Guild Wars 2

Ok, since the Megaserver patch this Temple event has been kittening me off.

It’s gone from being one of my favorite, to the most detested temple event in the game.

Thus far the only viable and pug-friendly way of doing the temple has been ignoring the shades and zerging down the Priest asap. But that “tactic” requires a certain critical mass of players. But given how unpopular the event is now, it rarely gets this type of attention anymore, meaning you’re left with maybe a dozen or so players trying to do it.

Then you have actual issues like:
1. Priest constantly resets and heals back up, even with players still in combat near him.
2. Even when the Priest resets, the Shades don’t despawn. So any reset essentially forces you to reset because you can’t deal with all the shades.
3. Shades have way, way, way, way, way, way, way too much HP. It feels like each shade has more HP than the bloody Fallen Prest. No surprise everyone ignores them because it would take AGES to kill them all.
4. Constantly being instant-gibbed with form of feedback. I know you drop dead once you reach 25 stacks of whatever, but avoiding these stacks is close to impossible. They seem to stack at random with no clear telegraph to avoid.

And NOTHING is as frustrating in PvE as these constant kittening instant-gib mechanics.

In short, this temple event sucks hard, especially since the megaservers. You need to change the shade mechanic to something more intuitive and forgiving.

A time-limit wouldn’t hurt either so that after 30 minutes of rezzing, running, instant-gib, people might actually realize they’ve lost.

PS: Here’s an idea for new mechanics that would make the whole thing less frustrating.

1. Priest of Grenth has a Shield that absorbs 99% of damage.
2. Players penetrate this shield by killing shades that spawn from the portals.
3. Killing shades allows players to deal more damage, but also makes them more vulnerable to the Priest’s attacks.
4. Players have 7 minutes to kill the Priest before the event fails.

Result: players must balance stacking penetration vs. higher susceptibility to damage, all while killing the Priest in time. Fairly intuitive, instant-gibs depend on player choice, flexible tactics…..less raging. Win/Win.

They aren’t going to change it.

Grenth is one of the best of the world boss events as it can actually kill the zerg. For that reason alone it really shouldn’t be changed. It is the players who are at fault for essentially being rubbish and they should shape up. It would help if some of the NPCs gave helpful hints instead of leaving it all up to players, particularly now that the EU megaservers are multilingual.

Priest resetting – Yes any spurious resets should be fixed. Yes the shades should reset with him when he does this.
Shade health – Yes it is a lot for one character to deal with but this is a raid event and as soon as more players take on the shades they do die at the right pace. Nothing needs to be changed.
Corruption stacks – It is possible to dodge, block, blind and otherwise prevent the shade attacks. It only seems impossible because there are so many shades roaming around and that is due to the zerg play.

This is actually one of the events where waypoint rushing makes players worse. If players couldn’t run back and hope to zerg everything then they would learn, just as they did when waypoint rushing was removed from dungeons.

There is also no incentive for commanders to take a train of players to do the whole of Grenth based in terms of rewards for time spent. It all takes too much time and loot is only given for the final stage. If commanders were coming regularly then they would train up their trains to do it right. I can’t seen any events changes being made to address this though as Anet can’t assume how the players will organize themselves as time goes by.

I see it done 50% by hammering the priest quickly, 50% done by killing the shades. So people obviously have different approaches and it clearly works both ways. This is not a bad thing.

Its the hardest of the temples but just requires a bit of organisation.

I love going there just to see the brainless megaserver blobs die.

I have done grenth at least 100 times since I started playing. At one point, I could solo him on my thief because I whittled the tactics down to 5 pieces of instruction. I normally post them in map chat when I see a group heading for the temple:

Stay off stairs, kite and DO NOT ATTACK shades, focus on grenth with ranged, Stay away from medium circles and WAYPOINT IF DED

Now there are defiant people thinking I am an elitist blowing smoke out my butt. The elitist part maybe true but I really just like to see people cooperate and coordinate. If someone tries to defy my instructions by commanding everyone to concentrate on shades then I will explain why:

The shades will keep respawning even if you kill them. They attack fast and their attacks hit in an area. You get more corruption while in grenth’s realm.

If you engage them, the fight will take longer and your chances of wiping gradually increase.

Killing grenth will get rid of them faster.

This is when the prideful players get hurt and say “lol idiot”, “kitten”, etc.

This hurts me, as an experienced player, to hear that my experience doesn’t count for crap. So I proceed to antagonize the people who won’t listen.

Just recently, I made a few commanders look like fools because all three were telling everyone to kill the shades and I, being the complete kitten that I am said things like:

KILL THE SHADES HARDER MAYBE GRENTH WILL CRY HIMSELF TO DEATH

Those shades are a kitten, aren’t they?

and

Well that sucks. Third time’s a charm, eh? :P

On the third try, a small group actually listened to me. They were also the last ones to die that attempt and managed to get grenth down to 50% while everyone was waiting for a res. A few minutes after the event failed, morale was crap. So I stepped in and said:

You guys want to listen to me now?

I got plenty of trolls telling me to f off. But I went to go spectate for one last time to see if they would. And they did. Grenth slowly melted and the whole ordeal was over in about 15 minutes with minimum deaths.

Experience > commander tag

How to Grenth like a baws (solo or duo is enough):
Run past it all and go to the back where skill pt challenge coffin is.

There’s two alcoves. One on left and one on right.
You range dps from there on Grenth only.
Avoid doing aoe on Grenth so you can’t aggro the shades to the back.
Stay cool and do passive dps on Grenth while completely focusing on your dodging space management.
Run out of the two circle attacks or dodge sync.

If you mess up and get downed, rally off the icy elementals that spawn constantly from the back, there are very squishy.

This makes it actually a fun challenging fight done this way. No point trying to dps shades that spawn faster than you take out with a high risk of dying+wipe wp running back. Let the Zerg die on the stairs and middle, stay cool and be the brave hero to solo Grenth in the back.