The reigning villain in Guild Wars 2 is Scarlet Briar, a cross between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy with killer robots tossed in. And in her Playhouse, she gets a giant hammer, in case you did not think she was enough like Harley Quinn. And they case one of the Harley Quinns to voice her. I am rather fond of the character, and Tara Strong can only make things better.
After the Queen’s Pavilion put everyone in a huge zerg, that approach fails consistently in Clockwork Chaos. Players need to spread out to complete more events. Players tend to congeal into large groups and farm champions. Large groups spawn multiple Aetherblade champions, and champions’ survivability scales up with participation, so portals that should take a few minutes to clear take much longer. Invasion events rarely see Scarlet if:
- movement is difficult around the map (to get between portals)
- the map uses a lot of Z-axis (harder to get between portals, false paths lead players astray, bugs with spawning the enemies at different heights and around water)
- Aetherblades are the reinforcements in anything but the last wave (momentum stops as players farm Aetherblade champions).
I joked in chat that the last update was to remove champions. Two minutes later, patch notes said that champion spawns were being toned down. They still spawn enough to congeal zergs. Map chat gets fun and dramatic.
: Zubon
“put everyone in a huge zerg, that approach fails consistently in Clockwork Chaos. ”
Not true. Just did an overflow with a super-massive zerg, possibly the largest I’ve seen. I had extreme lag, sound turned itself off, I expected to DC but fortunately never quite did. Many, many Champs spawned. They died very fast and we killed Scarlet with 7 minutes to spare.
On the other hand, before that I did an OF where everyone spread out and we hadn’t even got to final stage before the timer ran out.
My experience so far is that every Scarlet event is radically different. That’s why it’s so much more compelling than any other GW2 event sequence ever.
I’ve had quite a lot of luck reaching Scarlet – the only map I haven’t beaten her on yet is Frostgorge Sound, but players seem to be getting much better at co-ordinating.
What I’ve found helps, perversely, is explaining the mechanics. Kill twisted minions, stomp them to stop them upgrading to vets, finish molten/aether events, solo molten transports. If you can also encourage the farmers to call out where they’re farming, it lets all the farmers go to one place and thus leave the other aetherblade spawns to people wanting to stop the invasion.
It’s an event where actually talking to the map and co-ordinating gets results, which is a trend I’d very much like to see continue in these events.
I’ve also noticed a strong correlation: Aetherblades second, Molten third = event failed; Molten second, Aetherblades third = event succeeds.
The worst map I’ve seen so far was Harathi Hinterlands. When the invasion started, half the waypoints were contested due to the zone meta-event warring against the centaurs. Didn’t even get close to winning that one.
Edit: just realized that I should add that I think this invasion event is really sweetly tuned. I’m sitting at maybe half and half between successes and failures, with most of both being pretty tight and could easily have gone the other way. That’s really impressive given that there’s been a mix of different times of day, weekdays and weekend, different zones, etc. Hats off to ArenaNet for the tuning job they did here.
Agree with everyone else, the invasions scale remarkably well.
It’s still something of a mystery the relationship between the minion bar for each wave going down and mini-event activity. Can one huge zerg just farm a few events in sequence, and advance that? Where I’ve seen a big zerg crushing things, there’s been nothing to suggest there weren’t a handful of motivated scrappers running around completing the other mini-events (where it looks like a 2-5 players with good but not awesome synergy can clear one mini-event in a couple of minutes).
The Scarlet, Lord Farren, and troubadour dialogue were wonderfully distracting in the short playhouse instance (take the opportunity to look around at the end, no easter eggs, but the arena areas are empty so you can explore without veterans crushing you). Stupid hostages.
According to Anet, killing any and all Twisted anywhere diminishes the minion bar, while the Aetherblade and Molten ones tick down via each completed event.
This jibes with some of my experiences, like Bhagpuss, where a humongous zerg was successful on Scarlet with plenty of time to spare because said giant zerg was methodically melting anything twisted in their path while headed to Aetherblades, which also didn’t last long under the pressure, champions included. There were probably also other groups of fair size depleting Aetherblade events at the same time.
People spreading out tend to go through reinforcement events quickly but stall on minion kills because everyone’s so focused on breaking off and running to the next event, before they get killed by being the last ones left facing a sea of metal monsters.
Merus, I think has proposed the best tactic. Use the champion farming zerg to best advantage by corraling them in one spot or two – they will also tend to go through twisted on their way to aetherblades. Leaving those motivated to finish events with smaller scaling. Everyone playing a part, instead of yelling hostilties that just provoke noncooperation.