Curse

Inferos · Jan 20, 2012, 01:53 AM // 01:53

So I just finished reading Jack's write up (and all replies) about 7H HM UW farming, but the player's profession was not mentioned. I have searched Google and GWPvX to the best of my ability as well, and there is no answer to this.

With that said, I am pretty sure asking this is not violating a rule, as I'm asking a pretty specific question.

Which profession is most efficient when it comes to solo'ing 7H UW HM? I noticed in Jack's YouTube videos he is running W as primary, but can't make out what his secondary is.

Sacred Gee · Jan 20, 2012, 02:18 AM // 02:18

Looks like he was running W/Me. Not technically "soloing" if you're running 7H.

Gabs88 · Jan 20, 2012, 02:24 AM // 02:24

7H HM UW is not farming, and it's not even nessesary to ever do it. It's not profitable either. It's purely an egotrip.

7H NM UW you can do once if you haven't ever completed UW before, gives you a HOM point and thats it.

As far as most efficient profession for 7h goes I'd say Dervish overall. It's quite fantastic. For UW HM it's probably an ER Elementalist

Inferos · Jan 20, 2012, 02:32 AM // 02:32

Thanks for reply, I thought it looked like Me but wasn't sure. Also, by solo I meant solo real person... obviously not a solo character

And I was just wondering because I am new to the game and want to accomplish everything, but fear by the time I get there I won't be able to find a group for it. Also, I love doing things by myself.

Is Dervish really that strong now? I've heard mixed reviews on them, but it's tough figuring out whats right with all the updates.

Chthon · Jan 20, 2012, 02:53 AM // 02:53

Let me put it this way: By the time you are capable of finishing UW 7H at all, you will know enough about the game to be more than able to form your own well-informed opinion about which class is best for the task.

Xslash · Jan 20, 2012, 02:57 AM // 02:57

if you are willing to use consets (more importantly, essence). then assassin is best.

if you are willing to use pcons (candy corn, golden egg, lunar thing), etc. then ranger is the best.

i mean. if you just wanna complete uw with 7 heroes just cuz, then that'll be best.

but if you wanna complete uw hm 7heroes with no cons for some feat of strength or something, then any profession is fine.

Inferos · Jan 20, 2012, 04:41 AM // 04:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xslash

if you are willing to use consets (more importantly, essence). then assassin is best.

if you are willing to use pcons (candy corn, golden egg, lunar thing), etc. then ranger is the best.

i mean. if you just wanna complete uw with 7 heroes just cuz, then that'll be best.

but if you wanna complete uw hm 7heroes with no cons for some feat of strength or something, then any profession is fine.

Why Ranger? All I ever hear is how bad they are since they didn't receive a class review.

Kaida the Heartless · Jan 20, 2012, 04:48 AM // 04:48

Assassin is the best if you like to ball up targets and let your Heroes rip them to shreds.

Mesmer is the best if you like to run in and effectively engage/shutdown a group.

Necromancer is the best if you want to watch a movie while playing.

Elementalist is the best if you like damage.

Ritualist is the best if you just wanna drop Spirits (if you really get into trouble, you can Shelter spam and still be useful/damaging, unlike a Hero).

Dervish has the easiest Deep Wound application (but requires party specialization in most cases).

Paragon has the best party-wide damage mitigation (Imbagon).

The rest are pretty lackluster.

Inferos · Jan 20, 2012, 04:56 AM // 04:56

Going to be aiming for 50/50, so was leaning towards Ranger or Ele for the Armor set prices (they seem by far easiest to obtain)...

thanks for the list Kaida!

Gabs88 · Jan 20, 2012, 06:11 AM // 06:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kaida the Heartless

Assassin is the best if you like to ball up targets and let your Heroes rip them to shreds.

Mesmer is the best if you like to run in and effectively engage/shutdown a group.

Necromancer is the best if you want to watch a movie while playing.

Elementalist is the best if you like damage.

Ritualist is the best if you just wanna drop Spirits (if you really get into trouble, you can Shelter spam and still be useful/damaging, unlike a Hero).

Dervish has the easiest Deep Wound application (but requires party specialization in most cases).

Paragon has the best party-wide damage mitigation (Imbagon).

The rest are pretty lackluster.

Assassin is indeed very strong with a variety of different builds available, also very nice for making money if you're going for a single character approach. And can ball + trigger sprinter weapon relatively quick.

Primary mesmers can generally be replaced by heroes.

Necromancers can generally be replaced by heroes.

Primary Ele is very strong period. Good with AP builds, good with nuke \ PBAOE builds and ER for elite areas. But for maximum effectiveness you need a very active playstyle calling all targets.

