In the downtime surrounding the stress of the passing of a loved one (who lived an awesome, long life), I did get to play a bit of Guild Wars 2 Wintersday event. Unfortunately in picking up the pieces and tearing up drafts of some of my more frustrating thoughts, all I have left are brief windswept flurries. Feel free to add your own too! Apologies; I meant to add that Bhagpuss and Jeromai already have very thorough posts up about Wintersday!
- As a holiday event, Wintersday is amazing. I am just blown away with the magnitude of the event. It feels like there is something for everybody.
- Snowball Mayhem is now my favorite Guild Wars PvP aside ever. It blows away Dragon Arena and Costume Brawl of old, which used to be my favorites. It sucks that the achievements tied to Snowball Mayhem are not fun, especially Gift Stopper. It’s a small dent in an otherwise beautiful game mode.
- I am exhausted and puzzled at what the team behind the gem store are thinking. We go from souvenir miniatures (Halloween) to exotic tradable miniatures (The Lost Shore) to rare, untradable miniatures (Wintersday). Untradable RNG leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
- This puzzlement is compounded by taking down Lionguard Lyns and padding the RNG chests with so much crap! Who wants tonics? Seriously.
- It is nice to be able to buy weapon skins this time from the gem store. I really like the style of the wooden, runic Scandinavian-style skins.
- I love Bell Choir and the Wintersday themes. I hope that ArenaNet puts them up for people to download again like they did for Halloween. Some great holiday songs.
- The difficulty of the jumping puzzle and the Tixx events are just spot on. The jumping puzzle is a tad hard, but definitely not impossible. The Tixx events are great for a 5-man solo/group instance. Could this lead in to something like Rift’s Instant Adventures?
- I need to go check out WvW breakout events now. Cya!
–Ravious
I’ll just chop the text wall with Ravious style, so it can be more bearable ;)
*I’m just curious – is it “Gift Stopper” bugged, or what? Everyone is hating on it so much. Am I the only one who beat it in first 2 matches? First 5 targets with gifts down and ding the achivement (same on second account). On the other hand – I “hate” PvP, so the fact I did it all swiftly and I don’t need to get back there, is 6 gods of Tyria blessing on me ;).
*Untradable RNG is second worst idea (right after presenting new tier of armors in 3 month old MMO – kudos to ascended trademill poper ;P ) I ever seen in this franchise.
*Tonics -_-
*Nice skins, but still non of ’em in my taste.
*Bell Choir is my new love. I’ve done it, beat it on every spot and I wish they would add some achievements out of the Wintersday Event for this.
*Jumping Puzzle seemed too easy (wich is good, considering all the people who just wanned to have it done). Nah – Mad Kings Clock Tower spoiled me ;). On the other hand… I remember how much I was hating Clock Tower, until I read it was designed to be hard, so only +-5% playerbase could finish it. Then I’ve seen it as a challenge, I’ve beat it and I have some pretty awesome memories ;)
*I have my monthly kills in WvW – nothing can pull me there again till monthly reset. Not even ” free* ” precursor drop from every enemy ;)
Gift Stopper only counts if you are the one delivering the final blow that puts a gift carrier into downed mode, making him drop his gift. You don’t get +1 on the achievenment if you did 99% of the damage and somebody else deals the last blow. Also it does not count if you steal the gift with another skill like the Warrior’s Bull’s Strike.
I think most people are exaggerating the problem with the achievement. I did not play with the achievement in mind and still got it over the course of seven short matches. And the only reason it took so long was because 3 matches were flawless victories in which the opponents could not even touch a present, making it impossible to get the Gift Stopper.
The junping puzzle was a freaking cake walk. There was no challenge. It was straightforward and easy.
I had trouble understanding why they instanced this. The sniwflajes and presents take forever to disappear. If you’re going that slow you’ll die to hp loss before you get to the end anyways.
I sincerely hope they find a better way to scale difficulties for different players.
The RNG mini pets are also annoying. Let’s hope the devs respond to complaints about minipet acquisition as well as they respond to complaints about difficulty.. i was happy to buy 2 sets of halloween pets (for the glowing skele) but i’m not wasting money on a *chance* at a mini pet.. not worth it.
I found the jumping puzzle literally impossible and gave up in considerable annoyance on my fourth attempt. I never got past the snowflakes at the very beginning. I am not great at jumping puzzles but I’m not terrible either. How people think this one is easy is completely beyond me.
I think they need to find a way to introduce varying difficulties of the jumping puzzle. Like Bhagpuss, I found it extremely hard and gave up. Others found it laughably easy. A single-player game easily solves this by multiple difficulty modes, hopefully GW2 can do the same.
