So, I've finished the event. Well, basically. I don't have the Zombie Foxbat and I am missing the 3 currently bugged (fixed in 1 hour) Zombie heros' perks, but I got all the other perks and rewards, so I finished it ;) I'll still end up mucking about on a few of my alts with it, it's kinda fun. But, here's the feedback:

13 Heros:

First thing's first: Explain the event in-game. And make the beams of light easier to see/more obvious from afar so that EVERYONE knows where they are. Socrates should have alerts for this, I mean, that's what Socrates is for, isn't it? UNITY should give you a mission. Defender should. The guy by the plane should. This is an UNDEAD INVASION OF THE CITY. The MOON has turned BRIGHT RED. This isn't something that should, y'know, not be talked about by anyone in the entire game (aside from the zombies themselves). And beyond that, any time a question gets asked in-game this frequently, there's a design problem. I can't count how many times I pasted the link to the map of all the gates on the wiki, or explained in zone how to find Blood Moon content. And it doesn't even need to be intricate, just make a mission, given by all the aforementioned parties, that points you at one of these gates, and gives a little text explanation. Going to the gate completes the mission.

And, beyond that, as a little aside, the log-on-during-Bloodmoon experience was pretty weak. If it weren't for people talking about it, and the moon being red, it's entirely possible I could have done missions and missed the whole thing. I want to see hastily arranged makeshift barricades popping up around key points (ie Ren center, the choppa, maybe the jail, and City Hall) and occasional zombies surging out of random rifts in the ground assaulting the NPCs. You could even toss in a little mission for killing zombies around town. Bonus points if you put in roving zombie squads infecting civilians who then start trying to eat your brains. The lord of the undead, an incredibly ancient and powerful lich is attacking the city, but really, he only cares about the area 20-30 ft from the crypt gates. Oh, and a little spot where he spawns.

And lets get to Tacoface's spawn: What a let down. It was going so great, then it ended. It was completely chaotic and I couldn't see anything, but it started with him announcing himself to the whole zone, a MASSIVE purple cloud forming over him in the sky attracting basically the whole zone, hordes of zombies, him standing there in his throne, a big aura with a visual effect on your screen like Lemuria, and you start fighting his really tough minion. And just as you defeat his minions, forcing him to come out and... retreat leaving a little item? I don't even get to fight him? A little bit? Have him leave a parting gift of 100 zombies in a ring around all the assembled heros? I assume actually fighting Tacoface is going to be part of the finale on the event, but... give us a li'l taste!

Moving on! The crypts. At first, I just though they sucked. Because I couldn't find someone level 18 to group with and SK down to, so we were all level 28 or so (some of us were actually 30s and 40s but SKed down). So we just blew through the low level ones, by the time we got to the level 27 ones, we basically were tired of doing the crypts, and just stayed at 40 and flew to the entrance to the final chamber without killing zombies (I had fun escorting our level 25 past all the mobs though ;) ). When I did it later (SKed to 27 fighting in the level 27 crypts) it was actually kinda fun to do. We had 5, so it was still really easy, but it was a bit more fun to actually face down the zombie hordes. But the big problem? Variety. There's, what, 2 or 3 designs for crypts, repeated 'till we have 13 instances I have to do? At least make slightly different layouts, or make them shorter or something. Preferably, you'd put different types of zombie mobs in there too, rather than just having the 1 mid-point super villain change. And the final chambers were identical! Same boss, 13 times. Come on! Give each one a theme based on the heros it was paired with. not even something complicated, just have all the zombies in fireflight's instance do fire damage or be on fire or something. Give Johnny's zombies armor. And I don't know why you removed the crypts scaling in level with the players in it, it'd make it actually fun. Also, why don't the mobs and the missions give XP? I was surprised to find out that even the level 27s I was doing the level 27 missions with weren't getting any XP.

