Guild Wars 2

I’m talking about the time you have to defend hognis (or whomever he is) and destroy 6 burrows. The swarms are simply too many to even deal with. Is it possible to thin their numbers (I don’t expect to literally kill them all off) to make things easier?

Just kill burrows so fast that almost no graveling spawn.
Pretty sure that part can be done in ~10 seconds from start to end. In that time no graveling should have the chance to even get to hodgins.

Yeah, you can thin numbers. It helps to do so if you get overwhelmed, but best to do it when you only have 1 burrow open at the time.

Yes, this event is a DPS check… in a game where not all classes and specs produce maximum DPS. Why, exactly, was a DPS check a good idea? So more people would have a reason to exclude players based on class and spec?

P.S. any response that includes, “Just take a class X and use skill X” has missed the point.

OK this fight is not a DPS check, though it is possible to complete it without tactics if you have a high enough DPS. I have done it a lot of times with suboptimal groups and low level toons and what it really comes down to is having the right abilities equipped and doing stuff in the right order. I’ll try to break it down.

A. Hodgkins defense: One person has to defend Hodkins, My personal belief is that Engineer is the best class for this, but Thief with Short bow is also very good. Failing this either a Guardian or Warrior is the next best thing. Your aim here is not really to kill anything. You aim is to collect every graveling that drops from the front borrow, I do this on my engineer with ‘nades, shortbow AOEs also did a similar job. Warriors and Guardians can use Cleaves to pick up mobs, but this means they have to be facing the mobs, so they will end up taking far more damage than someone that can pick up the mobs on the move. The next important thing is the Gravelings also Cleave, this means if you stand on top of Hodkins he will take damage. The only time you should be near Hodkins is if you need to draw agro off him and a few swings of the greatsword should be enough for this. I generally try to keep moving when doing this, running in circles firing grenades behind me and occasionally on top of Hodkins to pick up any mobs I’ve missed, I used the similar tactics when doing this job with a Ranger and a Thief. Guardians can afford to remain a bit more stationary, though they need to be careful to watch out for Scavengers in Step C as they can end it very quickly for him.

B. The rest of the team. What generally kills teams is the knockdown from the Scavengers, but they only appear when you kill the front burrow. Therefore you should not touch the front burrow till your ready. With 4 people you take out the left burrow as fast as possible. Then head to the back-left burrow (the one in the side room). You then want to run along the back of the room, make sure you don’t drag mobs on top of Hodkins or the person protecting him. You then head to the front-right burrow and destroy that. AT THIS POINT NO MORE BURROWS WILL SPAWN. This means you can clear up any excess mobs that you have around the place. A team should be able to easily sit at this point killing any mobs that come out of the front burrow without any issues. So use the time to get your cooldowns back and heal up. Once ready kill the front burrow.

C. The DEATH Burrow. The back right burrow is the burrow that wipes most teams, this is because as soon as the front burrow goes down this burrow spawns and 2 Scavengers jump out. So it’s important your ready for them. Fire off Stabilities, make sure you pick up the Scavengers so they don’t attack the guy guarding Hodkins, and drag them onto the burrow, then AOE it down as fast as possible as it will continue spawning Scavengers. If you have taken the time killing the front burrow, you should have all your cooldowns for this job, so you should be able to deal with this burrow fast and have stability up for long enough (or have enough stun breakers/shields/Aegis) so that the team does not die.

D. Cleaning up, if you get to this point it really only take 2 or 3 people to finish the final burrow, so have a look at how the defender is doing. If necessary give him a hand while a couple of people finish the last burrow.

If you follow these steps you should be able to do it no problems with most teams.

Nice guide you made there! I have a few things to add:
When defending as a Guardian I usually use staff because it has a bigger range and an AoE auto hit to grab mobs from hodgins. Also line of warding is nice.
The whole groub should take stunbreakers/stability to not get knocked down and killed as easily.

do as ratty posted, we also do this tactics and dps is just a push, but not that important as long as u organize your group.
we made that a dozen times and i guarded hodgins even with my mesmer wearing his staff (i am not even skilled for staff tbh).
just use evry esacpe or cc together with aoe mechanisms u have for not being controlled by the gravelings.

if u have enough dps on burrouws u can semi “split” groups too to have faster access to the next burrow and not wasting dps (and cooldown) on one burrow only.

this event is no dps check, its a check for tactical behaviour as a group.

though i am with all of you when it comes to organized group play I’d still like to see a reduced amount of gravelings spawning.
in certain group setups you dont have the object damage to do this event properly.

kitsuneKyo.6824:

though i am with all of you when it comes to organized group play I’d still like to see a reduced amount of gravelings spawning.
in certain group setups you dont have the object damage to do this event properly.

