So far my impression of this event are not particularly good. The mechanics are interesting but just as a once a year kind of thing because it gets tiresome pretty fast and it consumes too much time (my favourite type of event are the bear orbs). But the part I really don't like is that it seems to be even more difficult to get the daily prize than it was last year and last year was really hard. I used up 2 big packages in one city and got just 1 daily (with the last candle!) and I used 3 big packages in my other city and got 0 dailies. Events are not much fun if you can't get the dailies
I'm also not fond of the "buy kps" quest that seems to come up more often than any other.
I used 3*420 packs in each of my 2 cities and got 3 dailies on each. And (2 or) 3 dailies from 1200 points sounds similar to a normal event.
BUT, I did feel quite lucky on that - hitting maybe more than one 5%er. The odds of a daily in each chest look similar to most events. What I think might differ is the number of "chests". I was noticing how far I could sometimes go picking up the odd cat, the odd extra light source, but no actual rewards.
Overall I like that it's different. I liked this event last year. But the more I see, the more I feel that actually there is very little strategy. You do have choice how/where to deploy lights, but given the narrow map and obstacles, in practice sensible placement is often constrained to very few choices. And you have no idea what's ahead, so if there's any real choice where to go it's just random anyway. A similar system where you could see ahead, but not afford to visit everything would be interesting.
And the lack of choice of rewards is a downside. With the 3-chest option we can focus on what we want/need. For one 420-pack today I got some rune shards and 2 PoP spells - literally worthless to me. The first couple of "chests" I saw in the penumbra I actually just left behind and didn't even waste a candle on - rune shards again. So the rewards feel quite slight (few "chests" achieved) and often things I don't want. Apart from getting lucky with dailies today I got very little for 2500 points.
On the plus side:
The re-roll is a nice addition (but useless if we can't get the daily exclusive).
This sounds interesting. But... in order to do a re-roll you need to place a moderate amount first. If it's a day where you don't like the special, then you're risking picking up that dud, for a chance at a re-roll to something random - which has only a low-ish chance of being a good one. It seems to me the best strategy is to just save points for a day which has a daily you want, and that using the re-roll is almost always a tactical error. (The exception being the last 2-3 days and using up any final points if you don't like the last specials). So having had just a day with the feature I'm already pretty sure I'll never use it
Which is my overall feeling for the event - variety is good; newness is good. But dig under the surface and I'm not convinved the mechanics really work that well.
Oh and there is some kind of bug lurking in the misty forest: I get this message from time to time. It's not correct as I actually do collect the rewards but it keeps popping up randomly.
I also got this. To add a bit more info for Inno... in my case I clicked and nothing happened. Click again, nothing. Closed event, re-opened it and got this message. It seemed like the first claim request reached the server, but the acknowledgement never got back to the UI, or the server was very slow responding. So a second claim request was sent... which eventually generated this message.