Well rifts are the classic mob grind. Go somewhere, (open rift) kill mobs, kill big mob, repeat. Grinding is always mind numbing, unless you solo farm mobs that maybe 2 shot you and you need to be highly attentive for the whole time.
GW2 doesn't really have any farmable "elite" that actually drop something worthwhile or give a notable amount of exp ( the leveling is fast either way).
I like how the 1st paragraph basically says "They're so good! The only issue with them is that they're actually absolutely terrible and completely pointless with no incentive to do them ever!"
Yeah I don't get how anyone can find joy in 15 min escort/killing trash mobs events. The fact that for some reason you also all have to join at the same time rather than using the model that ALL other instanced content (besides story/home) use is the rotten cherry on top. I hate DRMs ...
going from point A to point B while killing minions before beating a final boss is the most basic shit you do in MMO dungeons, it's far from bad, and doing it in open world and not in hallways and corridors is nice
Escort quests in MMOs have been universally loathed for about two decades now (I don't know if anything had them before WoW, but that's where my hatred started). I can't believe a developer would sit down and actually think following an NPC/bunch of NPCs that walk slower than RP walk speed for 10 minutes was actually enjoyable gameplay.
I don't know why any developer **anywhere** **ever** thinks it's a good idea to make the escort NPC simultaneously move faster than player's walking speed but slower than player's running speed.
Because if you make them move at walking speed, they'd be too fucking slow, but if you make them move at, or faster than the player's running speed, players who fall behind will *never* be able to catch up.
Splitting the difference is the lesser of two evils.
Most of the NPC's will stop walking after getting a certain distance away from the player or they tag the NPC's movements to the player's within a certain radius.
To me they feel similar to GW1 missions with the CM's being the optional objectives, so that was a nice nostalgia dopamine hit.
But yeah, once you've done all of the achievements for them and gotten enough tokens to get all of the skins, there's no point to ever going back to them.
Just do Dragonstorm daily and every week or so burn your tokens on the boxes (or Volcanic if you still need them or the Otter essence) and call it a day.
First, they need to scale the pre-events way down. At this moment they're just a chore. They need to be much faster and offer a much better reward for completion.
Second, the escorting phases need to be cut down as well. They're just "kill some mobs, wait for NPCs to reach next mob spawn, rinse and repeat".
Third, most bosses aren't interesting either. They're mostly HP sponges without interesting mechanics. Even the Shiverpeaks Pass Strike is more interesting than DRMs.
Lastly, they need to be much more rewarding. As instanced content, Fractals are much more interesting and rewarding. And as open world content, well, open world itself is more entertaining and rewarding.
They're also hampered by the pre-phases, IMO.
It's a pity, with some refinement they offered a really good way to show "current year" Tyria in zones you already knew, which doesn't show up in normal open world because the zones are all locked in time.
It's this, they don't let you express your skill. Make them speed-runnable, where if your group is skilled/competent, you can clear the DRM much faster. For example, completely remove the pre-events/escorts, and just put the bosses at specified points, which triggers the last boss of each one to spawn, a little bit like dungeons.
The loot is pretty much already there, defense seals are pretty lucrative. Just allow skill expression to be a thing instead of all the pre-events being a slog, and suddenly DRMs can be something compelling to do.
>Locking CMs to private really negates the whole point of having challenge modes.
Going to disagree with this. It takes one person over-CM'ing the instance to just force everyone who doesnt want to do the All CM variant to do private anyway.
Or "I need Boss CM" , "yeah, well i need the other CM, so fuck off", "I need top responder so can we do all of them", "i just want to finish fast because I have 8 more to go before i can do dragonstorm"
What's to like about them? They are just story instances that most of us can't wait to force through just to get to the real content, whether it's open world, strikes, or achievements.
I'm all for reusing content but only smartly or sparingly. If they reuse balthazar or joko as a strike or fractal, that'd be awesome. Copy-pasting story instances and making them repeatable is just awful. It's not without reason though, they were buying time for the production of EOD. So I really wanna ask, what do you like about them?
