Dragon Festival Mission One

Did anyone actually finish it?

Or were we supposed to feel suitably owned, several times with our miniscule party size.

I got owned twice. Too lazy to try for a third time.

closed 5 rifts with dunkoro zhed sf and minion master. got owned in the middle laguun rift cuz i lost many minions and didnt want to wander around looking for isolated foes to kill to rebuild my army.
seems doable

I was wondering when someone started a post about this.

It does seem to be a hard mission. For a moment I was wondering if I had HM turned on. I got no further then the second portal and don't feel like trying again, unless I know the reward is really good. But even then, I doubt I'll finish it. It's quite a bit above my league.

Oh well, back to token farming I guess.

It was hard last year with henchies only and PUGs.

Now I got into a decent alliance and heroes make things easier, too.

Hard, but doable - and this is how GW should be!

Everyone now has to carry his own weight, you have to do something, a cookie cutter alone is not going to win the mission, you have to do something yourself, too.

Where u get the mission?

The missions only stay open for 30 minutes. By now they've been closed for about 30 minutes.

Also, if I remember correctly, the reward is awful for the difficulty of the mission. Last year you got 50 or 75 Jade Wind Orbs (depending on where it was).

OK I've closed all the rifts and it still says 7 of 8 rifts destroyed. I've even been around them twice but it still won't tick off.

Anyone else had that problem

Yeah, when I closed my second or third rift, the counter wouldn't change. We got wiped shortly after though, so I don't know if it got fixed later...

it showed 0 of 8 closed after closing the first one for me. I didn't finish the whole thing though.

Yeah... these missions are not very fun. For just being "actors" in a "reenactment", those "mobs" can sure hit hard. Certainly too hard for an 'average' group of four to take on unprepared.

i got to 7/8 but all 8 rifts were closed

The first portal changed for me before I finished taking out the actors...but after that first one my hero group got silly and trained a bunch of stuff to me and wouldn't all attack the same thing at once.

all you get is 50 tokens :/

Tried once, and failed. If you could take even six people with you, instead of four, then I'm pretty sure I could have done it, but that is a little too difficult for my tastes. The bad reward makes doing it a little pointless. But I'm still enjoying the festival.

I guess it's possible it'll be like the New Year event though, where you get a mini-pet or something for completing all the missions. Who knows.

saaaaad only 50tokens. /skip

Ohh yeah - the mission is completely easy!

All you need to do is talk to some guy at Shing Jea - he then teleports you, then you buy some tickets - and go stand in a circle. Then you keep falling on your ass and getting up - and you do this for the whole weekend!

Ohh wait - you mean there is MORE to the event?
Watch me not care!

That's all I wanted to know...

...NOT worth the trouble.

Basically it's like clearing the place out in Hard Mode. Spending 1-2 hours on that is NOT worth 50 tokens by any stretch of the imagination.

It is potentially doable, but in terms of time and reward it's just not worth it...it's probably quicker to keep re-rolling a new character in Factions to do the quests and earn 240(?) tokens.

It's not so much the fact that the foes are lvl 24 and we're allowed a 4-person party that bothers me, it's the fact that:

• if you all die...it's game over due to no res shrines
• the monsters take for EVER to lose aggro
• monsters pop up all over the place, so it takes try after try after try to remember where all the spawns are you need to avoid.
• their Cry of Frustration seems to recharge in 5 seconds the amount of times they seem to get it off

All in all: Hoping for better things from mission 2.

It may be doable but remember: Hard is fun, frustratingly time consumingly hard is NOT fun.

these missions are the same as dragon festival 2006 missions (only with different foes). http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Dragon_Festival_2006 (scroll to Quests/Missions).

2nd mission Jaya Bluffs brings more of the same http://gw.gamewikis.org/wiki/Jaya_Bluffs_%28Mission%29

the last misson (shing jea) is particulary nasty (close 4 rifts at the same time). i doubt anyone managed to complete it last year.

I finished it but it was quite buggy.

It's not that hard if you've played Tombs before and you know the enemies. I had a hero group consisting of a Splinter-Barrage-Interrupter (myself), Talkora, Koss, and Olias (MM).

