Grenth Event is not good
Grenth is one of the few events where at least 1/4th of the people participating need to actually know what to do.
There’s really only 2 ways you’re going to die in the encounter:
1) You stood in a red circle – the ice drops or the vortex.
2) You got 1 shot out of nowhere and can’t figure out why.
If #1, don’t stand in red circles. If #2, you let the shades live too long.
What they should do is make shades pulse damage around them, only hurting those that didn’t get the buff from the pools, while their physical attacks only hurt those that did.
The loot problem exists because everyone gets their own private loot. As a whole, the loot can be greatly increased by simply adding more people, while at the same time reducing the effort required for each individual. If you solo, which requires more time and effort, you get rewarded less, regardless of if the content was designed to be solo’d. It’s both a flaw and a feature.
They could make loot scale, rewarding time and effort, but since one of their points was that you should never not want to see another player, they can’t do this. The bigger problem is, because of the way the system is implemented, you can be rewarded without actually doing anything. Simply show up and particpate for the last 1% and enjoy the same rewards as those that put in the time and effort to push the event to the end.
New Grenth is best Grenth. Learn which circles are which, and watch his casting animations, and you can take practically no damage from Grenth himself.
The loot is certainly not worth it, but I run it because it’s actually challenging enough now to be fun.
Don’t water it down. Buff the rewards to match the effort / difficulty, and add a door that closes each attempt to prevent graveyard zerging and freeloading, but don’t water it down. It’s fun watching 5-10 people take a dirt nap on the first Ice Spike / portal cast every attempt. Who really wants a boring boss fight with no risk of dying that gives garbage loot?
Kintari | Rintaki | Rin Taki | Kian Tir | Zahinn | Lith <<< Blackgate >>>
Anyone who’s read the other thread about Grenth being over-powered knows my stance on the fight, since I’ve defended its mechanics multiple times. The only problems with it, as I see it, are that it requires coordination and strategy and is placed in an overworld area where legions of uninformed players can rush in and botch the deal—which is just the nature of the beast, I suppose—and also that the loot isn’t worth the effort most of the time, so I agree with you on that. Off hours, small number of people, simple fight, sure I’ll do it. But peak play hours full of graveyard zerging and masses of people who don’t get it for a chest worth less than two camp defenses in Cursed Shore? Not my cup of tea, unless I’m really in the mood for a fight rather than a reward.
The only problems with it, as I see it, are that it requires coordination and strategy and is placed in an overworld area where legions of uninformed players can rush in and botch the deal—which is just the nature of the beast, I suppose
To me therein lies the issue, the encounter is actually somewhat fun with lots of little nuances that can be taken advantage of (such as lower ceilings in many places) but no matter how well designed something is it all amounts to nothing if you they place it in an entirely inappropriate setting.
Grenth, as it stands now, would/is a great 5 man encounter, requiring coordination between players and control over agro and positioning, however it is not in a 5 man encounter area, therefore it becomes terrible as any semblance of balance and control is thrown out the window with it being open world, specially with a fail condition that can be instantly triggered by 1 person (a warrior can run in, hit grenth and drag him to stairs = instant fail for the entire server by 1 person)
So as great as it is they need to rethink something about it, either the fail parameter (remove the death of keeper being able to be influenced by just a single person) or the encounter balance (tone down how much the shades scale up with extra players/make defeated players not effect it)
I mean you wouldn’t but something like say the claw of jormag event in a 5 man dungeon as while it would be perfectly possible to do it would take forever as its balanced for a large number of players. This is exactly the same sort of deal.
The only problems with it, as I see it, are that it requires coordination and strategy and is placed in an overworld area where legions of uninformed players can rush in and botch the deal—which is just the nature of the beast, I suppose
To me therein lies the issue, the encounter is actually somewhat fun with lots of little nuances that can be taken advantage of (such as lower ceilings in many places) but no matter how well designed something is it all amounts to nothing if you they place it in an entirely inappropriate setting.
Grenth, as it stands now, would/is a great 5 man encounter, requiring coordination between players and control over agro and positioning, however it is not in a 5 man encounter area, therefore it becomes terrible as any semblance of balance and control is thrown out the window with it being open world, specially with a fail condition that can be instantly triggered by 1 person (a warrior can run in, hit grenth and drag him to stairs = instant fail for the entire server by 1 person)
So as great as it is they need to rethink something about it, either the fail parameter (remove the death of keeper being able to be influenced by just a single person) or the encounter balance (tone down how much the shades scale up with extra players/make defeated players not effect it)
I mean you wouldn’t but something like say the claw of jormag event in a 5 man dungeon as while it would be perfectly possible to do it would take forever as its balanced for a large number of players. This is exactly the same sort of deal.
Jonez getting instagibbed needs to be reworked simply because it creates the possibility of deliberate griefing, but everything else should stay. Grenth is the only high-level event I can think of where you can’t just roflstomp your way through it by bringing way more players than intended, and I think ANet should consider that a success.
More troubling than failing an event a few times before winning is seeing these supposedly epic encounters reduced to yawn-inducing snoozefests that run with the regularity of a bus schedule. Guyz y no jormag spawn yet? How long window???
These events need to be a struggle, and the rewards should be buffed to match. The Grenth event is completed multiple times daily on the busier servers, and yet people still call it too hard?
