Guild Wars 2

I’m rather new to the temples in Orr scene, and I haven’t really paid them much attention. So I finally decide that I want to get an exotic back item since I don’t plan on running Fractals enough to get one with tokens.

After I looked up where to get the one I needed, I figured it would just be an event or whatever to get it flipped and I would buy the item then be on my merry way. Not exactly the case.

What I needed was from Grenth, and when I got there there was another player making his way with the NPCs. We tried and failed horribly. Try #2 and we get some people in the region and we make it halfway to the Champ location, and the NPC just keels over all of the sudden and runs back like a baby. Try #3 and we have a substantial amount of people, we kill the champ, then the spiders come and kill the paper-thin NPC when he’s doing his spell or whatever.

It’s at this point that I gave up trying to do it on my server and then decide to see if I could make a post on the forums to see if it’s uncontested on any of the other servers. I was surprised to see how popular these threads were and that the devs seem to be facilitating this method of just guesting to another server because nobody does the events/they’re too hard/not worth the effort, take your pick.

So this begs the question, is this intended or are the temple events just _________ ?

That was pretty much my question, is it a bug, a joke (not close enough to 4/1 though), or intentional. Other threads on event scaling would indicate that aspects may be unintentional and they are looking at it. Sadly, in some comments Anet made around Grenth being addressed to more skilled, hard mode players, I’m afraid that it is largely intentional, but may have been pushed well over the top by a scaling issue.

Bottom line is that open world PvE in an MMO should not be addressed, anywhere, to hard mode players. The design around the open world should take into consideration the player base found in the open world. And, by that, I’m not saying it needs to be easy, simply appropriate and most MMO’s have arrived at a good balance here. Where hard mode comes in is instances. I’m personally in favor of tiered difficulty being available to satisfy a diverse player base both in terms of desire and skill.

I’m afraid Anet has a whetted finger to the wind again and are listening to those who say everything is too easy. The answer here is not to make DE’s in the open world silly.

The event’s are not really too hard, unless you have a decent amount of people to do it who actually knows what they are doing. The rewards for flipping a temple are also high so it is intended to be challenging. However Grenth and Balthazar are in my opinion the hardest temples to do. So to make them all even they could use some balancing.

The guesting option is facilitated cause it is a valid option to use and it was being requested a lot. Therefor the mods made merged threads wich are now used for this purpose.

The most important reason is that some items there cantbe find elsewhere in the game and if your world is a high ranking WvWvW server people dont care for it to do it.

Last of all, the fact that so many guest on different servers means the events can actually be done and are done on active PvE servers on a regular base.

mercury ranique.2170:

The event’s are not really too hard, unless you have a decent amount of people to do it who actually knows what they are doing. The rewards for flipping a temple are also high so it is intended to be challenging.

Thats incorrect IMHO, the game is set up so you should have enough karma when you reach 80 to buy a temple set as your first exotic if you want.

And there’s a difference between challenging and close to impossible

There is a lot of discussion on the issue. Apparently some champions mobs aren’t scaling right, and they become way too hard. As mobs in orr keep getting buffed, the events NPCs remain the same, causing the events to become much more difficult.

Grenth and Balthazar are the two hardest events due to one thing in particular: The event has a fail condition based on NPC defense. Whereas in other events you simply just rez th NPCs and continue on your merry way, in these events the NPCs have a limited number of deaths or they can’t die at all. This leads to a need for sophisticated cooperation, which is something players lack in this game for the large part. There are any number of ways in which these events can go wrong, and often times it takes one person to mess it up.

