Curse

Ryan2 · Dec 23, 2011, 08:17 AM // 08:17

Frost way v2 for Rangers and Ritualists

I need feedback on this perfecting this team hard mode setup. Below is the build, equipment, usage, design, and results from using the current and past version of the build. Specific questions I have about the build are included below. I know that this build is not as good as other, more meta builds due to the active micromanagement required to effectively use this but I find this more fun and rewarding.

Purpose of the Build

When I set out trying to make a set of hero builds I started with a few objectives in mind. Firstly it needed to be capable of completing all zones in hard mode. Second it had to be able to complete those zones with only 6 heroes. Finally it had to be able to successfully integrate a ranger primary (me). Every aspect of the build was designed to counteract threats in hard mode. The build here I have found to be extremely effective at hard mode with proper micromanagement. In my tests I was able to complete every vanquish I have tried and any dungeon with minor modifications.

Overview of the Build

When developing my frostway build I identified every source of enemy threat and did the best I could to counter it with the bars.

Hexes – Two Anti-Hex spells on both monk bars provide strong hex removal capability.

Conditions – Mend Body and Soul provide effectively 100% condition removal each cast because of the large number of spirits in the team.

Pressure – A dedicated party healer along with 3 other heroes having effective healing prevent pressure from killing the team.

Spiking – Strong heals on the WoH bar along with the simultaneous casts from the other three healers/support serve to prevent single target kills.

Damage – Greater Conflagration, Winter, and Mantra of frost provide ~40% damage reduction and energy management. Anti-Melee spells, Panic, Dissonance, and Disenchantment disrupt enemy damage dealing. Spirits provide effective tanking. Interrupts disrupt enemy casting and provide energy management for heroes.

Individual Bars

SoS – This bar along with SoGM was inspired by the spiritway builds and their effectiveness. The SoS bar uses SoS and Bloodsong in the front of team to provide tanking ability and staggering damage per second. The rest of the bar is devoted to increasing spirits’ damage and providing extra damage and anti-spirit capability. Energy management on this hero is never a problem because spirit siphon, which lets the hero tap into the energy of all the SoS and Bloodsong spirits.

SoGM – This bar was designed to provide more dps and tanking ability, along with enchantment removal and general disruption with dissonance. Boon of Creation does not provide effective energy management for this hero because of the massive drain from Dissonance. Fortunately most of this hero’s skills are one time casts so the initial energy pool of the hero can usually allow for the casting of the full set of spirits on the bar.

P – I made this bar to shutdown large mobs of units that would normally overwhelm a team without Panic and Cry of Disruption. Mistrust is added in because of its effective area of effect damage. Mend Body and Soul and Spirit Light are included for support healing and condition removal. This bar also includes one of the four resurrects in the team. This bar has horrible energy management unless the hero is under attack and being fed energy from Mantra of Frost. I’m thinking about switching out Flesh of my Flesh for another energy management skill (possibly drain enchantment?) and leaving resurrection to the player and to the UA bar.

I – Ineptitude is used to shutdown melee, along with the other two related anti-melee skills. The hero also has the other support skills that the Panic bar has. Energy management on this hero is adequate, although I’m still debating on if I should keep the resurrect on this hero instead of switching it for another energy management spell.

WoH – The WoH bar is designed to provide capable single target healing and hex removal, along with support party healing. Two interrupts feed this hero plenty of energy while also disrupting the enemy from damaging the party, requiring energy to heal.

UA – The final hero bar, the Unyielding Aura bar was created to counter distributed pressure on the whole team through area of effect attacks and spells. It manages this with UA providing +50% healing for two party heals. The bar also contains the same hex removal as the WoH hero, providing effective hex removal.

GC – The only player bar in the build. This needs to be run by a ranger or ritualist because the AI sometimes targets the spirits, and summon spirits can allow the player to keep them alive. The skill also allows the player to drag the same set of spirits through multiple battles, allowing more time to be spent on micromanaging heroes. Ebon Battle Standard of Wisdom is used to speed up the recharge of the healers and mesmers’ skills, allowing for engagements to be expedited and healing to be sped up. “By Ural’s Hammer” is used when a party member dies or when the team overaggros and begins to wipe. The shout allows the play to wait until the last moment, and then resurrect the whole party in a second wave to finish off or further cripple the attacking group, without any death penalty. The last skill is a resurrect used in the case that Panic, Ineptitude, and UA heroes die in the battle.

