In this week's Scrying Pool, we talk about last weekend's Mordrem Invasion event.

The rewards that players could buy with the Mordrem Blooms were a mix bag. At the top end the rewards were amazing. Not only could players earn items that are no longer available, there was a nice collection of previously gem store only items in the form of armor skins and miniatures. Even on the lower end was an RNG box that had the chance to award weapon skins and dyes that could only be obtained through the game’s cash shop based gem store.

The other point of concern wasn’t with the rewards themselves, but in their cost. Each item would cost an amount of Mordrem Blooms in addition to some amount of gold. On the low end there was some ridiculousness as things like Essences of Luck and Bags of Rare Gear cost more in just the amount of gold needed to purchase them than they were worth outside of the event, and that is before including the Mordrem Blooms into the mix.

What had most players upset was that it wasn’t possible to get enough Mordrem Blooms to get all of the top end items on the merchant. At the top end players would need 450 blooms to get one of two cosmetic items previously—but no longer—available in game or both skins of two different gem store armor sets. The 450 blooms was not hard to get, as doing the daily for each of the 4 days that the event ran and a few extra rotations was enough to hit this milestone. This however, meant that most players were only getting one of these top end rewards if they were able to play each day.

I don’t think it is bad that players were not going to be able to get all of the rewards within a weekend. That it wasn’t too hard to hit this 450 tier makes the reward seem pretty well thought out. Things like the previously mentioned shorter schedule that I would like to see might make hitting this tier easier and a slight alteration to the way that rewards are credited to players might make the event more enjoyable overall, but the amount of blooms given I think fell pretty spot on for the weekend event.

Another concern with the event was that individual dynamic events didn’t give their usual rewards of gold, karma and experience. I like that the events didn’t give rewards, but would have liked to see the chest at the end of each map give some of these rewards. In previous events and Living World Season 1 patches there were cases of events that would give too much of these, especially events that would give too much experience and quickly level characters.

I like that this weekend event didn’t create this problem, but it did have the opposite problem. Part of this event was to bring in new players into guilds and show them this awesome event. For new players however, there wasn’t much to gain from this weekend. It didn’t help them level and the gold costs on the Mordrem Bloom vendor would prevent most new players from buying much. I would have liked to see the map chest give some gold and experience, such as 2 gold for getting the max reward chest and maybe 15-25% of a level in experience. Give some, but not a lot.

What surprises me most about this event is that it is only taking place the one weekend. With the 450 tier being not bad to hit, multiple weekends would allow players to slowly accrue all of the rewards or for more casually players to work toward that high end goal. Just running this event a second weekend without any changes I think would alleviate many of the concerns with the event’s rewards.

What really surprises me is that this event feels like a pre-expansion event. This event however takes place over a month before the expansion’s launch with no repeat weekend. If this event was held during two more weekends, that would fill up most of the weekends leading up to launch with either this event, next weekend’s TwitchCon which sounds to be quite the event and the upcoming third and final Beta Weekend Event. Instead we apparently are going to have three out of the five remaining weekends before the launch of Heart of Thorns with nothing happening.

Maybe there will be another event that we don’t know about, but for now it seems like ArenaNet starting throwing the confetti a little too early.

Matt "Mattsta" Adams is excited for the scrappy Scrapper.

We are 34 days from the expansion and I can't wait! Are you ready for Guild Wars 2's first expansion to launch?

I can't wait to check out the engineer's Scrapper during the next Beta Weekend Event. Also, it sounds like the Druid will be getting a specail announcement during Twitchcon next weekend! Does this mean amazing things for the Ranger's elite specialization?

If you have a question for me or a topic you would like to see talked about here, leave a comment below. You can also tweet your question and topics to me on twitter @MattstaNinja. Also, check out my site Mattsta.Ninja that focuses on guides and more for Guild Wars 2.