Winter Event 2009 Sneak Preview on the Live Servers!

FYI:

Lord Winter's damage resistance is now an even 70% v. all types. (Although, I've seen players' -DamResistance stack up and take that into the negatives -- debuffers are your friends.) [In previous Test sessions, his Resistance was higher, especially v. Cold.]

He's got Mag 100 Protection against all mezzes except Sleep, Taunt, Placate, Immob, and TP. (I'm assuming he's also easily Black Holed, like most GMs, but your fellow players will take a very dim view of you doing extra phasing to him.) His Resistance to Taunt is 100% (50% duration) and his range was debuffed by 75% when Taunted.

He has an 85% Resistance to these debuffs: -Regen; -Recovery; -ToHit; -Defense. And he has 10,0085% Resistance to -Recharge!

He has 14.05% Defense bonus v. all damage types except Psionic (Engergy Absorbtion power) and no Positional Defense bonuses (other than what comes naturally to a Giant Monster). Player debuffs stack and regularly take his Defense bonuses into the negatives.

No speed buffs.

ToHit Bonus of 50% and Accuracy of 1.5x. And yet, I saw at one point his "Last Hit Chance" be 7.5%, meaning that someone had a high enough Defense or he had enough -ToHit Debuff, or both, to floor his final ToHit roll (capped at 5% with the 1.5x Accuracy bonus applied after the fact).

He has 226,173.39 HP and a regen rate of .05% (113.09 hp/sec).

He has 800 Endurance and a recovery rate of 1.67% (13.34 end/sec).

Perception: 54 ft.

Experience to next level: 39,149,120. (Which makes him internally a level 50 GM).

Logged into Virtue last night and no one in PI was talking about WL teams. Heard on VU2009 that a WL was up in Skyway, but only one person was working on it. I was dual boxing with my lvl 50 ill/rad and lvl 33 cold defender on my laptop on follow spamming benumb and throwing out heat loss occasionally. We got maybe 4 to 5 on the WL and was whittling down well. When he neared defeat I broadcasted on major virtue channels again and a few more showed up. We went into the zone with 9 total people. We still beat him. The 9 seemed to know what to do and it went well. Zone to atlas and found that was where people were really going after it at, since that is where you get dropped off.

Did a second dual box run. had a few teams. Laptop was a lagfest (only 1gb ram) but was auto-follow anyway. My desktop was ok with 3GB ram but did boot out the desktop once. Got back in in time though. No second zone though.

Third run double boxing was even more teams. Second zone was spawned. We beat the Lord Winter with NO seconds left. (might have been the same run dumbleberry mentioned earlier in this thread). Logged off the laptop and was going to sell some canes and got another present message so I went off for one last time. First LW went down though there were alot of people who did not break off for the guardians. Spawned a second zone but not alot of people came over and though we had over 10 people we could not take him down again IN TIME. (we would have even with less people had we had more time).

Did make a boatload off candy canes. and have some merits i can roll with now. A dual box run beating both LW's nets you 18 merits apiece (if you helped with the first GM), and 80 total CC's. Yummmy!

Having read some of the comments two things strike me:
1. Remember we've been asking for a wee bit tougher stuff for ages
2. It's sort of "too late" for europeans since the general population rarely exceeds 100 ppl even counting both villain and hero side nowadays.

...but it does sound like some serious fun.

I took part of two take downs of the Lord of Winter on Triumph, both successful. This was with my squishy Fire/SS tanker, which delighted me to no end. We had at least 2 teams, if not 3 on each take down, and it went very fast both times. I'm thinking publish the thing, it's not going to get much better. The drops were great, BTW, please don't change. Only thing that might help is a map ID for Winter Lord, but I know how it is. I just really don't care for hunting GM's.

For those worried about the difficulty of completing these new events on low population servers, I suggest you drop everything else and try to complete them as soon as possible after the Winter Event starts. I had no trouble getting the Deadly Apocalypse badges on low population servers when the Halloween event first started, but by Novemeber 1st it was hard to get enough people interested even on Virtue.

I missed out on this yesterday so does anyone have any screen shots?

I like the new event. Some thoughts:

Do we know the population cap for each instance? It's really annoying to have 3 or so full teams enter at once only to be one of the few people booted to instance 2.

Lord of Winter's phasing seems to phase the tileset. Is this WAI? Or just a graphic glitch? I experienced it on two separate machines.

Merit rewards - being that you can "fail" the event, maybe the guardians and LoW should each drop 2 merits each instead of the whole event dropping 8?

I do like the fact that the map itself is random. That definitely adds a nice touch to the event.

