Is this a preview of the "new Mabar?"

[Faltout]

So it will be much more like Crystal Cove? Including the lag? ^^

Except the Cannith challenges (palace, lava caves) are like Crystal Cove. So, not like Crystal Cove.

Summoning Chamber offered:
- Multiplayer experience with unknown players. Tested communication and planning skills (pretty good)
- True teamwork. 8 spots in the place to be, with 2 tasks for each spot introducing 16 roles to play. (extremely good)
- Decent chance of failure. Death by dragon, possible destruction of 4 altars.

The new challenges obviously do not offer the 1st thing. That's ok, because some players did not like it anyway.
Kinda hard to offer the 2nd thing since you only have 6 people and some of them may not be self-sufficient. Maybe if the challenges do not involve battles, there's still hope.
So, here's hoping that they at least offer the 3rd thing. A decent chance of failure please. It won't be exciting if we just go in and collect our ingredients by doing some mundane task.

[alancarp]

Except the Cannith challenges (palace, lava caves) are like Crystal Cove. So, not like Crystal Cove.

Summoning Chamber offered:
- Multiplayer experience with unknown players. Tested communication and planning skills (pretty good)
- True teamwork. 8 spots in the place to be, with 2 tasks for each spot introducing 16 roles to play. (extremely good)
- Decent chance of failure. Death by dragon, possible destruction of 4 altars.

The new challenges obviously do not offer the 1st thing. That's ok, because some players did not like it anyway.
Kinda hard to offer the 2nd thing since you only have 6 people and some of them may not be self-sufficient. Maybe if the challenges do not involve battles, there's still hope.
So, here's hoping that they at least offer the 3rd thing. A decent chance of failure please. It won't be exciting if we just go in and collect our ingredients by doing some mundane task.

I like your take here - though I will say that coordinating that many people was unique in the game (given that raid groups of 12 was the previous high-water mark for social gaming), and typically only 1 spectral dragon group (per level) was fully endowed with sufficient manning to be effective.

But to follow-on, it would be an excellent idea to have something requiring parties of maybe 2-6 participants where different roles are necessary in order to excel... yeah, kinda like Crystal Cove: you *can* solo it, but you can only truly excel if you have a full party.

[Marupal]

Intrigued by the names of these. Can't wait to get into them and see what's planned.

"Primary Objective: 1 Dungeon". ...interesting.

It was too much to hope that the raid was going to be salvaged, but are we going to see Eternity make a cameo?

Making challenges out of the event looks like it's going to be a nice move. Having 5 unique challenges (if they are unique) should be a boon towards keeping the event fresh. It should also make the event friendlier towards players that play at off times as well as Wayfinder.

I'm convinced that a big portion of Mabar's lag was mass instance creation and over-burdened instance release methods. Waiting to hear what the mechanism for entrance is for these but am optimistic that lag will be a non-issue.