I’ve yet to see a setup that can’t do it. I guess if you went with a team of Necros and Rangers all in Rabid gear you may have issues, but tbh if you had that team every fight in the game would be an issue (due to condition capping). Almost every other setup will have Power as a stat on most pieces of equipment and that is the only stat that works on burrows, you can’t crit them and conditions do nothing.

Earlier this week I did this with a team with a level 40 Warrior, 42 Ranger (Which I know was in Prec/Cond green gear, so no power), 80 Guard, 60 Guard and 80 Ranger. Hardly a high DPS team, but we did it first time with no issues.

When I roll my condition necro, all I can do is running circle in front of him……and do whatever I can to hold aggro and stay alive. Cripple, freeze, regen, death shroud, heal, dodge, fear, plague………..and hope my guildies will clear burrows before I go down.

Afya.5842:

When I roll my condition necro, all I can do is running circle in front of him……and do whatever I can to hold aggro and stay alive. Cripple, freeze, regen, death shroud, heal, dodge, fear, plague………..and hope my guildies will clear burrows before I go down.

It does make sense for a full condition Necro to take the protection role. I would probably run Signet of the Locust to keep ahead of the graveling and do as you say throw out as much cripple and AOE as I can. The main job of this role is to keep the gravelings off Hodgins, not kill them.

Thank you for the guide with arrows, Ratty, I was just on a team a week or so ago that failed 4-5 times in a row before finally pulling it off and this would have helped. I’d read about a burrow order, but was never able to figure out from text descriptions alone what it was supposed to be. I usually follow someone else, but on this team evidently nobody knew the order past the first couple of burrows so it was messy.

So after you clear the first three burrows (But not the one directly in front of the table that spawns at the start of the event) gravelings stop spawning? I’ve actually never had that pointed out to me: if I’m understanding correctly, that gives a great opportunity to take a breather / clean up / let skills recharge.

A lot of groups can just soldier straight through and clear it in one go, but I’ve been in groups where I wanted to just stop and clear everything out so we could guarantee a finish. I always thought the graveling spawn was endless though, so I didn’t think clearing out the room was really an option unless you could kill gravelings faster than they spawned, which was often unlikely with those groups.

Softspoken.2410:

So after you clear the first three burrows (But not the one directly in front of the table that spawns at the start of the event) gravelings stop spawning? I’ve actually never had that pointed out to me: if I’m understanding correctly, that gives a great opportunity to take a breather / clean up / let skills recharge.

A lot of groups can just soldier straight through and clear it in one go, but I’ve been in groups where I wanted to just stop and clear everything out so we could guarantee a finish. I always thought the graveling spawn was endless though, so I didn’t think clearing out the room was really an option unless you could kill gravelings faster than they spawned, which was often unlikely with those groups.

They don’t stop spawning, but no more burrows will spawn, and the mobs that come out the front burrow are fairly weak. So even a group with poor DPS should be able to round up the spill over from the first 3 burrows, while dealing with the extra’s spawning from the front burrow.

In other words, once you get to this stage it is much easier to kill them faster than they spawn as you only have 1 burrow that releases weak Gravelings, rather than 2 or 3.

In the team I mentioned a couple of posts ago (the sub-optimal low level Guard/Ranger team), they cleared the room thoroughly enough before killing the front burrow that I could go and help them with the DEATH burrow, as I had no gravelings to kite away from Hodgins.

Hmmm, so let me straighten things up:

1) The burrows spawn the gravelings
2) Each burrow has a limit on the number of gravelings it spawns at any given moment
3) If I destroy a burrow, and kill the gravelings said burrow spawned, the gravelings won’t respawn at another burrow

In short, the number of gravelings isn’t dictated by a universal limit, but rather by the number of burrows currently active?

EX:
If there are 100 gravelings at a given moment, it isn’t because there MUST be 100 gravelings (so one burrow will spew gravelings until there are 100 of them), but because there are 5 burrows that will always have 20 gravelings associated with them, so if I destroy one burrow and kill said burrow’s 20 gravelings, the number of gravelings will go down to 80 and won’t rise again.

If all I said is true, that’s good news, because that part consumed up to half an hour during my last playthrough (or maybe more)