Problem was that some Rifts wouldn't close, I was left with 7/8 at the end of the mission and all blue flags. I had to drag a Scythe of Chaos back with me so he would open the Rift, so I could close it again.

As mentioned above, the prize was Victory Tokens, which can be exchanged for the mask at the end.

I have to say I was quite amused at the beginning seeing all these 'actors' wearing masks. I laughed a bit but then realized they could totally own me if I wasn't more serious haha.

I hope we can pick which 'demon' mask we want...

Almost all the enemies use this stance:
Fingers of Chaos

This does also trigger of their secondary profession. So its best that everyone is using /me or a non-core secondary, especially if they only use skills of their primary class. I'd suggest /rt for a hard res.

And I did manage to complete all the missions with a guild group last year. Since they are just reskined enemies and portals, I'm not planning to do so again. Well, I might try a dervish tank just to see how well that works.

Same reward as last year except its tokens i guess, seems just as hard as last year lol.

This mission is really not that hard. We did it with 2 prot monks(no bonders)_ and an assassin+Zhed. Zhed had 60% DP very soon and we didn't even bother ressing him. We did 9/10 of the mission with 3 man. The monks just protected everybody and the assassin killed somebody every 10 seconds.

If you just don't fight more then 5 guys at once, it is easy. If you find yourself fighting more then 5 guys, you have done something wrong and you can have a hard fight, with all those interupts.

If the reward is only 50 tokens... i'm not wasting my time.

And tbh i'm sure it could very easily be soloed... Burning Arrow ranger w/ Dash anyone?

I have not been successful, I am stuck at work

Yeah same bug here XD 7/8 Rifts open

Hopefully we don't get the same rash of "OMG TOO HARD!!#!@!@! REWARD SUXOR!#!!@@!" posts as we did last year.

It's basically an elite quest for the simple reward of doing it. Have fun with it, and hopefully an ecto or two drops for you by the time you're done with all four.

Just did Mission 2 with a guild party, didn't have too many troubles.
No ecto's though xD.

Just done the second mission, same bug as the first here. Shows as Capped on the map but does'nt count. You need to pull a mob to the portal to uncap it, then recap it to complete the mission.

finished the first 2 missions with my hero team, morgahn, razah and norgu, with myself running a ton of defense as para as well. save yourselves, there's nothing to fear, and they're on fire all stacked is gg wherever i go.

I don't think there's anything really wrong with these missions - I just don't feel they're worth waiting around for and then trying to get right in the tiny half hour windows.

The 7/8 bug appears if the actors get back to grey some rift and then you recapture it. But, if you just let them recap the rift till the flag is back in red, you can recapture the rift safely. We used this trick to "repair" a mission by luring a popup group of warriors to the closest rift.

I hope it will help someone.

You will see people complain and rightfully so. Yes, these are missions for expert players, but they are presented as fun things for all to enjoy. The only reason I'm here reading this board is to see if anyone has managed to do these missions.

Congratulations to you that have, In Shing Jea your as rare as rocky horse *$~#.

For the majority of us; It's same old board walk, same old instant finish quests and same feeling of let down.

Proving it's only for experts is easy:

Most players of GW will not be able to get that together in guild, alliance or in a pug, let alone in 1/2 hour.

And Cowboy Nastyman proves it's elite with his Razah. lol. I so want a Razah, lol

With a little imagination and thought these missions could have been something to make us forget the recent changes that have annoyed so many players. Opportunity missed.

ps. I have my 250 tokens.

Greetings,

Well, I just tried the mission one during it's second occurrence today. My thoughts follow:

This "mission" pits the player with a party of 3 others against level 26-28 enemies, in packs of up to 5 at a time. I have to ask - is this an encounter/challenge geared more for the casual player who logs only a couple of hours per day or is it geared for the hardcore farmer who does DoA in less than 8 man groups, perhaps even soloing it?

My opinion is that it is designed for only the hardcore players. Those who can afford to spend 8 to 10 hours a day, 7 days a week learning all the intricacies and nuances of all mechanics in the game. The casual player just doesn't have time for all that. And, for an open-to-all special event, this level of difficulty is excluding all those who aren't "talented" enough to win in these conditions (read - the casual players who want to experience the content of these missions, and are not just doing it for the victory tokens that they've already gotten from doing the quests).