Seems easy enough considering it’s in an instanced area. Instead of saying “Please send me to the jumping puzzle now” add an easy, medium or hard one to teleport to. Easiest one could have no time limit. Scaling rewards.
I suppose they could do that, but I’ve been fine with just deciding that some content is not for me to finish (or not right now). The best thing is that you don’t need every achievement from a holiday to get the title. I never finished Clocktower, I enjoyed attempting it but never won, and I’m ok with that because I didn’t really lose out on anything.
I don’t really mind the RNG cash-shop boxes because there is plentiful rewards in game that I find more desirable. Definitely going to be picking up a slingshot skin off the TP, and going to keep opening gifts in the hope of finding the unbreakable bell. Plus getting to pick up two minis for doing Tixx’s workshop, probably going with the griffon and ventari pets, prefer both of those over the store/quaggan pet.
Found almost everything about the event enjoyable, from the atmosphere and new festive music, the jumping puzzle was tricky but still doable in a fraction of the time it took to do Mad King’s tower. Going to be playing the bell choir and snowball mayhem a good many more times. Had no trouble with the Gift Stopper achievement, maybe I was just lucky, still working on the other achievement because I never get to return the present. There seems to be 14 achievements, and you only need to do 12 for the meta, and I think the monthly achievements seem to count too so that makes 16, that seems to be enough leeway to leave out what you don’t like.
The plush griffin mini is awesome!
I really enjoy Wintersday and the update that came with it, although I have to say that the timing of the update (2h after WvW reset) was just horrible and more than half an hour, the servers were down due to it. That made a lot of our server reset bash-forces disappear into the night (it was after 3am for us, mind you).
* Snowball Mayhem is great fun, but far from perfect. I like the old costume brawl from GW way better, since it offered different maps with different objectives, more builds and, most important, was balanced way better. That last thing is about the only real grief I have with this game: Scouts are way too strong, having two extremely powerful attacks, stealth, and a snare/evade.
* I’ve long stopped wondering about whole monetarization thing at ArenaNet. To me, they are one of the most incompetent businesses in that regard I’ve ever seen. Payment methods, variety of goods, their aquisition and their features – there’s a lot to improve with all of them. The whole RNG factor is just another mistake in a long row of them.
* The new skins may be nice for some, but they are just not for me. I’d rather have some serious, icy skins instead instead of candy cane, gingerbread or a princess wand, which I all regard as joke items.
* Bell Choir is great. Took me a while to get used to it, but now I love it, especially “Fear Not This Night”.
* JP is pretty easy, you’ve got tons of time before the platforms disappear and most platforms are pretty big. Still, they made an error when they did not make the frost take away a certain percentage of the health bar. Instead, the amount of damage is fixed, giving classes with big health pools considerably more time than others with low health pools. Just an example, I completed the puzzle on my Warrior with 5400hp left, while my Elementalist was down to 480 when it jumped into the present. Both runs of course without any speed buff.
* Tixx airship is great and the mini dungeons are a lot of fun. Destroying the miniature city is both a lot of fun and at the same time, I can’t help but feel sorry for destroying it, since it’s really beautiful. The dungeon is reasonably easy, you don’t even need a group of five, even without any lvl80 characters in your group.
* Bombarding your enemies with explosive presents, huge snowballs or candy cane ballista projectiles is just hillarious in WuvWuv. The breakout events serve their purpose I guess. Putting an end to Alt+F4 was really needed and having to repair a wall or gate up to 10% before it is fixed is reasonable.
I generally don’t touch the holiday gem store things, unless something REALLY catches my eye. The problem is that a lot of people seem to compulsively spend money on anything there for a limited time (or just anything). Case in point: people who spent over a hundred dollars on Halloween chests and then raged that they didn’t get a skin. The best thing those people can do is not buy anything RNG from now on, and ArenaNet will look at their data and think ‘hmm, people don’t like that, let’s change what we do there.’
If they keep spending that much money and then raging, ArenaNet have no reason to change things. A hundred bucks per holiday season is a pretty awesome profit, even if only from a few people.
My thoughts exactly. Wintersday is first monthly event I gave up on. I mean – in regard of Black Lion Trading company stuff. I’ve got all achievements that can be obtained till this moment, but I didn’t buy anything from BLT (except for free wizard hat ;) ).
First – because I don’t find single thing that is appealing to me.
Second – because only thing I want to have (all minipets) is too risky to get. I need to confess, that last two months weren’t kind to me and I’m lil short on real life coins ;), so paying for a chance to get minipets is a really bad idea for me. More than that – Foostivoo the Merry drop chance from giant wintersday box i so low (and from Mystery Box too in a matter of fact), that I need even more minipets from Mystery Box to craft him (cheapest way to get him it actually).