Then there's the open missions/mission progression itself. Well, you realized that the timers were not the good idea you thought, but getting past that, the fact that you can share the crypt missions is bad. Normally, I like all sharing missions things, but in this case, it just means everyone skips the open missions, and gets all the crypt missions shared. Instead, make them unshareable, but you get them as soon as you enter each crypt (from an area prompt or an NPC at the entrance, possibly the ghost of the hero you're rescuing). AND you can always enter the crypts, so long as the mission is completed at the time. So you have (as of tonight) a half hour window to hop into the crypt to do it, whether you did the open mission yourself or not. And make the open missions scale with players involved or something. As it is, it's kind of... a pointless gating of content. But at some point, when everyone's gotten the perks already, it'll be impossible to do without specifically gathering a group.

BITE:

This is actually quite fun. Or, sometimes is quite fun. The main thing that needs to be done is balancing the sides, and adding some more terrain to the areas the fights happen in. Either do a kludgey forced-balancing of the players, or add in the following things: Increased NPC spawns for the underdog side, and the ability to carry both missions at once to easily switch sides so we can balance ourselves. Some better explanation of how the powers work would be nice too, I still don't know under what conditions I'm allowed to use the various hunter/werewolf powers, just some have cooldowns and it seems to like me using the 2 and 3 slots, then the 4, 5, and 6 slots. Speaking of slots, please, PLEASE make it so we can move powers around in the tray. I might actually do this event again on another character or for fun on the one I did it on, if you fix this before the event ends. It's just so unpleasant to try and mash 5 repeatedly to attack, and having my lunge at 2 (where my attack should be). Oh, and give some better explanation of what the powers do, they're a bit confusing.

Probably the best part about the Bite event is the hill that hunters get in the desert one. If the hunters play it right, they can have a really huge advantage on that hill, and it TOTALLY feels like you're fending off ravening werewolves as you knock them off when they lunge up at you, or come around from the back entrance. Probably the most fun I had in the entire BITE event was playing either side of a conflict over that hill. ADD MORE TERRAIN! It makes PvP so much more interesting when there's things like high ground to defend, or choke points, or whatever. But reduce the number of player kills needed for the mission. 100 is just unpleasant. Unless you're intended us to do that in multiple playsessions (and since it's repeatable daily, I assume you aren't necessarily), 100 player kills takes a good hour or two, especially if one side rolls all over the other. Fixing the exploit/bug/annoyance of pets not desummoning when you change form would go a long way towards making it more fun as well.

ZombApoc:

I dunno, this might be the greatest thing ever. Like... at all. It's so much fun, it combines the fun of L4D's teamwork against zombie hordes (with real death consequences and escalating difficulty) with the fun of an MMO: building a character of your very own to put in the situation. No more deciding between a shotgun or an assault rifle as my only choices, I get to play with knockbacks, lightning bolts, heavy defense, etc. There's some serious balance concerns with ZombApoc though. Circles are way too good. Zombies are stupid and don't knock the players out of them. Well, they do, the lasher ones, but the player runs right back in. Attach a snare to the lash or something so that it's not so easy to hop right back into the circle. With me playing my force char and 2-3 players in CoPD (1 with a heal) I can almost always win the map without losing anyone. The CoPD guys take care of NPCs, I send the lone hero zombie flying whenever he gets near (takes about 10-15 seconds to come back from one of my force detonation knockbacks, and it has a 20 second cooldown). BUT DON'T ADD MORE LASHERS. I actually got pulled ALL the way out of the circle from the center by 3 simultaneous lashers yanking on me. I'd say reduce them, just make them more effective when they use the ability.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is the terrain is boring. Hopefully you do more things like this in the future, and it doesn't necessarily have to be zombies (I was imagining an irradiate attack through a valley in the Desert as a good one), but this is a bad terrain setup, so don't use it again (and change this one if possible). There's basically 1 strategy in ZombApoc: stand outside the cabin and get them to all die. You can't choose a different place to defend from, or they'll swarm the cabin. You can't have people in different positions, or they'll get swarmed because they're closest to the zombie spawn. You all just stick together right outside the cabin. If, for example, there were a few choke points around the cabin, you could assign people to guard each one. If the zombies generally only came from one direction, but might go around, you could cut them off and not have to defend 2 fronts. But they come from all angles, straight to the center. Which means you aren't going to be blocking the lasher attacks, because you probably aren't going to see them, at all. They're behind you, while you deal with what's in front of you. And really, you can't have someone out there guarding your back, everyone's sort of just watching themselves and trying to stay in a clump.