For Grenth, the hardest part is the champion and defense event. For the champion, players need to walk into the portals on the sides to get a buff that lets them attack shades. The room is shaped like an up-side down T. The vast majority of players should be concentrating on the adds, and the champion should only be engaged once the adds are dead. He will spawn more adds at 75%, 50% and 25% HP. The shades themselves are immune to damage, and don’t do any damage themselves. The shade’s attacks will stack corruption on the player, and the player downs instantly once corruption reaches 25. The priestess has only 3 attacks: one where makes miniature ice elementals that explode , one where he drops ice shards on everyone within range, and one where he causes vortexes to appear on the ground that drop players from the roof. The first two attacks aren’t too dangerous, but that vortex attack has a large area, very little warning, and bypasses the downed state. He will raise and twirl his staff while using this attack. Once he hits 25% health, the number of shades he’ll spawn is innumerable, so all players should focus on DPSing down the priest at that point. It is important that anyone who has the priest’s aggro should never run back to get the buff to fight shades or try and heal deadrun or anything like that. The priest is obsessive and will chase one player until he gets to deadrun, and WILL kill deadrun quite easily. The priest will glare at the player who he is aggroing on. Rezzing the defeated is too dangerous, so the defeated should use a WP then run back; it really is quicker that way.

In neither of the events should players crowd around deadrun. Veteran wraiths will spawn frequently, and their well can kill deadrun very quickly.

For the defense event, it is important to know that at certain intervals enemies will spawn, regardless if you cleared out the prior spawn or not. The champion spider will spawn at around the 4:30 mark; DPS him down as quickly as possible, since at around the 3:00 mark spiders will spawn right on top of deadrun. At 1:30 a champion wraith will spawn on the stairs, and at around 1:00 another spider swarm will hit deadrun. It is important to pull the aggro off of deadrun while maintaining some distance, since veteran wraiths spawn throughout the fight The Risen spider can be killed if focused on, but the Champion Wraith will be nearly impossible to kill in his timeframe. Instead, focus on bringing down his stacks of defiant, and stunning him when he slowly raises his arms up to use life transfer. It is adviseable to have someone stand very far away near the stairs to distract the wrath, since a sustained life transfer will kill deadrun. The sheer number of mobs in this event is astounding, so AoE damage is highly recommended.

That is a lot to remember for the two events… I can’t even begin on Balthazar since I run that one so rarely. But for Balthazar, the strategy is fairly simple but difficult: Heal the NPCs like mad while having players intercept the enemy groups as they spawn.

For Balthazar escort, just memorize where the mobs spawn, and the next time, be the first one to aggro them by spawn camping. This stops nobles’ shadowsteps on NPCs, and also allows the campers to clearly see the veteran acolytes that others can’t due to culling.

The Balthazar escort is hard only because of human conditioning, which makes ppl looters instead of campers (campers have to rush to the spawn sites, so there is no time to go back to pick up loot).

For the priest of Grenth, aggro the mobs before the Pact do but not the priest, lead them to the right room, kill veterans 1st and then the shades because shades can’t kill Jonez, and finally aggro the priest. Use the tree and the alcove by it to line-of-sight the priest to the skill point, then jump on to the top of the coffins, enjoy being out of all of the priests’ attack, and just shoot him to death (some auto-attacks gain ~100 units of range due to elevation). This fight is a piece of solo-able cake but not many ppl know how to do it.

For the cleansing of Grenth, do NOT summon the next waves by killing off everything in the 1st 2 groups of mobs, leave some harmless trash mobs alive to the PACT and fucos on the champion spider at 4:50. Spam 1 at the center pillar where the champion spider spawns at 4:50 just like ppl do to the jungle wurm world boss, and make the spider face away from Jonez so the hatchlings won’t spawn right at Jonez. If the stallings are done right, no mobs can spawn from the 2 trash mob pipelines, due to the sequential mechanism of the event. The rest of the players who aren’t stalling can just chill at the stairs and wait for the champion wraith to spawn at 1:50 at the waypoint and keep it on the stairs and interrupt its Life Transfer.

The cleansing of the temple of Grenth is hard only because of human conditioning, which makes ppl looters instead of stallers (stalling brings less mob loot).

morrolan.9608:

mercury ranique.2170:

The event’s are not really too hard, unless you have a decent amount of people to do it who actually knows what they are doing. The rewards for flipping a temple are also high so it is intended to be challenging.

Thats incorrect IMHO, the game is set up so you should have enough karma when you reach 80 to buy a temple set as your first exotic if you want.

