two, with a large boss-ish event in the middle. While interesting, the bandit trio event isn’t overly engaging, and the longer you play and continue to clear wing 2, the more this becomes a rather annoying encounter. At the release of wing 2, players spent some time on Slothasor as he provided a nice challenge, but then most teams rolled right through the Prison Camp and onto the final boss. While Matthias is a fantastic encounter, the wing ended up feeling a little short overall because of that. Additionally, the loot you receive from the bandit trio lags behind other encounters, just like the event-y nature of its gameplay, which makes it even less interesting and enticing (and certainly a little more annoying) when it comes to clearing months later. That being said, wing 2 was still very enjoyable and, overall, I do think it was a little more difficult without some huge ramp up, which is something I like and appreciate.
Unfortunately, the raids came at a time where the game itself was lacking other new PvE content and it would be some time yet before we would see Living World story return. On top of this, there had been excitement building around what was going to happen with the legendary armor we’d started building in wing 1. Would we be able to finish it? What were we going to need? Or would we find out that legendary armor would still be a distant goal? The latter turned out to be true and there was some disappointment from this, but wing 3 also suffered from other problems. First, there seemed to be a lot more bugs within the wing itself. Wing 3 suffers like wing 2 in that there are only
two bosses and a middle event that players either seem to love or get annoyed with fairly quickly over time.
Like last time, I wanted and expected a little more difficulty - just a slight bump
“
But it did start with a bang in that there is an escort event that ends with a mini boss. This was really well received and a lot of fun - certainly something we’d not seen before in raids. But like a lot of the events over time, this one has become a little tedious. The good news is that this event is fairly easier than the starting bosses players would encounter in wings 1 and 2 and it does
This leads us up to wing 3, and like last time I wanted and expected a little more difficulty - just a slight bump in challenge from wing 1 or wing 2, nothing huge or earth shattering. Sadly this didn’t come to fruition as wing 3 was more or less on par with the other wings. As a whole, the raids themselves were being generally wellreceived within the raiding community, despite bandit trio’s lukewarm reception. EDITORIAL - INKS on Raiding | GUILDMAG ANNUAL 2016
35