Oh, and fix the "people burning in the fire to be a zombie" thing. If you die as a hero, your acclaim/XP should be multiplied by the proportion of the 20 minutes you can last if you "win" that you lived for. So if you lived for 5 seconds before suiciding to be a zombie, you get .42% of your points from killing players. If you last a full 5 minutes, you are getting 1/4 of your points from killing players. That way, no matter what, if you start as living hero, you want to stay that way.

I suppose that's about it for now, overall I like Blood Moon. It's fun, adds some neat things, and celestial is pretty cool. Though for the love of god can you make the end builder not look like a special-needs child having a seizure while pretending to do the backstroke in mid air? It looks ok if you're standing still, or even backing up, but good lord if you walk forward while you attack a guy with it, it will make you think your hero needs a safety helmet.

Very good points.

I pretty much agree with most of what you said, specifically:

13 Heros:

I got the missions from someone who shared them with me, so you're right, I completely dodged having to do the open missions. I wanted to do them but the long timer and some broken spawns were making me hate these missions so I just went and found someone who had them all and was sharing them.

There's very little variety to the missions ,it was really monotonous and repetitive. It would have been great with different designs and different end bosses.

I'm level 40 and I did not need to SK down to enter the crypts. I teamed up with a level 14 friend and entered the crypts while he was SK'd up to 40. This made these missions really really easy to complete. I think it would have been better if the missions scaled according to what level the group is.

BITE:

Pretty awesome fun, I didn't see much of a balance issue here and had a blast playing it.

Zombie Apoc:

This could seriously be a game in itself... It's the most amazingly fun thing EVER. The funny thing is that I enjoy being a zombie more than a survivor. Just sneaking up on the hero's from above and raining hell down onto them while they are focused on fending off the other hordes of zombies just plain fun.

Overall:

The most fun I've had this entire event was mostly due to the PVP content, which is odd because they claim to focus on PVE. I don't mind at all because I enjoy PVP, but I wish the PVE stuff just had some more variety and higher difficulty to it.

Anyway, those are my 2 cents.

.. am I the only player in CO that likes mowing down L18 zombies on a L40 toon?

*sigh*

as for the other two bits, I don't know, I don't PvP, ever.

The only thing I'm not liking about this is the crypt bosses, no way should a level 18 super villain own a level 30 hero so easily.

Hehe they are a shock after the easy zombies before hand. His life drain is the big issue, block it or interrupt it. Also using all the dropped summon ghouls/zombies help as they keep him busy. You can zone to the corridor if close to death to avoid running back as well, but he resets.

The crypt bosses were pretty funny to me for the brief time I could be on. (my pc and internet connection got screwy)

I flew through the entire crypt aggroing everything and SMGing them all down (level 40 in an 18 instance, durr) and kind of let collective will kill the boss. She managed to ice me once when I stopped paying attention and she hit me with the drain life. Every other attack was entirely ignorable to the point that eldritch shield's advantage (the HoT) could out heal her, until drain life which floored me pretty quickly.

I thought the devs got rid of the absurdly powerful drain life attacks ;)

very well written thoughts.

!! I support this feedback. !!

ya, I liked it too the first couple times, but let's face, it there's 13 crypts. It gets boring @40 clearing the crypt. I would much rather see the instance scale with player/group lvl. Not to mention that lvl 20ish drops for a lvl 40 are worthless.

PVP so far has been the bright spot. The bite event is button mashing entertainment at it's finest.

They have the tech though. The PH battle room proves it.

EDIT: Err, this post is in reference to the one after it >.>

CO does not seem to be big on scaling content difficulty for, well, anything.


-np