Equipment

All heroes are fit with a wand that is +5 energy when above 50% health and a wrapping that reduces recharge time of the bar’s primary attribute 20% of the time. These were bought from Nago (weaponsmith). All the heroes are fitted with a shield with a +10al vs. Cold inscription to provide further damage reduction. Any shield handles are ones that I salvaged, although +45hp while in a stance would be preferable over any other mod. I am using a channeling wand (10 points in channeling for damage) and a shield identical to the ones the heroes use. I also use a longbow for pulling. All the heroes are fitted with minor runes on all used attributes, along with either a major or minor vigor rune. All heroes except for the monks are fitted with sentry’s insignias; the monks are fitted with survivor insignias because the added health causes the AI to avoid targeting them.

Using the Build

This build requires the player to micromanage the placement of heroes and spirits. The build also benefits from the micromanagement of the individual heroes as well. When engaging an enemy that is weak it is best to fire off Greater Conflagration and Winter, and then engage the enemies. When the enemies are stronger it is best to spread your heroes while starting the engagement so that the SoS, SoGM, and Panic heroes are in the front, and the rest directly behind the initial three. Against a large group or a boss group it is good to precast the first heroes’ spirits and then target enemies for panic, ineptitude, and painful bond before luring the group.
I hotkey the heroes’ skills on my number pad along with the flag commands.

Suggestions Needed

1- How can the energy management for the two Mesmers be improved? Should their resurrection skills be removed and replaced with energy management? If so what skills should I put there? I’m worried about adding too many interrupts.

2- What is a good optional eighth bar to add to the team? I used a Spiteful Spirit necromancer earlier but I feel that it is a weak addition to the team.

3- Relevant to number one* Can the SoGM bar be improved, should Disenchantment be dropped for shadowsong, and enchantment removal added to the two Mesmer bars in the form of drain enchantment?

4- Are there any other better modifications/etc. to the skill bars that would benefit the team without hurting the team’s capability at countering threats.

Windbow · Dec 23, 2011, 11:03 AM // 11:03

You really have too much overkill on defense mate.

Calista Blackblood · Dec 23, 2011, 02:33 PM // 14:33

Waaay too much defense - not enough damage. SoS SOGM and Inteptitude really don't scratch the surface in HM on their own. Looks like you tried it and failed so went down the "damn I died,need more healing and prot" route.

SS wouldn't make much of a difference until you rework it pretty much entirely.

Googi · Dec 23, 2011, 02:42 PM // 14:42

You really should replace the rit heals with other dom/illu skills on the mesmers' bars, their attributes are spread thin enough with FC, Dom/illu and Inspiration.

Heroes have terrible AI at using Patient Spirit, you are better off with something else like Dwayna's Kiss. Also, you don't really need two dedicated healers, best to have one of them carry some prots; maybe something like a smite/prot hybrid.

I know not everyone is opting for the speediest/most efficient builds, but I honestly think these bars require too much effort with too little in return. There's just isn't enough damage.

Vernphos · Dec 23, 2011, 04:11 PM // 16:11

I totally agree that there is too much defense.

While I love the idea of the mantra/GConfl combo, at some point you have to actually kill the guys attacking you.

What happens if the GConfl spirit gets rupted or killed...? A whole team built around a flimsy spirit makes me uneasy...

Cool build tho, good survivability

WarcryOfTruth · Dec 23, 2011, 04:53 PM // 16:53

This isn't to troll, honestly, but, with the upcoming update to Hard Mode, that build will lose even more power. With foe health increasing significantly, it will take longer to do the same amount of damage, which is what armor ignoring damage will be. That's why people are a little nervous about losing their Trenchway teams, at least the few I've spoken to.

Wait until the update happens, and see how foes are at that point, THEN make a build

Coast · Dec 23, 2011, 06:41 PM // 18:41

trenchway will still kill easily, they need to improve at maths.

Windbow · Dec 23, 2011, 06:47 PM // 18:47

The reason they're worried about them, is urgoz change. Theyre afraid cuz CC/NT might be changed.

Chthon · Dec 23, 2011, 07:59 PM // 19:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ryan2

When I set out trying to make a set of hero builds I started with a few objectives in mind. Firstly it needed to be capable of completing all zones in hard mode.