And there’s a difference between challenging and close to impossible

As stated later and in my post. the exceptions are Grenth and Balthazar. They take a little bit more smart thinking.

I dont know what the amount of karma has to do with this and I do believe you are incorrect. If you level a character to 80 and do one month of daily’s and monthly you have enough karma for a templeset (if you open the jugs with the boosters on).

The daily’s and monthly’s where added later and definitly not a part of the design of these events.

Bottom line is that I did all temple events several times and with success on the first attempt. Balthazar and Grenth are indeed easier to fail, but still very doable if you know what your doing.

mercury ranique.2170:

The daily’s and monthly’s where added later and definitly not a part of the design of these events.

Bottom line is that I did all temple events several times and with success on the first attempt. Balthazar and Grenth are indeed easier to fail, but still very doable if you know what your doing.

I didn’t mean the design for the events themselves I mean the intent of anet behind adding karma jugs. There is after all no other use for karma apart from legendaries.

morrolan.9608:

mercury ranique.2170:

The daily’s and monthly’s where added later and definitly not a part of the design of these events.

Bottom line is that I did all temple events several times and with success on the first attempt. Balthazar and Grenth are indeed easier to fail, but still very doable if you know what your doing.

I didn’t mean the design for the events themselves I mean the intent of anet behind adding karma jugs. There is after all no other use for karma apart from legendaries.

I do truly not think that the karma jugs where added to match this but more to make daily achievements more interesting.

So, what we had was reasonably difficult open world content that anyone could participate in. What we have now is content requiring coordinated teams of skilled players. I thought that was what dungeons were for?

There’s a great deal of theory available on how to deal with the events but in practice, any open world event is going to be dominated by mob mentality. You can see this even in much smaller events like the Infinity Coil Commander – for a group of 3 people who know how he works, the fight is simplistic but you would see that boss reset again and again because when they aren’t formally coordinated, people either don’t know or don’t care about the mechanics. IMO, the events are neither “easy” nor “difficult” nor “close to impossible” unless you’re an officer in a big guild that actually has some pull; difficulty implies that you can do anything about it. I can’t look at the uncleared Temple of Grenth and go “Hey, I need that PVT Karma gear and I know how he works, so I’m gonna go do it.” Events like Grenth and Balthazar are simply so big that you, personally, have basically no influence on the outcome. On Sanctum of Rall, the Temple of Grenth, at least, does get cleared once in a while but I haven’t seen Balthazar open in quite some time. This could simply be because Grenth supplies the popular PVT gear that gets some groups interested while Balthazar’s PTC gear is a lot less used and known.

IndigoSundown.5419:

So, what we had was reasonably difficult open world content that anyone could participate in. What we have now is content requiring coordinated teams of skilled players. I thought that was what dungeons were for?

This is pretty much the conclusion that I have come to.

It would really seem that these events should be able to be completed just by a group or 2 of people already in the zone. It doesn’t seem like it was intended as this huge cross-server event that takes quite a few coordinated groups or guilds full of people on Ventrilo or TS to be able to complete successfully. That’s really more of a dungeon thing.

The other larger issue with these “protect the NPC” events in general is that since the game doesn’t really have an aggro/hate mechanic with no options for taunting or tanking, it’s generally just kind of random how it can turn out. I realize you’re just supposed to attack everything you can so the NPC doesn’t get hit but that doesn’t always work. The lack of healing classes only exacerbates this problem(yes I know some classes have area heals).

So I guess the point really is that should these be dungeon-hard? I don’t see any groups on gw2lfg.com for them when I searched before, and the rewards are for ACCESS to PURCHASE something, not actual physical rewards. It just doesn’t quite add up I guess.

Zindrix.1750:

So I guess the point really is that should these be dungeon-hard? I don’t see any groups on gw2lfg.com for them when I searched before, and the rewards are for ACCESS to PURCHASE something, not actual physical rewards. It just doesn’t quite add up I guess.

Course they shouldn’t be, anet have their head in the sand or maybe even individual devs in this area who have their own ideas and are influencing outcomes.