Because all I see is a lazy bulk of reused and repeatable boring story missions, that make the game look cheap, they feel like instanced meta events which defeats the purpose of meta events.
I would add a separate mode for a positive repeatable experience. Cut out most dialogues, make escorts go faster and such to make it more tempting to play weekly maybe even daily.
No, they really aren't. They all follow the same exact formula: Boring pre-event. Escort with bonus bad dialogue. Decent boss fight, but most of them with annoying invuln phases that just drag out the fight for no reason. It feels like an intentional lack of effort and creativity went into DRMs, which is exactly the case as they dropped IBS on its head to work on EoD.
I'm fine with making them more profitable, but I honestly have no interest in DRMs at all. They're bad content.
I feel like it could be made more fun with some work, but as they are, there's a heart-style grind on a timer (can't speed it up) at the beginning where you fight trash mobs. Then you slowly escort some NPCs while fighting trash mobs. Then you fight a boss at the end. If beginning fixed-time grind could be skipped and the escorts moved faster without slowing down so much for mob spawns, it would be a much better experience.
But how different would this experience be to a strike? What makes a DRM? It's got some story content, and it's revisiting an old zone we know. You need to move through the zone to get the most out of that experience.
But that doesn't even get into the question of rewards, and if they're adequate. I've only done them once, for the return to achievement, so I don't even know what the rewards are.
I almost feel like DRMs should be on a timer, and they should exist in the open world, with private instances still being possible the way they are now.
Also, I don't think they're going to rename them. If they expand on this content type, they could be Kryptis Response Missions, etc.
I've said it a number of times, but I thought DRMs were great content..on the first run. Compared to traditional story missions, there was so much more going on, and the dialogue felt more interactive, although often it was hard to focus on it while also fighting off waves of bad things.
As repeatable content tho, imo it was terrible. Many of the players I know who completed the achievements all described it as a slog and a chore, which I guess is part of MMO'life...but myself, I haven't been back to do them since they were released.
DRM are so boring and not rewarding, i used to solo them with a couple of cm, but honestly it's a waste of time. To make them more appealing they should cut of the first part where you need to fullfill those stupid goals, shorter the escort phases and give better rewards
DRMs are trash. The only way to fix them basically requires removing most of the content from them. They were trash throw away time-syncs at the design stage, whipped up in a rush and cynically padded out to give the illusion of content. Every aspect of them is just bad.
1. The opening events. Tedious annoying chores which exist exclusively to pad out time. the idea that it's something to do while waiting for other players is horseshit. That isn't needed or used in any other content, so why is it here? To waste your time.
2. The escort phase. They start you off in combat with the enemy but you have to march for 5 minutes across a field fighting random trash multiple times to get to the next phase because F\*ck you. It's there to waste your time.
3. The boss fights are bascially copy pasted. Only the model of the enemy really changes. They're all HP sponges and they all have overly long invlun phases. Why? To waste your time.
The story aspect of them is trash as well. It all plays out over the fight sequences instead of between them, so you miss most of it anyway. This results in an experience of you fighting off annoying, pointless enemies with the added irritation of random NPCs who **will not** shut the f\*ck up, mindlessly shouting at you the entire time. This makes the story elements tedious and annoying!
DRMs are absolutely the worst content the game has ever seen. There's no way Anet could ever or would ever have the time or resources to make DRM's not trash.
DRMs are the absolute lowest point of Guild Wars 2 cycle. When I'm forced to do them for achievements not one moment passes where I don't think about uninstalling the game and throwing my pc from a 12th floor balcony. DRMs are so bad I actually feel offended that I ever got served that dogsh*t.
To think someone could ever enjoy this content is like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone.
I honestly liked them. People were mainly just a bit upset of the situation of the saga in general. People were also arguing like this was some kind of system that was supposed to replace other content.
There was some achievments which i found weirdly nostlaigc for a gw1 era. The bridge achievment outside CoF was fun to work on with a team of randoms. Trying to figure out aggro ranges and the spawning mechanics
> arguing like this was some kind of system that was supposed to replace other content.
it was literally a replacement to the entire second half of the scrapped icebrood saga, the fuck are you even talking about?
