The Temple of Grenth event needs a rework

The Temple of Grenth event needs a rework

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Posted by: TheKillerAngel.3596

TheKillerAngel.3596

Currently, some of the mechanics, chiefly the shades’ corruption, lack reasonable counterplay.

To defeat the shades at the Risen Priest of Grenth, players must enter Grenth’s domain by touching these pools at the side of the room, enabling them to damage the otherwise invulnerable shades. In theory, this sounds alright. In practice, this runs into several severe problems:

1. The shades apply 1 stack of corruption per attack, each lasting 60 seconds, and 25 stacks results in instant death. There is no way to remove these stacks other than sitting out of the fight, and 60 seconds is a very long time.

2. Killing the shades would supposedly prevent stacks from becoming an issue in the first place. Unfortunately, the health of the shades scales up dramatically as more people enter the event, requiring a significant amount of time to kill them.

3. Because the shades are numerous and have the ability to instantly kill you if you are attacked 25 times within 1 minute (less than 1 attack every 2 seconds), it is extremely difficult to defeat them in a proper battle. The longer the fight goes, the higher the chances the shades will win because you are constantly being attacked and cannot cleanse the stacks. Most of the time, players attempting to fight the shades will die within 10 seconds. I think the only way to kill them in a timely manner, if they are scaled up to 30+ players, is to use dungeon speedrun tactics (full berserker gear with multiple fiery greatsword elementalists rushing LOS’d shades into a wall). That’s not going to happen in the open world because people “play how they want” at the end of the day.

4. Ultimately, this means the event is easier to complete with as few people as possible, which with the megaserver system is rather difficult.

Here are some ideas for improving the event by giving the enemies more opportunities for counterplay.

- As players acquire more stacks of corruption, they deal more damage to shades and the Risen Priest of Grenth.
- There can be pillars of light that players can stand in to remove corruption stacks.
- Reduce the duration of corruption.
- Limit the number of shades that can be active.

Think stacking and skipping trash is cheap?
Read: Playing to Win.
Guide: How to play a Mesmer in dungeons.

(edited by TheKillerAngel.3596)

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Posted by: Mortifer.2946

Mortifer.2946

+1

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Posted by: CptAurellian.9537

CptAurellian.9537

There actually is some highly effective counterplay against the shades and their stacks: blinds. A competent thief can take three or probably five (never bothered to look at Black Powder’s target limit) shades out of the fight forever and a good guardian or elementalist can also severely slow down the corruption stacking of up to three shades.

The problem with the Grenth temple priest fight is something else: 90 % of the people participating are completely incompetent. They don’t bother to get the buff and kill the shades, so the few players who know what to do simply get overrun by shades. And out of the people fighting the shades, I’d bet that a large part runs builds which are completely useless for PvE, complicating the fight even further.

In the end, the fight is fine. There’s no need to change it and reward stupidity.

Warning! This post may contain traces of irony, sarcasm and peanuts.

There is no loyalty without betrayal. -Ann Smiley

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Posted by: Ryuujin.8236

Ryuujin.8236

There is a lack of information presented to the players about what is going on. Even if you make it clear that everyone’s priority is to cull the shades (Which is a good strategy, the NPCs and players not listening will finish the boss for you), a large portion of the players will fail to get the buff.

This is made worse by the fact there is little visual distinction between the teleport-into-the-sky vortices, and the domain buff vortices – I have known newbie players told to “jump into the vortex for the buff” to accuse me of being a troll when they have fallen to their death jumping into the wrong vortex and refused to get the buff thereafter.

The Grenth fight is a good one – it has multiple mechanics at play. It’s probably is that the mechanics are: A: completely opaque without someone taking the time to explain it to you in advance. and B: Can result in an unwinnable situation developing.

I think 1 SINGLE change would be adequate – and that is to place a cap on how many shades can spawn simultaneously. Maybe 5-8, so stacks are still a threat if ignored, but don’t acrue so fast that they wipe you before you even reach the vortex

The Ashwalker – Ranger
Garnished Toast

The Temple of Grenth event needs a rework

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Posted by: TheKillerAngel.3596

TheKillerAngel.3596

There actually is some highly effective counterplay against the shades and their stacks: blinds. A competent thief can take three or probably five (never bothered to look at Black Powder’s target limit) shades out of the fight forever and a good guardian or elementalist can also severely slow down the corruption stacking of up to three shades.