Ritualists is overall very strong, both with AP builds, SoS and ST. But in general ST isn't needed and SoS is replaceable by a hero. So you're left with AP for maximum effectiveness which means holding CTRL constantly for the next 500 hours.

Dervish is excellent for general group by group balling aka RoJ heroway. Easy deep wound, quick splinter weapon trigger, natural AoE damage, durable.

So I have to disagree a bit with you're ratings. Cause IMO SF play isn't as viable for general play as some people claim unless you're familiar with every single zone in advance and can instantly pick the right SF build for each zone. And often even if you got a perfect SF build for the zone you can do it just as fast or even faster with a group by group ball and nuke approach (dagger spam or dervish) or a AP caller build.

IMO, AP callers recuire a too active play style over time in order to get the same level of effectiveness you can get with pulling group by group.

This leaves us with 3 top classes:
Assassin, Dervish and Elementalists.

Assassin because of the overall effectiveness of dagger spam builds and the ability to use SF when recuired.

Dervish because of the overall power level of the Scythe in spikes and with general survivability.

Elementalists because of the recent buff and the extreme effectiveness they gain with AP caller builds.

LexTalionis · Jan 20, 2012, 07:41 AM // 07:41

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gabs88

*snip*
Primary mesmers can generally be replaced by heroes.
*snip*

Heroes do not, in general, play many Primary Mesmer builds well, including but not limited to:

-Keystone builds (AI is notably horrible at this)
-Fevered Dreams
-AEcho EVAS spike (for obvious reasons)
-Extend Conditions lockdown (with Technobabble, occasionally superior to FD when you need fast interrupts)

Heroes are also extremely bad at interrupting important off-target casts with Frustration/Cry of Pain, have issues with target selection on Mistrust-type skills (which I've covered in the Mesmer AI thread) and are generally horrible with Panic (which they use on single targets).

Additionally, nearly any role that can use ER effectively on an Elementalist can be replaced by a hero, hence I believe you're showing a bit of an irrational bias. The only popular Ele builds I can recall that a heroes were quite bad at involved AP.

Gabs88 · Jan 20, 2012, 10:01 AM // 10:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by LexTalionis

Heroes do not, in general, play many Primary Mesmer builds well, including but not limited to:

-Keystone builds (AI is notably horrible at this)
-Fevered Dreams
-AEcho EVAS spike (for obvious reasons)
-Extend Conditions lockdown (with Technobabble, occasionally superior to FD when you need fast interrupts)

Heroes are also extremely bad at interrupting important off-target casts with Frustration/Cry of Pain, have issues with target selection on Mistrust-type skills (which I've covered in the Mesmer AI thread) and are generally horrible with Panic (which they use on single targets).

Additionally, nearly any role that can use ER effectively on an Elementalist can be replaced by a hero, hence I believe you're showing a bit of an irrational bias. The only popular Ele builds I can recall that a heroes were quite bad at involved AP.

Frankly I disagree with most of that, Panic is played just fine by heroes as long as you think for a second or two about your positioning. Fevered Dream is okeyish but hardly ever played. And far from impressive. Keystone uses Symbolic Celerity and is pretty useless without it. Which IMO is a huge downside to this build which means I avoid playing it.

AEcho EVAS is very good indeed, my fav mesmer build. But it's just another AP caller build.

And as far as ER goes the difference between an ER hero and an actual ER bonder is like light and day. And ER heroes are suffering from the same problems you see in keystone heroes.

Wielder Of Magic · Jan 20, 2012, 10:33 AM // 10:33

Don't be lazy and micro your panic.
its not that hard to select a target then use a hotkey/mouse click for panic.
Most enemy groups tend to ball together at certain points during their patrols anyway, so usually all you have to do is wait.

Most skills are as good as the player that uses them.

Venganza · Jan 20, 2012, 10:34 AM // 10:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gabs88

Frankly I disagree with most of that, Panic is played just fine by heroes as long as you think for a second or two about your positioning.

You might "think" heroes use Panic well, they don't, and in case you think I am being a party-pooper:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero_behavior

There are tons of skills which heroes use more or less acceptably, but often in practice they fall far short of human behaviour.

Gabs88 · Jan 20, 2012, 10:50 AM // 10:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Venganza

You might "think" heroes use Panic well, they don't, and in case you think I am being a party-pooper:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero_behavior

There are tons of skills which heroes use more or less acceptably, but often in practice they fall far short of human behaviour.

You're missunderstanding, I know heroes use Panic in crappy ways. But if you as a human position yourself properly so the majority of mobs you're fighting are decently balled up. That's irrelevant.