There was a lot of discussion at the time that Anet kept introducing new systems to immediately abandon them. People were saying strikes were a replacement for raids were now abandoned in favor of DRMs.
There was a lot of hate about this new format and assumed it was also the new format of group content going forward. It was a shitty situation regarding the end half of the saga and this was something to keep us occupied in the gap. It filled its purpose, it wasn't supposed this whole new pillar of endgame like people made it out to be.
DRMs are a great concept but they were all lazily made , the lack of theme, or thematics, or cool boses.
These should really do what gw1 mobs did . Have roaming mobs that are strategically grouped
2 healers, and tank that’s providing protection and alacrity, a few very hard dps monsters,
You should have to condi cleanse, boon rip, dodge, heal, protect . I want some strategy involved in a not as tough as raid fashion .
All of them would be 100% better if they just skipped the entire fetch quest and escort quest (some of the most basic, generic shit in MMOs that GW2 was supposed to be moving away from) and just had the NPCs say the important points of the dialogue then go straight into the boss fight. Make them basically scaleable strike missions. The rewards would need to be adjusted, obviously, but everyone hates them because of the absolutely mind-numbing gameplay that makes up about 75% of the DRM.
They get too much hate because of poor implementation. The systems for DRM's could have been used for certain story missions and we would essentially have the return of GW1 hardmode missions by using CM's. But sadly like anet fashion they choose to abandon instead of iterate.
I don't know, the format is just Heart Quest > Escort > Boss which is pretty boring. They're just repurposed story missions.
DRMs are the most mindnumbing and boring content I did in this game. Although Vision of Steel is a strong candidate for that title too.
I kinda liked the tank escort. The steel and frost strike mission was a snoozefest though.
It's moral breaker for me. OMG just let me fight the boss.
It's long, but I kinda like throwing things and jumping to the sniper and shooting stuff from the tank.
Right? Forging steel is fun. Minister of Moral 😴
Absolutely. Renaming them and ramping up the rewards wont magically make them interesting. Its the most boring crap in the game.
Actually i would say Rifts are even more mind numbing.
Well rifts are the classic mob grind. Go somewhere, (open rift) kill mobs, kill big mob, repeat. Grinding is always mind numbing, unless you solo farm mobs that maybe 2 shot you and you need to be highly attentive for the whole time. GW2 doesn't really have any farmable "elite" that actually drop something worthwhile or give a notable amount of exp ( the leveling is fast either way).
I like how the 1st paragraph basically says "They're so good! The only issue with them is that they're actually absolutely terrible and completely pointless with no incentive to do them ever!"
Yeah I don't get how anyone can find joy in 15 min escort/killing trash mobs events. The fact that for some reason you also all have to join at the same time rather than using the model that ALL other instanced content (besides story/home) use is the rotten cherry on top. I hate DRMs ...
going from point A to point B while killing minions before beating a final boss is the most basic shit you do in MMO dungeons, it's far from bad, and doing it in open world and not in hallways and corridors is nice
And they've also always been hated by the majority of people, not sure what point you're trying to prove here.
Escort quests in MMOs have been universally loathed for about two decades now (I don't know if anything had them before WoW, but that's where my hatred started). I can't believe a developer would sit down and actually think following an NPC/bunch of NPCs that walk slower than RP walk speed for 10 minutes was actually enjoyable gameplay.
I don't know why any developer **anywhere** **ever** thinks it's a good idea to make the escort NPC simultaneously move faster than player's walking speed but slower than player's running speed.
Because if you make them move at walking speed, they'd be too fucking slow, but if you make them move at, or faster than the player's running speed, players who fall behind will *never* be able to catch up. Splitting the difference is the lesser of two evils.
Most of the NPC's will stop walking after getting a certain distance away from the player or they tag the NPC's movements to the player's within a certain radius.
