Discussion: The Winter Event Has Arrived!

The 2009 Winter Event has reached Paragon City™ and the Rogue Isles™ and there is much rejoicing to be had again this year! But don't fall into the trap and keep your senses alert as a new menace is also looming in the horizon threatening to bring the holidays to an abrupt end! Will you be able to defeat Lord Winter before he succeeds?

This year's Winter Event goodies include a new "throw snowflakes" emote and a character respec (both bought by candy cane salvage), and two new holiday badges--Festive and Lord of Winter/Lady of Winter! All the temporary powers, badges, and fuzzy earmuffs from last year are also back, bringing nostalgic cheer. Along with streets and rooftops loaded with Father Time's gifts, you'll still encounter snow beasts and Winter Lords, Father Time's mission, ski challenges, candy canes, and more in this fun-filled feast of holiday festiveness!

• Starts: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 8:59 a.m. PST (11:59 a.m. EST / 4:59 p.m. GMT / 17:59 Central European Time)
• Ends: Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. PST (2:59 a.m. EST / 11:59 p.m. GMT / 00:59 Central European Time)

• If you are in Lord Winter's Realm and the event timer runs out, you will be returned to Atlas Park (Heroes) or Mercy Island (Villains) rather than the zone you originally entered from (unless you entered from a PvP zone).
• The Winter Lord may not spawn in Mercy Island and Port Oakes.
• The Winter Event does not run in the Co-operative or Hazard zones.
• The Winter Lord will spawn in Bloody Bay, Siren's Call and Warburg but not in Recluse's Victory. Be careful though, since they are PvP zones, you may accidentally attack another player through the 'Tab' keyboard button or through your pets.
• If your team gets split to two different maps of Lord Winter's Realm due to the zone cap, you can rejoin each other through Lord Winter's Realm Portal. Please note that the primary purpose of Lord Winter's Realm Portal is to allow split teams to rejoin one another.

Not directly related to the Winter Event, but the GMotD says, with regards to the free server transfers, "Not all possessions will transfer". Could we get some clarification on what does or doesn't?

I'm pretty sure that means stored items don't transfer.

Click for Hot Sun Splitter Action

And has anyone transferred yet? I don't see anything different on the log on screen and it still says "buy" server transfer. Can someone clarify the process?

Is there a forum announcement regarding the free transfers?

What about stuff that's on your person, as it were? Like in your recipes/salvage/enh inventory?
Say I have a 50 Numina's Unique that I'm holding onto until I'm old enough to slot it. Is that gonna get lost?

The server transfer announcement discussion thread is available here

I guess server transfers are cool, I just have no interest in bouncing toons around. personally think free character slots would'a been a nicer gift.

lol, so no one cares about the Winter Event enough to give it play in it's own thread?

OK, so I guess I'll be ther first one with a Winter Event question. Does anyone know how to get the new badges? I saw there were two of them.

Badge #1 is a login badge

Badge #2 is for defeating the Lord of Winter.
Summary of method:
a) get presents in zone and defeat winter horde
b) when enough winter horde have been defeated a Winter Lord appears
c) Defeat Winter Lord and he drops a big present with a count down. (~ 5 misn to organise for next pahse)
d) Click on present to get to Lord of Winter's Realm. He is a huge bag o HP. At 75%, 50% and 25% he summons another Winter Lord and phases until that summon is defeated.
e) defeat the big guy (and in so doing defeat the 3 summons) and get 8 merits and 20 Candy canes.
f) (optional) mop up more horde in the realm for more candy canes.

The "Northern Light" wisps that spawn around Lord Winter on the instance mission have a strong defense debuff (and it's auto-hit or 'untyped' if my observation is right).
They don't deal a lot of damage on their own but if they target toons close to Lord Winter, you will see a lot dead toons in no time.
Toons that have defense-debuff protection might look better here.
With only 2 teams, fairly balanced but nothing uber, the debuffs caused a wipe.
Defeating them helps but they will respawn in no time.

I suggest 3+ teams for a "realistic and fun" raid.
Servers with smaller population will have trouble to pull this during off-times, this is my only issue with this instance.

Maybe after 4 years of questions like "Who is the Gamester?" They've decided to retcon him out of existance.

Well, got both my badgers out of the way for the Lord Winter badge.

Honestly? He was a bit of a ponce. Went down fairly easily with minimal defeats to the toons. I think we only had two teams both times. The hero run ended up with 6 minutes left, the villain with about 10.

However, the villain run was slowed to an absolute slideshow. Don't know what it was, but it was like a Hami raid from the days of yore.

I don't think I like the trend of new GMs and AVs. Just giving them over 200,000 hit points doesn't make them difficult, it just makes them take forever to whittle them down. Give them better powers, better choices, and better AI, but don't simply give them more damage and more hps. It won't be long before they start turning into 1,000,000 hp sacks, which simply isn't fun to work through.

I just failed an assault on the Frozen Realm. The Winter Lord was standing on a small cliff overlooking a lake in the Croatoa map. We only had one team, but we went in and were doing ok. Then a bunch of the Northern Light spawn and shot a broadside on us, taking out half the team. The rest didn't last long enough for the rest of use to get back from the hospital. And then we got shot up again, trying to engage the Winter Lord again.

It was totally down hill from there. We couldn't get rid of the Northern Lights fast enough. There was a swarm of them and some were imbedded/bunkered within the cliff itself. As soon as we got close to the cliff, we were shot up. Not only that, I didn't have any knockback protection so I was just being bounced constantly. We tried to pull the Winter Lord, but the swarm of Northern Light inevitably followed.

Eventually we were rezzing in the Hospital at such a fast rate, we were retaining aggro or something because the Winter Lord and entourage making rushes at us at the Hospital. This occured a few time, but we were able to pull them away from the Hospital. Until we couldn't. Everyone was at the Hospital and the swarm of Northern Lights came right up to the threshold of the rez room. We were dead again before we could stand up fully. After a while the Winter Lord came to see what was going on and came into the rez room.

At about a minute or so left, we all had max debt so it was kinda funny. Rez, try to take a shot before dying again, repeat.

Lots of fun for me tonight on Virtue. Minutes after I logged on and started my loop for gifts on Talos Island I stumbled upon the Winter Lord. Teams formed up quickly and down he went. Into the Realm and we polished the old guy off with 11 minutes left. First team member to leave messaged to let us know a WL was up in AP. So we jumped through and it looked like 4 teams were just waiting around the gift. Another fast beat down for Lord Winter ensued. I was on my emp/ene defender and just kept the buffs and heals going while I blasted away. Good times.

Switched to my katana scrapper and promptly stumbled upon another WL in Talos. Once again teams formed up quickly and we gave LW the smack down with time to spare. Made my way back to Talos opened gifts until I got my badge for winter spawns. Looking forward to doing the same on the other 8 alts.

Two major gripes about the event.

1) No Hero/Villain zone event messages for Portal present appearing. Or at least I've never seen one for the 4-5 ones I've done so far.

2) Portal present disappears WAY too quickly. It should stay active until the instance is over. I've had plenty of failures because no one can join in the instance beyond the first few minutes. Makes it way frustrating.