Of all the seasonal events, Larfleeze's hostile take over of the Star Labs Research Facility and plans to thwart Christmas is the most challenging. Nonetheless I participated in this year's festivities because of four things: 1. The Krampus style items are attractive and I'd want to equip them for fashion purposes and not just a one star feat. 2. Several of the base items are awesome 3. As was the case for many who have already posted on the forums, I believed penguins would drop in the instance 4. I wanted to purchase the arctic style items on an alt (because it's a cool style). Someone decided it would be a good idea to price all style pieces at 15 holly leaves for all styles. I'm going to assume the steep cost of a single piece of gear, and the fact they are affiliated with a feat, is why devs only created four Krampus pieces. Unfortunately, styles like Arctic which contains seven pieces are still going to be valued at 15 holly leaves per piece. Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but I recall when the Arctic style came out, they were not valued at 15 holly leaves per piece. That'd 105 holly leaves for the entire set. Here's a suggestion. May we please add previous year's style to the loot table of the seasonal instance? Quite frankly, I am sick and tired of getting the same old "re-gifted sweater" and "incredible sweater" one of which can't be traded anyways. This would also make up for the fact that many of us thought that penguins would drop in the instance but actually don't. It would also give some players some incentive to go into that instance at all given that there's still a 50/50 chance of completing it. I am a firm believer in evolution but DCUO seasonal events sorely tests my convictions. There is a stat clamp. Low level characters have no excuse for short comings. And even if they did, there are at least two health barrels that respawn between waves of breaking that frigging shield. I do not understand. High level end game players who think dps is all that matters. Dude.... you killed it. Good for you. Stop randomly throwing the frigging lantern and hoping it'll hit the console. And for the love of all that is holy, activate the presents. You've wasted enough of my time. Do not pug a feat and if you do, tell us first that you want to go for a feat. Do not assume that everyone wants to attempt one of the hardest of all seasonal event feats. It has been proposed in another thread that the pricing of items this year is justifiable because the max number of marks is 16. Then by the end of the event a user can acquire 496 marks on one character if they do the instance and open world mission everyday (and not ever using replay badges). That's enough to purchase all the items necessary to fulfill the two new feat requirements, purchase at least two penguins, but still not complete a full set of style from a previous year. (Keep in mind that vendor bought styles cannot be traded.) I have no idea how many players will log in everyday, complete every aspect of the winter event and acquire the maximum number of non tradeable currency on any one particular character, but I'm going to wager it's less than 100% of the DCUO community. And I will commend developers for creating a ton of new items including the Harlequinn tables which I must have. Stereotypical female that I am, I can't buy just one, I am going to have to buy at least four of both varieties so that is where my excess holly leaves across all of my characters will go. That and a variety of other things. I just wish that when I ran the vault seasonal items besides a snowflake and slushy snowdrift would drop. Maybe a winter sleigh or a reindeer. I can't prove it, but I know you're teasing me. "I bet you wish I was a 15 holly leaf Wonder Woman Tree or even a festive fireplace don't you? I bet you wish I was anything but another clump of icicles!" First world gamer girl problem: being annoyed when devs manage to make in game winter holidays expensive. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person that feels this way.
I can understand the frustrations, but unless you're only running one character total in the game (or are extremely limited on time available to play) the holiday stuff, including older styles you might want, are within reach. Between multiple characters (many of whom had leftover Holly Leaves from last year) and planning out what I wanted to get and who was going to get it, I finished getting the stuff I wanted from the Holiday event in about a week, maybe just under a week. I set aside getting the Krampus stuff for my villain and other characters checked off the base items for the feat this year one by one with all the base items going to one character. I didn't even have to go through all of my active characters to do so, and had a couple days where I picked up some extra hanging lights for a character's holiday area of a base. At 16 per day you can get the Arctic set in a week. Same goes for a penguin. Most, if not all, of the base items are tradable (not sure about the penguins, they were cool but not a must-have for me) so even if you've only got three or four characters that's at least 3 penguins in a week while number four gets the Arctic set you want. Besides, considering how, um, let's say challenging the RNG factor can be with loot drops in the game, I'm not sure putting older styles into the loot table for the seasonal would be the best solution.
Yeah, was annoyed a the price hike as well (the full set of the Holiday Elf will now cost 120 HL, when it use to only cost around 40 or so), but that's just how the DEVs have been forced to react to a portion of the customer base
I'm the kind of player that's more likely to spend money on replay badges and vault tickets though than paying for holly leaves in the market place. Vault has the potential to drop seasonal items. Seasonal instance should drop seasonal items. However every year, while we get new feats, styles and base items, the instance and the vault drop the same exact items consistently. And increasing the prices of past items like Arctic/Elf styles to supposedly balance the cost of vendor items is sort of like a slap in the face. We're now either forced to farm or forced to pay for holly leaves in the market place.
