Eye of the Brandstorm Feedback

[Erasculio.2914]

I have noticed two trends that really annoy me:

 

* **Way too many visual effects**. You can see that whenever you try to do the Serpent's Ire meta event, for example. In "Eye of the Brandstorm", the first S4 story mission, we get the visual effects of the brandstorm continually around us, then the ligntnings hitting frequently, then the energy dome around the energizing crystals, and the effects of the enemies' attacks. It's simply way too much - I went from my usual 30 FPS to 16 FPS in most of that instance. It's also very poor storytelling - it becomes visual pollution at that point.

 

A similar thing is about the way the events happen. We are told, "quickly, rescue those civillians by breaking those crystal" - and immediatelly after that our characters say, "wait, was that Aurene?". Where? By giving us a task with a short timer, player attention would be focused on breaking the crystals. By making Aurene appear - somewhere - at the same time, it's almost certain that players won't be able to see where she was. ArenaNet mentioned they knew this was an issue at the end battle in PoF, but they still continue doing the same thing here.

 

* **Using way too many control effects**. In the boss fight for "Eye of the Brandstorm", there are five different mechanics that cause control effects. Five. That's waaaaay too much. It feels like ArenaNet's answer to making an encounter unique is to fill it with control effects, but ironically that has only the opposite effect - they all begin to look like each other. There are multiple effects they could use in a fight instead of relying on the same kind of thing, and the same mechanic appearing so often in the same fight is very annoying.

 

For those who are curious, the five mechanics are:

 

1. The wing flaps, which send waves of launching effects

2. The dash, which knocks down characters in its path

3. The tail attack, which knocks down characters that are hit

4. The effect that creates a crystal around our characters

5. The stun effect in the environment

 

"Just dodge them" - it's not a matter of dodging. I'm not saying the fight is hard - it isn't. It's simply very poor design, IMO, to rely almost exclusively on a single kind of mechanic. All those effects should be replaced by something more interesting that seeing the same thing over and over.

[Kungstrollet.5283]

I agree it is very poorly written.

 

It seems that ArenaNet's believe it will be a good story if they "throw in as much as possible" and "Make sure that intelligence strategies are not rewarded".

 

I hope that this narrative technology will end so that GW2 will again be something I can recommend for others.