Guild Wars 2

It’s AWESOME. It really is. I know it’s super hard and only two or so groups have beat it so far, but it’s really great challenging content that requires a lot of skill, coordination, and practice.

I’ve run the event around 6 times now (gotta get that Mistguard headwrap!). I’ve learned a lot. I’ve had to brave up and get better at fighting melee. I’ve had to lead. I’ve had to be able to forgive myself for my mistakes, and others for theirs.

I’ve had to step up tag, organize, command, and teach, since not a lot of people are organizing the event yet. I’m terribly shy with a lot of social anxiety, but the community of people trying this event have been extremely friendly, willing to learn, willing to forgive, and willing to learn with me. It’s made me even more eager to get a legitimate commander tag (I’ve been using the lovely budget tag XD) and get more involved in helping the community in-game.

I’ve made some friends, at a casual level, literally from seeing them map after map. We organize, fight the boss, fail, discuss what we learned, and then go our separate ways for an hour until it’s time to start organizing for the next run. We start to recognize each other’s names and call each other out in map chat. We start taking responsibilities for different lanes and strategies. And we look forward to seeing those names again next run, even though we’ve never and may never done anything else together.

I’ve done a lot of things during the Tangled Depths meta event.

Still haven’t beat it, though. XD

My reaction to the event is almost entirely positive. The difficulty is almost entirely of the good, challenging, interesting kind. We keep losing, but we also keep learning things we can do better. For the most part, we haven’t been feeling like we lost for no reason. We felt like we had learned some way we could do better next time, and we really did improve.

The one issue I’d have is that, after 6 or so tries, I and others are running into a bit of a wall. We’ve improved a TON, but we’re still not quite there. I know a couple of groups have beat the event, but it seems a little depressing if only incredibly elite, highly organized groups can beat it.

We’re a bunch of pickup groups, learning but still working largely with pugs. Personally, I don’t think we should have to give that up. There’s a sense of community and camaraderie in working with pugs, rather than having to form some highly efficient group (not that I don’t think those should exist, but save it for raids?).

From what we’re learning, it’s reached a point where the only thing we can really improve on is having the groups mostly comprised of melee, full-zerk players. We’re completing all the objectives in time. We’re taking out the chak rushes. We’re destroying the break bars in under 4s. We know the event pretty dang well. The issue is that the chak gerents are huge damage sponges. They’re really really huge. We don’t really know what else to do but put out more DPS. Significantly more DPS.

Of course, zerker melee builds in the challenging content for HOT are hard to pull off. Some of us are (me included, though I’m fairly new to the melee thing), and some of us simply aren’t. It’s a lot to ask to have an entire organized map of zerker melee players who can pull that off and not be constantly dying, WPing, and running back.

I think there’s a line between challenging group content and punishing the playerbase for not having a majority of elite players. Mostly this event is challenging group content. That last 20% of the gerents’ health, though? It’s starting to seem a little punishing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still getting back on tomorrow afternoon and giving this another shot. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong and I’ll learn more, find out that yes, there’s something else besides DPS we could be doing better. But my general impression is that the event would be more rewarding and get more people feeling like they could actually tackle it (just finding enough people who are willing to attempt it is a big undertaking, since so many are just not expecting to win, ever.) if we had about 10% more time or the bosses had about 10% less health.

tl;dr: waaa waaa nerf gerent pls. XD No but seriously, this event is great.

Thanks for a great experience, and if you read all that, thanks for that too. XD

P.S. Don’t quote me on my numbers, numbers are hard. That’s just my general feel, the numbers could be a little off.

Raeysa Penrose.8450:

We’re destroying the break bars in under 4s.

Try not doing that. Try keeping him in the AoE Phase as long as possible.

For reals? Why’s that?

Because if your strategy is heavy on melee then they have an easier time dodgin the rocks than not dieying in the blue goo.

Btw.. they health pools are not so over-sized if you can complete the side events multiple times to get a damage bonus.
In fact on our successful Gerent kill with WUMS-Guild I was on Nuhoch lane and we had enough overcharges to possibly have killed him in phase 2 already if we had gone all in at that time.
We also had far over a minute time left after ours was dead to walk over to an adjacent lane and join in on finishing off theirs too.

So key to depleting his HP-Pool is to complete as many bonus events as possible in the burrow phase. If you are super good at that you won’t need 100% insane berserk melee peeps to win this.

I do feel like it could do with taking a small nerf in the hp pool department. Other than that i think it’s a well-rounded, interesting meta event.

I do kinda wish there was a big bad boss at the end after you’ve blown the hole in the wall, though… The way the camera zooms out in LLC made me expect there would be one, and i was disappoint.

Inverse.2967:

Btw.. they health pools are not so over-sized if you can complete the side events multiple times to get a damage bonus.

My understanding is that they just get extra stacks of vulnerability? stacks which are probably kept close to capped anyway? in the chaos of the fight i haven’t been able to check this out for myself…

Stationary Boss, no new pheromone donuts more and slots for high damage skills on players.
If you can dodge the AoEs this works well in phase 1 and 2.
In Phase 3 there will be a lot of circles and you are better off just breaking the bar sooner than later.
Does not apply to SCAR lane.

Hmmm, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the advice! I’ll try that out.

Inverse.2967:

I was on Nuhoch lane and we had enough overcharges to possibly have killed him in phase 2 already if we had gone all in at that time.

This is only on the Nuhoch lane though.
The Overcharge there gives you priods of 2.5x Damage on the boss so its no miracle that its the fastest lane to kill the boss.
On the other lanes the overcharges give far less damage increase or none at all (scar) so you need to have high dps players there.

Inverse.2967:

Because if your strategy is heavy on melee then they have an easier time dodgin the rocks than not dieying in the blue goo.

Btw.. they health pools are not so over-sized if you can complete the side events multiple times to get a damage bonus.
In fact on our successful Gerent kill with WUMS-Guild I was on Nuhoch lane and we had enough overcharges to possibly have killed him in phase 2 already if we had gone all in at that time.
We also had far over a minute time left after ours was dead to walk over to an adjacent lane and join in on finishing off theirs too.

So key to depleting his HP-Pool is to complete as many bonus events as possible in the burrow phase. If you are super good at that you won’t need 100% insane berserk melee peeps to win this.

I’m curious. Did you avoid breaking his bar for that kill?

I do wonder if that is the optimal strategy since even though you don’t get bonus damage on the cc break you keep him still for the entirety of phase which is hugely useful for staff elementalists although you would probably need a block or two to cast firestorm.

There is actually no dmg increase if you break his cc bar – none.
That’s why we came up with this in the first place.

Hmm, that’s interesting.

Almost all commanders I’ve dealt with try to get people to break the cc as soon as possible no matter what phase. I imagine it’s gonna take a while to convince people to hold back on cc in phase 1 and 2.

It worked quite well for us. We didn’t specifically say that no one should use cc but we certainly did not tell people to break the bar when it appeared. Our breakbars lasted between 30 seconds and a minute i would say. Dodging the orange circles is easily doable by just walking out of them (in pase 1 and 2 at least – also depends on the Lane geography and boss position). If you get hit you will be cc’d for 4 seconds though so bring a stunbreak or lots of stability.

The EU guild Wums finally posted some footage of their successful meta completion and I have to say it does seem like that strategy is quite the way to go. If everyone goes to dps his face and avoids the rocks, you can pick up the stragglers that get hit by a rock or two and you keep him from running all over the place.

If we can get PUG’s to do this, I think will see an increase in the number of lanes successfully killing their Chak Gerent.

If you look closely you can see me. \o/