limited time Consortium Chests items as rares, and eventually the Consortium Chests will disappear. If you feel like showing monetary support to ArenaNet, this is a good place to do it. The gold-2-gem conversion has already skyrocketed in response.
A chest created for an event is a much better iteration over the Black Lion Chests getting chances of limited time stuff. If this is the way ArenaNet garners a monthly fee from players, I am all for it. It’s a good chance for players to play the gem market, buy some gold, or get a neat token of the event… apart from, you know, all the other event achievements, titles, and tokens players can get. I definitely like that the items can be received outside of the Consortium Chests too, but players are likely going to be farming the events until they pass out to bypass the need for gems. Still, I like that ArenaNet creates a pretty snazzy option for throwing money at them.
All in all, I am quite impressed. The reward structure seems to be moving in nice direction, and new content is always appreciated. Lost Shore from an interview with ArenaNet’s Izzy was started to be worked on post launch, and they plan to keep the pace. To be honest, between this and Shadow of the Mad King, I am more than impressed. Now, I have to go hone my hexes. Karka gonna bleed.
–Ravious
on the subject of exotics and drops: I’ve never been in a party where one has dropped from a normal open world mob, let alone had one myself. But 15mins after last night’s patch I was working through the defend Arah dynamic event chain and one of my party members had a pretty fancy looking exotic axe drop form a normal mob.
Encouraging stuff.
Would like if champion hunting would become a thing in other zones, especially the champion abomination for the Zho’qafa chain event, I swear every time I’ve been down in that area, that champion has been there with the dead Pact team at his feet. The Plinx event got nerfed, don’t know by how much yet, but I like that they are balancing. Was trying to do the Temple of Balthazar event twice last night, failed both times, so would welcome people returning to the Straits of Devastation.
I like that they added a new stat combination in crafting, ‘Apothecary’ (healing, condition damage, toughness). Honestly that is more interesting to me than the ascended nonsense. Some of the named ascended items have new stat combinations too, which leads to the question why the new tier rather than just adding more named exotic items with different stat combinations and new skins. Considering kitting my necromancer out in Apothecary rather than Rabid for a more support type role.
I’m slowly losing my patience with ArenaNet in Guild Wars 2. They’ve done a great job in creating the game, but a HORRIBLE job in execution of an MMO. The lost shores “finale” event was just the latest in a series of bungled player-releations.
First off, we have new content that’s only accessible for a two hour window on a sunday afternoon. While this is just a game, we are paying customers with a minimum expectation that we can experience what we paid for.
Second, if you could attend the event, you probably experienced horrific lag making the play-quality poor.
Third, ANet decided to offer rewards better than ANY current in-game reward (dungeon chests, story rewards, map-completion rewards, you name it). If you want to make players mad, schedule an event they cannot attend and then give a kick-ass reward.
Now, if that wasn’t enough in the “bad decision” column, consider the “one-time” event was exploited by players hopping to different overflow servers on alternate toons to reloot the final chest. I personally saw one player link 5x the reward chest in map chat. He then gleefully expressed “I ran it on all my alts!”. I don’t think ANet intended that behavior (the event was one-time after all) so I’m calling it an exploit.
ANet continues to work-over the player base for an MMO in ways I didn’t not really expect from them. I’m losing more than patience… I’m losing respect.
I would table this comment for < one hour. :)