Not to mention the interest cost of playing Panic as a human player when you could be playing something else.

aspi · Jan 20, 2012, 11:13 AM // 11:13

My hero(merc but that should not matter) uses keystone a lot better than panic. Might be because you really notice when they misuse panic. But keystone is almost the same as panic + damage so I like this way better.

LexTalionis · Jan 20, 2012, 04:32 PM // 16:32

Using Panic (or other interrupts) effectively usually requires you to micro them, which somewhat defeats the point of putting them on a hero. I can micro a bonder, but that's frankly not a very fast nor compelling way of playing through HM, and solo 7Hing the UW as a bonder frankly sounds extremely annoying.

I can equally contend that the difference between maining a Mesmer and having a hero do it is as night and day, especially versus boss casters. The problem is a majority of HM isn't particularly difficult enough to warrant bonding (which is generally a tactic done in teams or small party farming).

As for elite areas, you could bond through the FoW, but you don't *have* to - shelter is perfectly sufficient for it. Bonding is somewhat ok in the UW (although it's typically done with 2 humans) but it's almost completely impractical in the DoA thanks to spawn sizes and damage frequency. To make matters worse, it's not a particularly engaging playstyle while being a highly involved one - and typically only has space for one abusive PvE skill. To make matters worse, there's large sections of the game where Bonding is extremely annoying in HM thanks to factors such as lifesteal, nature spirit spam, environmental effects, enemy mesmers, etc (any centaur infested stretch of Tyria will do).

As an aside, personally, I think the biggest gap between Hero and Player capability is in Paragons. No build you can put together with a hero paragon is even halfway as effective as an Imbagon. That's another note I disagree with on the simplification of "Assassins, Elementalists and Dervishes".

Gabs88 · Jan 20, 2012, 05:05 PM // 17:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by LexTalionis

*snip*

Obviously you don't bond the entire game, you don't bond unless you feel you have to. But it's very nice to have the possibility.

And as far as Paragons go, it's a bit like playing a bonder through the entire game. The damage you do is just not even worth mentioning, and while the defence is nice it doesnt help at all vs armor ignoring skills so you can't do stuff such as completely dropping other defences. And Racway, while fun. Is simply slow

Kunder · Jan 20, 2012, 05:20 PM // 17:20

Most efficient is a hard question (assuming by efficient you mean time). I don't think anyone knows or cares to debate which class is fastest to complete UW with 7H because anyone speed running does it with SC groups much faster.

Now, if your real question is "what primary profession is easiest?" then let me simplify that question for discussion: The only difficult part of UW is 4 Horsemen, any group that can beat 4H can easily beat the rest of the UW (assuming you know how to do them correctly). Therefore this thread should be directed towards strategies for 4H and which class makes this quest the easiest.

There are literally dozens of "tricks" to make 4H fairly simple with any class. If you just want a stand and fight approach, you really need either an E/Mo prot or ST rit, as Imbagon won't work at all on the reaper who isn't a party member (and a good amount of the damage is armor ignoring as well). If you have one of those, know how to micro well, and have a decent amount of offense to kill enemies at a quick pace, it shouldn't take you more than a few tries to master the quest. It should be noted that you don't have to be the E/Mo or ST rit yourself, you just have to have one in your party and micro them decently.

As for hero paragons, I have actually had success with multiple paragons + conjure + EBSoH + GDW (running an E/Mo or ST Rit/AP Rit to provide the GDW yourself). Each Paragon averages ~62 DPS, chain defensive anthem + SYG+ whatever and between that + E/Mo or shelter protting against all spell spikes you don't die. Also lolspamknockdowns everywhere (I take a Rt/P Spirits Strength rit Earthbind as well since Earthbind both makes knockdowns 3s AND lets you knockdown every foe in the game). It's not the fastest build by any means but could certainly beat elite areas that aren't HM Gloom. Another option is Bow paragons + Ignite Arrows which does about an extra 15 damage per hit and 30 AoE damage per shot, but with slower bow attack speed.

Yeah, its hard to make a hero paragon as strong as an imbagon. Its almost equally hard to do so with a hero warrior vs warrior with SY or hero ranger vs ranger with SY. Fact of the matter is that ANY physical that doesn't have SY is a lot weaker because SY is an invulnerability mode switch.

As far as weakest hero class goes, I have to nominate assassins because they can take 10s to complete a 2.5s chain, and since the Crit Scythe nerf there isn't anything else they can do except Crit Barrage (which is only slightly less of a joke than Crit Wand) (Note that I have beaten Slavers with Crit Wand, its actually awesomely cool and not too ineffective with the right build).

Hooper287 · Jan 20, 2012, 06:51 PM // 18:51

I sense a lot of hurt egos and pros in this thread, why though? This guy simply asked a question about a profession.