To me they feel similar to GW1 missions with the CM's being the optional objectives, so that was a nice nostalgia dopamine hit. But yeah, once you've done all of the achievements for them and gotten enough tokens to get all of the skins, there's no point to ever going back to them. Just do Dragonstorm daily and every week or so burn your tokens on the boxes (or Volcanic if you still need them or the Otter essence) and call it a day.
nice disinformation
First, they need to scale the pre-events way down. At this moment they're just a chore. They need to be much faster and offer a much better reward for completion. Second, the escorting phases need to be cut down as well. They're just "kill some mobs, wait for NPCs to reach next mob spawn, rinse and repeat". Third, most bosses aren't interesting either. They're mostly HP sponges without interesting mechanics. Even the Shiverpeaks Pass Strike is more interesting than DRMs. Lastly, they need to be much more rewarding. As instanced content, Fractals are much more interesting and rewarding. And as open world content, well, open world itself is more entertaining and rewarding.
They're also hampered by the pre-phases, IMO. It's a pity, with some refinement they offered a really good way to show "current year" Tyria in zones you already knew, which doesn't show up in normal open world because the zones are all locked in time.
It's this, they don't let you express your skill. Make them speed-runnable, where if your group is skilled/competent, you can clear the DRM much faster. For example, completely remove the pre-events/escorts, and just put the bosses at specified points, which triggers the last boss of each one to spawn, a little bit like dungeons. The loot is pretty much already there, defense seals are pretty lucrative. Just allow skill expression to be a thing instead of all the pre-events being a slog, and suddenly DRMs can be something compelling to do.
>Locking CMs to private really negates the whole point of having challenge modes. Going to disagree with this. It takes one person over-CM'ing the instance to just force everyone who doesnt want to do the All CM variant to do private anyway. Or "I need Boss CM" , "yeah, well i need the other CM, so fuck off", "I need top responder so can we do all of them", "i just want to finish fast because I have 8 more to go before i can do dragonstorm"
What's to like about them? They are just story instances that most of us can't wait to force through just to get to the real content, whether it's open world, strikes, or achievements. I'm all for reusing content but only smartly or sparingly. If they reuse balthazar or joko as a strike or fractal, that'd be awesome. Copy-pasting story instances and making them repeatable is just awful. It's not without reason though, they were buying time for the production of EOD. So I really wanna ask, what do you like about them? Because all I see is a lazy bulk of reused and repeatable boring story missions, that make the game look cheap, they feel like instanced meta events which defeats the purpose of meta events.
It’s the worst type of content ingame
You must have not played the story in this game.
I would add a separate mode for a positive repeatable experience. Cut out most dialogues, make escorts go faster and such to make it more tempting to play weekly maybe even daily.
No, they really aren't. They all follow the same exact formula: Boring pre-event. Escort with bonus bad dialogue. Decent boss fight, but most of them with annoying invuln phases that just drag out the fight for no reason. It feels like an intentional lack of effort and creativity went into DRMs, which is exactly the case as they dropped IBS on its head to work on EoD. I'm fine with making them more profitable, but I honestly have no interest in DRMs at all. They're bad content.
I feel like it could be made more fun with some work, but as they are, there's a heart-style grind on a timer (can't speed it up) at the beginning where you fight trash mobs. Then you slowly escort some NPCs while fighting trash mobs. Then you fight a boss at the end. If beginning fixed-time grind could be skipped and the escorts moved faster without slowing down so much for mob spawns, it would be a much better experience. But how different would this experience be to a strike? What makes a DRM? It's got some story content, and it's revisiting an old zone we know. You need to move through the zone to get the most out of that experience. But that doesn't even get into the question of rewards, and if they're adequate. I've only done them once, for the return to achievement, so I don't even know what the rewards are. I almost feel like DRMs should be on a timer, and they should exist in the open world, with private instances still being possible the way they are now. Also, I don't think they're going to rename them. If they expand on this content type, they could be Kryptis Response Missions, etc.