Now, I place myself just slightly above the casual player, what I would call a "firmcore" player. Not as hardcore as the hardcore players, but with knowledge above that of a casual player. There is no way that ArenaNet should expect the majority of players (read - the over 80%-90% of players that aren't hardcore) to be able to complete these missions as designed. It's like trying to complete a Tombs run with just a party of 4 players. In other words, next to impossible.

I just hope that ArenaNet doesn't view it's playerbase , and as such develop further games, as being a majority of players who can hope to complete these. If they (ANet) do view their playerbase as such, they will be in for some surprising revelations come time to tally the sales figures that exclude all but those 10%-20% of hardcore gamers that are left playing.

Not to pick on these two people specifically, but this shows the attitude of hardcore players in general quite well. They feel that they are not doing anything special and having quite an easy time of it, so there is something wrong with those who cannot perform at their level. All the while not realizing that their ability is not the majority. To comment on Jetdoc's comment specifically, though, when he said that it is an elite quest, he, unwittingly perhaps, perfectly stated the problem with these missions. They are geared to the elite level/difficulty in an event that is come-one-come-all, regardless of skill level. The missions should reflect that.

Well, I've rambled on long enough. To put a closing summary on all this - these missions should have been geared to the casual player base, the majority, instead of geared towards the elite/hardcore players, the minority, and I hope this is not the overall view of ANet that they are taking with their future products.

Merry meet, merry met, merry meet again,
Wyldchild777

I haven't attempted yet because I'm still at work, but I hardly feel tempted considering the only thing of slight interest this Festival is the Mask; which isn't even very cool looking. aNet should give out Dragon Masks again -_-;;

You also get 240 victory tokens from just doing the 4 easy quests available all the time, so without some ulterior reward for finishing all the missions, it's rather pointless to do any of them, just do the quests and win some tokens from minigames for the mask if you really need it. At the very least, the actors should have been made succeptible to LB Gaze to push the odds at least remotely in the favor of common players.

Yea, tried it on my Rit, I figured, well hell, a few level 20's and all that, should be doable ..
I get there, I see level 24's/28's and I'm thinking ... a party of 4 versus 3-5 level 24's who spike.
So I jumped on my ele .. hell she should be able to MS / savannah heat the hell outta them ...

Nope.
Mission 2 took place in Jaya Bluffs ... I closed 3 of the 4 visable rifts, my team died, I had no rez.

I went back to shing jea and people said the other 4 are hidden ... WTF?

I'm not even going to bother now, I have about 5-6 level 20's I'll just run the quests to get the 240 tokens with and then see what happens on Sunday with the masks (250 + mask or choice of mask)

I was thinking maybe some sort of fancy weapon (Never know) but to see that the first mission only produced 50 victory tokens .. GG Anet.

**I too had the bug, I'd close 2 and it'd say "1 of 8 rifts closed", close 4 and it'd say "3 of 8 closed"

I managed it, although it found it to be extremely challenging and very slow-going. I'm not used to small party sizes against monsters that tough, and I found myself exercising the better part of valor very frequently

Fingers of Chaos does not work on Heroes.

The 2 missions today (repeated tomorrow?) give 75 tokens for completion, and they both take ~20 minutes using full heroes. Not worth it for just tokens, but meh.

I just did the Tsumei Village with me as a tank [with only one defensive skill XD], SF, heal, and prot. It was really easy and I got a 75 token reward.

EDIT: People are calling this hardcore? I've never completed Urgoz, The Deep, DoA, not even Tombs. The only UW I've ever done was last year, I SSed with a 55er, and I've also never been into FoW. These mini missions aren't anything compared to those. I've already got 240 tokens on all my characts, so this is the only way I can get more. It's very worth it, since I get flasks of firewater.

Second EDIT: Just beat Seitung. I failed twice because of bad pulling. If you can pull well, only the tank should be set on fire, blinded, and crippled the whole time. *growls* But besides that, it was still not too hard and worth the 75 tokens in my opinion.