Winter Event Test ~ Official Feedback thread

Good fun on the Winter Event, and it's not the same map we're used to for the whole "Rescue Baby New Year" thing. This is Croatoa frozen over right behind the tram, over on the big hill.

Smacking around Frostlings, Blights, and Snow Beasts in the Winter Realm gives you Candy Canes as well, it seems.

Did have to wonder why the graphics occasionally went all grey (not unlike being in Dark Astoria, actually), even with my graphics settings maxed out as usual.

Other amusing notes - new emote that can be purchased for candy canes at the Ski Chalet - /em snowflakes - you toss snowflakes in the air to a soft jingling bells sound. Pretty.

New badge - Festive (for logging in during the event). As usual, you can buy the earlier holiday event badges for candy canes in the Ski Chalet.

New amusement - you can now WALK down the ski slope (at roughly 4x normal speed), and it seems there's now a full bar at the bottom of the ski slope, plus Port O Potties!

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Push this to live nao!

I enjoyed it a lot and have some thoughts.

1) Lord Winter is too similar to Winter Lord, maybe Winter King or King Winter instead.

2) The Knocking off of toggles by the Lord Winter. It's not clear enough that he's doing it. Several of us thought there was a bug causing it at first. Unfortunately I don't really know of any way to make it clear without making it possibly too obvious.

3) Small Bug: the Lord/Lady of Winter badge seems to be confused as to the gender of its recipients sometimes. My female character Mercurial Talon got the Lord of Winter badge and I was going to suggest making it gender specific with a Lady of Winter version until I saw that all the other female characters who were wearing it already had that.

4) I miss the frozen waterways that we had in the original winter event.

Otherwise, it was a blast. I look forward to beating up giant snowmen a lot.

What a great little event that was. Breaking up the fight with the Lord of Winter to go after his guardians was a nice touch from keeping it feeling like a straight tank-n'-spank battle. I also enjoyed that you have to keep an eye out on your toggles, as the battle with the Lord of Winter can detoggle (not suppress) any number of your toggles. Making the boss fights more active is a step in the right direction. One that I've been seeing happen more often. Cheers!

Got on a team of six villains that was able to spawn the Winterlord and promptly killed him. However, we did not get a way point nor a marker on the map for where the giant present was located, thankfully it spawned right where the Winterlord was where we then waited for the Giant Present to allow us to enter the realm. We had asked for backup over the global channel, and didn't get any. Once the giant present let us enter, we were able to fight Lord Winter.

There was no indication of this zone being a timer at all, so if it is supposed to have a timer please add it. With just the six of us we managed to get Lord Winter down to 48% life or so, had to kill two of the Winter Guardian's to unphase Lord Winter. At that point, we got a warning to please exit the zone, and two minutes later it kicked us all out on our butts with nothing to show for really. If this zone is not supposed to have a timer then whatever kicked us out needs to be fixed

I would like to comment that I was playing as a DB/WP Brute, and thanks to Brad's bubbles, I was sitting at the Cold Defense cap. As such, Lord Winter spent the majority of his time whiffing as he tried to attack me. I understand the goal was to make him challenging, however I found the mag 100 Hold (ala Ghost Widow), and whatever it is he used that causes TWO toggles to detoggle immensely annoying without being the slightest bit life threatening though that might just be due to the secondary I was playing (Yes, I am IO'd, no I am not uber-IO'd, I went concept and stacked a bunch of +RunSpeeds, I do not have masses of +def or anything that would increase my survivability above that of base-line Will Power).

Since powers that trigger detoggles have been removed from the game some time ago, this new Lord Winter having this mechanic is incredibly counter-intuitive, when I saw someone ask in team why his toggles dropped, I looked at mine, and that's when I noticed I was missing two as well. (Mind Over Body, and Indom Will) I quickly mentioned to the team what was going on of course. I then spent the rest of the fight paying more attention to my toggles on my hot bar, than what was going on the screen itself when Brad had mentioned that we weren't doing damage to him anymore. Turns out the Northern Lights are buffing the Lord Winter, so I kept Lord Winter's attention while the rest of the team would take care of the North Lights. Which amounted to me watching my toggles, and retoggling them while keeping up with my DPS so his attention remained focused on me.

Overall I found the detoggle ability annoying and counter-intuitive mechanic, not challenging in the slightest. The Northern Lights, however, are a nice touch, it keeps the team on their toes, and gives an importance to holding the Lord Winter's aggro so the rest of the team can mop them up.

Thoughts so far:

• Lord Winter is sturdy as a GM should be. The Greater Mystic Aspect should have been like this.
• Only six merits for defeating Lord Winter and his guardians? I would suggest at least 8. You do face 3 regular GM's plus Lord Winter.
• Good-bye Winter Lord farming. I will miss the abundance of merits.
• Phasing is generally annoying.

The Lord of Winter's realm would've been more spectacular if not for those Croatoa buildings on the edges of the map.

Okay, some actual feedback.

Very glad to see some more of the tech that overlays your Nav window when you get close to a special feature. (If you are near the huge present left behind by the Winter Lord, you can click on the (i) in your Nav window for information.)

Lord Winter - can we possibly get a different name? We've had Winter Lords of various strengths for years now, and adding a new version with the same words in his name is a bit odd. Can I suggest 'Old Man Winter' or 'King Winter' or even 'Giant Wandil'? (That last one is a bit obscure but fits perfectly!)

Could we also maybe get some more variation in the models, if possible? Right now the Winter Lord, Lord Winter and the Winter Guardian all look pretty much the same. Maybe give Lord Winter an ice-textured halo or something?

Three minutes may be a bit long for the countdown on the present. Two minutes would give a bit more frantic tension.

Rewards seem well worth the effort.