When you say "all zones," do you mean "all zones in DoA" or is this supposed to be a general-purpose PvE build for beating literally "all zones"?

If the former, I don't really care.

If the latter, frostway is just a bad idea. There's going to be far too many places you won't be able to keep your spirits alive.

WarcryOfTruth · Dec 23, 2011, 11:12 PM // 23:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coast

trenchway will still kill easily, they need to improve at maths.

It depends. If the health boost isn't significant enough, then yeah it will. But if its double health, or even triple, armor ignoring damage loses power the higher the health increase winds up being.

X monkey boy X · Dec 24, 2011, 01:56 AM // 01:56

If they decrease the amour a lot and buff the health, teams will simply swap too a differnt spike. while this could mean that the runs take slightly Longer if you think the update will stop trench way you are wrong the tactics still remain the reason why it is fast.

Ryan2 · Dec 24, 2011, 05:04 AM // 05:04

Firstly, damage is not a major issue with the build at the moment. The spirits' damage output is massive, and with good spread they actually don't die often, and when they do they are replaced quickly enough.

I do like the idea on taking away one of the healer bars, I could replace in another hero for added damage. I'll also take away the patient spirit and replace it with something else.

To the person asking whether this was meant for explorable zones or places like DoA. The only two places that I haven't managed to clear easily with this has been the DoA and Frostmaws, although I believe if I devoted more time to the specific challenges in the areas I'm confident I could change up the build to clear those two zones.

To the people worried about speed, I vanquished Varajar Fells (495 foes in 91 minutes) for a rate of 330 kills per hour. For that run I did take some random pug paragon, who lacked factions so he wasn't very effective at providing defense (no SY). I also wiped where there is the shrine in the forest with all the shock phantoms, I didn't know if the allies would turn on me, and when they did I was in aggro range of the full group of them. I also had to search around 3-4 min for the final group in the area.

The amount of micromanagement does pay off and is rewarding to me because it makes me feel like I am improving with at the game. Also micromanagement is basically done fully with hotkeys so I can get set up for an attack in seconds. The spirits are placed far enough back and have a large enough range that they should never die, although I included serpents quickness to reduce the recharge of them in the case that they do die.

Things I am planning on changing
1- Removal of resurrection from mesmers and replacement with drain enchantment.
2- Removal of the WoH monk and replacement with something more of a damage/support hybrid.
3- Replacement of patient spirit with another heal

Edit: Thinking over it a bit, would adding a BiP necromancer instead of the WoH monk work for the build as a whole? The necro would fix the energy management problems for the heroes and would free up those energy management slots for damage/support spells. Currently I'm thinking shatter hex accumulated pain for the two mesmers instead of flesh of my flesh. If I was going to remove the WoH in favor of BiP I would have to keep the ritualist support on my mesmers though.

The Super Chilli · Dec 24, 2011, 07:40 AM // 07:40

Drop the WoH for a RoJ smiter. Same utility but more spike damage.
Drop heals on the mesmers for dom/illusion spells.

The best defence is a good offence

Sorry if its turned into meta-way but its the most effective way to improve

SlappedYak · May 07, 2012, 10:41 AM // 10:41

Frostway is a really fun build

and I like this variation on it very much. You obviously thought about it a lot and it shows.

I used a Frostway variation to vanquish sacnoth valley and it works wonders. Your build is quite defence heavy (which people have said before...some were dicks about it though :P *ahem*) with all the extra defence from mantra of frost/frozen armor/frost-bound insignias etc you can afford to drop one of the healer monks and add in a dps.
- I play ranger, and few things give me more joy than running frostway with b/p heroes

or SF nukers (particularly against enemies weak against cold dmg, destroyers, titans etc)

*edit* - for those saying spirit survivability is an issue...summon spirits ftw? >.>

*edit2* - A little point on the SoS rit spirits - they aren't affected by the winter*conflag effects (in fact I dont think any natural rituals affect spirits do they?) so in terms of getting more bang for your buck I'd use a B/P hero to replace the spirit spammer, and take advantage of the physical -> fire->cold dmg convertion thing which is what makes this build so much fun. Also would make it feel less...meta-way xD

Some great ideas though, I will be trying ^.^

Calista Blackblood · May 07, 2012, 11:27 AM // 11:27

Can you please check the date of last post before posting. Thanks