How is the present timer configured? Each time I participated in the event, the amount of time to being able to open the present has been random - ranging from ~5m30s to ~2m.

Completely unrelated side note: If Croatoa ever gets a revamp, it would be nifty to have a section that is completely iced over with snowbeasts and such. Maybe even a new mini taskforce similar to Katie Hannon (in length).

[ @Zombie Fryer ][ @Zombie Smasher ]
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Seems like we are testing this on live servers.....wussup with that?

I enjoyed the limited play time I had last night. The event was really fun, but I also really liked the Halloween event.

I did the Lord Winter Realm once on Justice Heroes. The GM in Talos went down very quickly and almost everyone hung around for the Realm. We had 2-3 teams I guess, and if anything, he went down too easily. I didn't even notice a timer, but it felt like it only took ~20 seconds between GM spawns and each GM was done in ~10 seconds for a total of around 2 minutes for the big guy to drop. Sounds like we may have just gotten lucky with the toons present.

After a few BNY runs, we went to Brickstown for presents and another GM spawn. I have 2 questions about that:
-Is clicking presents all that is needed to start the event? I guess we clicked around 50 presents and never saw the zone dialog for the GM. Were we just unlucky? Could he have already spawned before we zoned in and we didn't see him? Did we need to do something else? We eventually gave up.
-Are the levels that spawn from naughty presents random? We were level 29/30 and thought Bricks was the most level appropriate zone (Talos was spawning grays), but we got anywhere from 30-38 out of the presents. Our static team is well built and could handle up to +6s, but I imagine PUGs would have some trouble. We simply could not damage the 38 boss enough to make a dent and TTPed away after a few deaths. What determines the spawn level?

Thanks. I look forward to the live event.

Do we know when this goes live?

Tomorrow?

Next week?

Dec 22nd?

I forgot to mention this or bug it, but while the patch notes say that timing out will send you to Atlas Park (for heroes) rather than the zone you started in... leaving at any other time also sent me to Atlas Park. That was apparently my only option, even though I had started in Steel Canyon and Peregrine Island.

Also I only took one picture... not that great but here it is:

Holas:

No offense, not reading through entire thread so excuse any repetition.

Tried the WL event. Not too shabby, with sufficient debuffers and healers. Didn't get the badge first two defeats. Finally nabbed badge on third defeat.

Nice collection of goodies through the Candy Cane Elf, especially the new Snowflakes emote. Just wish the Devs would make a Snowflake Aura, like the Sparkles Aura. My winter wonderland jumpsuit would be complete then. Need a bobsled slope this time around. Heck, while we're mentally masturbating here, why not a skating rink and a hot chocolate vendor? Just because...


Bella

Just thought I'd give a little feedback.

I took part in eight attempts at defeating Lord Winter on Defiant this monday during the sneak preview, each time on a different character (seven villains and one hero) and all of them successful. Each character received the badge for defeating him.

He didn't seem quite as tough as I'd expected after reading the feedback on the US test server forum, and those Northern Light-thingies wasn't really an issue so we tended to just ignore them. Time remaining on the counter after he'd been defeated ranged from ten to five minutes left.

The only issue I noticed was when trying to target him using the Select Nearest Target key, which every now and then would select a mob behind him unless I zoomed out a bit.

All in all a fun little addition to the Winter Event.

It was pretty enjoyable. I sort of wish that presents sometimes would spawn a winter lord without triggering the raid. Maybe the one that triggers the raid is called winter guardian, which would make sense because there are winter guardians in the raid zone.

The new winter things are well done, finally something different atleast, keep up the good work.

Overall it was fun but i have some issues with it.
1. Having team orientated activities is fine but the new content needs multiple teams to complete. This is okay at peak times on most servers but limits the fun. (Getting enough people for Halloween banners was difficult).

2. The GM in the new mini-zone is rough on lowbies/smaller teams. A villain team spawned the GM/present and went to the zone. The minions were doable but the GM's northern lights(?) wiped the team quickly. We were 6 villains topping at lev 25.

3. I wish presents used the rikti scaling method. This would make candy cane hunts harder but prevent the crap-shoot we have now. My level 23 FA/Stone was doing presents around Spanky's Boadwalk. The snowmen ranged from 20 to 27 and some fights were impossible. Villainside we found the snowmen to multiply not in numbers(due to us being on a team) but difficulty - clicking on a present away from the group was a death sentence and even in the group we usually faced purples. This wasn't much fun.

4. Getting candycanes from mobs is great. This makes present hunting more fun and is a nice boost to doing BNY again.

5. It would be nice if there were some solo friendly mini missions associated with the event.