You all try so hard.
Did the Lost Shores weekend event on GW2. It was a mixed bag, mostly due to problems with lag and broken scavenger hunt. ANet needs to add a PTR of some sort. The initial event was designed into too small a space. You had the Karka invading from the shore, but they were all in just one area of the city. This caused everyone to be in that portion of the map. The combo of multiple mobs, large mobs, and hundreds of players all in the same part of a map really choked their servers.
I skipped the second event and I hear it wasn't much to talk about, but on the second day Fractals of the Mists dungeon opened up and that was the best part of the Lost Shores patch. The Fractals of the Mists is an endless dungeon mode based around 9 mini-dungeons and a large boss fight. The mini-dungeons are in different settings, and some are retellings of events form the first Guild Wars. You enter the dungeon and select a starting difficulty tier. Your first time you start at level 1 difficulty, but each three mini-dungeons you raise up a difficulty tier. After you do three mini-dungeons, you get ported back to the hub where you can sell stuff, repair and buy things from the fractal merchant. (Fractals are the reward currency for completing a minidungeon.) Then you can go back in for another set of three or leave. It saves your character's progress so once you've completed up to a certain tier, you can always go back and start at that tier. After every 8th mini-dungeon, you fight a world boss sort of creature. So far I've fought the Jade Maw twice. I hear that after you reach the 10th tier of difficulty the Agony mechanic comes in and you get a DoT that does a percentage of damage of your health each tick. Then you have to start using Agony Resistance. =/ I'm only tier 3 so far.
The mini-dungeons are great though. I only disliked one that had traps all over and it may have just been our inexperience. It does help to have voice chat on these as communication is rather important. One of the dungeons is the Colossus. You port into this area and you're at the foot of a giant colossus that's been chained to the wall and kept their by giant seals. You first fight a boss with a giant hammer. He hits really hard, so it's a mater of kiting and dodging. After you beat him, he drops his hammer. When you pick up the hammer, you get a set of three new skills, but you also get a ticking corruption upon you. Once the corruption hits 40 stacks, you instantly die. The Hammer is used to break the seals, but it must first be charged by killing a cultist protecting the seals. Then once that happens, your fourth skill opens up and you can strike the seal. Inbetween the seals are jumping puzzles and rooms with traps.
The dungeon revolves around passing off the Hammer between players so the corruption stack doesn't get too high and quickly moving from seal to seal. It's challenging but doable. Once you get it down, I imagine you can speed run it.
Another dungeon was at a fishing hut where Krait had abducted prisoners. You fight mostly underwater. The first part is defeating Krait and freeing the prisoners. After that, you dive deeper into the ruins. I hear there are two diferent paths that can happen here, but I got the dolphin path. This turns your party into dolphins with sonar, escape and distraction skills. You have to get past the enemies and have no real way to fight them. It's like Ecco in 3d and confusing as hell. After this, you return to human form and fight a jellyfish boss.
Other dungeons involved a Temple of Doom like dungeon, an Asuran dungeon with Golems and jumping puzzles, a replaying of Ruins of Surmia and the Searing from GW1 but from the Charr perspective, the swamp one that gave me a headache, and one in the middle of an intense blizzard where you had to use torches to keep bonfires lit and see in the dark.
That stuff was all cool.
Then there was the new zone that opened up on the second day as well. There was a event that happened here and I did it once or twice. A chain DE to take and set up camp on the island. After that, there wasn't much going on in the new area save for a couple DEs and a jumping puzzle. The jumping puzzle was pretty cool and involved hopping across rocky geysers.
The third day was a mixed bag as well. There was a huge Dynamic Event chain to kill the ancient Karka boss on the island. The whole event took like 2.5 hours total and about everybody hated the reinforcements sections of the events. The problem was the scaling was way out of hand and the culling issue in the game made for invisible enemies. The other parts of the chain were pretty good and I liked the segments immediately following the reinforcements fight. In order to weaken the giant Karka, because its shell was protecting it from all attacks, you had to maneuver it near hot air geysers and lava pools, knock down trees on top of it and create rockslides. At the end, you move it back to its nest cave and set off explosives, then fight it at the very bottom and then once it gets to its last 1% health, you actually start jumping up and ground pounding the earth to break open the earth and sink into the lava below.
Though a drag at 2+ hours, the rewards were huge for finishing the event. Some people made out huge by getting precursor weapons that sell for hundreds of gold. Everyone got exotics, rares and the largest bag size. I did it again later on on my Engineer alt and for some reason it went much faster that time. I think the total time spent was cut in half and I still get big rewards.