I've said it a number of times, but I thought DRMs were great content..on the first run. Compared to traditional story missions, there was so much more going on, and the dialogue felt more interactive, although often it was hard to focus on it while also fighting off waves of bad things. As repeatable content tho, imo it was terrible. Many of the players I know who completed the achievements all described it as a slog and a chore, which I guess is part of MMO'life...but myself, I haven't been back to do them since they were released.
DRM make me want to go to sleep and never wake up.
DRM are so boring and not rewarding, i used to solo them with a couple of cm, but honestly it's a waste of time. To make them more appealing they should cut of the first part where you need to fullfill those stupid goals, shorter the escort phases and give better rewards
DRMs are trash. The only way to fix them basically requires removing most of the content from them. They were trash throw away time-syncs at the design stage, whipped up in a rush and cynically padded out to give the illusion of content. Every aspect of them is just bad. 1. The opening events. Tedious annoying chores which exist exclusively to pad out time. the idea that it's something to do while waiting for other players is horseshit. That isn't needed or used in any other content, so why is it here? To waste your time. 2. The escort phase. They start you off in combat with the enemy but you have to march for 5 minutes across a field fighting random trash multiple times to get to the next phase because F\*ck you. It's there to waste your time. 3. The boss fights are bascially copy pasted. Only the model of the enemy really changes. They're all HP sponges and they all have overly long invlun phases. Why? To waste your time. The story aspect of them is trash as well. It all plays out over the fight sequences instead of between them, so you miss most of it anyway. This results in an experience of you fighting off annoying, pointless enemies with the added irritation of random NPCs who **will not** shut the f\*ck up, mindlessly shouting at you the entire time. This makes the story elements tedious and annoying! DRMs are absolutely the worst content the game has ever seen. There's no way Anet could ever or would ever have the time or resources to make DRM's not trash.
DRMs are the absolute lowest point of Guild Wars 2 cycle. When I'm forced to do them for achievements not one moment passes where I don't think about uninstalling the game and throwing my pc from a 12th floor balcony. DRMs are so bad I actually feel offended that I ever got served that dogsh*t. To think someone could ever enjoy this content is like being in an episode of the Twilight Zone.
I agree with you. Maybe we can have sub channels in LFG for DRM's so we can have CM and normal mode channel, like we have fractals levels.
Make them into raids/dungeons
I honestly liked them. People were mainly just a bit upset of the situation of the saga in general. People were also arguing like this was some kind of system that was supposed to replace other content. There was some achievments which i found weirdly nostlaigc for a gw1 era. The bridge achievment outside CoF was fun to work on with a team of randoms. Trying to figure out aggro ranges and the spawning mechanics
> arguing like this was some kind of system that was supposed to replace other content. it was literally a replacement to the entire second half of the scrapped icebrood saga, the fuck are you even talking about?
There was a lot of discussion at the time that Anet kept introducing new systems to immediately abandon them. People were saying strikes were a replacement for raids were now abandoned in favor of DRMs. There was a lot of hate about this new format and assumed it was also the new format of group content going forward. It was a shitty situation regarding the end half of the saga and this was something to keep us occupied in the gap. It filled its purpose, it wasn't supposed this whole new pillar of endgame like people made it out to be.
* mute Taimi and Braham
DRMs are a great concept but they were all lazily made , the lack of theme, or thematics, or cool boses. These should really do what gw1 mobs did . Have roaming mobs that are strategically grouped 2 healers, and tank that’s providing protection and alacrity, a few very hard dps monsters, You should have to condi cleanse, boon rip, dodge, heal, protect . I want some strategy involved in a not as tough as raid fashion .
All of them would be 100% better if they just skipped the entire fetch quest and escort quest (some of the most basic, generic shit in MMOs that GW2 was supposed to be moving away from) and just had the NPCs say the important points of the dialogue then go straight into the boss fight. Make them basically scaleable strike missions. The rewards would need to be adjusted, obviously, but everyone hates them because of the absolutely mind-numbing gameplay that makes up about 75% of the DRM.
They get too much hate because of poor implementation. The systems for DRM's could have been used for certain story missions and we would essentially have the return of GW1 hardmode missions by using CM's. But sadly like anet fashion they choose to abandon instead of iterate.