Daaaang congrats on the beastly new rig Khold. Wowza.
Anyone else think this patch was an enormous step back for the game? (Not even referring to the fact that now there's pockets of lag and loading times have increased tremendously)
In an effort to stop farming a single dungeon, they implemented a system to get people to do all the dungeons. This had me excited, dungeon'ing is fun and doing more than the same dungeon all the time is even more fun.
But now with Champions and the Pavilion, everyone else is farming. So we went from farming a single dungeon to just bum rushing champions, which requires almost no intellect at all. Just mash mash mash. I feel like the Pavilion is even ANets way of celebrating zerging. It might be some of the worst content they put out, basically a giant room full of loot. Essentially Mad Kings domain with Halloween doors replaced by Champions and Legendaries.
It's tough to see it as any kind of step back. You're basically right on the money about the Pavilion being like the Mad King's domain and if you disliked one it's hugely likely you'll dislike the other. Others may rather enjoy giant rooms full of loot. Crucially, it can be safely ignored, even if the meta achievement rewards are non-optional for you (I think you can theoretically fill the entire meta just with the Jubilee daily acheivements if you do enough?). Put another way, you don't like this event's temporary content, but at least you can rejoice that it's temporary.
Your concerns about more systemic changes are less clear. 36 dungeon runs were listed on gw2lfg in the last 10 minutes, and a lower percentage than ever before are looking for COF1 runs. This seems healthy to me, so maybe there's something perceptual going on. When you say
now with Champions and the Pavilion, everyone else is farming. So we went from farming a single dungeon to just bum rushing champions
Do you mean the guild? Cause... I spent release day systematic hunting different types of Champions (if that can possibly be considered farming, it's the least efficient version ever
) and last night we dedicated a guild event specifically to them... and that's it. It's only been two nights. I'm definitely sorry if you did not enjoy our event, but I have to stress that we can't ensure every individual one appears to every member of the guild.
Rest assured that I will be back to rabidly running dungeons soon enough and I have no doubt that this holds true for many of our guildmates as well.
I think you also may have ignored or glossed over the disappointing strangeness of the new dungeon reward allocation. Every single dungeon path outside of AC and Arah is worth 1 gold. They successfully made "anything other than COF1" more appealing than "COF1 again," but they certainly did nothing to make SE2 as appealing as SE1, TA3 as appealing as anything in CoE, or to convince me to yawn through the Butcher once more in HotW. Nor did they do anything to make any of the above
more appealing than COF1 if you're just picking a single run to do.
It's so out of wack it feels borderline
bugged to me, and I really hope they give them another pass soon. It's nowhere close to enough to dissuade me from doing dungeons- I'd still want to run my favorites even if there were literally
no rewards- but it is certainly the most disappointing aspect of this patch from my perspective rather than the other stuff surrounding it that you think had a negative impact on dungeon running.
So all in all, rather than a tremendous step back, I think it's a big step forward with temporary content that some may understandably not enjoy, and good reason to take another look at the reward level for many dungeon paths.