Fixed it. There are different kinds of players. Yeah some players would happily spend money on holly leaves. I'm freemium so the holly leaves gimmick isn't attractive until there's a sale on db cash. But replay badges are usually a worthwhile investment as they can be used for any instance and members can purchase them for their friends or themselves. Eliminating penguins from the vault and seasonal instance likely reduced the number of customers who spent cash on market place items like vault tickets and replays. Or once players find out they spent money on replays hoping to get a penguin that was never in the loot table, a some probably won't participate in future seasonal events. Most players didn't buy replays for marks or refurbished re-gifted/incredible sweaters. They likely assumed penguins would drop like teekl did during Halloween. Similarly I doubt anyone bought more vault tickets because they hoped they get another snowflake/slushy snow drift. Penguins is what we wanted. Because of the steep price of getting the feats AND the awesome base items like the Harley tables as well as past base items that we can't get enough of. Now if DayBreak wanted to pull a Wal-Mart and do a massive rollback on all vendor items on December 24th.... make all style pieces 9 Holly Leaves (which is a more reasonable price anyways....)
Selling seasonal currency is the new cash grab and prices have been adjusted accordingly....tis the season to be greedy...albeit easy to get the impression that for DCUO now its now less a season and more a lifetime!
You know, since you're more likely to buy replay badges, you could simply buy the badges and replay the content as much as you can handle to get the stuff you want. That is a choice you can make, after all. As far as the game goes in general, the only person who can force you to do anything is yourself.
Please clarify. Do you mean replay all the content including the open world mission? If so..... Ordinarily I might agree with you except the open world mission was ever so slightly altered this year such that we only need to fulfill one objective. Under ideal circumstances you need to find a minimum of five christmas trees to complete it. I'm not complaining because winter daily mission was always far easier than say the summer daily mission in terms of time consumption. But am I the only who noticed that these lantern brutes are extra jacked, like they've been hitting some venom spiked with kryptonite? At cr 160+, they should not be able to spawn, and proceed to blast me over to ICW henchmen. Furthermore at some trees the set up goes: Lantern transformer appears, kill it, three normal looking lanterns appear. The good thing is once you down the three lanterns, three presents appear. Only one of the presents counts towards the mission objective. One puts you into a orange lantern snow globe, the other makes you do a little jig OR turns you into a snowman. I have done this mission as a nature and fire dps. My nature dps does this in wolf form to speed things up. Being turned into a snowman screws me over because now I have to restart my whole loadout from a human. As a fire dps, I have to waste more power after being snowmanned to respawn my bot because he goes poof when I get snowmanned. The fire power set is greedier than Larfleeze when it comes to power consumption. Again, I am not complaining, just stating that I'd rather not be annoyed multiple times a day on any toon after having been brutalized by an open world mission and then possibly had my soul sucked out during an instance. Not unless there was an added bonus beyond "16 marks." DayBreak wants to make money to turn a profit, but lots of players actually want to have fun in a game they play not feel like they're farming because they actually are. Now if you mean just resetting the event instance.... Pros to using replay badges: - I'd get 6 marks (just enough to purchase only one item assuming i didn't want a style piece or a tree) Cons: - The risk of getting into a fail pug are fairly good so the chance of me completing on the first replay are not good = waste of time - There are no other item rewards worth receiving upon completing the instance So the cons outweigh the pros.
Just as an observation, outside of an attack power to either stun or knock down the Orange Lantern constructs/NPCs in the open world section, why would you bother using anything but weapon attacks to take them down? Even under the best of circumstances you're doing very little damage with powers and can get rid of the constructs quicker using an attack like the Hand Blaster Pulse Beam attack. And it's not just limited to the Holiday seasonal. I've had the same results with every seasonal when it comes to the open world sections, be it Valentine's, St. Patrick's Day, you name it. In my experience using weapon attacks will take down the seasonal NPCs far faster than powers. The only time straight weapon attacks don't work as well for me is when people swoop in on spawns I'm already working on and try to "help" and/or get credit for the spawn, but that's a whole other rant. As for the rest, I was simply offering an option given your preferred purchase choice (replay badges), and it is a viable option to use. I personally avoid replay badge overuse because it's a road to burnout city for me, but that's me.
Briar stuns the lanterns. Harvest roots them in place before they go in different directions or blast me to Bruno's turf. WM. WM. WM. Activate present. Do an idiot dance. Activate present. get snowglobed. Activate present. It counts towards mission! Kill hulking add. Three adds spawn. Knock em out. Activate present. Get Snowmanned. Activate present. While snowmanned, get snow globed. Activate present. It counts. Stare at my computer screen annoyed while i wait 10 seconds to break out of this madness. I'm usually in wolf form before I start seasonal stuff so it's convenient. On a bad day it takes less than two minutes per tree though. So it's not the end of the world and I'm really not complaining about the timing of completing the open world. Just that having to use replay badges to redo all the seasonal content for marks would take all fun out of the seasonal. If I'm going to farm at least make it a bit more fun.
