If you’ve been following the community buzz in Guild Wars 2, you probably noticed a name on a lot of players’ lips: the Twisted Marionette, which readers will recall was being temporarily returned for a week. It turns out that this particular fight is a stern challenge for most public groups, meaning the attempts at global tier achievement goals were not going well. This caused no shortage of discussion about the encounter, with players either begging for a return of the public version of the fight or lauding the squad-only version as a good thing.
This leads us to a dev post in the forums, which noted that players were slowly learning the mechanics of the Marionette encounter and clearing the fight at nearly double the rate they were a week ago. While the public version of the fight is indeed offline as originally planned, there will be a change to the fight that only starts the event timer after a minimum number of players are present in the instance, which means that the public version will indeed be coming back. The squad mode of the fight will also see a change, kicking off only when the squad leader confirms the group is ready for the instance. The public fight should see a return sometime in late summer.
“When we started planning to add the Twisted Marionette back to the game, we were concerned that the difficulty level and the player counts required for the encounter would make it challenging to keep in the event rotation. After reviewing the data we mentioned above, we’re feeling a lot better about it,” reads the post.
This announcement appears to have been almost universally praised by players, with many appreciating how ArenaNet waited to collect data and see how players reacted to the fight before making adjustments. All told, players can apparently still look forward to a tough fight, just with little tweaks in the interest of better coordination.
