Gree Event, Day Four

Still having a lot of fun with the Gree event.

As soon as we had enough people at a high enough reputation level to enter the Grey Secant, my guild took on Xenoanalyst II, the event operations boss, on both story and hard mode. Story mode is pretty forgiving and should be easy to pug, and while hard mode is obviously... well, harder, the basic strategy is more or less the same, just with tighter dps requirements (and some nasty Terentateks that hit like trucks).

While the boss and pretty much his whole room is just a reskin of the Operator in Terror From Beyond, I still found the fight quite amusing. I love the premise of a boss whose very purpose is to test your combat skills. He tells you that you can start the encounter whenever you want, his abilities have names like "Environmental Awareness" (Look, over there! Kill the thing!) and "Problem Solving Evaluation" (Press a button, everyone!), and after you beat him, he gets back up again and channels an ability called "Gleeful Analysis". He's happy that you beat him! Too cute.

PvP on the Western Ice Shelf also continues to be a hoot. Unlike other people, I certainly haven't had any "problems" with people not wanting to fight, though I've certainly observed varying degrees of hostility.

I thought it was very fascinating how things were comparatively peaceful when I joined two other guildies there one afternoon, with people loosely "queuing up" to take turns at the pylon. When it was my turn to charge it and some bounty hunter started to open fire on me, this only resulted in a quick and decisive precision gank from my guildies. The bounty hunter's friends decided to step back and not get involved, so there was no further bloodshed for the time being.

However, it got busier by the minute and it quickly became apparent that trying to cooperate was increasingly becoming a pain in the butt. The energy orbs only last ten minutes, and the pylon resets about once a minute, so "queue" times just keep getting longer and longer until you reach a point where your buff would expire before you'd ever get to take your turn. In addition people were spawn-camping the Ancient Gree Destroyer right next to the pylon by spamming AoE... so the tension eventually exploded and things ended in a giant brawl. Nothing quite clears the air like sending half the present players back to the medcentre.

Later in the evening I came back for another round, and again people were queuing in relative peace. However, I was grouped with my guild leader at the time, who immediately declared that he wasn't going to wait on anybody, jumped the guy who was trying to charge the pylon at that moment and simply stunned him. We ninjaed the charge and walked away without even bothering to kill anyone. That, too, is PvP.

The next day I had an experience that was more in line with traditional world PvP again by going in with some guildies that mainly just wanted to fight. I think it took me four or five attempts to actually carry my first orb to the pylon, because I kept getting caught up in random skirmishes and dying. I didn't mind though, because I thought that it was a good laugh.

Some people in general chat were a lot less enthused though, and my guild even got called out a few times as being mean gankers or something (I wasn't reading along myself; that's just what I heard from others). Generally I don't like to see my guildies causing other players any aggravation, but I have to admit that I have little sympathy for people who get upset about engaging in PvP in a completely optional PvP area.

Interestingly, I've seen very few members of the hardcore PvP guilds around. My mostly PvP-focused friends seem to be in warzones all day as usual. Our own PvP officer needed to be dragged out of Huttball because he hadn't even been paying attention to all this supposed "PvE stuff". I suppose this is the kind of content that works best for those of us who genuinely enjoy a little bit of both - tackling some dailies and world bosses in relative peace and then jumping into the PvP area for a bit of random brawling.