These events suck. - Open world time after time is a broken mess for some weapons/powers(big Hit Detection problem) -Points earned vs point cost is horrible. Trinkets, pets and stuff like that should take multiple days to get. Base items should be super cheap 1-2pts, Styles(Fugly and just there for feats) should all cost the same no matter how many pieces and only take 2 days max to get. -One mission should not lead into other. It should just be XX Event with two parts, open world and OnDuty. Letting you complete them in whatever order you choose. Been playing a year now and those are my issues. Some events are way better than others just in terms of awesome stuff. Having to run them so much is such a pain tho. So many friends want stuff but hate running the event because of time needed, they would rather be playing and working on characters, so they do not run event.
If you are having problems with ending up in the unloving arms of high-level mobs, maybe find a different tree-lot? With me, it was all character headed to the North Burnley club area, between Giordanao Gardens and Ellis Memorial Hospital, even taking into consideration other players in the area (and agree with other poster about the utter annoyance of 'helping' players, cereally? are you that short of time or skill you feel the need to 'assist' some random player? GO FIND YOUR OWN DAMN TREE!!!), but lately the Heroes have been heading south from East End PD near the docks Would also be nice if we could either break out of the Snowmode, or at least let us fight back!! Getting blasted and sent twenty feet down the road and then slowly waddle back again hoping the present that blows up the gift-stealing street-urchins hasn't gone to space is not fun Oh, and as for the actual defeating the orange meanies, spamming the ranged weapon attack works on all of them, although Issan uses her melee staff for the triplets as the staff has a convenient stun setting: doesn't matter what attack you use, you only do 1 point of damage, so it's speed that counts
Other people fighting those adds has zero affect on your weapon attacks. As for "helping" or getting credit, yeah, that's how open world content has always worked with adds and bosses, so your rant would be completely frivolous and moot. Haha... you people are hilarious. Annoyance? What the actual.... ?? It has nothing to do with skill, but yeah actually, some players are short on time and would like to get the seasonal out of the way so they can play normal content and work on levelling up more. First of all, it's not 'your' tree. That's like the people who get upset when people get involved in conversations in shout. It's out there, in the open... for anyone to take a whack at. Secondly, you get credit if someone is on the same tree as you, as is the case with all seasonal content. Finally, what is wrong with you people, whining about people helping others out? Man, and people wonder why so many people say this community sucks. smdh
It does not take that long to find a free tree, heck, most times there is one just across the road They don't ask or say anything, just jump in, so tend to leave it to them and go find another tree, usually three blocks away, and you don't always get credit if they are from the opposite faction (that has happened to me a couple times) That's one thing miss about EQ2: the ability to lock encounters. Once you set fire to the tree, the orange meanies should be locked to you, being the one who lit their undies on fire, although that would prevent training them to other players (happened to Zoom the day before: she was standing just south of the Little Bo Nightclub, had alt-tabbed out to do something else, came back to find someone had sent her an Orange Construct as an early Christmas present!)
CR 167 Nature DPS Acrobat Villain. Time to complete open world seasonal: 45 minutes. Time actually spent fulfilling the objectives: about 8 minutes. What went wrong: - A Super speed hero kept activating the present that actually counted towards the mission and getting credit for it while I was stuck inside of a snow globe. - I went to a different location and ended up near a hero safehouse and was sent flying by a frigging hero safehouse guard while taking working on a tree half a block away from the entrance - I relocated to the villain Little Bohemia safehouse area. The lanterns slapped me across the street and I landed at the feet of Kid Flash. While trying to activate presents, I had to tussle with an annoying frigging bounty. I've hard periods far less painful and frustrating than my luck tonite with the open world seasonal. - I eventually completed the open world and the mission glitched out on me. so at the end of completing the seasonal content in order I received only 10 holly leaves instead of 16. Level 19 Sorcery DPS Acrobat Villain. Completed open world mission without too much of hassle. About 10 minutes total. What went wrong: - I attempted to pug the seasonal instance. I asked if everyone knew what to do. No one responded. Scorecard said they'd been in there over an hour so clearly either everyone knew what to do and maybe the roster of every hero/villain to ever exist just sucked super hard. We wiped trying to fulfill the first objective which was break the frigging shield by defeating lantern constructs. - See above statement and repeat it 6 more times. - I gave up and asked my league to help me queue.
That sucks, on the hero side I only run areas where there are no NPC's, inside and out take me 10 minutes total per character, 5 minutes in each area. As for your sorcery, I've had bad groups too, but luckily with pet powers it's easy enough to solo the inside instances, sorry the missions glitched out on you.
It's a mission intended for a large variety of players (level 10 and up). It can be done alone. The cities are FULL of spawn locations so finding a spawn that isn't being engaged is not a problem. As indicated in this thread, different players have different patterns and plans of attack for dealing with the various spawns. Given all that, I wouldn't mind an explanation as to why people feel the need to swarm like locusts to every spawn they see and (more often than not) disrupting how someone else is dealing with that spawn location. At the very least it's downright rude and inconsiderate.