The problem with the Grenth temple priest fight is something else: 90 % of the people participating are completely incompetent. They don’t bother to get the buff and kill the shades, so the few players who know what to do simply get overrun by shades. And out of the people fighting the shades, I’d bet that a large part runs builds which are completely useless for PvE, complicating the fight even further.

In the end, the fight is fine. There’s no need to change it and reward stupidity.

The target limit for black powder is 5.

Think stacking and skipping trash is cheap?
Read: Playing to Win.
Guide: How to play a Mesmer in dungeons.

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Posted by: Ryuujin.8236

Ryuujin.8236

There actually is some highly effective counterplay against the shades and their stacks: blinds. .

The shades don’t physically strike you to stack corruption. Simply standing in proximity to a shade when it “ticks” will add corruption. The only defence against corruption is to kill the shades as fast as possible, blinds even invulns don’t work

The Ashwalker – Ranger
Garnished Toast

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Posted by: CptAurellian.9537

CptAurellian.9537

Blinds do work, as well as invuln and probably also block. I’ve done the event this morning.

Warning! This post may contain traces of irony, sarcasm and peanuts.

There is no loyalty without betrayal. -Ann Smiley

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Posted by: Dalanor.5387

Dalanor.5387

The problem with the Grenth temple priest fight is something else: 90 % of the people participating are completely incompetent. They don’t bother to get the buff and kill the shades, so the few players who know what to do simply get overrun by shades. And out of the people fighting the shades, I’d bet that a large part runs builds which are completely useless for PvE, complicating the fight even further.

In the end, the fight is fine. There’s no need to change it and reward stupidity.

+1 for this, even in this harsh context.
The only remotely challanging open world content is a few Orr temple and the golem boss, but the later one is simply get ranged to death from a safe spot by the majority of the players. And poor fire ele’s health pool got reduced it seems, so it melts (lol?) really fast nowadays.
Keep the hard stuff hard.

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Posted by: TheKillerAngel.3596

TheKillerAngel.3596

If an encounter is challenging because I have to fight the stupidity of other players rather than the actual boss, I think there’s a problem.

Think stacking and skipping trash is cheap?
Read: Playing to Win.
Guide: How to play a Mesmer in dungeons.

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Posted by: CptAurellian.9537

CptAurellian.9537

Unfortunately, you will have that problem with any non-trivial open world zerg content, from Grenth via Teq and Marionette to the worm …

Warning! This post may contain traces of irony, sarcasm and peanuts.

There is no loyalty without betrayal. -Ann Smiley

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Posted by: Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Blood Red Arachnid.2493

Something I hate is that now the shades seem to inflict corruption in an AoE. Originally I could just kite the enemies, or I could face tank them with blinds. Now, I get stacks when I’m not even being targeted by anything.

So far that is my only complaint. The event is hard, but it isn’t too bad.

I don’t have opinions. I only have facts I can’t adequately prove.

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Posted by: Azhure.1857

Azhure.1857

In the end, the fight is fine. There’s no need to change it and reward stupidity.

As evil as it will sound…
I actually enjoy sitting back and watching the megazerg crash and burn during this event. I agree with Aurellian here – please don’t “reward stupidity”.

Isle of Janthir Megaserver

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Posted by: VodCom.6924

VodCom.6924

In the end, the fight is fine. There’s no need to change it and reward stupidity.

My friend, this thread taught me something about the event. There is nothing, really nothing that warns you about the stack limit and instant death. The tooltips of corruptions and shadow effects are not even translated (in French at least).

How do you expect people to learn if the game fails to teach you how a fight works ?
This is guild wars, not Riddle wars. Riddles are fine in fractals, dungeons and puzzles. Riddles are NOT fine for zergy meta event.

Known as Reegar Else, Linda Else, Xiana Else and Thorgall Breakstone

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Posted by: tigirius.9014

tigirius.9014

The thing that I’ve noticed is the tendency to make these things a stackfest. These enemies go after not the people who are using the portals to do damage but the people who happen to be close by going after the boss, they stack to 25 and then poof before anyone can adequately move to a zone where these stacks can be removed (at least last time I did the event they could be if one stood in the same portal as the people who are slightly out of phase and were cleansed by an AOE affect of some kind) then if you go back to reality as it were you could start attacking the boss, but it seems like they don’t want you to get over there. I’ve seen people try to stack far enough away behind the boss to prevent being seen by the shades in the shade summon spawn point and it still not work they died, so not really sure what to tell you.

I’ve not done it in months tho so it could have had the stack removal changed for all I know. That’s what I used the last time I was there.

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