Challenge of the Gods Event Review
The Challenge of the Gods took place on the weekend, so it’s time to assemble those pros and cons today! The third run of the event saw the addition of Blessed Gift of the Gods and Vicious Enchantments and minor tweaks to the challenges.
Amaunator’s challenge now varies depending whether the character is within a Stronghold or not, asking for a donation to the guild’s coffer or killing enemies without the use of At-Will Powers. Selune’s task was also changed to complete one Heroic Encounter instead of defeating five tough enemies. Overall everything is a quick completion, but there are some differences in difficulty, or let’s say annoyance. Corellon and Kelemvor want you to survive or kill while below 50% health, which doesn’t suit DPS classes too well. It’s actually really complicated to stay below 50% with the amount of Lifesteal everyone is running around with. Even for tanks it might be better to dodge these tasks and take the next one. I personally also don’t like that both can’t be completed in the flow of whatever you are doing. You need to get a mob, wait until 50% and survive or kill without triggering LS or any healing ability. Chauntea and Selune are also too situational, so I personally stuck to the tasks that simply involved killing enemies in some way or another.
The challenges are a nice change of pace and sweeten the daily grind. No challenge dropped inside dungeons for me, which I feel is great to not annoy your teammates. Maybe it was RNG though, because I did actually get challenges within groups outside DDs and at one point felt like someone in eCC was completing Silvanus and deliberately not using Encounter Powers. But I didn’t ask and might be wrong. It was no biggie anyway.
Haven’t checked whether Gifts drop in good old farm foundries, but for this one a Stronghold map might be best anyway if you wanted to grind, because it features Heroic Encounters. I however don’t really recommend going for it. Just like the Tymora or Waukeen events it is great for getting slightly more out of your playtime than usual, but the rewards don’t actually warrant more.
It’s nice though that they’ve upgraded the Gifts to drop Rank 6s, especially since the double weekend affected the box drops as well. But I absolutely think it’s a bit over the top to both limit the amount of packs you can get over a weekend and make the valueable drops BoP. There are nice rewards included, most namely the Forgehammer and Oghma Artifacts as well as an additional shot at an Eye (although currently available at a reasonable rate thanks to the latest Artifact Pack), but it would be fair to let people make a buck or two off the Gifts and spread the rewards in the process. The bind status also isn’t clearly described by the tooltip, there were complaints and they are going to patch it on Thursday. If I bought more Blessed Gifts based on an early BoE drop, I’d feel scammed. PWE’s official comment: Oops. Can only agree with becks that this only fuels conspiracy, because it happens way. to. often.
The drops are not equally distributed btw. Here’s a guy opening 50 Blessed Gifts on the Russian server and he or she ended up with a bunch of Coins, Vicious Enchantments, Lathander Belt/Neck and only a few Artifacts. Strangely the Bell, that goes for pennies on the auction house, also seems to be quite rare.
If you absolutely want to keep it at BoP, I think another tweak would be to make the Blessed one a 5% chance to drop off a challenge, thus giving players the opportunity to grind for them. But we know the reason of the design, ain’t we? Blessed Gifts are 100 ZEN in the cash shop after all. This honestly makes the whole thing feel too much like a bait. Hey we have these new super cool Blessed Gifts, but you can’t get more than five because of the bind status and daily cap. Sorry pal. That’s why I keep raving about the Winter Festival. Similar design, but the daily box or more specifically its rewards are BoE, so you can actually grind for it using an ALT farm. Not the same with Challenge of the Gods, go spend cash on chars that actually need something out of the box please!
Besides this disturbance though it’s actually a nice minor event for a weekend if you don’t expect too much out of it. Specifically on my lowbie I enjoyed the extra injection of RP, but didn’t get anything of value or use out of my Blessed ones. And even though the Artifacts are BoP, you can still use them as feeders to refine other ones. Plus the new Vicious Enchantment offers a stat combination that works very well in PVP and should find its place. Without the tooltip issue it could have really been a smooth run.
What are your thoughts? Did you like the Challenge of the Gods or do you challenge the event? Share your thoughts in the comments below or our forum!
