Guild Wars 2

I’ve heard whispers that there’s a Grenth dynamic event that’s a really good example of a decent non-zerg content.

Anyone care to fill me in?

I will break this down by the reasons why zergs fail from the most common to the least.

Aggro shifts – More people (especially the inexperienced) means more good-willed folks trying to rez, which in this game acts as the “taunt” button. That’s why most of the time the priest of Grenth moves towards the infamous staris where most people are, and drops the ice storms on Jonez to death.

Corruptions and shades – Shades spawn at 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25% of the priest’s HP, and their corruption auras stack every 3 sec, which eventually cause players to instantly get downed when reaching 25 stacks. With a number of participants fewer than 5, there is only 1 shade at 100%, 1 at 75%, 3 at 50%, and 4 at 25%. However, the event scales by multiplying the number of shades. The more people, the more shades at each wave, the faster the corruption stacks to 25.

DPS and shade spawns – The inexperiecne people do not know the importance of killing shades to stop corruption auras, and also do not know when shades spawn. Most of time they just keep attacking Grenth and cause more shades to spawn, resulting in wipes after wipes due to 25 stacks of corruption. The more inexperienced people, the faster the HP of the priest goes down, the faster the shades spawn before the existing shades are cleared.

Ice stroms – Like Subject Alpha, these AoE circles are generated where players, pets, minions, turrets, and NPCs are, within 900 units of the priest, so more people means more red circles, albeit there is a number cap. People tend to favor spreading out, and as a result, ice storms are spread, causing less room to move around. If people stack on top of each other, ice storms also stack, causing instant death to people who do not get out of them in time.

Vortices – Although the number of vortices do not scale with the number of people, they are very unfriendly to good-willed folks who try to rez, due to its nature of spawning gradually and randomly in a huge radius of 1500 units of the priest. The more people, the more trying to rez, the more rezzers getting caught in the vortices.

Acolytes, wraiths, spiders – They can spawn at the entrance, or any of the 3 rooms of the temple. The more people, the more they are, the higher chace Jonez get killed by the ones spawning at the entrance.

Frost bolts – This is the only attack of the priest favoring zergs in this fight, which hits hard around 3.5k each and chilles whoever gets hit. The projectiles move slowly and always come after ice storms in 3 bolts at once, aiming at 3 different targets if applicable. The middle one is always at the current aggro holder, while the other 2 at 2 random people or NPCs in line of sight. The more people, the less chance one will get hit repeatedly, except for the aggro holder.

Notes:

Corruptions fall off every 2 sec when out of the range of shades (around 500 units). If you’re not tanking the priest, run to the entrance tunnel to lose aggros on shades and stay there for a while (kill some mobs while there to help Jonez) if the stacks are too high.

Shades only do damage to corrupted targets, that’s why they can not kill Jonez, or downed players, or evern turrets (pets and minions, sadly though, can be corrupted). I used Supply Crate to tank shades as an engineer in my soloing.

Just opened temple of Grenth on JQ with my engineer and noticed that turrets are affected by corruptions.

Just opened temple of Grenth on TC with my engineer and found out that turrets can NOT aggro shades anymore.

Just killed the priest of Grenth on IOJ (and as usual, failed the last event). Turrets tanking on shades still works in soloing when Pact NPCs are all dead.

Another way to put it is that with Grenth the difficulty scaling is backwards.

This is the most interesting fight in the open world right now, in my opinion.
I was playing during 5 wipes in a row on TC last night, and every time I knew why we failed, what we could have done to prevent it, and how we could tie down execution in the future.

This is a great thing.

I could see a guild of 15-20 down Grenth 100% of the time with perfect execution. GW2 needs more of these fights. They’re interesting, challenging, and fun.

The Grenth fight is not skill based, its just basically the game cheating to defeat you. In fact I think they made it even harder than it recently was.

It drops you from the sky, you have no defense against it, and its instant death. Eventually people will stop doing the event completely. The person who wrote that event obviously is the game guy who made the Fire Elemental event in the newbie zone.

The loot is also horrible if you ever manage to defeat it.