Kintari | Rintaki | Rin Taki | Kian Tir | Zahinn | Lith <<< Blackgate >>>
Im all for challenging, but it has to be tuned for the area and situation it is in.
Right now Grenth is tuned for basically a 5 man group to do, if you introduce more its doable but only if your a well formed large group and yet its a world boss thats meant to attract a large portion of the zone to it. This means its going to have not only a group of knowledgeable players fighting him but a large portion of people who don’t know anything.
This of course shoves the difficulty so far up that the experienced players won’t be able to manage it and the new players not only won’t really get a chance to learn first hand (due to instant death and lots of stuff going on on screen) but they can actively fail the event for everyone involved.
Sure nerfing them it down to dragon style difficulty would be extreme (mainly because they left far too many safe spots in those fights rather than most of the mechanics themselves) but there really not balancing it for what the target audience is currently.
If they want to maintain its current balance they need to stop it just being an openworld boss and make it so that groups of the size that actually get a challenge without ridiculous odds can face him without the threat of random people messing it up, such as instance it or at least collapse the tunnel behind keeper at the start of the fight and warping any defeated away (he is the undead priest of the god of death after all) that way it weeds out the people there just trying to kitten a box of loot and allows the people who actually bothered learning the encounter from having a fun, challenging event for possibly nice rewards.
There’s really only 2 ways you’re going to die in the encounter:
1) You stood in a red circle – the ice drops or the vortex.
If #1, don’t stand in red circles.
The larger the group, the more vortexes, the larger the chance for each individual there to be dropped and die.
More people can deal with more shades, but more people can not deal with the entire floor covered in vortexes.
Smaller teams do better not only because they are better players but also because the event is easier with fewer people.
The only nerf needed is to not disproportionally scale up the chance of being caught in a vortex.
(edited by helladoom.4317)
Im all for challenging, but it has to be tuned for the area and situation it is in.
Right now Grenth is tuned for basically a 5 man group to do, if you introduce more its doable but only if your a well formed large group and yet its a world boss thats meant to attract a large portion of the zone to it. This means its going to have not only a group of knowledgeable players fighting him but a large portion of people who don’t know anything.
This of course shoves the difficulty so far up that the experienced players won’t be able to manage it and the new players not only won’t really get a chance to learn first hand (due to instant death and lots of stuff going on on screen) but they can actively fail the event for everyone involved.
Sure nerfing them it down to dragon style difficulty would be extreme (mainly because they left far too many safe spots in those fights rather than most of the mechanics themselves) but there really not balancing it for what the target audience is currently.
If they want to maintain its current balance they need to stop it just being an openworld boss and make it so that groups of the size that actually get a challenge without ridiculous odds can face him without the threat of random people messing it up, such as instance it or at least collapse the tunnel behind keeper at the start of the fight and warping any defeated away (he is the undead priest of the god of death after all) that way it weeds out the people there just trying to kitten a box of loot and allows the people who actually bothered learning the encounter from having a fun, challenging event for possibly nice rewards.
On TC he gets beaten multiple times daily by pugs, usually with a group 10-20 in size. He’s fine for an open world boss. All they need to do is address the Jonez issue, add a door to the event, and buff the loot, and it’s good to go.
Max-level open world DEs should be hard. There are plenty of faceroll easy DEs already in the game for people who want to do exactly that. It’s entirely OK if there are some DEs that you can’t just roll up to with 20 other people you’ve never met, and win on the first try.
When I go to Grenth and 5 people die on the first Ice Spike cast, and then another 5-10 on the first Portal, and none of them have any idea what hit them, the problem isn’t uplevelled shades.
If you want to see a mechanic that makes an open world boss next to impossible with randoms in the area, see Kazzak 1.0 — this is what an ‘unpuggable’ world event looks like. Vortices and upscaled shades are nothing lol.
Kintari | Rintaki | Rin Taki | Kian Tir | Zahinn | Lith <<< Blackgate >>>
I’ve pugged the new grenth, but it’s kind of dumb to have a world encounter where one mistake = death and long run back. I probably won’t bother to do it again because I don’t need the karma gear on any of my characters and I’d make more money doing easy events.
If its as easy as a few people claim here (which its not), then the poor loot IS fine.
You can’t make your argument both ways.
I recently tried Grenth with a 3 man pug, and there definitely were fewer vortexes than there are with a larger group (also Grenth definitely does cast vortexes on the stairs next to Jonez).
In spite of being with only 3 people and in spite of it being a pug we got Grenth down to 20% before there were more shades than i could handle.
So with a large group the chance for each player to be caught in a vortex is significantly higher than with a small group. With a small group the event is easier in absolute terms.
They could make loot scale, rewarding time and effort, but since one of their points was that you should never not want to see another player, they can’t do this.
Why is that a problem for temple events but not for ordinary DE’s?
Primary reason why many people avoid temple events is that those offer low drop reward for much effort.
(edited by helladoom.4317)
New Grenth is best Grenth. Learn which circles are which, and watch his casting animations, and you can take practically no damage from Grenth himself.
Though on my server, the fireworks elemental that acts as the Priest of Grenth instead of the usual risen doesn’t seem to have any visible animations.