Two Bosses Enter: Gruul vs. C'Thun
Though two bosses will enter WoW Insider's deathmatch arena, only one of them will be walking away. Every week we pit two of the World of Warcraft's raid bosses against one another in a battle that your votes get to decide. This week we have Outland's own Gruul matching up against Ahn'qiraj's final boss C'Thun (and one of the hardest fights you'll find in Azeroth). Dragonkiller vs. Old God? This one should be interesting. How would these two fare against one another? Ultimately, that's for you to decide -- so read on and cast your vote!
Gruul relies primarily on melee damage to bring down his enemies -- and that damage only gets worse as you fight him, for every 30 seconds, Gruul will buff himself with Growth and increase his damage by 15%. We're ignoring abilities that relate to the specific terrain of Gruul's lair, because we presume these fights take place in a neutral arena. However, Gruul still has a few tricks up his sleeve:
Hurtful Strike hits the 2nd target on the threat list for a high amount of melee damage (12k to 13k). If there isn't a second target in melee range, Gruul will hit his primary target with Hurtful Strike. The damage increases with each Growth.
Ground Slam: An AoE knockback.
Gronn Lord's Grasp: After being knocked back by Ground Slam, players receive this debuff, which reduces movement speed by 20%. Stacks.
Stoned: After 5 stacks of Gronn Lord's Grasp, the player will become stunned by Stoned.
Shatter: After Stoning his targets, Gruul will Shatter them, dealing damage (more if players are close to one another.)
C'Thun is the final boss in Ahn'Qiraj, an old god considered to be one of the most difficult pre-Burning Crusade encounters. The fight has two phases, a standard DPS phase one where you run C'Thun's health from 100% rto 0% and a phase two where C'Thun takes almost no damage -- but occasionally C'Thun takes out his opponents with high nature and shadow damage along with tentacle power. In a fight with C'Thun, you can expect to encounter the following abilities:
Eye Beam: A nature damage attack that targets a single player, but jumps from the first player to subsequent players in range with increasing damage each jump.
Dark Glare: An incredibly high damage (read: no player could survive it) shadow attack that sweeps 180 degrees across the room.
Eye Tentacles: These tentacles spawn at intervals throughout the fight. Individually, they have low health, but they spawn in groups and do a Mind Flay-type spell. (With generally meaner "giant" versions spawning in phase two.)
Claw Tentacles: These tentacles also spawn at intervals throughout the fight and have low health. However, unlike the Eye Tentacles, these do melee damage. (With generally meaner "giant versions spawning in phase two.)
Stomach of C'Thun: In phase two, tentacles will swallow players and send them to C'Thun's stomach. As you might imagine, it's not a friendly place, and every few seconds damaging debuffs will stack on anyone inside. There's an easy exit from the stomach, but killing Flesh Tentacles inside the stomach weakens C'Thun, allowing him to be hurt and killed -- so you might want to stick around.
As you can see, it's a fight requiring a lot of coordination from a player raid. But could Gruul overwhelm C'Thun with his high-damage, brute force melee capabilities?
So we have two bosses that are present unique problems for players, but might not pose such a threat to each other...! Who wins and who loses in this epic battle? It's nearly time for you to to tell us, but before that, a reminder: we're considering these two bosses with approximately equal health and approximately equal damage output capabilities. We aren't making this into a math equation of who's got more health than who, so when you cast your vote, cast it on fighting style, not highest level. You're welcome to factor the lore of each character into the equation, but don't presume that one would win out because they're in a higher level dungeon.
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