Ops discussion (part 2)

Due to the resetting challenges yesterday I ran two Ops last night (1 as a support and 1 as defense).

I joined a match as a Sunflower for that first challenge and it was wave 4 in Ruiny Ruins. We got an elite boss wave and it was pretty cool. Twin Gargantuars. When we vanquished one, a grave would appear so we had to destroy it to prevent it from respawning and as the fight went on, more of them would spawn and we had to deal with them to keep them from coming back. It was a lot of fun and I love this idea to spice the boss waves up.

Then after leaving and coming back for that defense character Ops, I was a Citron on Pressure Pier. The waves are both denser than I recall and didn't have to spend half the wave hunting the enemies down. We had a normal boss wave here.

This was much better than before the patch but I still prefer GW2 Ops over BfN Ops, and I'll go over my concerns:

-I'm curious as to why we don't fly in at the start of the match (Not a huge deal admittedly but added flavor), and more importantly, why we don't have the evacuation stage. I loved the sometimes frantic scramble to get everyone to the landing zone and survive the onslaught. It was a pain in Ccrrraaazzzyyy Ops, but still liked it. I'm curious as to why this was removed.

-Speaking of Ops difficulty. A way to select difficulty would be nice. Maybe like using the bait in Boss hunts in GW2 witht he way the MP portal works for Ops?

-I'd like the ability to play with AI like in GW2. Being able to bring a friend or 2 and fill the rest with AI for a kind of private match would be great.

-I'm less concerned about this, but having one fixed position for the gardenator/grave-o-matic, is something else I'm curious about. Unless we had a reason to use one of the more difficult to defend spots (enchanted for more coins), we tended to use the same one or two spots in Ops in GW1 and 2 anyway, but I'm still interested in the reasoning here.

-I actually prefer 5 waves now that we don't spend half of a wave trying to hunt down mobs. 10 waves always felt long, especially when getting all the quests done all the time in GW2 (5 challenge waves as zombies took way too long). Was this change made to speed them up? Will there be an option to make them 5 or 10 waves?

-I'd like to see more special waves. Wave 3 wasn't always special before the patch, not sure if that's been changed as I only ran 2 Ops since the change. I like how special waves change things up and add variety and challenge.

22 Replies

Iron_Guard8
Legend
6 years ago
I ran two last night as I needed bots/pots damage and in the plant Op, got another elite boss event.
I gotta say, that even with the other lacks the Ops have here compared to GW2, these boss events are a lot of fun and the disco one was much different from the gargantuar twins. Great job on these special events and it's nice to have the special boss wave specific music like we had in GW1 back too!
ToastedSarnie
6 years ago
@Iron_Guard8 I've played a lot of Ops today & agree the waves seem to work a bit better & the elite boss waves are fun. However, one for Squash in Ruiny Ruins, where we had to vanquish a chomper champion to collect a seed, that we had to take to a pot to make soup before we could attack Squash's health, turned into a nightmare due to the size of the map. Chomper decided to merrily race around the outer fringes. We had to separate for one pair to chase & attack him, while the other tried to defend the graveinator.
Dying because of being away from bot/team back-up, slow auto-respawn, distance chasing him down then trying to get back to do the next stage etc, etc, when you have a limited time to kill the boss just did not work for us on this map. And we're people familiar enough with boss hunts to have been able to figure out what we needed to do.
Had a similar map-size issue on a normal boss wave where we spent ages trying to track down what we thought was the last stray pumpkin weed, only to find it was actually the Laser Bean boss each of thought had been killed close to base. He'd obviously got bored & decided to go for a picnic at the edge of the woods around Z-Tech! And one of the problems is that while the central bar indicates there's a zombie/plant left, unless they're close you have no way of telling what kind or whereabouts they are - we were on the verge of quitting because we thought we'd looked every & could find no sign of anything.
Ideally, the maps need to be smaller - so many of them are just too big for this.
Ops have improved & I know there's another update to come, where maybe these issues will be ironed out. And I'd really like all of the options back for Ops that we had in GW2 🙏
asabaida
6 years ago
They mentioned Ops briefly in the live stream last night... and said they were working on other things for it...
But I'm sure Shaun Laker also said that they don't want IOps the same as GW2 (although they always avoid saying GW2 and say "our other shooters" or something similar.
So lets just hope we some other options in the map for where the gardinator or graveomatic is and difficulty settings....
and maybe they are going to add some really good stuff....
dunno but at least they have improved from the first week thankfully 😃
Hope they add game modes with AI though... still zero mentioned about that sadly.
dwooten77
6 years ago
You’ve covered the basis on ops concerns. My gripe today deals with the challenges. I need 75 bucket head vanquishes. Well I can’t find them.
A: half the time I end up in zombies ops when I enter as a plant.
B: Even if I do play as a plant some maps don’t carry bucket heads. At least not enough to make it worth it.
Pretty frustrating to say say the least. Yes I can just grind xp to get the blue gems, but the challenges should be achievable in a fun challenging manor. When I roll the dice to get another challenge it just gives me the same challenge with a different AI. Not cool bro.
mistincat
6 years ago
I played a round of Ops last night but then got bored and turned the game off lol
ToastedSarnie
6 years ago
@mistincat It IS a bit better than it was, the elite boss waves add interest if you get them & you get the same friendly "in it together" feel from randoms who join, but there are (for me) lots of problems still.
PLANTS/ZOMBIES: I enjoy Ops as a relaxing, fun alternative to pvp. Atm I don't mind too much playing both teams, as I need to level characters on both sides but if I have a particular challenge, being able to choose would help & for future fun, I would only play plants
BOTS/POTS: why does the position of them change whenever you go into the same map? I've done Z-Tech a lot of times & get annoyed the pots/bots aren't where I remembered - particularly in one game where there was only ONE that was on the graveinator/gardinator (not enough especially if the enemies have to be chased down). Everything else was outside, getting slowly picked off by the AIs & they don't have enough health
CHARACTER: If you join a game already in progress, you often have about 2 seconds to choose your character before you're automatically put into the game as whatever you're hovering over. I've been put in as peashooter several times, annoying because I've mastered it so I would've chosen something else that I need to work on or gone healer because there wasn't one. And I've never been able to respawn at a later stage to something different
MAPS: I don't know for sure how many there are, I think I've played about 6. All but Pressure Pier are simply too big for comfort for reasons previously given & because they're so big, even if you were able to set up your own choice of base, there would be no real strategic advantage in doing so.
And there are at least 3 maps, given the choice, I would never play at all
TEAM: Only once have I found myself doing Ops alone because no one joined, but this is likely to change as the game ages. The first couple of rounds were fine, but trying to do the challenge wave was impossible. If nothing else, I would like the chance of adding AI team-mates of my choice for wave 3 onwards if I was on my own
Just my personal opinions, not meant to upset anyone, blah, blah! 😊
ScrappyCocco97
6 years ago
I'd love an option to choose difficulty and between 5/10 waves too.
It kinda feel boring to do only 5 waves sometimes, that also are quite easy.
mistincat
6 years ago
Is there any kind of "Enchanted" feature like in GW2? Iv'e only played Ops a few times so maybe i'm just yet to have an enchanted "Whatever the things are we protect"
ToastedSarnie
6 years ago
@mistincat If there is, I've not seen it & I'd say I've played about 20 over the past couple of days
Iron_Guard8
Legend
6 years ago
They need to tune the Spooky Squash elite boss. It's a cool idea but we ran out of time. It's obviously meant to be similar to the boss hunt in GW2 but we either need more time or it needs to have less health or something. Only elite boss I've fought so far that haven't beaten.