More feedback:

Unlike the Halloween Event, there doesn't seem to be any sort of a story behind this event (at least, we've not seen one!) It doesn't make a lot of sense as it stands - defeat the Winter Lord and Lord Winter sends you a huge present which you can use as a portal so you can come and confront him?

I think it would make a little more sense if we forced the Winter Lord to drop the present, the idea being that the present is his portal to the Winter Realm and we're hijacking it.

I love the new event. More so than the Halloween one in the sense that we don't have to wait for the event. We form a team, open presents to spawn a Winter Lord and then enter the realm of Lord Winter.

If there is a timer for the Lord Winter's Domain, a timer should be visible once we are in. Getting booted without notice is annoying.

Instead of Lord Winter phasing, how about one huge mega snowstorm with mag 100 knockback and a radius of 100 ft so no one can shoot him from a distance? Snowstorm would go down when the Guardian is killed. Would be cooler than the phasing.

BUG: on the expert ski slope in Pocket D, if you take the pathway with the teleport, you appear sideway instead of looking down the slope.

* Loved that the new event has a mini-zone just for itself. This is kind of like what the Cathedral of Pain should have been, multiple teams in the same "mission".

* The thick fog every time Lord Winter phased was very annoying. Pure grey stopped being a justifiable background choice with the NES.

* The Winter Guardians don't drop the standard 2 merits for a GM, instead Lord Winter gives 6 merits. This means that if a team is unable to defeat Lord Winter in the allowed time, they'll get no merit rewards out of the whole encounter, even if they'd defeated all 3 Winter Guardians and could have been awarded 2 merits for each. 2 merits for each Guardian and 2 for the Lord Winter sounds more fair.

* I crashed 3 times to the desktop with the crash dialog. That may have been my connection being a PITA, but considering the recent server issues on live I thought I'd bring it up in case something reintroduced instability.

I was on the six-villain team already mentioned. This was a *tough* fight. I've been on easier Hamidon raids. In fact, counting the time to spawn the Winterlord and the waiting time to get into the portal, I'd say that it took significantly longer than any Hamidon raid I've been on in the last couple of months. And, yeah, despite substantial regen debuff from my Assault Bot's plasma cannons, and all three Warburg nukes, there was no way we were going to take him down in that timer. If the timer'd gone 80% longer, I think we could have done it. If it'd been 100% longer, I know we could have.

So given that it takes as long as a Hamidon run, killed about the same percentage of us as a Hamidon run, and requires organizing a team roughly 1/3rd the size of a Hamidon run, I'd call 6 merits "insulting." As long as it takes and as much work as it takes, you are not going to see anybody doing this after the first week, not if it's only 6 merits.

I'm hoping that you set it very conservative and are timing our runs at this, in order to calculate the actual, final merit reward? If so, please remember to factor in the average amount of time it's going to take one to two full teams to spawn a Winter Lord in the first place. Thank you!

Other than that, all I want to say is that Lord Winter's pocket portal is a beautiful map, one that makes me wish we had winterized, snow-covered versions of all the zones that would replace the existing outdoor zones during the same server maintenance as the one that activates the winter event, and revert during the first server maintenance in, say, February or March. Seasons for the win, especially ones as pretty as snow-covered Croatoa. Maybe some day. In the meantime, beautiful artwork.

Oh, and the new /em snowflake emote is very cute. Almost kawai.

Edit: Two more things I just remembered.

Contrary to what it says in the patch notes, the version on the test server does not turn off [Walk] when you slip or slide, including on the ski slopes. The result is hilarious looking, and harmless, but probably wrong.

And we had a level 50 team running around Cap au Diable clicking Mysterious Gifts. As in prior years, they were spawning (that I saw) as level 13 to 20, and might have gone lower, that is, the level range of the zone. Now that we have super-sidekicking, if you're going to allow people to click presents in zones below the level where they could trick or treat (and given the nature of the Lord Winter sub-event, you almost need to), it would be worth the effort to make the "You've been naughty" snowbeasts level-less, if there's time between now and when it goes live. Please?

Subjective Feedback:

I like the new event but some improvements could be made.

I had the "hero/villain zone event" channel in one of my tabs and while opening presents with my villain, I never saw a "Winter Lord GM has spawned" type of message....I got lucky and actually saw him standing around. If there could be a message saying when the GM spawns so that people know to stop opening presents and just look for the GM that'd be great (as well as having the little location meter like there was for the Aspect GM in the Halloween event in the nav bar).

When fighting the Lord Winter, he kept detogg'ling random powers on my char. (EI, Kin/Rad Def. which has 5 toggles running, CJ, Acro, Psy. Armor, Assault and Tactics). I was curious why but from what I read from GF that is supposed to happen.

The only 'bad' thing is that...again it kind of stinks for anyone that wants to do the event but doesn't have 10-20 people that want to help them. On the villain side, I got a team of 4 together (no one else was responding) and we were able to take down the GM in Cap, but didn't scratch the GM in his realm.

I think this game (along with others) would benefit from having the ability to grab an AV/Hero/NPC to help you...kind of like what Guild Wars does...if you need a debuffer, grab Positron (or GW) or what have you...maybe not have the signature characters but...just have some generic'ed named toons/NPCs that you could 'borrow' for x amount of influence or something to help you. *shrugs* that's the only thought I can think of at the moment to help with the low population servers.

Edit: Oh and it really seemed like the presents themselves were a good 90% "naughty"...I only was "nice" like 3 times out of the 10-20 presents I opened.

The "old" winter mish doesn't give the option of getting candy canes this year. Not sure if this is intentional or a bug, but I think it's a bad idea. Having to have several teams to get a descent amount of candy canes is a pain. I don't see any reason why you can't get them for the old mish and the new GM event. With so many items up for grabs via CCs I don't think the ways to obtain them is enough.